AutoFix AdvisorCast

Chris Cotton [00:00:00]:
This is the autofix Advisor cast powered by worldpac. Hey everybody, this is Chris Cotton with the autofix Advisor cast and autofix auto shop coaching. We're here today talking to Casey Presnell, probably, probably one of the best managers in the country. If well at the top, if not the best. I would, I would take her in Durango, Colorado if she ever decided to move out here and work in our shop. I would for sure take her. How are you doing today, Casey?

Kacie Presnell [00:00:36]:
I'm doing, I'm doing really good.

Chris Cotton [00:00:38]:
Good. And so can you tell us where you're at or where you're at, what shop you work for, everything like that?

Kacie Presnell [00:00:46]:
Sure we are. Yokim is an independent repair shop. It's located in Republic, Missouri which is suburb of Springfield area. We're about 10 miles west of Springfield, Missouri, the big Bass pro shops capital of the world.

Chris Cotton [00:01:01]:
Right.

Kacie Presnell [00:01:02]:
We have three A techs in our shop and we have two service advisors. And we're just in a small community, but it's a very, it's a growing community. It's one of the fastest growing cities in the state of Missouri.

Chris Cotton [00:01:19]:
That's crazy. It seems like you, you have all these people shifting and moving from one part of the country to the next. And I will tell everybody, all the listeners out there, shop owner, service advisors, this is probably the best ran four bay, two service advisor shop in the country. Just from a standpoint of average repair order, car count, profits and everything else like that. But before we kind of get into that, how long have you been working for Brent there?

Kacie Presnell [00:01:48]:
So I've been there 17 years.

Chris Cotton [00:01:50]:
Okay, and then what did you do before that? What was your background before?

Kacie Presnell [00:01:54]:
I have been a stay at home mom, I have been a paramedic, I have been a legal liaison. I've kind of, I've done a lot.

Chris Cotton [00:02:01]:
Of things and probably the best cake.

Kacie Presnell [00:02:04]:
Maker I know, I do have a in, in home bakery and I raise dogs and I'm the financial secretary for my church.

Chris Cotton [00:02:14]:
So you're always on the go, right?

Kacie Presnell [00:02:16]:
A little bit, yeah.

Chris Cotton [00:02:18]:
So how do you think all of those things have helped you be the service advisor and manager You've become just.

Kacie Presnell [00:02:27]:
Learning people is the biggest thing. People are just different and learning how to meet them at their, at their need. Instead of just kind of a one size fits all, you have to kind of meet people where they're at. And all of my different jobs have taught me a lot about people.

Chris Cotton [00:02:48]:
It's interesting that you say paramedic. I don't think I knew that about you, I don't know we've ever talked about that, but I think that's fascinating. And just the stress level of being a paramedic. We had another shop that we coached that they had an ER nurse come in and work as a service advisor and, and she was kicked back in the corner. She's like, this is not stressful at all. She goes, if you want something stressful, come work in the ER with me. Like it's all perspective based, right?

Kacie Presnell [00:03:17]:
Yes. I handle all the triage at the shop, you know, all the cut fingers and all that. But I told Brent when I started working for him, he was saying he was going to get me a new stool or something to sit on. That, that one wasn't very comfortable. And I said, I've been a stay at home mom for four years. Like this is the most I've sat down in one day along.

Chris Cotton [00:03:38]:
Right. So for sure. Well, you'd think maybe having a paramedic on staff would make their workers comp insurance and everything go down. Maybe.

Kacie Presnell [00:03:46]:
You never know.

Chris Cotton [00:03:47]:
You never know. Right. So. So a couple of things that we talked about in the beginning, before we hit record was you wanted to talk about the way you do correspondence with your customers and teach us a little bit about that. You want to go ahead and get into that?

