As you seek to grow your quick lube operation, there are two levers you can pull: You can grow your “ticket” per car or grow your daily car count.
Ticket growth is well understood. Quick lubes can grow their ticket by increasing prices, converting more guests on additional services, or adding new services to your offering. Growing car count can often feel more elusive. I often hear the phrase, “We don’t control car count” from various people around the industry and even in our own stores here at Oilstop.
I couldn’t disagree more! Not only can car count growth be controlled but growing your car count is actually a simple recipe. But as in all good things in life, it requires hard work!
So, how do you grow your service center’s car count? First, car count starts with a great guest experience. The easiest guest to acquire is the guest you already have. It’s very hard to keep a bucket full of water if there is a hole in the bottom of the bucket. There are studies that show it is often about five times more expensive to acquire a new guest instead of keeping your existing guests.
By ensuring your team provides a great experience in the bays, it will ensure that the guests you are already serving continue to come back to you for every oil change. To understand how you are doing at this today, track your guest retention and average visit interval. How many of your new guests try you once? How many come back for a second visit? How long do they wait to come in for their second visit? Look at your Google or Yelp reviews to understand how guests feel about the experience in your service center.
Once you have a sense of how well you are retaining your guests, then work with your team on areas of improvement. I love to call guests who leave negative reviews explaining their bad experiences. Apologize for their bad experience and ask a few questions about how you could do better. This will teach you what areas you can improve in. Make changes to improve the service based on this feedback. By retaining today’s guests, it will allow you to focus on bringing in new guests who will GROW your car count.
Once you’ve made sure your bucket isn’t leaking, then you can focus on how to get new guests to give your service a try. In the past five years, the quick lube market has seen a significant shift towards offering discounts for first-time visits.
“Discount” can be a scary word in retail, but instead of discounting, think of this as giving the guest a reason to try your service. Habits are hard to break and even harder to form, so you need to give them a reason to change their habit. By offering a discount to first-time guests, you are giving them a reason to believe and try out your service.
Next up, you need to communicate this offer. We offer discounts to first-time guests through our managers in our service centers, on banners in the bays or in front of the stores, on mailers we send out to nearby neighborhoods, on social media, Google, and everywhere we run advertisements. If your service center is on a high-traffic street, then banners and signs will work well. If not, you need to focus on finding ways to spread the news about your service.
Investing in marketing will help grow your car count. Track each area or “channel” you spend money on for marketing and monitor how many guests come in from that channel. At Oilstop, we put a unique coupon code on every marketing tool, so we can then measure how many guests came from each channel.
This allows us to find out what marketing channels are working at each service center. Once we know which channels work best for a service center, then we keep doing that and stop spending money on things that don’t work. The amount of marketing money that is wasted each year would make a big dent towards our national debt, so be sure to track your spend so it doesn’t go to waste.
We are always excited to test a new channel, but we always make sure we can track it to know if we should continue to invest in it for the long term. As you find marketing channels that help bring you new guests, you will see your car count grow.
These two steps are quite simple: 1) Make sure your guests come back and 2) Find and convince new guests to give your service a try. Track and measure both to know if you are improving. While simple, the continued focus to repeat this process over and over again will help grow car count. It’s a bit like mining for gold, you have to keep dipping your pan in the water and carefully sifting through the dirt. If you take your eye off your pan, you will miss the gold and send it down the river (or to another service center)! Rinse and repeat. But it works. We have service centers where this process has helped us grow the daily car count by more than five cars per day over last year’s count!
