Episode Description
Inefficiencies in the shop add up in time and dollars. Often Service Advisors are forced to take shortcuts since estimating takes a long time and might not be justified in the eyes of the advisor because they are super busy.
This show will leverage the success two shop owners achieved after they changed their process and selected the right tools. The results were unprecedentedly high and definitely worth looking into. We’re joining forces with the team at AMS to examine the profitable impact of making your shop as efficient as possible, and we’ve got the data to prove it. Will you join us?
On this episode:
We’ll explore the integration with Protractor and AutoVitals, how it allows our shops to simplify the RO writing process, and how to identify opportunities to get to the best possible use of your service advisor’s time.
Episode Transcript
*This transcript was generated using Artificial Intelligence. Errors may occur. If you notice an error, please contact [email protected].
Tom Dorsey (00:00:05):
Good morning and good afternoon. Welcome to this week’s edition of The Digital Shop Talk Radio. I’m Tom Dorsey, and today we’re going to be talking about efficiency gains possible through the integration of AutoVitals and Protractor. So it doesn’t matter if you’re using AutoVitals and Protractor together already, you’re going to get some great tips and tricks. I highly suggest you find your quiet space, your safe space, and get a pen and paper because you’re going to want to take some notes today if you’re using AutoVitals or or Protractor one or the other, and you’re looking for ways to improve segments in your business and specifically how to maximize efficiency by leveraging the fantastic integration that we have between Protractor and AutoVitals. This is the show for you. Don’t worry because we’re going to record it, but you’re still going to want to get some notes.
(00:00:58):
We’ve got some fantastic guests joining us today, and you might recognize a couple of these guys. Right? Welcome back, John Long and Adam Bendzick. Co-hosts, actually our remote co-hosts for the Digital Shop Talk Radio. Welcome gentlemen. Thank you very much. Thanks for having us again. Yeah, no, thank you. Yes, definitely. Thank you. Yes, sir. Thank you for coming on. And as folks, maybe you don’t know these two guys, I don’t know how that’s possible if you’ve been watching this show or you’re in the automotive industry actually, but they have been very instrumental in, they’re both using Protractor, they both switched to Protractor. They’ve both been using AutoVitals very successfully in helping us to kind of define and learn actually some of the things that we’re going to be talking about today, the power between those two systems. And without further ado, and I’m really excited to welcome this gentleman because I got to tell you, anytime I talk to somebody about this guy, I hear the same thing.
(00:02:06):
What a nice guy. And he’ll bend over backwards to help you anytime of the day, whether he’s outside or inside of his house and or office. Welcome Scott Thorley from AMS. And Scott, if you don’t know Scott, Scott is kind of the American arm of Protractor distribution and he’s been, he was at our digital shop conference. He’s out there. I see him everywhere, spreading the love, helping folks to look at something new, leverage new technology to improve their shops. And of course, as always, I have my expert panel of experts joining us a little late. Welcome, Bill and Uwe. Good day. Hello. So gentlemen, Bill, let me ask you, you are also knee deep in the Protractor and AutoVitals integration and defining best practices as the senior digital shop trainer with AutoVitals. What would you biggest takeaway be for folks watching the show today? What would you want them to take away?
Bill Connor (00:03:21):
So knee deep, I’m thinking I’m pretty much up to my head.
Tom Dorsey (00:03:23):
Yeah, I just, I didn’t want to give away all the secrets.
Bill Connor (00:03:27):
So the biggest takeaway that I really want them to have is that leveraging the two programs to work together, specifically using service packages to make sure that everything the technician recommends properly, documents makes it to the estimation phase, gets presented to the customer and lets the customer say yes or no. And this is one of the programs. We can actually do this really quickly and also be able to measure the fact that it’s being done or not done. So that’s really what I want everybody to take away is put in a time, set things up properly, lean on Scott to go ahead and make sure the right service packages are in there and work with your AutoVitals trainer to make sure you put it together and measure it.
Tom Dorsey (00:04:12):
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Uwe from you, you think every day about how we can improve efficiencies and working with guys like John and Adam and folks in the Facebook form and other users. And Scott, what are you looking for these folks to take away today?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:04:33):
Let me throw out a stat. I started promoting probably five years ago in the industry and I was really shy doing it because it’s such an incredible number. 66% of all technician findings are not sold. 66% of all technician findings are not sold. And so we were going, wow, is that really true? And then we started looking at this and so was advisors or Superman, we said that so many times on this digital shop talk radio, but they really spend a lot of time estimating. So my personal estimate is it’s about 60% of their time. And so anything we can do to shave off a substantial amount of that estimating time and get to the goal Bill was so nicely summarizing is golden for every shop. And I would like the audience to get some tips and tricks of how to do that with the integration between Protractor and otherwise.
Tom Dorsey (00:05:51):
Yeah, and that’s a great point, right? Time is money and time’s a funny thing. You can spend that time doing nothing. You can spend that time doing something or you can spend that time doing several things at once. In other words, really maximizing the time that you spend to get the most out of it. And when we convert that time into dollars by empowering those service advisors and those technicians to get more done, do more things in the time that they’re spending or not spending, if we can automate and provide a lot of that time that they would’ve normally spent to ’em. Would you John agree with what Uwe had summarized and was that a defining factor in what you were looking to do when you made that switch over to Protractor?
John Long (00:06:46):
Oh, most definitely. It definitely was a deciding factor for us. For me, when I looked back at it, the biggest thing that a service advisor should be doing is selling. That’s the number one thing. That’s what we pay them to do is they should be selling. And if they’re sitting there estimating 60%, or I even think it could be even a little bit more than that of the time, they cannot sell. They cannot spend the time with those customers and develop those relationships properly to be able to sell.
Tom Dorsey (00:07:18):
Yeah, Adam, and when you say it’s a degrading, and I don’t mean it in a, I’m degraded, it’s a, let me say, a declining return over time when you start to spend, the more time you spend estimating and then if you don’t make that conversion, if you don’t make those sales, you start to spend less time estimating.
Adam Bendzick (00:07:42):
Yeah, I mean that’s definitely very true is you allocate all this time to something that maybe doesn’t turn out to be a success for you and then you start thinking to yourself like, God, that was frustrating. I didn’t get any reward off that. But it’s a trickle down effect. It starts at the service advisor estimating that stuff and not getting the sale. Then the technician starts saying, why am I inspecting these things so heavily? And then that trickles down to them and just this whole wave of bad work, let’s just call it that, it is what it is. If you spend as own shop owners, managers, whatever it might be, spend all this time training your technicians do a great quality inspection, you can lose their interest pretty quick if your service advisors are then not estimating all that stuff out. So even the best trainer can have that happen to ’em, where’s the incentive if you’re not getting those sales off it?