Kacie Presnell [00:04:01]:
Sure. So we have the texting availability, our mechanics all use tablets to write their s, to do their diagnosis, take pictures, all that. A lot of shops do that. That's commonplace now. When we first started doing it, it wasn't, but it's become very common. So we prepare the estimates. One of my rules in the shop is that we present all the information to all the people all the time. So that keeps us from predetermining what a customer will spend or what they want to do.

Kacie Presnell [00:04:39]:
And then it's, it's fair. It's not ever cherry picking certain vehicles or certain customer types. It's just saying this is what we do all the time. So that's one thing that we do. But with the estimating process and putting together maintenance needs, repair needs, those kind of things, it can be overwhelming. I think when people receive that on their end of getting a laundry list of what they might need to get done on their vehicle. I thought about it a couple months ago if I was sitting at my job, or maybe I was at my job as a paramedic or maybe even a stay at home mom, if I was sitting there and I received this text message that just had this huge list of things and maybe I Took it in for oil change, but maybe I took it in, have a diagnosis done, but then I get five or six items that my car needs. I think that people immediately shut down when they see that and they just go, you know, just do the oil change and I'll talk to my significant other and we'll figure this out.

Kacie Presnell [00:05:48]:
And so what we started doing is we send the inspection information that's going to give the details about what's needed, why it's needed, so you can give them pictures to look at, but we don't send the estimate at that time. We give them time to digest that. Our, our program that we use lets us see when they actually view the inspection. So once they've viewed it and have had a little bit of time to digest it, we call them at that point before we were just sending, and.

Chris Cotton [00:06:19]:
We can, we can mention that. So you guys use TechMetric, which we use TechMetric in our shop as well.

Kacie Presnell [00:06:24]:
Yeah. So we call them instead of sending them the estimate and go through and answer their questions before we get to the numbers of things. Because once we are able to explain why something is important or the order of things that can be repaired or maybe something that could wait, that they just need a budget for, it starts to establish that rapport of walking them through the approval process, then we can go on to the numbers and talk about what they can afford. If we have any resistance at that point, that's when we can start offering their financing programs that we have and give them some other options. But I think from what I've seen that people, when they receive information, especially if it's at work, they don't want to deal with it then, and so they tend to just shut down, decline everything. We'll deal with it later. Of course, we want, we want to take care of those problems once in the shop with us.

Chris Cotton [00:07:26]:
And, and I will tell you, if you think back, probably, I think when I first met Brent, your, your guys average repair order was in the three hundreds, maybe the low three hundreds. And now you guys are like getting close to 650 or, or staying over 650 now in, in less than four years. That's really, really good.

Kacie Presnell [00:07:47]:
And we found too, that if we, if we don't do that inspection, which, that very rarely happens, but let's just say that we're super busy and it's just an oil change and we want to get them in and get them out. We found that we've trained our customers to actually expect that because they'll say, you didn't find anything wrong. Was there anything? Even the people that don't necessarily purchase at the time of their vehicle being in there, we'll always want to know like when you know, when do I need to do this? Or did you check on this filter while it was here? So we've trained our customer base to actually look for that inspection. But we found that they weren't opening the inspection. They weren't looking at the pictures, which we know data tells us that the pictures are what sells jobs. And so they weren't looking at that. They were just going directly to the estimate. They were seeing this big number and then just hitting decline.

Kacie Presnell [00:08:45]:
So this kind of stops that speedy process, slows it down and lets us walk with the customer through that so that it's not so overwhelming.

Chris Cotton [00:08:53]:
That's awesome. Can you talk about. Because one of the issues we were having in the beginning is the technicians really weren't bought into doing the pictures and everything on that. Can you talk about what Brent and you did to kind of get them? And I guess like if you're still doing your follow up and I guess the award kind of what that system looks like.

Kacie Presnell [00:09:17]:
So we incentivize the program to. If our mechanics are going through vehicles doing their complete inspection, taking the pictures, the items that are sold off those pictures, we're able to keep a count of that each week. And the mechanic with the highest number of upsells from pictures gets $100. Spiff. And it's been very effective. I've seen huge improvements on that. I mean they keep track of it more than we do. Honestly.

