We may be well into winter in Canada, but lessons can be learned from one Markham-area shop where it’s about planning ahead and focusing on efficiency over volume.

By Lois Tuffin

In mid-October, long before the first snowflakes fly, Emily Chung sends out text messages to the 60 customers who store their tires at AutoNiche in Markham, Ontario.

She invites them to book their appointments to beat the rush, and she shares a link to the online system AutoOps, which she installed in August, and which ties into her Protractor SMS.

Ultimately, she hopes it will reduce the volume of the shop’s phone traffic. After all, she is filling in on the front counter until she hires a new customer service representative. If a customer books before October 31, she makes a donation to the Legion poppy fund.

It’s all part of the processes she has developed to keep the “crazy” out of the busy winter-preparation season.

As AutoNiche’s owner, Chung is always thinking one season ahead. Now, she’s making inroads to get her customers to think the same way.

It’s not always easy in a city where most snowy days don’t begin until Jan. 12 and end by  Feb. 25, with an average of one to four inches of snowfall, according to WeatherSpark.com.

“Over the past 15 years, we’ve gotten better at managing the craziness,” Chung says. “We joke in the shop about how I see a change in more sanity now.”

“It takes a commitment to vision,” she continues. “You can train your clients. Anybody can fix a car, so we focus on transparency and communication.”

Keeping up with the competition

AutoNiche operates out of a 4,400-square-foot location that has five bays with hoists and one open bay. Chung works alongside one service advisor and three techs, who service 120 cars each month. While they work on all makes, most of their customers drive Toyota, Honda and Hyundai models.

As winter approaches, she sees a 34- to 55-per cent increase in her car count from November 1 to December 15. But she aims to avoid disruption to the steps that make her small-but-mighty shop profitable.

The competition sits right outside her front door, with 17 other shops within the same block. She shares an industrial complex with a Mister Transmission, two quickie oil-change locations, an exhaust shop, a Speedy Auto Glass and a car wash, plus eight other auto-related businesses.

Fortunately, she also has several jobbers nearby, so she keeps limited stock in her shop. These serve the 100 auto repair shops in the immediate area near suburban Toronto’s Highway 7 and McCowan Road intersection.

Yet Chung’s value proposition helps her operation stand out. She compares her approach to people who will wait for a Starbucks barista to prepare a latte, rather than get a double-double from Tim Hortons.

Scheduling for sanity

With a small shop, Chung limits the number of “waiters” who linger during a repair or service. She keeps these coveted spots open:

• Three at 8 a.m.
• One at 1 p.m. during the busy season
• Two to three at 1 p.m. on quiet days

Anyone who cannot mesh these times with other commitments are invited back on a Saturday.

“It’s like a restaurant where you cannot get a table at peak times,” Chung notes. “If we had more feedback from our clients about our arrangement, I would change it.”

The shop runs Tuesdays to Saturdays. Every Tuesday morning, her team meets for 15 minutes to go over the previous week’s numbers and the upcoming week, especially going into the pre-winter rush.

In particular, they combine snow tire installations with other services to keep the ticket price close to the average estimate of $1,300. Rustproofing must be merged with another service, Chung says, to use techs’ time well.

The value of turning away last-minute requests

As for people who panic when the first snowflakes fall, “they are not our clients anyway,” Chung says. “For me, it’s about finding and servicing the right client.”

“We don’t have the capacity to serve those people because we have pre-booked work,” she adds. “We want to maintain the metrics we have, since we know how our car counts affect our labour rates.”

If she jams them in, her techs don’t have time to complete adequate digital vehicle inspections, with a minimum of seven photos – dropping her conversion rate.

“You have moments when you really want to be empathetic or it does get crazier on our end,” Chung says. “On the other hand, I want to set up the techs for success.”

At times, things still go awry. For instance, one Saturday, her tech discovered he was one litre short of Genuine oil for a Mercedes. With their regular supplier closed, Chung found herself rushing to a dealership to complete the service.

“The customer experience is about process,” she says. “They don’t see the backroom stuff that happens or understand that there are more cars than just theirs.”

This article also appears in the October/November print issue of Indie Garage.