Tom Dorsey (00:08:39):
And then it usually from being on the other side of the fence a lot of times then it usually trickles down like this. It goes, gosh, I’m going to get my web provider on the phone and yell at, I don’t have enough cars. And that really is kind of what ends up happening is we start to think we need to rely on new customer acquisition and push in the front door because all of this stuff is chaotic and messy and it’s inconsistent. Scott, from your perspective, where does Protractor really bring the meat when we’re talking about efficiencies, and I’m going to put you on the spot buddy, give us some insight on, I guess I’m not going to nail your feet to the floor from that perspective, but there’s probably some systems out there that are integrating with Protractor that are more efficient than others. Give us some perspective on how Protractor brings that value and then how it can be improved from some of your vendor partners.
Scott Thorley (00:09:46):
The biggest thing, Tom, that I’ve seen from Protractor versus other shop management systems, the way Protractor s designed is designed to put all the jobs on the ticket and then estimate where some of the other systems you estimate one job at a time and it’s an incredibly efficient marriage with AutoVitals because AutoVitals allows the technician to do that inspection and then you to push all those jobs onto the ticket at one time. So the combination of the tech finding all those jobs, pushing it over to the ticket at one time and then in Protractor looking up all those jobs at once just makes the efficiency on that just fantastic and faster than you could do it any other way.
Tom Dorsey (00:10:31):
And it really does. And to Adam’s point, that really kind of sets that service advisor up to have a process in place that is successful and then they repeat it and it becomes consistent. The habit develops around it. And before you know it, if you were to look at your old kind of process, especially back on paper right before all of us, and compared those two things, the number of wrecks that make it to the estimate, the number of approvals that finally get approved and the time that it takes to generate that stuff, you, it would be like throwing your iPhone in the drink and going back to having a pager and driving around looking for a payphone or something, right? I mean that’s really, and it’s funny, we iterate and we kind of get these gains and we find these benefits and we get used to ’em and we really don’t look at what it was like to ride a horse before right now that we’re driving down the highway.
(00:11:29):
But Scott, your point is couldn’t be a better segue into what I want to bring up next. And Uwe, if you could, I know you’ve built us an infographic for today that really I think does a great job of conceptualizing that process difference and showing the benefits of leveraging that Protractor and AutoVitals technology. And we’ll get into the meat and potatoes here in a second, but there’s some very specific practices that you use through that integration that does exactly what Scott said and that’s put it all on the estimate first, so then you a save that time, but then it’s hard to take that stuff off. You have to start to cherry pick and actually physically go in and start to delete stuff and that’s easy to identify in your operation. Uwe, if you could, Dustin, maybe if you could show Uwe’s infographic for the audience and Uwe, if you could give us an overview and rundown of this timeline.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:12:36):
Thank you. Yeah, for sure. So what I try to capture in one picture is on the left, the traditional way of getting inspections done by the technician and on the right the way how we propose and recommend to protract on AutoVitals users. And so you see on the left-hand side, a typical inspection with no setup of any service packages is the tech enters a condition and sometimes the technician enters a recommendation or sometimes the tech doesn’t even enter a recommendation. The service advisor is then responsible for checking the technician’s conditions and recommendations. And as Scott described, go down the list condition by condition, recommendation by recommendation and select the corresponding jobs, verifies the parts for each recommendation skips a few. We just talked about the psychological reason for that. But constantly on the time pressure service advisors try to identify the biggest bang for the buck and identify the things they don’t want to estimate because they don’t think they have the time or sometimes the skill to educate and sell.
(00:14:09):
And that can take any time from 35 minutes to whatever the inspection results might be because it’s a constant iteration on looking at the inspection result, identifying the right job at the parts if they’re not already defined, verify the availability and iterate through going down the work order. And that can take time. And the skips a few is really one of those psychological things we should not ignore because it’s not a complete estimate very clearly. And on the right hand side, if the recommendations are already set up as service packages on the inspection sheet and set up in the point of sale and by configuration available on the tablet, that’s all the technician does. They just hit the condition and the condition corresponds to a recommendation. And once the inspection has hit the service advisor’s desk, he does just one thing, update work, order one button.
(00:15:35):
And then depending on how the service packages are set up, sometimes vehicle specific ports need to get added and verified. And to Scott’s point, that’s one button press and so the estimate is done and that frees up a tremendous amount of time. So in this case here at least 10 to 20 minutes, but really depending on the individual case, it can be more and so it doesn’t, if you could scroll a little bit more, the overall benefit is the time savings can now free up the service advisor to focus on the customer. The approval rate goes up because more has been estimated more thoroughly estimated the technician’s confidence in an inspection increases. And we say if you assume that a job is at least like $80 to estimate like a cab air filter or something like this, you can have easily a revenue gain of $2,000 a day just by configuring your tools properly and use the combination, use the integration in Protractor and otherwise.
Tom Dorsey (00:17:10):
Well, that’s a bold claim. John, is Uwe full of beans? I mean because seriously, 10 to 20 minute time savings per estimate is That’s nothing to sneeze at.
John Long (00:17:26):
No, he’s not. I’ll tell you a brief story here real quick. About a year ago, my shop foreman challenged me to be able to write an estimate under a certain amount of timeframe on it. And this was a late two thousands Hyundai, I think it needed a time and belt tires and a bunch of other maintenance stuff. The total estimate was about $2,500 from the time he hit submit. And then I had to edit the inspection, bring everything over and then write the estimate up. I had four minutes to do it. Granted I’m not normal. People in my shop call me a robot on this, but I did it in three minutes and 38 seconds or something like that and it was a $2,500 ticket in that amount of timeframe. So I mean it can be done, like I said, that’s not normal. Most people, I would say that’d probably be about a 10 minute estimate in Protractor. So like I said, he’s not full who was not full of it when talking about that time saving at all.
Adam Bendzick (00:18:25):
But still, John is how your prior point of sale system, if that’s three minutes and 38 seconds or something
John Long (00:18:32):
Like that’ve would at least a 10 to 15 minute job for me at least, if not more.
Adam Bendzick (00:18:38):
Exactly. It’s
Tom Dorsey (00:18:39):
So, I mean we’re even improving the time that Protractors already giving you. We can get it done even faster. So Scott, let me ask you though, because the key to all that is that Protractor supports robust kits packages. Yeah,
Scott Thorley (00:18:54):
Correct. Yeah, you can set up those packages, you can map ’em to the AutoVitals inspection sheets and we’ve done a lot working with Bill and the team at AutoVitals there to make sure our database that we start with has a lot of that already canned for you, so as little work as possible for the shop. But you get that mapping right, and like I said, it’s just automatic. The tech picks the recommendation automatically ties to the job click update work order, that job shows up on the ticket
Tom Dorsey (00:19:27):
And there is some work, it’s not going to happen overnight. You do have to put some work in, but it’s one of those things that once you put the work in, you take advantage of it forever and pennies turned into dollars, that time adds up that ability. It’s really, it’s returning opportunity to you because now once you save that time, well now you get to sell it. And so it’s the ability for you to, and that’s where we really, we’ve talked a lot about this and it’s taken, of course it has to get proven. We have to be able to point somewhere and say see C, but that is exactly what we’ve been kind of talking about. It’s not just a digital inspection. We take that and really focus on how to make it as most efficient, pull away a lot of the busy extra steps that a lot of people do by relying on antiquated processes even or multiple systems and then find of course, critical to that is a technology like Protractor that supports the ability to really leverage that technology.