Kacie Presnell [00:09:51]:
They kind of have their own competition out there. And you can definitely tell when a mechanic is wanting to get that Spiff. We also have a very hard rule that anything that is on that inspection is an upsell. I should be able to walk my customer out in the shop and show him exactly what that problem is.

Chris Cotton [00:10:10]:
Right. And no, I think that's been great. That's been really great for your guys shop as far as getting the technicians on board. So if you're out there and you're having trouble with technicians taking pictures, then that's a. That's a good way for, for them to do that. Can you talk about the finance for itself?

Kacie Presnell [00:10:28]:
I'm sorry?

Chris Cotton [00:10:28]:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. $100 versus however many. Well, before I move on, how do you track that? Do you go back and look at each inspection to see what was sold and then like have a spreadsheet or how do you keep track of those things?

Kacie Presnell [00:10:41]:
So it's a part of the mechanics timesheet, which is a Google Doc. And they have to fill out their own. All of our mechanics are played paid flat rate. And so they fill out their timesheet with the vehicle ro, the work that was done. And then anything that that they consider an upsell goes in parentheses and then they will say how many upsells were on that RO and how many were with pictures and then their hours. And then we go back and we verify that information.

Chris Cotton [00:11:16]:
Okay, good.

Kacie Presnell [00:11:17]:
On a weekly basis.

Chris Cotton [00:11:18]:
That's a good way to keep track of that. Also, do you pay just for random knowledge? Do you guys get paid weekly? Bi weekly? How does, how does Brent pay? Okay, yeah, I still run it. We pay weekly in our shop. I still run across a lot of people that pay BI weekly or 1st and 15th or all kinds of different crazy ways. Now you had mentioned financing a minute ago. How many different financing options do you have? And do you have one that's more successful than the others?

Kacie Presnell [00:11:47]:
So we have Synchrony Car Care. What I like about that one is it's a very well known, established program. It's very legit. Some of the programs that I've reviewed in the past, they're a little bit sketchy sometimes as far as how we present it to the customer and how that affects the customer's. And I don't want to ever be somebody that's adding to someone's credit problems. So Synchrony Car Care is great. They have a really high approval rating. It's instant.

Kacie Presnell [00:12:20]:
They have a super easy website to use and customers can do that themselves. The secondary one that we've started using is PayPal where you can do the pay in four, I think it is, right where they can do four installments on their. And we've just started using that one. I ran one last week actually and it seemed pretty seamless.

Chris Cotton [00:12:48]:
Well, And I know TechMetric has an option where the customer can use Klarna or Affirm. Do you have many people that are doing that?

Kacie Presnell [00:12:56]:
We don't have. We do not have that set up on ours, no.

Chris Cotton [00:13:00]:
Okay.

Kacie Presnell [00:13:00]:
I looked into a firm and I looked into Klarna a little bit, asked me to do some research on those and I thought that PayPal was going to be a really good option for us.

Chris Cotton [00:13:13]:
Okay. Do you wait until the customer needs a bigger repair to get them approved for that or are you working on like pre approvals for people? That way they don't have to like last minute.

Kacie Presnell [00:13:26]:
So we have started promoting the financing more in the Shop. We have some different marketing materials that are in the shop. It's on our website. Both the PayPal and the synchrony are on our website. We try to do that needs based as far as like when we hear a customer, you know, back off from a repair or say, I'm going to have to figure out how I can pay for this or those kind of things we try to offer, then we have been trying to be more proactive with offering it in the beginning instead of when they say I don't have any money. And I. And I declined everything.

Chris Cotton [00:14:06]:
Right. Okay. And I know, I know Brent and I have been talking about it a little bit. How, how things in your market to seem, seem to be a little bit different. But how, what if anything are you doing to counteract that or you want to talk about the shop kind of right now?

