How to tell what’s actually broken.

The mistake this is meant to prevent

A shop is quiet. The owner concludes he needs a better website, spends real money on one, and nothing changes. He decides marketing does not work.

What was actually happening: nobody could find him, so nobody ever saw either website. The new one was a genuine improvement to a thing that was never the problem. I have watched this happen more than once and it is always the same shape — a real fix, applied to the wrong step.

Six steps, and you only need to find the first broken one

Every customer goes through the same six before they pay you. Test them in order and stop at the first failure — everything after it is untestable anyway, because nobody is getting that far.

1. Find you The test: on someone else’s phone, search what a customer would type — your trade and your town, not your name. Are you in the map box? The blue links? The written answer at the top?
   If not: the three places people look.
2. Trust you The test: read your last five reviews and look at your gallery as a stranger. Recent? Replied to? Can you tell how many different cars are in the photographs?
   If not: reviews and photographs.
3. Reach you The test: have a friend message the shop at 7pm and see what he gets by morning.
   If nothing: what happens while you’re busy.
4. Get a price The test: time how long it takes on your phone to find an actual number on your own site.
   If you can’t: publish the price, or quote on the phone.
5. Book it The test: count last week’s price conversations that ended in “thanks” and nothing else.
   If most of them: how people actually decide.
6. Come back The test: of the cars you did last month, how many were repeat customers or came from someone you had already worked for?
   If almost none: you are buying every customer twice, and that is the most expensive way to run a shop.

The rule

Fix the earliest broken step, not the worst one. Improving step five while step one is broken does nothing measurable, because the traffic to test it with does not exist. This is why the order is the whole point and why I will not sell somebody a website when the real problem is that nobody answers the phone.

The one exception: if a later step is nearly free to fix — an automatic reply, a price on a page, asking every customer for a review — do it this afternoon anyway. Cheap things do not need to wait their turn. Just do not mistake them for the fix.

If nothing is obviously broken

Then you probably do not have a marketing problem, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Two questions worth sitting with instead:

• Are you charging enough? If the bays are full and the money is not there, more customers is the wrong answer — you would be buying yourself more work at the same margin. That is a pricing conversation, not a marketing one.
• Are you selling the second job? Brakes today, tires in the spring. The customer you already have is the cheapest one you will ever get, and most shops in this trade never ask him for anything again.

What I do with this

The free audit is exactly the six tests above, run properly on your shop, written down. You get the answer whether or not you hire me — including “nothing is wrong, save your money,” which I have said before and will say again. It is a couple of hours of my time and it tells you which of these pages is actually yours.

Written for independent auto repair and auto glass shops. If you read this and fix it yourself, that is a good outcome and I would rather that than sell you something you do not need.

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