(00:20:29):
Well, I guess to the degree that we’re able to jointly we could do so much more matter of fact Uwe, would you speak to that a little bit if you could, because I know it’s a frustrating something. Uwe would’ve had this done 10 years ago if you could have, and it’s a point of frustration because you want to run, you want to sprint and a lot of times outside factors kind of drag you back and you got to slow crawl sometimes. We had to knock on a lot of doors to get some of this stuff done. If you could speak to us a little bit about what’s possible, right? What’s on the horizon a little bit.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:21:11):
I mean Scott said it already, if there was a chance for us to standardize service packages, my dream is basically we deliver a library with integration at onboarding done, I don’t know.
Tom Dorsey (00:21:33):
And it becomes standardized.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:21:35):
It becomes standardized. Wants to,
Scott Thorley (00:21:37):
Lemme just clarify
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:21:40):
If I may, nobody wants to repeat John being on a Saturday at vision at a hotel and sitting three hours preparing his service package just before he goes live on Monday, right?
John Long (00:21:52):
Yeah, it was probably a little bit more than that. It was like every night at vision for several hours, but it was well worth it. Putting the time up front is well worth it on the backside.
Scott Thorley (00:22:06):
And let me just clarify. So we’ve solved a lot of that. So our default database for AutoVitals now has 95% of the jobs that you need already coded the way you need it. So we’ve saved a lot of that setup time that John had to go through. So it’s the 5% now you don’t have to map everything, you have to map that extra 5%
Tom Dorsey (00:22:29):
And saves a lot of that time. So in other words, at Vision, John could have caught two parties instead of missing ’em all.
John Long (00:22:38):
I don’t think I missed any parties still.
Tom Dorsey (00:22:40):
Okay, good deal. Yeah, that’s just about time management, right, and priorities. Hey Bill, we’ve been talking about all this awesome whizzbang technology. Can you show us what it looks like?
Bill Connor (00:22:53):
Well, I believe I can. Let me see if I can get the technology to work here and find my screen.
Tom Dorsey (00:22:59):
I mean you’re out there in the bushes. I don’t know how you’re going to get, I don’t even know how you got signal to get on this show. Looks like you’re on top of a mountain somewhere.
Bill Connor (00:23:06):
That’s a very good question. That’s the slippery slope you’re talking about that people go down when they don’t use the process properly.
Tom Dorsey (00:23:13):
There it is. The door to the slippery slope is right behind Bill. He just tosses you right out of it.
Bill Connor (00:23:18):
So can I make the assumption that you can see my screen,
Tom Dorsey (00:23:21):
We can see you
Bill Connor (00:23:22):
And that’s probably an ugly site, but that’s okay. We’re going to go and fix that.
Tom Dorsey (00:23:26):
It’s all perspective young
Bill Connor (00:23:27):
Man. And so what I wanted to do is I just wanted to go over here to a work order that’s actually in Protractor that we actually set out there for a technician. So this is the work order that was originally written. It had an inspection on it, an oil change and a wheel alignment. So this is what went out to the technician. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to let that do his inspection and I’m going to go and close this back out and I’m going to switch over to a today’s vehicle page or at least that’s my plan. I’m going to go and open this inspection up by going in and clicking on this link. And so this is the inspection that came in from the technician and you can see the service riders, they’ve done their job, they’ve already edited and as we go down this list you can see that they’ve got a lot of conditions here and each of these conditions has got a recommendation for the technician that needs to be done.
(00:24:19):
And so you can see the technician, he hasn’t totaled this vehicle, but he’s done his job. He’s righteously documented. Everything needs to be done done. I’m going to change this over to creating an estimate. I’m going to go ahead and press the button that says work order update as soon go ahead and push them all to Protractor and it should give me a message here in a minute. And now what I’m going to do is I’m going to switch back over to Protractor and I’m going to go ahead and open that repair order back up and everything that technician did, so first of all, he marked the inspection done. So it’s brought it in, it’s marked it green, it’s brought in the link for the inspection, but more importantly it’s brought in all his recommendations along with notes and if you configure your shop, the links to the images and inspection and so on. So there is no way to go ahead and get a one-on-one relationship between what the technician recommends, get it to the management system and from there that’s where we let Protractor take over. They can hit the catalog button at the top or they can click on one line at a time and look up the parts if additional parts have to be sourced. So that’s some pretty cool stuff.
Tom Dorsey (00:25:28):
And if you can for folks, maybe somebody who’s looking at Protractor and they’re in here, what would that look like without AutoVitals or maybe I’m using another inspection. It seems to me like most of the other inspection programs push it straight to the inspections tab instead of the ro,
Bill Connor (00:25:45):
So they’ll push it to the inspection tab or a sub estimate or sub. But yeah, there’s none of them that actually go ahead and bring it in where, so these service packages and Protractor are really configured to where that if it doesn’t go and identify the exact parts, it gives the service advisor a kind of template to know that they should add an air filter to it or for hood strikes they should go ahead and add parts and so on. So these service packages and templates that are actually built in Protractor are really advanced and they’re really designed to go and take a service writer and take a lot of the thinking away from ’em and just automate the process.
(00:26:27):
Other systems have got labor codes that we can go and import but not really the ability to do this. And then if they don’t have labor codes we can import then this is where the service writer is going to have to go ahead and switch back over here to manage or AutoVitals and go and look down the list and say, okay, I need to go in here and I need to go ahead and add a cabin air filter labor. Then I got to look up the part, then I got to scroll down and look in the other one. And over a period of time it just becomes painful. So to me when I’m working with a shop, I’m always encouraging them to take the most pain-free way that I can measure and this is one of them.
Tom Dorsey (00:27:08):
Yeah, no, that’s awesome. Hey Adam, so for folks that maybe not taking advantage of the packages like that, what would you say to them? What would you say is things that you need to make sure that you focus on and get right and what are some things maybe that you learned that they should avoid?
Adam Bendzick (00:27:32):
So as far as working with them trucker things they should
Tom Dorsey (00:27:36):
Avoid getting your kits to or your packages to the point where you have to do the least amount of fingerprinting after you import as possible.
Adam Bendzick (00:27:48):
Yeah, exactly. Not to do the exact same thing that Bill just did, but I spent a bit of time prepping for this, so can I do basic exact same? Is that cool? Alright, because the thing is there’s so many features within Protractor that there’s a catalog that you go through in the lookup and Scott is huge about showing people how you look up that information and then not just look up one individual part. You look up every piece of it. So I believe you should be able to see my screen now, correct?