Kacie Presnell [00:14:25]:
Sure. So I have noticed that it seems like to us that our customers have relaxed as far as not being so uptight about spending money on their vehicle. I think there was a lot of, you know, after the election, before the election, during the election. And I think that more than anything just kind of creates a snowball cycle. I don't know that many people actually buy into it so much as they buy into the frenzy around it. So. So since we have, since that, since the election and those things, we've seen that our customers have been more relaxed about spending before we would have somebody that might be, you know, you're in here for oil change and you have a nail in your tire. Would you like us to fix that? No, I'm not doing anything.

Kacie Presnell [00:15:15]:
You know, just really, I mean, really, really tight. It seems like our customers have really loosened up and are wanting to get their vehicles taken care of. We have seen a big shift in, you know, there for a while there it was anytime you brought up a repair, it could be an alternator. Then everybody was just going to trade in their vehicle. They're going to get rid of it.

Chris Cotton [00:15:38]:
Right.

Kacie Presnell [00:15:39]:
That has definitely changed. As far as they know that that's not a realistic possibility any longer.

Chris Cotton [00:15:46]:
Yeah. We had a customer come in last Friday on a newer Ford Bronco. I think it was a 21 or 22. There's no aftermarket water pump for that. There's no aftermarket belt for that. Even right now it's like the three cylinder turbo. And she called Ford and Ford told her it's going to be eight weeks before they could get her in. And that was Friday.

Chris Cotton [00:16:10]:
We got the part in first thing yesterday and got it done. And changed out. But she had told me over the weekend that she went to Ford and was like, you know, I've had all kinds of trouble with this Bronco. Maybe I want to trade it in and get something else. And as far as like new payments go, there was nothing like everything was double what her payments were now. And she was going to have to get into a car that was like four years older than this one in order to get the payments even close to what she's paying. I think, you know, vehicles are so expensive and I guess this is good for us in the industry. But you know, you have this parts obsolescence and then you've got people holding onto their cars longer, which means that they're going to have more terminal breakdowns instead of just the maintenance.

Chris Cotton [00:16:59]:
Because if you look at what we're doing, 15 years ago everybody was saying, hey, cars are more reliable, parts are better, they're not breaking down as much. So everybody was shifting to preventative maintenance. And it seems now like we're still doing preventative maintenance, but we're shifting back the other way where we have these big repairs that are leading to bigger Aros and everything.

Kacie Presnell [00:17:23]:
I agree. And I also think that vehicles now are not engineered from the perspective of being worked on. So the repairs before that were an hour or a simple starter, alternator, battery. I mean, some of Those are now 2, 3 hours depending on how a vehicle has been engineered and designed, where the location of those items are, you know, headlights, that's a huge deal. Headlight used to be a 310 job all day long and now we have headlights that are two hours. You're pulling the bumper off, you're, you know, recalibrating things. And so it's just not really designed for being repaired. And so that of course drives up all those prices.

Chris Cotton [00:18:12]:
Right. Anything else you're seeing industry wise or in your local area?

Kacie Presnell [00:18:21]:
We see a lot of people, it seems like they're wanting to get into newer cars. We don't. We're not seeing as many of the super, you know, 25, 30 year old cars around any longer. We try to shy away from that. But people kind of got pushed into new cars from, you know, this kind of dates back a little bit, but when we had the cash for clunkers and then we got rid of all of the potential, you know, used vehicles out there, it really left a huge gap and in the car pool of what was available for people to buy and all. Honestly, the newer generations, they have no interest in a vintage vehicle. They want a Vehicle with all the bells and whistles. Something that we will start seeing more and more of is ADAS technology.

Kacie Presnell [00:19:13]:
And so that's kind of the wave of the future of vehicles eventually being able to drive themselves. That's where everything is pointing towards, which.

