Is your PDR operation too busy to grow?
Many a business owner has fallen into this trap- assuming that a busy business is a growing business. We all know that busy is better than slow when it comes to business, but is your daily grind actually keeping you from growing? If you are saying to yourself that “you are too busy to read this now” then you definitely need to read this. Increased activity does not equal growth, but increased revenue does.
Seek out and destroy the bottlenecks
If you are like most shops, you only get paid for billable hours. Any time spent on anything other than flattening dents is not making you money, unless that activity is somehow sales generating activity. But businesses can’t be run without office time, accounting time and paperwork time, all of which can keep any business owner busy.
Bottlenecks are also hidden sources of wasted time. For example if your PDR tools are unorganized and you constantly walk around looking for a misplaced tool, wasted time starts to pile up fast especially when looked at cumulatively. If it takes you an extra thirty minutes of tool searching per job, it can really add up in a week month or year. Where are the other bottlenecks in your auto reconditioning business?
Here are a few common sources of cumulative wasted time:
- Travel time
- Job Assignments (for multiple technicians)
- Documentation
- Invoicing
- Insurance or customer data submissions
Travel time- As a mobile business, travel time is inevitable. Bouncing from dealership to body shop can really eat into productivity hours, and thus hold you back from growth. The key to reducing wasted trips is as simple as a more efficient scheduling system.
Knowing how long each job will likely take will allow you to plot the route for your day more efficiently. Think strategically and set a goal to shave as much travel time as possible each day and the time savings will open up more opportunities for revenue.
Job Assignments- Let’s say you have grown your business to put a few employees out on the street for your business. That’s fantastic, but how are you scheduling who works on what job, and how do you keep tabs on all of the assignments? If “spreadsheet” is your answer, it’s time for you to consider an upgrade, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Documentation- When you arrive at an assignment, what is your intake process? Are you taking digital photos but filling out paper forms which have to get data entered in at the end of the day or week? You have a bottleneck on your hands. But there are digital solutions to help you. We will cover that in a moment as well.
Invoicing– That which does not get billed does not get paid, right? But when you are running dozens of a cars through your business each week, the invoicing (and sometime the tracking down of payments) can quickly spiral out of control. So what do you do? Can you afford to hire a bookkeeper? Or is that just another revenue-grabbing business expense that you can avoid? Don’t worry there are alternatives.
Insurance or customer data submissions- If you are working with multiple body shops who are servicing multiple insurance carriers, each carrier has their own process for submitting the workflow documentation so that the shop can get paid (and thus pay you). And it is only going to get worse as Insurance companies replace field adjusters with their photos process, much like Liberty Mutual is doing now. More photos will be needed, more shops will need you to do it for them, and more of your repair time will be spent helping them pay you.
There is a solution!
If you have read this far, you are probably a bit stressed out realizing where all your profitable time is being spent. The good news is we have a solution for you. A quality PDR management tool can automate most if not all of the time wasters listed above.
A quality Paintless Dent Repair management tool like the one we offer here at AutoMobile Technologies (ReconPro), will allow you to organize your customers, make and manage technician assignments, document the before, during and after repair, generate and deliver an invoice while syncing with your accounting software, and transmit all this documentation with electronic signatures all right from any mobile device.
A quality PDR tool will pay for itself the very same day you begin to use it, and can help usher your business into the next phase of profitability and growth.
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