Tom Dorsey (00:28:25):
Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Adam Bendzick (00:28:27):
So as far as everything goes, I look at this process and I think John does as well and absolutely grab into this as much as you want to as John and Scott and everybody, but as far as the way that we used to do things is the service advisor bid out every job you’d have, your conditions recommended actions and everything. It almost, if you have it set up correctly, it almost starts the bidding process in the technician’s hands. And why I say that is you have all these conditions and you have these recommended actions and if you have it set up correctly from AutoVitals and Protractor , 90% of the jobs that come over are going to have a labor time in there. They’re potentially already going to have parts pricing and a placeholder and all those things already. And I’ll show you how here.
(00:29:10):
So standard inspection battery below 60% state of health recommend action that everybody’s kind of used to if you click a condition and pre-fills in a recommend action and so on and so forth. As Bill had said, there’s an update vin odometer button. I always get used to hitting that. That brings over the bin number and all that stuff and then update work order and the way that this started as this is in my name, the way that this started at is just oil change and level one inspection save and close back out of it and then hit the update work order button
(00:29:50):
And go back into that vehicle and within 10 seconds everything that inspection was in there brought over and we have our packages set up where the pricing and everything is completely in there. This one has a transmission service kit that’s pen ready deal for a flush and the only thing we have to look up then is that inventory on the transmission fluid, which Protractor has some great utility stuff for that five W 30 A TF types, all those things. There’s a great catalog that’s quick access up in the corner, but mainly that stuff being brought over there, our pricing and our labor and everything is already brought there. So you could almost take this ticket without even looking up the air filter. Exactly. There’s pricing already built in there and hand that to the customer and within 10 seconds that stuff from the inspection report is brought over there and priced out. We are in the habit though of always going through there and looking it up. Where I love Protractor is the catalog lookup. You can look up everything like one thing individually and it’s going to look up just that transmission fluid or you can highlight the whole package and then do catalog lookup and it’ll go to your inventory here
(00:31:08):
And as you go through the list it jumps from transmission fluid to air filter. So now you’re getting your air filters and you choose, okay, I want that one, and you apply it and then it jumps to the next one and it goes to battery. Okay, I want that one and apply it. And then you go to cabin air filter, okay, now I want to switch my vendor to O’Reilly’s and go to that one and apply it and it’s jumping from piece to piece to piece as opposed to adding job at a time, job at a time, job at a time
Tom Dorsey (00:31:36):
Back out and then reopen it and back out and
Adam Bendzick (00:31:39):
Exactly, exactly. So it’s really, really efficient. So that, and then you come back over and there you are and the catalog look up for labor is in there and it’s just, it’s really, really quick. So that was brought over from the inspection within 10 seconds or so and then you’re bidding that thing out and even though I’m talking through it, maybe that’s under 60 seconds kind of thing if you were literally just doing it as an advisor where that might take 10 minutes in a different program. So that’s the basics
Tom Dorsey (00:32:12):
Of it. And so then is it just your counter sale items that you have pricing in on there or are you really expanding that out to add it into most of your canned jobs?
Adam Bendzick (00:32:24):
So I think some of this is the way we do it within our shop, but then some of us, the way the system works and why I say that is over the years we’ve evolved into instead of the technician saying I have a valve cover leaking, I have a oil pan gasket leaking and then have them having that on the inspection, we’ve turned that into every time it’s a dere so that way you can just have a preset degrease price at 50, 60, 70 bucks or whatever and then that is what your inspection click or your technician clicks on from the inspection and then that’s brought over so then you put it back in the service advisor’s hand to say, okay, this is what we do as part of our process. If that piece is bought by the customer, now we do the degrease, which is probably the proper way of doing it anyway and you’re not having ’em waste all that time of putting together a valve cover, gasket estimate, oil pan gasket estimate and all those things and spending those extra minute, two minute, three minute type deals. They go into a dere, they sell a dere, and now you know that the customer is actually interested in the oil leaks. By no means do I not want to price out things and give the customer every piece of information, but there’s no way that our shop and John’s shop and others could go through the car cones that we are without making these things more efficient. That’s both on the tech side and on the service advisor side
Tom Dorsey (00:33:51):
Or skipping it or just not even bothering to estimate
Adam Bendzick (00:33:55):
It. So I would say 90% of that stuff that comes over from the inspection already has a preset price in there. I mean your power steering fluid flush, we have two options. We have a standard power steering fluid flush and then we have one that’s called a global, the globals are like your Mercedes, your B BMWs, this and that. The standards is another one and the pricing is built as a standard platform and then the technicians know that I’m working on this vehicle, it needs a standard, I’m working on this one, it needs a global, so they choose which one they need and then that’s what pricing is brought over. Another thing that’s great with contractor basically
Tom Dorsey (00:34:30):
Build the
Adam Bendzick (00:34:30):
Estimate they are. Yeah, and another thing that’s great about Protractor and the way that AutoVitals integrates with it is going back to the inspection is the technician had, let’s see here, front end quick check. We do things like this too is the video. We don’t want to take a video of every single thing that’s on there, but that part of it you can have your inspection set up where you have your technician go to that individual outer tire end every single time and have another person grab the camera as they load test or whatever. But what we’ve been getting the habit of doing is just shake the wheel. That’s a better representation of what actually is going on with the vehicle than if you show ’em a ball joint that they don’t know what they’re looking at when you can show like, hey, this is what’s loose and this is why we need to check into it further.
(00:35:21):
Now we sell our level two inspection, which is actually load testing it. We know the customer’s interested about those things and actually wants to fix ’em because they’ve committed to spend a little bit of money to do a level two inspection and then now we spend a little more time doing videos and getting further into it and then building that bigger, bigger estimate once we know they have that commitment. At that point I have a couple level two items put on there as a left front outer tired end and then alignment, loose components found on inspection, we’ll need alignment when those items are done. Some of these things are just like to make building the estimate easier so that you’re not just bringing a tire rod end over, you’re having the technician say because of this tire rod I’m going to need an alignment also.
(00:36:03):
So that information was brought over here, tire rod and alignment so I didn’t have to go back in, add a service package, type in alignment, bring it over, add and close and bring it over that way. Even just that if that’s five or 10 seconds, by having it in the technician’s hands, I pretty much guarantee you the technician has more time to click on those things. Then the service visor does up front so by keeping it in their hands it just helps the service advisor build the estimate. That tire end job that’s there. A great thing that AutoVitals brings over to Protractor is those conditions and notes. It says left front auto tire end so we can have just one base service package of tire rod and then I can go in there and do a catalog lookup rather than having an outer tired end, an inner tired end, an upper joint, a lower bul joint, you can have one service package and then look up that piece and by having that note in there, I don’t need to go back in here and say left front outer tire rod, just those extra little notes that the service advisor makes notes on, it’s already brought over there and doing that already.
(00:37:15):
So there’s just little pieces like that that are time savers and it’s five seconds here and it’s 10 seconds there but it’s huge in the grand scheme of things.