Chris Cotton [00:19:23]:
Is kind of just crazy. And I remember, like, all these young pups listening. They're not going to remember what cash for clunkers was like, or even like 2008, 2010. And those, like, if you think you're having trouble selling now, you should have been around back in those days, because that was tough. Like. Like people would go drive their stuff to the salvage yard and pour the stuff in the engine and just blow it up and be like, okay, where's my money? Like, it was crazy, crazy times. Really, really tough. And we were fighting, fighting for every customer we could get into the shop.

Kacie Presnell [00:19:56]:
Scraping for every order and just even trying to do an upsell was just unheard of back then. You were just hoping that they would buy the fuel pump. You know, it's just right. So we have come a long ways in that.

Chris Cotton [00:20:10]:
Which, you know, I guess that goes into. Back then, we didn't even think about mental health. But it's really hard when you're at the counter trying to sell and take care of customers and you get your teeth kicked in all the time. Do you do anything? Like, what hobbies do you have? How do you. How do you relax and decompress after a long day at the shop?

Kacie Presnell [00:20:31]:
Well, I have taken that stress on for several years working in the shop, and it was not good for me, not good for my health, not good for my mental health. And I've learned to just really detach from that. It's, you know, it's their car. If they're going to fix it, they're going to fix it. If they're not, they're not. And there's always, you know, people that personally attack you and come at you and those kind of things. And I really just try to not just let it go. I don't know these people.

Kacie Presnell [00:21:02]:
They don't know me. I'm trying to fix their car and just. That's the end of it.

Chris Cotton [00:21:06]:
Well, and I tell the guys all the time, I'm like, we didn't buy it, build it, or break it, but we can for sure fix it. Like, that's, that's. That's the mentality you have to take at it. And I. Our. Our store manager was on vacation for a couple of days, so I went and helped the guys out and I got one of those phone calls, like at 4:50 on Friday, and the guy's screaming at me on the phone for no reason. And I think I'm gonna do a separate podcast just on this one phone call. But the guy was just, basically, I refused to fix his car, and he was just beside himself, screaming and yelling at me.

Chris Cotton [00:21:47]:
I'm like, sir, I think the best option now is just you go your way, we go our way. I'm going to give you a receipt. I'm not charging you a penny for it. You wasted our time, we wasted your time. But we're just going to, you know, boom, just wipe our hands and move on.

Kacie Presnell [00:22:03]:
Yes. I've had customers even be physically threatening, you know, those kind of things, and just say, you know, we're not. We're not your shop. We're not a good shop for you. We're not a good fit for you, and we don't want you back.

Chris Cotton [00:22:18]:
Well, he showed up yet.

Kacie Presnell [00:22:19]:
Go ahead.

Chris Cotton [00:22:20]:
Go ahead. No, you go ahead.

Kacie Presnell [00:22:22]:
I was going to say one thing that I've learned to do, and it's kind of a little bit of a mental head game with customers is, you know, when you're talking to somebody about their car, a lot of times it's a. They feel like it's a personal attack on them. It's be like talking about your kids, you know, and so if you're talking to them and saying you didn't change the oil, you didn't add the coolant, you let it overheat, they start to hear that as a personal attack on them. So a lot of times when I'm talking to a customer, I'll say, the car ran out of oil, the car overheated, these kind of things. And I associate all the bad things with the car.

Chris Cotton [00:23:09]:
I think that's good advice.

Kacie Presnell [00:23:10]:
Yeah, I try to find something positive in those and say, you know, I can tell you take really good care of the car. It's very clean inside. I can tell that you just rotated your tires and you're doing a lot of maintenance. So I attribute the positive attributes of the whole repair order to the customer, and I attribute the negative attributes of the repair order to the car. And I separate them. And so what the customer's hearing is, I'm doing my best, I tried my best. This isn't my fault, and let's blame it all on the car.

Chris Cotton [00:23:48]:
And I think that's a great point to make. And I want to go back and talk about the pictures for a minute. You know, part of Our job is building value for the car to make the customer, you know, realize that it has potential and that it can be fixed and they can keep it without having to buy something new. And so if you're. If you are a service advisor, you're in your shop and your technicians are only taking pictures of all the bad stuff, you got to sprinkle the good things in there about the car. Hey, the car's in great shape. Upholstery is good. You know, you came in today and we did an oil service, and we didn't find anything else.

