With AAPEX’s biggest event in Las Vegas right around the corner (November 1-3), we sat down with Lucas Underwood and David Roman co-hosts of the Auto Shop Owners Group (ASOG) Podcast, and both shop owners themselves- to discuss the value of training and attending conventions, and how they can help shop owner’s grow their own business.
As a shop owner, it can be very difficult to manage a shop, let alone figure out how to make sure it is constantly growing and changing to fit the needs of the ever-changing automotive after-market. Roman finds that one of the biggest challenges facing the individual shop owner is properly valuing their employee’s service, that “if they figured that out, it would effectively fix every other problem in the industry i.e., the technician shortage.”
He believes that the technician shortage is “the root of a deeper issue, and that deeper issue is the lack of management training.” If shop owners were better equipped to handle their tech-nicians and knew how to manage and value their employees in a better manner, perhaps more people would respect the profession of technician. Roman finds that many shop owners “get stuck in this grind of not charging enough, not making enough and therefore they can’t do all these other things to be successful- one of those things being management training.”
Challenge number two, which coincides with challenge number one, is that shop owners don’t have perspective. According to Lucas “it takes 30,000 feet of perspective to look down on the business and figure out where we’re missing things, where we’re not accomplishing things, and where we need to.” Shop owners need to see the value of the business, but it’s hard to see the value of the business when they’re in the thick of it (or in the wallet). Getting perspective could help the shop owner see that they aren’t doing as well as they thought they were. That they need some help.
The good news about both major challenges is that there is an easy and simple solutionto solve the root of the problem: train and attend events. Both proposed solutions can help give shop owner’s a great amount of perspective about their shops and the automotive aftermarket. Underwood finds that events help “you begin to understand that you are just a tiny little piece of th[e] pie that is a massive pie of technicians and shop owners and service advisors”. Not only that but attending events offers the opportunity to network with other technicians and other shops opening new routes and opportunities for your shop.
Two sessions that Roman and Underwood are looking forward to at AAPEX 2022 are “What’s a 20 group and Why Should I Care?” and “Business Sales, Strategies and Design”, both sessions offer great opportunities for auto-shop owners to learn and prepare their business for the future. Because in the words of Underwood, the best way for auto-shop owners to improve their business is to “train, train, train, train, train” and what better way to do that then to attend AAPEX 2022 in Las Vegas? Register Here
