You might call what Bill Garcia experienced an epiphany, a eureka moment. With the loss of his bookkeeper, the owner of Bill’s Quality Auto Care in Simi Valley, Calif., a Motor Age Top 10 shop in 2012, decided to look through the books himself. What he found wasn’t shocking — his bookkeeper was good — but it was surprising.
By combing through budget minutia, Garcia has discovered hidden savings. Take his contract with the company that supplies and maintains the shop’s uniforms, towels and rags. “We’ve been doing Quick Books since January of 2003,” says Garcia. “We’d been doing business with this uniform company four years prior to that. So I went back to that date, I looked at how much money we spent with them. I looked at the cost trend; one of the things that really opened my eyes is that I’d let a couple guys go and the bill actually went up. What the heck was going on?”
Turns out the company had charged more because some uniforms were embroidered. “I said ok, you charged me full retail price for uniforms that (we’ve) had for 3 and half years,” Garcia reasoned. “Can’t you get your ROI (return on investment) out of that and give me full retail on those things?”
He also asked them to reconsider what they charged in towels, since the company used a formula that out of 200 towels supplied each week, his shop would lose or destroy 25 towels at 40 cents a towel.
“Long story short,” says Garcia, “I got my bill negotiated down about $200 a month.”
It’s hard to argue with such logic, and Garcia seems to revel in it. “I refuse to hire another bookkeeper until we nail this down,” he explains, “So I’m kind of going through my trial by fire here. I can hire somebody to help compile it, but I’m going to do it myself. It’s like when you don’t want to go to the gym and get on the treadmill for an hour; you’ll find any excuse not to do it. But when you do it, you never regret it. I don’t carry a briefcase right now, I carry a banker’s box, a cardboard file box. The guys at the shop are making fun of me.”
But as Garcia points out, since Bill’s Quality Auto Care operates on profit sharing, this benefits everyone. “Every time I find a spare buck, everybody wins,” he says, like dropping an unused phone from his cell plan. “When I start looking over the books, I have a whole list of things; what my payoff time is on certain pieces of big equipment, what can be renegotiated.”
This March 3 marked 20 years in business. “When I first opened I had my checkbook and my little solar powered calculator,” recalls Garcia. “That’s how I did everything in my 712-square foot single bay shop in the middle of nowhere. Now we do about $2 million a year. We have families to support, we’re members of the community. We’re very proud of all that but when you look at all your duties and responsibilities you say, man I’ve got to do this right.”
For example, how to better communicate with the client. “That’s what makes our job never ending,” he concedes. Bill’s has a shuttle, which Garcia has had occasional to drive. “You learn so much. People say incredible things when they’re riding. I’ve come back and said, ‘Forget that tune-up; this lady has major drivability symptoms.’ When I hire a shuttle driver, I tell them a lot of times they have more face time with these people than anybody. The impressions they give or get are very important. Sometimes I’ll do it. I’ll have some of my service advisors do it, but it’s a key position.”
So Garcia will continue to micro manage, at least for now. “But once I get good at this,” he gleefully asserts, “I can’t wait to hire someone else to shuffle papers!”
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