Kansas City, Mo.--Have you ever felt that going to your business is like walking into a hurricane? Do you put in long hours and work hard, yet feel frustrated and unfulfilled?
Automotive Training Institute Instructor Matt Winslow proposed answers to those problems during a management training course at Automotive Service Association of Missouri/Kansas (ASA-MO/KAN) Vision Hi-Tech Training. Winslow's class, titled "Four Keys to Lasting Success and Profit: Survival in the 21st Century," focused on four areas: Passion, Plans, Procedures, and Performance.
Passion
"Create some drama," Winslow said. "Give your employees somebody to fight or they will fight amongst themselves."
Shop owners, he said, must get their employees to follow a cause, not a person; they follow what a person represents. An enemy can even be created to reinforce the cause, he added. For example, a battlefield can be developed, an enemy created (e.g., competitor), and then a plan can be devised to win the battle. Winslow said that is how you create passionate employees.
"Leaders can get troops to follow you into battle," he said. "But it is management's job to equip people to win the war and make sure they are successful." He added that you can lead millions but only efficiently manage three to five people.
Plans
Setting and measuring life and business goals is an important aspect of being a business owner, Winslow said. Developing plans includes basic business plans to more specific plans on how to strategically and tactically meet the goals that a shop owner develops, he said.
Becoming a mature business owner is a goal that shop owners should strive for, he said, adding that a mature owner is one that takes care of his employees and his business, rather than one who takes care of customers and cars -- an owner in infancy.
When shop owners develop plans and tasks to reach those goals, Winslow said it is imperative that they set priorities. For example, he broke down types of events into three categories: appointments, which must be attended at a specific time; tasks, which can be completed in under an hour; and projects, which take over an hour to complete.
Those events, he said, can then be inserted into a time management matrix quadrant divided among:
I. Urgent/Important
II. Not Urgent/Important
III. Urgent/Not Important
IV. Not Urgent/Not Important
"Most shop owners spend time doing things that are found in three and four, instead of doing things in one and two that are actually important," Winslow said.
Procedures
A shop owner who runs a procedure-driven business depends on a system for marketing, work flow, and hiring and training, Winslow said, which allows more free time, a consistent income, consistent quality, and peace of mind.
Owner-driven businesses on the other hand, depend on an owner's focus, requiring the owner to always be on location, he said. Without procedures, quality fluctuates, income fluctuates, and the owner has a high stress level, he said.
Productivity
Winslow said analyzing a shop's productivity requires researching staff efficiency, which should be 90 percent or better. Some areas that he said can rob shop efficiency are pricing (not charging for every part, using the wrong mark-up), communication (fixing the wrong problem, ignoring maintenance services), staffing (insufficient staffing, employee motivation), work flow (insufficient car count, waiting for parts), and customer acquisition and retention (advertising, calling customers to assure satisfaction).
