Your workshop. Your rules. E-Book

Mike Duggan

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 74

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

DESPITE RISING DEMAND AND A GLOBAL SHORTAGE OF TECHNICIANS, AUTO REPAIR SHOPS ARE CLOSING. WHY?

It's getting harder to make money. For decades, shops haven't been able to address their number one problem.

Research with 581 workshops on 4 continents uncovered this startling truth: shops get their core processes right less than one third of the time, which costs each shop more than $400,000 a year as revenue leaks out of the business.

If that was sustainable in the past, it certainly isn’t now.

This leakage is similar whether the shop uses a workshop management system or pen and paper – existing technology is not addressing this problem.

Early adopters have boosted their revenue by 34% without changing rates or adding staff. Now it's your turn.

Inside, you'll find:

- An easy to follow, simple step-by-step guide to transform your business, focusing on the one metric that matters most.

- Proven tactics from other industries to deal with rising vehicle complexity and scarce technicians.

- A clear path to a better, less stressful, more satisfying business for you, your team, and your customers.

Don't let your business become another statistic. This no-nonsense guide cuts through the fluff, delivering actionable insights to safeguard your legacy and help you thrive in a changing industry.

Your competition will read this book. Will you?

Leseprobe

First published in 2025 by Giant Leap Publishing.

© Copyright Mike Duggan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The right of Mike Duggan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Illustrations: Mike Duggan

This book is not intended to provide personalised legal, financial, or investment advice. The Authors and the Publisher specifically disclaim any liability, loss or risk which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any contents of this work.

"In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it."

Robert A. Heinlein

Dedication

My Grandad made his workshop the most exciting place on earth. But my parents were forced to leave the business when they realized it couldn’t generate enough money to support their family. Without that one single painful decision, I would not be here. I owe everything to my parents’ courage and hard work, and to my incredible wife Abigail and wonderful daughters Charlotte and Evie who bear the consequences of their fateful decision so patiently.

Introduction

For decades, auto repair workshops haven’t been able to address their biggest problem.

The number one profit driver for workshops is their ability to turn technicians time into money. But in their everyday operations, shops face real challenges doing this and are constantly frustrated. It’s so bad that most shops can’t conceive of a world where things reliably go well most of the time.

Our research involved 581 workshops across 4 continents. We can clearly see that everyone faces the same core set of problems. Shops say they can get their core processes right only 29% of the time, and so, every year more than $400,000 of potential revenue leaks out of the business.

Average workshop revenue is slightly less than $1 million. If the problems that cause this were fixed, their average revenue would be closer to $1.4 million.

This makes the auto service and repair industry highly unusual. I’ve never seen another type of business that routinely leaks so much revenue from the core processes that are at its heart.

And interestingly, the amount of leakage that shops experience is roughly the same whether the shop uses a workshop management system or pen and paper – which suggests that existing technology is not addressing this problem successfully.

The leakage occurs in three areas:

$244,483 is lost to poor planning.

Technicians are not assigned enough work, missing parts cause avoidable delays, and technicians need to constantly stop work to access information they need to do the job.

$76,479 is not invoiced

Time wasn’t tracked and there’s no proof of the work done.

$88,318 is lost to slow customer messaging

Slow replies from customers to messages delay work, and slow paper invoicing delays cash collection.

Is this sustainable?

We asked shop owners how good they are at turning technicians time into money - the number one most important thing in the business. Few rate themselves highly. The overall score is just 29%.

If that was sustainable in the past, it certainly isn’t now.

As vehicles become more technically advanced, they become more complex. This makes it harder for workshops to rely on technicians’ labor as their primary source of income.

Technicians can't work efficiently without the right parts on hand - delays in parts delivery and parts that don’t fit result in idle time and lost income. Customers expect timely repairs. They expect their vehicle to be fixed first time, putting pressure on workshops to deliver even if the diagnosis and the fix is complex.

There's a shortage of skilled technicians in the industry. Finding and retaining qualified staff is becoming more challenging. It takes longer than ever to train technicians. As people leave the industry, their knowledge is often lost.

These factors combine and create financial stress. The traditional model of making money by selling technician’s time is under pressure. Workshop owners and technicians face increased frustration and economic uncertainty.

Many in the industry are looking for ways change their business model and adapt to market conditions. This isn’t as easy as it sounds.

You can raise prices, and maybe you should, but that comes with a degree of risk. You can find ways to package work into larger sales, but customers have only so much appetite to pay more. You might find new ways of marketing more effectively. These are all good things to do.

But if we don’t directly address workshop efficiency, they are all ways of filling up a leaking bucket.

Wouldn’t it be better to plug the leaks?

The inescapable truth is that workshops need to make money by charging for technicians’ time. The best way to fight back against the forces making this harder is to find new ways to operate more efficiently. It's not just about fixing cars; it's also about maximizing every minute of your team’s workday.

When this is done right, it’s the most effective thing you can do and creates rapid payback.

The elephant in the room is that stopping the leakage entirely requires a new type of technology. One that doesn’t exist in this industry yet. Even though all the constituent parts needed do exist in other industries.

This lack of effective technology has meant that shop owners have never been able to tackle their biggest challenge. As a result, they've had to focus on other opportunities and accept massive revenue leakage, because this problem has been too difficult to solve. This book is my effort to change that.

My name is Mike, and I have an unusual background. It gives me a different perspective than most on how this problem can be solved.

I spent 30 years as a business consultant helping iconic brands prosper from change. I’ve developed and used a robust set of strategies to deliver a series of high-profile transformations - increasing sales, improving efficiency, and building the core systems that power the world’s biggest businesses. But I also spent my formative years working in my Grandad's workshop.

Drawing from both worlds, it was natural to think about the effect these strategies would have in independent auto repair shops.

They’d worked well for us in a range of other industries. Our work has created newspaper headlines and been featured in the business press. Apple have showcased our work with their investors and on their website. We’ve achieved transformational - not merely incremental – outcomes in industries many think of as traditional and resistant to change. To give you one example, we helped one customer boost sales and jump from fifth to first place in their most profitable market in just over a year. When we started working together our goal was to increase sales productivity 10%. In fact, we achieved 40%. Which meant that all the sales reps in the market very quickly wanted to work with our client. I don’t say this to boast, but so that you can understand that the winning strategies in this book are well proven and robust.

We were curious about the opportunity in automotive and wanted to know more. We wanted to understand in real depth the challenges that auto repair shops face. So, we used the exact same research method that worked so well in other industries and conducted research with 581 workshops across 4 continents. That convinced us that the opportunity is significant and that everyone has the same core set of problems. And we’ve not yet met anyone else who has conducted this amount of research. But still the question remained – would theory translate into the real word?

So, we built a series of prototypes to test this out. The results surprised us. The prototypes turned out to be more effective than we thought possible. Workshops using early versions on average made an astounding 34% more money within a year - with the same technicians charging the same rates. This is purely from using new technology and without any training or coaching or change management.

We could clearly see that, whilst there is nothing wrong with addressing other priorities on your list, they won’t give you the same results. And – just like in the other industries we’ve worked in - focusing on the biggest constraint you face unlocks a huge amount of value for your business.