Tom Dorsey (00:37:23):
No, that is brilliant and I mean it empowers your text. I mean one of the biggest challenges, this is an age old challenge in independent aftermarket, well everywhere, right? Anywhere you get texts that have to sell through a service writer is that their job ends at that last check mark on that piece of paper. After that I mail it off and I hope and I wish and I dream and I click my heels together, whatever voodoo ritual you go through in your shop to try to hope to get work and that gets stale over time. Here’s a concept where it says no technician, you are fully in control and empowered to use the expertise that we’re paying you to use to find and recommend and add those notes and information and prioritizations and detail that a helps the service advisor to actually get that stuff approved but then as you just saw, really eliminates a lot of the back and forth because a lot of that stuff isn’t just yeah, I got to go here and click here.
(00:38:34):
Again. A lot of it also is let me walk out into the shop and talk to this guy and figure out what he really meant and come back and then click the stuff and all of that goes out the window. John, what would you say from a techs perspective, because we’ve been talking a lot about the service writer, but this is a really great point on empowering that technician through that digital inspection and being able to set up such so much, it’s almost just like a prebuilt checklist that he walks through. In other words, you don’t really need to spend a lot of time thinking about it because the information’s there for you and you just make your selections from your observation. What are some of the best practices that you’ve been working on implementing at shirts, automotive to get those texts to be able to produce the first time, the best possible draft of the story?
John Long (00:39:30):
Well the thing that we did was going back through our inspection and making sure if they select a condition, it’s automatically going to select the proper action so they don’t even have to choose the action that’s already set up and that’s ready to go so they can just going back to the tire rod, they can say loose tire rod end and it’s automatically going to select the package to replace that tire rod end just going through and taking the time to properly set up your inspection that way. And I know we had a question from Jose how long it took us. Well unfortunately since I was the Guinea pig like Scott said, for me it took me a lot longer than probably what it does people nowadays to set that up for me it was probably easily 20 hours minimum at the initial get-go. And then as AutoVitals has evolved, I’ve evolved with it and we’ve redone our inspection a couple of different times since then.
(00:40:22):
So I mean we’ve got conservatively, I’d probably say at least 50 hours into building our inspection the way it is now on it and Adam’s shaking his head yes and smiling because he knows he’s right there with me I’m sure or pretty close to it. But the thing that I want to emphasize is spend that time, don’t think of it as waste of time to set it up because it’s going to help everybody in the process including your techs because your techs are going to like it because they can get through the inspection faster and they don’t have to think, okay, if I choose this condition, what action should I choose? It’s automatically set up and you don’t have to go back and forth on that
Tom Dorsey (00:41:00):
And that’s actually one of the challenges to adoption because it’s so different than checking a box on a piece of paper. And so then you get this dropdown and oh my gosh, and some guys, yeah, they’ll get over analysis paralysis is what happens and this is one of those things that just eliminates that it really use your talent, make the right observation, let the system make the determination, the solution and then populate everything that you need and you just follow the process. You go here, then you go and you take the picture and now I mean notes populate. You just make your recommendation, just make your observation and take a picture of what you observed and the system and then the service advisor is just so much better prepared as we’ve seen, to not only efficiently estimate that information and provide it in a way to your customer to the motorist that makes it a no-brainer.
(00:42:00):
Easy to understand. I don’t have to go Google it, I don’t have to think about it. I can plan how I want to take care of some of those bigger tickets over time and so I get the exit schedule on the back end, but also it becomes consistent. It just starts to happen that way all the time and that’s really the key for what a lot of people are and matter of fact, it doesn’t matter what season it is, it doesn’t matter how busy you are, the processes, the process, follow it each and every time and you’ll get those consistent benefits.
Bill Connor (00:42:35):
So could I go ahead and help alleviate some of Adam and John’s pain that they had when they set those up? Because if a shop changes the Protractor now from what they’re using, Scott’s going to dump them service packages in there by default AutoVitals when we set up your shop, we’ve got inspection sheets that already pre mapped we’re going to drop in there, so you’re not going to start out with the work from day one if you want to go rogue and go ahead and develop your own stuff later on by all means, but you don’t have to do all this work from day one Now with the tools that AutoVitals and am s Protractor have put in place as a team
Tom Dorsey (00:43:14):
For sure, and I mean if you’re saving 10, 15 minutes per estimate, you make them 50 hours up pretty quick anyway and that doesn’t even calculate the added sales, right? So that’s
Adam Bendzick (00:43:23):
Worth it. It’s a lot of time, but I would say John and myself or whoever else is doing it would not take that time back and put it towards something else so worth it.
Tom Dorsey (00:43:34):
Right. Well I want to shift gears and I want to talk metrics. I want to start talking about this is all great, all this stuff we’re talking about sounds fantastic and you’ve seen it so it’s one of those things you got to see it to believe it, but for your individual operation, I would really like to get into how can I monitor? How do I know that it’s working, how do I know that that efficiency is improving and I may still able to maintain my car count and I’m still able to grow my approval rate and some of my other top line metrics that I’m driving to grow my business. Is there anything else that maybe we might’ve missed or you guys wanted to talk about as it comes to that interaction in estimate creation segment?
Adam Bendzick (00:44:30):
Just the only thing I would add is kind of echoing the same thing that Uwe said. You hit the nail on the head as far as $2,000 revenue a day. It sounds huge but it is a hundred percent spot on. I think he created a chart and then I created a quick little reference there too of whether you’re a shop that’s doing a hundred cars a week or whether you’re a shop that’s doing 50 cars a week, you take an 80 or a hundred dollars type item and it can turn into two grand in gross profit a day. Not only just revenue, literally two grand in gross profit for a 50 car shop that can be a thousand dollars in gross profit. And then for little extra credit, me being anal is I start thinking about the parts that we’re selling and the rebates that we’re getting and the Napa autocare stuff and the this and that and the eight percent’s here and the 10 percent’s there on the cost of the parts that I bought.
(00:45:23):
That’s not even just thinking about the rebates on top of the sales revenue. So there’s just mean spend the time to do it. This is the things that sets the shops apart that are going to have an owner that’s there working 60, 70 hours a week doing the service size, trying to be the tech and everything like that to where you can come on a radio program like the four out of every six weeks for an hour and a half and talk your head off with all these great people. You have that flexibility because now you created revenue stream that allows you to do the things you should be doing as opposed to crank and wrenches and working with every single customer. So it’s so worth it. Spend the time
Tom Dorsey (00:46:08):
And don’t let him fool you after the show he is going to go fishing. Yeah,
Adam Bendzick (00:46:12):
I still work quite a bit, but yeah, now I’m thinking about ways of doing things better and not working within. They say that work on the business then in the business and it’s like you want to roll your eyes whenever you hear it because it’s like, God, I hear that all the time. You hear that all the time, then you get to this point you’re like, yeah, I should have listened a lot earlier.
