Oct. 15, 2020—What determines your shop's menu of add-on services? Margins and low cost of goods would be a good place to look. But in the quick lube business, you should also be looking at how quickly those services can be deployed.
Just ask Justin Alford, co-owner of Benny’s Car Wash, whose sole focus of his services revolve around time. Over the years, he has put a focus on simplifying their services and putting an emphasis on overall convenience.
At Alford’s operations, time is of the utmost importance. As a speedy quick lube facility, their goal is to get customers in and out in under 15 minutes, and because of this, the quick lube doesn’t offer a lot of add-on services and items, saying sometimes less is, in fact, more.
“You don’t want to take away speed of service,” Alford says. “You want to make sure the service fits with your original mission.”
For example, many quick lubes also do brake fluids, but Alford says you need to be an expert at it to rule it as an efficient service.
“They are profitable, but we don’t want services to slow us down,” Alford says. “I want to stick to a few basic things and be really good at it to hit the mark every time.”
They’ve even discontinued services based on their overall goal. For example, the shop used to offer tire rotations and balancing, a service that customers do ask for, but they stopped offering the service a few years ago because bay times were inconsistent and the tire rotation and balancing sensors were a huge liability for the shop. Since then, they’ve made sure to stick to the basics to achieve fast, quality service.
