Driven to be the Best

Chris Gerber is what you’d call a veteran of the repair industry; he’s a classic example of a technician who climbed the ranks to become a shop owner. But even though he’s clocked more than four decades worth of experience in the industry, that doesn’t mean he’s stopped trying to push his shop forward. As the owner of Transolution Auto Care in Missoula, Mont., Gerber has embraced new technology and makes an effort to stay not only on top of, but ahead of, the latest trends and technology in the industry.

I always ask my customers, remember the show The Jetsons and all the flying saucers? Well, we’re not too far off. Cars are changing unbelievably fast nowadays. The automotive industry changes every year. To adapt, you’ve absolutely got to be into reading and studying to keep up with the changes.

It’s a matter of staying current with the technology that’s out there and making sure your staff is educated, as well. I always like to stay on the edge of technology. I want to be the best shop in town, with the best equipment, and be ready to service our customers for whatever they need.

I’ve always been interested in new technology because I’m an automotive junkie. I grew up in the industry and I’ve always been into it. When I first started out back in the 1970s, I worked with a great shop owner who would always ask, ‘Did you have anything to do with the cause, complaint or failure of the part?’ If you did, it’s your job to fix it.

I’ve adapted that to all my employees, too. No matter what comes in, we figure out how to correct the cause of the malfunction, rather than just replace parts. Many customers come in with a lot of drivability issues because they’ve gone from shop to shop, and those shops haven’t been able to figure out what the problem actually is.

Figuring out the root of the problem is something I really drill into my employees now. I get here before we open at 7:30 a.m. and, along with my two service writers, we input all the jobs that need to be done on a digital job board first thing in the morning. Then, if a customer brings in a car at 8 a.m., we always want to have the diagnostic information back to them by 10 a.m.

Striving to be the best at diagnosing has informed a lot of our technology investments, too. For example, a lot of cars today can be corrected by reflashes. For many years, we weren’t equipped to fix those errors, so we had to send the cars to the dealer. I decided that rather than sending the customers down the road, which takes away from shop profitability, I would invest in the necessary reflash equipment.

We had to purchase a J2534 tool, which hooks up to a dedicated computer station and downloads all of the information from the manufacturer. You can enter the vehicle identification number and find out what the vehicle needs and update it with the latest and greatest programs from the manufacturers.

Now we can update BMWs, Volvos, Chryslers, General Motors vehicles, and we can do a lot of things that other shops can’t because we have the knowledge and equipment to correct the problems. It was expensive and it was a big learning curve at the beginning to understand the program.

The first time I tried using it, I lost all of the information on the Chevrolet I was reflashing because my wireless Internet went down.

I watched a lot of videos of vehicles on how to reflash, I read everything I could get my hands on, and I was patient. It does take time, but the end result is that you’re a lot smarter and you’re able to help the customer out with services they otherwise would have to go elsewhere to get.

Similarly, I also recently upgraded to a VERUS scan tool from Snap-on. It’s a top-notch scanner that lets us do so much more than before. We can record drivability issues, print them out and show them to the customer.

Another feature we really like is the ability to record videos with it. Basically, once the tool is hooked up, you can bring up all the different inputs and outputs in the car and it will actually show the part working in a digital graphic. So you can watch the line go up and down as the transmission shifts, for example. If there’s a glitch, you’ll see a dash go up at the exact spot it glitches. That really helps us narrow down exactly where the issue is and we are then able to get a graph that shows precisely what the component is doing.

Again, learning everything your scan tool can do requires a lot of training. It’s like learning how to ride a bike. But if you don’t take the time to find out what all the programs do, then you’re just scratching the surface.