Tom Dorsey (00:46:36):
Believe me, I know. And there’s a lot of people in the audience right now going, I hate that guy. Yeah, exactly. He’s on that show
Adam Bendzick (00:46:42):
All the time and just shut up already just like, can he leave? We want more Bill
Tom Dorsey (00:46:52):
Time, the tan, but so I have a question. Is fishing the new code world for call racing? Right? Right. Yeah, definitely. No, I was going to throw that in too, but that’s happening on the weekends buddy. That happens on the weekend
John Long (00:47:07):
And the further Adam’s point, it’s also not just about the revenue, it’s also about the customer service that you can provide your clients because if your advisors have more time to talk to them, you’re going to develop those lifelong clients and you’re not going to be just a one and done client. So I mean it’s that revenue over lifetime and not just that one time or that one monthly spot, they’re going to be more apt to leave great Google reviews for you. I mean that’s one thing we’ve seen a huge increase in is our Google reviews have just exploded because our advisors have more time to build those relationships and cultivate them
Adam Bendzick (00:47:45):
And we just care about doing a good job anyway. I mean our goal is a good job taking a check engine like diagnostic, telling ’em that a camp shaft position sensor is bad and then send ’em out the door or is it good job taking the wheels off there and actually taking a look at brakes and saying there’s a ball jet loose, they had no idea and then is a good job stopping at that point and saying, here’s your inspection and saying here’s all these things as they look at it, hopefully they can take it in because you did a good job editing, inspection, all that stuff. But if you don’t end up giving the pricing, all it is is information that goes into one ear and back out the other and there’s nothing to take action on. So to me a good job is literally all of those phases and doing it every single time and if you focus on just doing a good job, the revenue, the this and that, the reviews, they kind of start to just come in because that’s what your focus is. It’s doing that good job.
Tom Dorsey (00:48:44):
Yep, it’s organic. Hey Scott, I got a quick question from you from Jeff Newton boom in the audience and he’s asking how are the past inspections accessed in Protractor ?
Scott Thorley (00:48:56):
Yeah, so because AutoVitals pushes that information in when you’re looking at the screens from Bill or from Adam, you notice there were links in for each of those lines. So you pull up any historical invoice and you’ve got the link right there to access the past inspection and I think you can also do access those past inspections from within AutoVitals once that customer comes back. But even in Protractor it’s saved with the invoice, so it’s very easy to access.
Tom Dorsey (00:49:20):
Yeah, there’s a link in there and you just click on it and wham bam. Thank you ma’am.
Adam Bendzick (00:49:23):
Really easy thing too is the deferred work where the way that shows up there where you can see that at any point is clicking on the deferred work at the top, it’s dated, there’s the deferral notes and everything like that is all there. So anytime you can click and queue that up.
Tom Dorsey (00:49:38):
Yeah.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:49:39):
And services, sorry, on the tablet for the tech as well includes the inspection link, right? So it’s the whole shop, not just service advisor.
Tom Dorsey (00:49:49):
So
Bill Connor (00:49:50):
One of the things I commonly see shops do is when they do an inspection, they try and use it as a to diagnose the vehicle, and I really kind of like what Adam said earlier is that look, we want to sell that testing time, so we have things in there like Degre engine, we’ve got things like AC performance tests and things like that. And so my question is I’ve got a lot of shops that go in and have other inspection sheets that use to go ahead and build value into that testing time through pictures and so on. Are you using any additional inspection sheets or you just use the one main one?
Adam Bendzick (00:50:26):
Yeah, good question. Yeah, we use the one main one, but then we have different levels of the main one. So the guys know the first column is what we call our level one and that’s your standard courtesy check with fluid checks and light checks and so on and so forth. Then we have our level two, which is the load test and the steering suspension, taking the wheels off there and doing the brake inspection. So depending on which phase we go to, that’s how in depth the inspection we go to, and that’s that basic part of it. I would say there’s more stuff on the level two inspection that actually requires a lookup for labor and parts and everything like that, whereas the courtesy check stuff is, it’s literally 90 to 95% of it is all pre priced in there. It is easy to look up with the catalog lookup, but nonetheless, just to make it quick, we also do too is we have little timestamps built into it and this is tip of the cap to AutoVitals for giving us the ability to do so is based off of conditions and recommended actions.
(00:51:25):
There’ll be alerts that come through that says air filters marked dirty. If it was good, there’s no alert that’s going to come through If it’s dirty, it’s going to give us an alert. If we get to the point at which everything is done on that level one inspection, there’s one note about thank you for coming in today and it’s just like a timestamp of the progress that the technician’s at some shops will maybe think that that’s a great thing to add. Some won’t, but it just gives us little spots. Even though we only have one inspection for everything, it gives a timestamp as to where we are. Then when you hit that update work order button, what I love is our prior point of sale system, it took a long time to bring everything all over and then if you had already brought it over and then you queued it up to update work order again, it would bring that job in again.
(00:52:14):
So you’d have two air filters or two ball joint jobs or this and that. Now we can hit the update work order button once that air filter is marked as dirty because the alert came through and then it brings it over the work order. And now if they’re still doing the rest of the inspection and we have that level two phase and they find breaks, sure, yeah, we can hit the update work order button again and then it updates the newest point in which their progress is. But that service advisor, they have downtime, eliminate that downtime and make it less stressful for ’em by allowing them to start bidding those jobs out when they have the time to do so. Then once the technician does the final submit and it’s all good to go, hit that update work order button one more time and everything is brought over at that point also too is when they’ve completely submitted it, if you have that big long 15 service package, $3,500 estimate, everything can kind of melt together a little bit. So those green bars that are brought over to Mark the progress of what’s already done helps the service advisor also to say, alright, I’m done to this point. Here’s the other items that I got to try to sell or I got to bid out or whatever. Yeah, a little
Tom Dorsey (00:53:24):
Workflow management even inside the ro. Yeah,
Adam Bendzick (00:53:28):
For sure.
Tom Dorsey (00:53:30):
Real quick, I got a great question from Jose Anta and he’s asking, what is a benchmark? What would you guys say? And I actually want to know has that increased from and how much has it increased by? But what’s a good benchmark for number of ROS that a single service advisor should be able to process in a single day and he’s saying 10 to 15 question mark?
John Long (00:53:55):
I think it just depends on your shop setup as, I don’t want to really get into this too much because we’re kind of getting off topic, but our service advisors don’t write up the estimates. I’ve got a separate production guy that writes up all of our estimates, so my advisors can probably handle a little bit more just because they’re not spending all that time writing those up. I’ve got a separate person that does all that. So yeah, they could probably handle 10 a day, 12 a day with ease, and they’ve got tons and tons of time to develop those relationships.
Adam Bendzick (00:54:30):
My general rule of thumb that I learned through a TI was an hour per vehicle per day is what one person can do. So if you have a service size production manager, you got to plan on each of ’em that’s going to half a half hour into it and still an hour to take that job from start to finish and it seems like a lot of time, but that’s the initial phone call two days ago to set up today’s appointment and all those things. So I plan off an hour. However, my goal with AutoVitals help and Protractors help and everything is actually to make that process where you could do it in a half hour to create that much more flexibility and time to sell jobs and spend time and so on and so forth. So even though an hour might be the standard time, I guess you could say we’re still trying to goal for a lot less than that. So now you can take, instead of 10 vehicles a day, maybe you can take 20 for a service advisor that really knows AutoVitals, really knows Protractor . I feel myself, I could actually take four technicians being the service advisor, production manager myself, talk to every customer, do it from start to finish on 20 vehicles, and I think I could do that. It would be overwhelming to do it consistently day in and day out, but you actually could do it with how AutoVitals has it set up and how that marriage with Protractor works.
