All Night Auto thrives on appointments, and concierge service provides a white glove approach to customer service.
A repair model that's moving the industry with white glove service and late hours still relies on the traditional distribution channels found with other repair shops.
Getting what the customer needs means getting the parts needed, which could be a challenge given the unusual hours of All Night Auto, which is working to put a more personal spin on vehicle maintenance. But the company has worked around any potential snags by working predominately by appointment, which allows the centers to know what vehicles are coming in, when they are coming in and what they are coming in for, says CEO Nicholas Cocco.
"We stock typical maintenance and repair service items such as brake and suspension components, rubber, fluids and filters at our stores," he says. "For the more complicated services such as diagnostics on fuel, emissions, electrical and drivability, we do our best to schedule this work during the daytime hours to allow us to diagnose when our supply warehouses are open."
Cocco adds: "Depending on the vehicle needs, sometimes we have to hold a vehicle over whether diagnosed day or night just because parts are not available from our warehouses."
He is taking the group of service centers and retail opportunities nationwide with its focus on service and free Concierge Club with pickup and delivery of a vehicle when repair or maintenance is needed.
"If you knew you didn't have to worry about your car, and every 90 days I called you and said it's time for your next oil change (you would appreciate it)," Cocco says. "You don't realize how much time you spend in auto repair. If you service your vehicle like you should, which is at least four times a year, every year, you're spending 12 hours of your life (each year) talking to dealers, talking to automotive people. If we can free up that time so you can do something else, it's worth it and that's what people are telling us."
Cocco says the company's clients, through focus groups and information sessions, told the executives that they don't like dealing with dealerships and service centers, whether it's buying a vehicle or having it repaired or serviced.
All Night Auto will handle all of those aspects for a customer, from setting up test drives to picking up the vehicle to servicing it themselves. The concierge service is the latest feature at the company, which began in Troy, Mich., in 1994 and has expanded to 10 locations in Michigan, Illinois, Oklahoma and Arizona. The locations are open until midnight on weekdays and 6 p.m. on weekends.
"It's all about the service, whatever our clients need," Cocco says.
Unique relationships
Cocco is quick to point out that rental vehicles are provided, as is transportation in shuttle vans. And for some larger business-to-business clients, special inventories can be stocked at their request.
"As far as our unique relationship with our suppliers, it's really about management and communications," Cocco notes.
"Our regional directors are highly involved with our suppliers, and our service and retail managers meet with local suppliers on a weekly basis to make sure that we have what we need to meet our client's needs and to keep in touch with changes that may be coming down the road."Getting to work
The company started when Rich Cole, now the chief financial officer, left work one night and had car trouble. In 2004, Cocco came on board after serving as global chief technology officer for Delphi Corp. He brought his experience as an ASE certified master technician to complement Cole's background as an accountant. Cocco got to work right away to link the main store with its two-franchise location.
"We had to centralize everything, create a central infrastructure. The franchises had virtually no contact with the original store, which was in Troy, Mich.," Cocco says. "There was no common parts, no common marketing, no common anything. It was just as if everything was a mom-and-pop organization, standalone. Even though they had the same name, that was all that was the same."
So Cocco created a training manual, policies and product, brought in new technology from Delphi and other manufacturers and pursued partnerships. The format has changed from franchises to joint partnerships, where people will put up cash and All Night Auto will run the business.
"The advantage to this is there's a lot of people out there who have $200,000 to $500,000 and would like to run their own business but don't want to give up their careers," Cocco offers. "Maybe they want to have something to retire to, and that's who's funding our expansion."
The company hopes to have 600 stores by 2012. There are three models: the standalone service center, a service center with an embedded retail store and a hub-and-spoke model. All three formats are in operation, including a hub-and-spoke model based in a shopping mall in Bloomington, Ill., a setup that saves on overhead and increases exposure.
Clients take their cars to the mall, where there is a retail showroom, and the vehicles are taken to a service center in a nearby industrial space to be serviced.
"Our business is growing. Each store has over the last three years done 20 percent improvement year over year. Again, the key to that is it's such a hassle," Cocco notes. "Compare getting a car fixed to anything else that's out there, and people most compare it to going to the dentist and getting a root canal. When you deal with All Night Auto, you don't even think about it."
The company has a national contract with Parts Plus, now part of the Automotive Distribution Network (ADN), and is working on national contracts with NAPA and other groups, Cocco says, in addition to regional and local contracts. It offers "full disclosure" in printing out pages of manuals to show customers what was done and walking them through the work completed.
"The key to service success is communication. That's key. But it's got to happen on both sides," Cocco explains. "There's a lot of good people in the automotive (community) who do a lot of good things every day, but the customer doesn't want to give them the time of day. We have to earn that, so we go out of our way."
