With so many hours focused on managing your auto repair shop, sometimes it’s hard to take a step back and see beyond that description of your business. Odds are, your repair shop is a lot of other things, too. It’s where you see many of your friends and customers each day. It’s a physical monument to the work you’ve accomplished over the past years (or decades!)
It’s also a small business. And while all small businesses are different, they also have a lot in common. So while it’s critical to stay informed on what it takes to make a repair shop successful, sometimes it’s also important to take a step back and ask “What makes small businesses successful?”
Everyone has a different spin on the most important factors for success in small business. Some focus on customer service, some focus on the product being delivered, and others focus on profit. But there’s one area that most people agree is essential to success. In fact, the Small Business Association, Entrepreneur magazine, and USA Today have all discussed the importance of this one factor: planning.
Planning sounds daunting, because it involves designing a set of business processes. Plenty of businesses survive without a 50-page document explaining every step of every day. But just because they accomplish the goal of staying in business doesn’t mean that they’re successful.
Like all business plans, the most valuable part of an auto repair shop business plan is a statement of what you built the business to do – your purpose. There are more than a hundred thousand businesses in the United States that repair vehicles, but you decided to undertake the major task of owning your own shop for specific reasons. What do you want your shop to provide to you, the owner? What do you want it to provide to your employees, to your customers, and to your community?
It’s not until you can clearly state your goals that you can start planning how to meet them. In the process of this execution, you’ll almost certainly find things that need to be done differently to achieve your goals. You’ll probably consider ideas that seem great until you ask if they’ll actually help you achieve the goals that make your shop worth owning. In fact, you might find out that your goals change entirely. But having those major goals in place, and working towards accomplishing them, is ultimately what makes business ownership fulfilling.
If your auto repair shop is in no immediate financial danger, but it’s still not making you happy, it might be time to go back to those core goals of your business. Beyond a salary and business survival, what do you want your shop to achieve? How can you get there? And how will you measure that success? Asking these tough questions will do more than make your business more profitable – it will make all the work you do to keep it thriving more fulfilling.
To learn more about how Repair Shop Websites can help your repair shop achieve success, call us at 866-665-1605 or email us at Team_RSW@RepairShopWebsites.com.