KEEP THE PANDEMIC (AND FUTURE) IN PERSPECTIVE

Despite an off year, the aftermarket is poised to prosper

BY JORDAN WIKLUND

There’s much to cover about the pandemic; how have you contextualized it as part of the industry? What have you seen?

As far as the Colorado market goes, the impact of COVID gets less and less with each passing day. Many shops had a massive dip at the onset, but I hear a lot of positivity from talking to local business people in Colorado Springs and from other shop owners around the region and country. Everyone is pretty pumped up that the third and fourth quarters will remain a very strong year.

If you think about it (and putting all politics aside), the big picture is we were the sleeping giant and found ourselves very vulnerable, just like what occurred in World War II after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. We put a war machine together and entered WWII. We returned to business fast and then dominated, and that’s how I look at COVID; we got our butts kicked in the beginning and now we’re bouncing back. There will be more national travel this year as families will be driving to see relatives they haven’t been able to see. Those of us in the aftermarket will prosper.

Looking ahead, we always talk of tech and tools and keeping up with modern times in the shop and on the shop floor. How do you balance the tried-and-true tools of yesterday with tomorrow’s advanced shop tech and its needs?

You want to make sure your name is in front of people as volume increases, so marketing is important. Investing in apprenticeship programs and developing the next gen of technicians is important; everyone should be spending some money on that. You need to keep up with technology if you want to hold onto longterm customers.

So how do you prioritize? I suppose that’s the challenge every day.

It is. It also depends where you’re at in your own business. Some shops have great technicians and equipment but don’t know how to market nor sell the work; the “ferrari in the garage” dilemma. When I teach and have the opportunity to speak, I use slides about an oncoming tsunami. When it hit, some people didn’t realize what was going on. Others hit the high ground immediately. The analogy is consolidation; the consolidation of independent shops is going to organically squeeze out singlestore, mom and pop shops. From the 2015 Ratchet+Wrench survey, 50 percent of mom and pop shops wanted out by 2020. And that was all before COVID. It’s a time when sharp operators need strong single locations or understand that diversifying is the wave of the future. If I’m one guy with a $33,000 scan tool, how long is it going to be until I have paid that tool off? Is keeping up with technology worth it for me?

Let’s zoom in a bit. What stimulates you? What’s interesting and needs to be addressed?

The short term is the technician shortage. I know it’s an old subject, but there are not enough qualified guys to go around; someone always gets the short straw in any market having poor technicians. Savvy owners are working directly with local governments, local high schools and programs, and they’re figuring things out under their own roofs to grow their own. It’s a hot topic, and the long-tail end can be hard to see, but if you can grow your own you will be poised to handle the shortage and teach technicians how you would want them to be taught.

To that end, how long will the current aftermarket atmosphere endure?

I believe gas-powered vehicles are going to be around for a long time. Most dealerships’ lots are 98 percent internal combustion engines, hybrid or not. We may not know what the far future holds, but the short term one still relies on the internal combustion engine.

I’ve always been proud of our industry and our ability to reverse-engineer the answer or the repair from what we’ve seen. The reality that few talk about is that technicians at a dealership aren’t any more well trained than the guys working at my shop on the most contemporary technology; we all need training on that, and we don’t even know what types of tech we’ll need. Will shops need to have an electrical engineer? I don’t know. Maybe.

Here’s my last thing--when computers really became mainstream, we all believed it would galvanize productivity. Work/life balance would be better and everything would be easier. The opposite is actually true. Who works less hours? No one. We’re answering emails at 9:00 at night. That’s my analogy for digital vehicle inspections; they’re great in our industry. Customers love it. We get a lot of positivity around it. But what’s going to happen and what’s already been happening through COVID is that some service advisors don’t necessarily need to work as hard; it may seem great now, but eventually it will erode because you don’t have a personal relationship with the people to whom you’re selling. In the aftermarket, it’s all about the relationship. The entire reason we exist is because people didn’t want to feel like a number. Still, some advisors are taking the easy way out and are successful at it, but the longterm ramifications are significant.