Garage Operations
What your front desk should be able to decide without ringing you
"We close on the 19th and re open on the 5th January. That's 16 days and that is my only time off this year."
That was posted in a garage owners' group, and nobody argued with it. Plenty said they do the same. Shut the doors, take the fortnight, open again in the new year. One of them gave the reason straight out: closing is what lets him have time off without the phone going.
That is how a lot of this trade takes a holiday. It stops the business earning for a fortnight. Not because the work dries up, and not because the lads cannot turn a spanner without him. Because the minute the doors are open somebody needs an answer, and the only person who can give it is at the airport.
Shutting works, and there is no shame in it. It is also the clearest measure you will ever get of how much of the garage still runs through you.
Your garage runs without you exactly as far as your front desk can decide without you. Not as far as the diary is full. Not as far as the techs are good. As far as the desk can decide. Every call that reaches you when you are away is a decision nobody else was allowed to make.
Start by counting what the desk rang you about last week
Not how many times. What each call actually needed from you.
Most owners find the same split. A few genuinely needed the owner: taking someone on, spending real money, the customer you have known twenty years who wants a word with you and nobody else. Those are yours and always will be.
The rest were not emergencies. They were questions nobody else had been told they could answer. The desk was not being slow or soft. It was doing the sensible thing, which is to ask the person who knows the answer rather than guess and get it wrong in front of a customer.
While you are in the building, asking you is quicker than any system. That is exactly why it never gets fixed. It only shows up on the day you are not there, and by then it is a car on a ramp waiting for an answer.
The four calls that should not reach you
Extra work found on the ramp. The tech is under a car and finds more than the job card says. Someone has to price it, tell the customer and get a yes. Today that goes tech to desk, desk to you, you to desk, desk to customer, and the car waits through all four. The desk should be able to run that on its own, and the yes should be in writing. Not because you do not trust the customer, but because "he told me to go ahead" is worth very little six weeks later when he says he did no such thing.
What a job is worth. Nobody should be ringing you for a price on standard work. If they are, your labour rate and your parts markup are living in your head. Write them down, including the awkward ones: the old car that takes twice as long, the mate's rate, the job somebody quoted over the phone last week.
The part that is wrong, late, or dearer than the quote. This one is a limit, not a rule. Under a number you set, the desk orders it and tells you after. Over it, they ring. Most owners have never set the number, so every one of them either comes to the owner or gets guessed at.
The customer who is not happy. The desk needs something it can do on the spot without asking. The diagnostic taken off the bill, the car collected, the next MOT done for nothing. A customer waiting for the owner to ring him back is not being looked after. He is being stored.
The four numbers that have to leave your head
Read those four again and they come down to four numbers:
- The labour rate, and what it is on the jobs that are not standard.
- The parts markup.
- What the desk can spend without asking you.
- What the desk can put right without asking you.
Four numbers. Most garages have none of them written down anywhere the desk can actually see. They are in the owner's head, where they work perfectly right up until the owner is in Spain.
While those four numbers are only in your head, every decision that needs one has to come back to you, wherever you are. That is not a discipline problem on the desk. It is the one thing standing between you and the garage you are trying to build.
A desk that can decide keeps the bays full
When owners talk about this, they talk about their own time: the calls, the interruptions, the day off that was not really one. Almost nobody puts a number on the other end of the call. A car that cannot move, a customer waiting on a price, and a bay standing still until you pick up.
A desk that can decide turns the work found on the ramp into a booked job the same morning. A desk that has to ask you turns it into a car that waits, a customer who goes quiet, and an advisory that nobody picks up again until the next MOT. The work was already there, in a bay you are already paying for. Whether it becomes money depends on how quickly somebody is allowed to say yes.
That is the difference between a full diary and a profitable one, and it is the part most owners never get to, because they are busy being the answer.
One owner in the same group moved to Spain and reckons his lads run the place at twenty to twenty five per cent below what it does with him there. He counts that a success, and he is right to. Most owners have no idea what their own number would be, because shutting means they never have to find out.
What the system has to do so the desk can hold it
Writing those four numbers down is most of the work, and you can do it this afternoon on the back of an invoice. Making them stick every day is where the system either helps or gets in the way, and the list is shorter than most software companies would like it to be.
- One job card the desk and the workshop both work from, so nobody is walking out to the ramp to find out what was actually done.
- The extra work priced and sent from the desk to the customer's phone, approved or turned down in writing, and back on the job either way.
- Parts landing on the job with your margin already on them, so the price does not depend on who typed it in.
- The invoice out the same day, and every invoice and payment across to Xero or QuickBooks on its own, so nobody is piecing the day back together at eight at night.
- The work that got put off coming back on its own. GarageRevs texts the customer when a service, an MOT or work deferred last time is due, and the desk sees who has been reminded.
That is what the desk running the day actually means, and it is why the work chasing itself matters more than it sounds. Neither of them needs you in the room.
Want to see it on your own garage? Book a 15-minute demo and we will run it on your own figures.
What you look at instead of standing there
Once the desk is deciding, your job changes. You are no longer checking that the work got done. You are checking whether the numbers you set were the right ones, and that is a numbers job. It is also the one thing you should not hand to anybody else.
What each job made on labour and on parts. How many estimates turned into work. The labour rate you actually got, as against the one on the wall. What the work found on the ramp was worth, and how much of it the customers took up. What is still owed.
None of that needs you in the building. It needs the figures to be right and you to know your numbers on a Sunday morning with a coffee, rather than standing over the desk on a Tuesday working out what went on.
Where to start
Two jobs for this week, and both fit in an afternoon. Go back through last week's calls and write down what each one actually needed from you. Then write the four numbers down and tell your team what they are.
The hard part is not that. The hard part is the next time somebody puts their head round the door with a question.
Answering is the quickest thing you can do in that moment, and it is the reason nothing ever changes. An answer you give in ten seconds buys you the same question again next month, and the month after, and on the Tuesday you are in the departure lounge.
So the next time it happens, take a breath and do not answer it yet. It is usually a fair question, and that is the point. Ask yourself a different one instead: what would this person have needed to work that out without me? Nearly always it is one of four things. A number nobody has told them. A limit nobody has set. A price they cannot see on the system. Permission they were never actually given.
Then go and put that thing in place, and tell them it is there. That is the whole job. You are not answering the question, you are getting rid of it, and a question you get rid of properly stays gone whether you are in the building or not.
It feels slower, and for the first fortnight it is slower. An owner in the same group put it better than any of this:
"Staff asking lots of questions. Give them resources to find their own answers. Make them wait, do something else. Amazing how often they will quickly sort it themselves."
Do that for a month and the calls thin out on their own. What is left is the short list only you can answer, which is the list you should have been dealing with all along. Then the system either holds all of it every day, or it quietly hands it back to you. GarageRevs is built for the owner who has decided to step back and wants the place to hold together properly while he does.