Chris Cotton [00:24:19]:
Like, everything's, you know, great. We have to do that and build value for those vehicles as well. And I think. I think some people forget that.

Kacie Presnell [00:24:27]:
Yes, whenever we are at a. That fork in the road with a customer where they're trying to decide legitimately whether they should do the repairs or whether they should, you know, go someplace, you know, get their money into a newer vehicle. First of all, we try to be honest with them. If we really think that they shouldn't put any more money into it, we tell them that. I'm always surprised at the people that argue with you on that. It's like, listen, I'm actually losing money by telling you this information, but I don't think you should put an engine in this one. It has 275,000 miles on it. It's 22 years old.

Kacie Presnell [00:25:05]:
You know, we try to guide them and be a good steward of their finances and help them with those decisions. But then the other thing I tell them is to really take into consideration, you know, if the repair bill is, let's say, $2,500, and they're considering getting rid of the car, I tell them to take into consideration, could you go out and get what you've got? Could you get the same vehicle for $2,500? Or are you going to be in it to a payment? Maybe you're upside down on your loan. You also have to pay your personal property taxes on this. Like, the $2,500 sounds like a big bite now, but maybe it's not the bigger chunk that you're looking at here.

Chris Cotton [00:25:49]:
Well, and again, it's. It's about slowing down, explaining things to the customer, not being in a rush. And I like to call it spending relationship coins. Like, when you're doing that, you're actually, you know, you're. Without doing it, you're, you know, reaching into your pocket, you're taking coins, and you're giving those to the customer. And if you do it well enough and long enough, then the customer will hand all those back to you in real cash to fix the vehicle. Yes, but you got to spend time with the customers. You can't be so crazy and busy that you're just running around all the time.

Kacie Presnell [00:26:22]:
Yes.

Chris Cotton [00:26:23]:
So that's amazing. Casey, any. Any other words, any last thoughts or impressions you want to share before we go?

Kacie Presnell [00:26:34]:
I think the biggest thing about this, this industry is that it has been given such a bad reputation for so long. I mean, we're all crooks and thieves and stealing things out of your car and we're all doing that. And so the biggest part, I think, as an industry as a whole is that we have to start putting trust back in. And trust has to be built into all of our estimates. It has to be built into all of our practices. Everything that we do has to have a trust factor built into it. The things like the pictures that show people what we're talking about, we do. I'll walk customers in my shop and talk to them about, show them the repair.

Kacie Presnell [00:27:19]:
We ride with customers to hear what they're hearing or feel what they're feeling and just try to give them. And that trust factor has to be built back into all of it. Trust. You can't put a dollar figure on it, but people will pay good money for trust.

Chris Cotton [00:27:36]:
Absolutely. Again, thanks so much Casey, everybody out there. If you want to have any follow up questions or have questions for the show, you can send it to christofixsos.com also we have two other podcasts, the weekly blitz with Chris Cotton that you can go out and listen to. And we just started the Autofix Technology Cast. Have a great day everybody.

Kacie Presnell [00:27:58]:
Thanks, Chris.

Chris Cotton [00:28:03]:
That's a wrap for this episode of the Autofix Advisor Cast. Thanks for tuning in and investing in yourself and your career as a service advisor. We hope you found the insights both valuable and are ready to apply them to your shop. Thanks to WorldPAC for sponsoring the show and the WorldPAC Training Institute. WTI is dedicated to providing advanced level training for independent automotive repair facilities offering everything from advanced diagnostics to OEM and business development programs. Whether you're looking to sharpen your skills or take your shop to the next level, WTI has you covered with online and in person classes to fit your schedule, check out WTI's offerings and invest in your future success. Thanks again to worldpac and WTI for supporting Autofix Advisor Cast.