Tom Dorsey (00:55:48):
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Real quick too, I got a question from Carlos Contreras and he’s asking both of you, what point of sale were you on before and how hard was it to convert that million dollar question right there?
John Long (00:56:01):
Both Adam and I were on the same point of sale system before we were both on our rider. For me, it was not hard at all to convert, nor for my team it was not hard at all. My team says we had probably one of the most successful launch days in the history of converting from one system to another. It was just a smooth, easy transition. But it was also because I spent the time in the setup process, which a lot of people now don’t have to do because of what Uwe Bill and Scott have done in that setup process. But for us it was pretty easy and seamless.
Adam Bendzick (00:56:38):
Same for us as far as before going into it. John, I’m sure you share the same sentiment, Scott, what is the commission program that we’re talking about for lining this all up? Is there
(00:56:52):
So no, legitimately we were our writer. The times that our service files save and then how quickly to tickets get back. I can’t imagine going backwards to what we had before and not wanting to pull my hair out. There’s things that, it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with AutoVitals, but there’s things of review service packages where our writer before you had to click and convert to estimate and then go from estimate back to work order where now it’s literally unchecking a box, checking a box. I as a shop owner, but prior service advisor and still service advisor, sometimes literally having that one feature I would never change to any other system unless it had that feature. That is everything with inspections and what AutoVitals does is awesome, but having that feature as well is equally as great. It’s a no brainer. I would never switch.
Tom Dorsey (00:57:53):
Everything else is gravy.
Adam Bendzick (00:57:54):
It is. It is. A hundred percent is and I
Tom Dorsey (00:57:57):
Like gravy, so I was supposed to talk BCPI was supposed to talk metrics and I know we’re at top of the hour, but I want, if we can at least give some people the takeaway there and they can go in and kind of figure it out and get started, then we can kick it over to Facebook and give some deeper guidance. Uwe, from your perspective, what would be the KPIs that you would recommend folks are paying attention to when they’re making this conversion, whether they’re on Protractor or AutoVitals now and just not fully taking advantage of those kits, the packages we’ve been talking about or they’re already doing it, what should they be looking out for?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:58:41):
I think three KPIs are important. How many deferred jobs got created out of the estimate? Building in the action with the customer, how many recommendations given by the tech made it to the estimate, right? With this tool it should be a hundred percent. So the service advisor needs to take them off, right, to not have a hundred percent. And then of course, the million dollar question, how many items on the estimate get sold? But those are the three KPIs.
Tom Dorsey (00:59:25):
Is that kind of what Adam and John, is that kind of what you guys are looking at? I mean, this is old stuff for you by now, but I’m sure you probably monitor it just to make sure that everything’s staying consistent. Yeah.
John Long (00:59:41):
Oh yeah. I look at tickets daily. It’s just a part of my process as an owner to go through and just review audit stuff. But yeah, it’s making sure everything gets on there is the biggest thing because a lot of people think 50 50 sales ratio, 50% approved and 50% decline is the industry norm, but let’s not fool yourself when you make this switch, you’re going to probably see a lot different rates. It’s probably going to go to 40% approved and 60% decline or maybe even a little bit higher just because everything is now getting on that ticket. Just for a quick story here, well not really a story, but just last month we did almost $300,000 in sales. My approval rate was only 30% and we had a $650 ARO. So am I going to complain to my service advisors that they need to sell more because they only had a 30% approval rate with a six 50 ARO? I don’t think so. Pretty happy with that, but you may see it as 60 or 40 60, but the 50 50, I don’t think is the industry norm anymore, in my opinion. If you actually are doing everything right and properly,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:00:58):
If I may,
Tom Dorsey (01:01:00):
Of course.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:01:02):
I think what’s more important is the trend. So you introduce a new system, you start religiously measuring the metric, and then you see an improvement. That’s way more important than just going for whatever industry standard or other number because if the improvement is solid and becomes second nature, you can just extrapolate where you’re going to land. And so it’s really initially more important to watch how the new behavior becomes second nature than anything else. I mean, do you agree John and Adam?
John Long (01:01:43):
Oh yeah, I definitely agree. Looking for that trend. We definitely did it when we made the switch, is looking for that trend going upwards as far as our ARO, because we knew we were putting more on there. Other things were going down just because we were putting more on there, but looking for those trends, and I’m not really concerned about the industry norm. It’s what can our shop do and how well can we do it? And I think we’ve been successful in doing both of those things and our numbers show it overall.
Tom Dorsey (01:02:15):
No, that’s it, right? You’re carving your own path, you’re setting standards, right? You’re sentinel standards, right? I mean there wouldn’t be Olympics, right? If you weren’t trying to break that last guy’s record and make a new one. Scott, I got a quick question for you before we got to get out of here. There’s a lot of strong metrics in the business summary inside of Protractor s as well, and I know a lot of shops are finding a lot of value in combining, taking some of those high level metrics and then doing the digging in and the research and looking at the behavioral. How did we get to this point inside of the business control panel in AutoVitals? What would you say is kind of your biggest differentiating value between other systems out there and what you guys are doing through that business summary?
Scott Thorley (01:03:03):
I think in general, Protractor just has a ton of available reports and then almost unlimited ability to customize. So my issue almost is there’s too much, right? There’s too many reports and too much customization. So some shops that don’t know what they’re looking for, sometimes it can be daunting initially. So one of the things I love to do is I love doing that reporting stuff. So I’ll talk to a shop and say, what do you want to see? Don’t forget about what you looked at in your past system. What would you like to be able to see? And I can customize reports to drill down by service writer by category and look at metrics like deferred versus sold down to that level. And I can slice and dice it a bunch of different ways, so I don’t expect somebody to be an expert at doing that. That’s what I’m here for. And we’ll create those reports for you. And the great thing about Protractor is those reports are exportable. So once I do one for one person, I put it in our user group and anybody can load it in their system and run that report. So there’s just so much information you can get. It’s just a matter of identify what you want to see and likely I can get it for you.
John Long (01:04:14):
And that was one of the things that attracted me to Protractor because I’m a numbers geek, so looking at those reports and then building dashboards off of those, that’s all me. And I know Adam’s the same way. Yeah, it’s fun. I love it and I know Adam loves it too, and we will compete and we’ll say, Hey, I created this dashboard, take a look at it and we’ll send each other dashboards all the time.
Adam Bendzick (01:04:37):
Yeah. I look more at instead of conversion rates, I’m looking at how many dollars per estimate are we bidding out and then what are the dollars that we’re selling off that? Yeah, you can see a sold percentage, but since estimating everything and having the Protractor and having that data live updating literally every five minutes without me having to generate a report because we have a dashboard built up that way. I mean for the number geek of number geeks, it’s like Christmas.
