Motor Age: Do you do anything to promote preventive winter maintenance? If so, what?
Woodard: Yes I do. We promote general maintenance all the time. It's actually the majority of our business at this point. It used to never be. We actually do a lot of our in-house marketing with a program we've got. It saves us a lot of money to do it that way. We use our internal database. We get a higher return using our own database than using a mass mailer.Motor Age: What type of maintenance are you performing?
Woodard: Anything involving a fluid exchange is always top of the list. Recently, we invested in several approved machines to flush fluids, which wound up being a good investment, because a majority of the work is fluid exchange. If you just go ahead and buy the equipment, you can go ahead and make a big profit margin on it.
Motor Age: How have you been able to keep on top of new technology you're seeing on today's vehicles?
Woodard: Training. We go to training facilities. We realized early on that if you don't keep up with your training, there's no way you can be on top of your game. We've invested in any equipment that's shown a return and gotten (technicians) training so it's not scary anymore.
Motor Age: What's the biggest problem you're facing in your shop right now? What type of help could aid you in solving the problem?
Woodard: You can find good mechanics and technicians out there, but you are pulling from an underschooled, undertrained pool of people. So it's not easy to just go hire a person that's going to fit your needs. You're going to hire someone who's already had the lack of training and is far behind, even though he's capable, but lacks from previous employer's training. You're pulling from an empty pool almost. The biggest thing to help me would actually be probably programs that offer more hands-on training. There's a wealth of training programs out there, but it's the hands-on ones that I've seen over the years that benefits my employees. There's something that gets lost in training when you don't have that other person.
Motor Age: Are you seeing the effects of a down economy? How are you combating this?
Woodard: Our company has been down 27 percent due to the effects of the economy, and what I did is hire a good sales service writer and we no longer have that problem. We actually do not have a problem now in this economy. I'd been looking for a service adviser, and when the economy is bad, you feel like you can't hire anybody. And when you hire a good sales service adviser, you'll see that there are people out there who want to spend money on their vehicles.