Tom Dorsey (01:05:07):
Well, and it’s so insightful because you get that information almost in real time. You can get out there and find out, Hey, there’s something off here. Let me dig in and find out what’s going on and correct long before you notice it in the bank deposit or whatever. Right. Hey, is there anything else? I know we got a break now. I could go on another hour. I got to tell you, and we’re going to have to push I think some of the metrics discussion on the Facebook if we could. I know we had some visuals. We’ll post those up on Facebook. Well, we got a final poll for you too. Please take that. If you’re not registered in the Facebook forum, you just get in there and search for AutoVitals partner forum or Digital Shop Talk and you’ll find it. It’s a closed group, but you just request to join.
(01:05:57):
We’ll ask you a few questions and then get you in there. There’s thousands of shop owners in there and these guys, and we’re all talking about how to be better shop owners, how to help each other be better. So getting that conversation and we’ll post up a lot of the follow up in there. And so if you didn’t get your question answered today, get into that Facebook form and post it up in there and we’ll continue the discussion over there. I think we’re going to have to have a second segment and bring you three back if that’s possible here in the not too distant future because we’ve got a lot more to talk about. We just scratched the surface really. Scott, in parting, is there anything that you’d like to leave us with that maybe you’re hoping we’d cover and we didn’t get to?
Scott Thorley (01:06:47):
No, I guess I just want to say in general, the partnership with AutoVitals from the beginning when they did the integration, they just did a fantastic job and the speed is amazing. I just want to I guess point out it wasn’t smoke and mirrors, right? Adam showed he clicked update work order. That information was on the work order and Protractor in a second, right? No smoke and mirrors. That’s the way it works. The integration is fantastic. So it’s been great.
Tom Dorsey (01:07:14):
Thank you. And Bill even was fasting. Look at where he’s at. He’s out in the bushes in the hill country. That’s the hill country.
Bill Connor (01:07:21):
So it’d be great to go ahead and for those that are watching, using the business control panel to KPIs that are related to this that you’d want to watch is the number of recommended actions, estimate to recommendation rate, estimate to sales rate, and then maybe even pull up can job one and two and actually look and see what has been going through your shop. So those are good ones to monitor pertaining to what we’re talking about today.
Tom Dorsey (01:07:44):
Yeah, because that really tells you that ties the knot for you. You did all that work the 50 hours, now it’s greatly reduced. Thanks to John Long and Scott, do we
Adam Bendzick (01:07:54):
Have time for that Bill as long as we’re here? No,
Tom Dorsey (01:07:57):
But you get that stuff pushed over. Hey, real quick, I want to say thank you to Carlos Contreras also. He said thank you and I really appreciate you coming in Carlos and listening. His goal is to hit 2.5 mil this year, so you are in the right place young man. Get over in that Facebook form if you’re not there already and get part of it because these guys will help you get there. No doubt about it. John, anything that you want to leave us with any more pearls of wisdom or even share some of your lunch recipes with us?
John Long (01:08:28):
Oh, we got about another three hours, right?
Tom Dorsey (01:08:33):
Eight minutes ago.
John Long (01:08:37):
No, I mean I think we hit a lot of the first section talking points pretty well on that. There is a significant time savings there between the marriage of AutoVitals and Protractor and it’s just get it done. What are you waiting for if you’ve been on the fence for a while? Plus I need to get some more steak dinners from Scott.
Tom Dorsey (01:09:02):
He’s got the Omaha account just shipping to you daily. I’ll tell Adam he’s getting McDonald’s.
Adam Bendzick (01:09:08):
What?
John Long (01:09:10):
Hey, I’m the original. I get the best stuff. Oh
Tom Dorsey (01:09:13):
Goodness.
Adam Bendzick (01:09:14):
How? Yeah, John started. You were with it six months or so before I was, I think,
John Long (01:09:20):
No, it was about a year actually. It was
Adam Bendzick (01:09:21):
It about a year. Okay. Yeah, and I mean he worked through it and it was extremely helpful to have him work through some of those bugs as always before I got to it, to Scott’s credit and Uwe and everybody else is as accessible as Uwe is through the Facebook forum and sending messages and stuff like that. And Bill as well. Scott’s that same way for Protractor, so that hands-on extra person that you can talk to instead of calling and waiting on the phone and then not getting right person anyway. And I’m going to have to escalate this to level two. I mean I just remember hearing it so many times and I wanted to shake whoever was on the other end of it is
John Long (01:10:01):
Four days later you might get a level two person.
Adam Bendzick (01:10:03):
Exactly. Exactly. Like Scott is on it. The other support’s been great too, but just having him be that person like Eva is and Bill is, and the team at AutoVitals System, Tom, I can’t imagine aligning with a better company
Tom Dorsey (01:10:19):
And Protractor has a great users forum also get over there. I mean that’s holding it down over there. Uwe’s holding it down on the AutoVitals Facebook forum and that’s how accessible that they are and I couldn’t said it any better, Adam, is that that’s a refreshing thing, man. When you got somebody especially, it’s such a critical, become such component of your business and what a great thing that A, not only do they listen to you, but they actually respond and you can get ahold of them. Eva, what are you leaving us with Buddy? Other than where’s my sunset or sunrise? Probably while you
Adam Bendzick (01:10:58):
Were a little chopped about the steak Uwe. I’m a little, my,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:11:05):
No, I think I cannot really add a lot to it. Let’s keep finding more hidden gems we can uncover and make it faster. That’s our mission to really turn the service advisor back to be a service advisor advising service.
John Long (01:11:30):
Exactly. That’s exactly the key right there. Yes, and there are some more hidden gems out there. I know I’ve poked and prodded on some of them, so I know we’ll have to get into that another day, but
Adam Bendzick (01:11:41):
Well, there’s a lot of gems that are already there that we don’t have enough time to talk about. The opportunity is endless.
John Long (01:11:49):
Yeah, work order templates are huge. That’s a huge time saver if you know how to do those and have those set up in Protractor.
Adam Bendzick (01:11:55):
Yep.
Tom Dorsey (01:11:56):
Tune in for episode two.
(01:11:59):
Hey and real quick, Carlos’, follow up to my shout out. He said that John and Adam are driving Ferraris after seeing how fast they can convert an inspection team. Yes, they are. Join the speed team guys. I can’t thank you enough. It was a great show. Like I said, I could see just like John’s point, I could see a couple more episodes coming soon on just things we didn’t even get a chance to cover. Looking forward to having you all back on. I hope everybody got great takeaways and you got a full notepad again, get it into the Facebook forum and continue that discussion there. Scott Doley, Mr. Thorley, I can’t thank you enough for coming on Ticket Time out of, I know you’re amazingly busy schedule to come in and talk to folks and we hope to have you back soon, buddy. Absolutely. Thank you very much. And of course to my expert panel of experts get to Work. We got another show next Wednesday. Tune in 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern where we’re at. Subscribe so you get the notifications and we’ll see you next week.
