The automotive aftermarket has had its fair share of wagon peddlers and get-rich-quick offerings. It’s had more than enough of here-today, gone-tomorrow vendors, and a plethora of wacky advertising schemes that are akin to the infamous bridge to nowhere.
It has had myriads of acronyms and marketing mumbo-jumbo that excites mostly the sales executives who invent the jargon to amuse and impress other marketing executives. It’s hard to navigate between the dangerous shoals that surround the solid ground of truth and the sandy atolls of conjecture.
An opinion is actually a judgment not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. Advice is also a judgment, but is distinguished by being rooted in knowledge or authoritative experience. Recognizing the difference should be easy to discern, but the apparentness can be elusive. Take it from me, it’s good advice to have the ability to readily define when smoke is being pumped toward the general vicinity of, well, enough of that unpleasant image.
In our business, everyone is ready to listen to opinion, but few of us are willing to act on good advice. I’m going to intervene with a new euphemism about opinions: “Opinions are like blog sites, everybody’s got one.” They are a little less revolting, but equally as numerous.
Our customers and consumers will believe almost anything that they read on a blog site as opposed to listening to our professional advice. As a result, they spend two to three times more trying to fix their own problems, and still end up seeking the help of a professional counterman or technician.
So, who’s to blame, you ask? Why are so many consumers risk takers? It’s quite simple. Opinions are painless advice that offer just enough hope of beating-the-man (professional). On top of that, our entire industry carries around a stigma of either selling the wrong part, charging too much, or being a bunch of grease-monkeys taking advantage of women and the elderly. How in the heck did we get these inflammatory reputations?
This is my advisory opinion. We didn’t take or act on good advice ourselves. The independent warehouses do not listen to the independent jobbers that say, “Give us more available inventory. Your shipping fill-rate is killing us. We need daily delivery like our big box competition offers their stores.”
Why don’t the warehouses and program groups listen to us? Our customers and installers want us to stock more products, offer same-day delivery for special orders, and stop already with the goofy spiff programs and box-top incentives.
The professional employees and technicians want specific training and more specific information regarding complete repairs. A pattern should become clear. In our industry, there seems to be a disconnect about how to make money and service our respective customer bases. It’s not a new phenomenon, but it is the reason we continue to lose market share, revenue and have tremendous difficulty finding qualified people.
We have a dysfunctional pyramid marketing program largely led by second and third generation nepotistic owners that didn’t take or heed to good advice from those that came before them. The blind man leading the seeing-eye dog where he or she wants to go regardless of the trained professional seeing-eye dog’s good instinct.
We continually try to re-invent the wheel, so to speak. This business is not rocket science, but at least rocket science is firmly rooted in logic, and our respective comparison of implementation of new ideas could be referred to a type of non-descript dogma. I had this discussion with my aged and ailing father, and waited with anticipation for his response or insight on such a matter. He had a look of consternation while he twiddled his thumbs as if searching all of the crevices and wrinkles of his brain, plying his intellect in a manner that had me confused to the point of asking him again, thinking he had not heard me (his hearing is quite bad), or wondering myself if the lunch we had just shared wasn’t sitting well on his stomach. Yeah, that kind of look. Finally he spoke.
“Do you remember that time I told you if your oil light came on, you should turn the car off and check the oil?” asked dad.
“Yes, I remember that, and I know where you are going with this,” I replied.
“Hold on, son, let me finish. Well, you didn’t listen, you were 16 years old, and were in such a hurry to go see your girlfriend, you ended up throwing a rod thru the oil pan, and you did not get to see your girlfriend, for several weeks as I recall. I wouldn’t let you borrow my car, seeing how you took care of yours and I made you fix your own neglected car. It’s kind of like that. You were happy when you got that car for sure, I remember the first day you drove it after we rebuilt it, painted it, tuned it, and put new wheels and tires on it. Man, you sure loved that car,” dad reminisced.
“That old Mustang was something for sure,” I agreed, and went on to ask, “What’s a 16-year-old punk kid blowing up his car have to do with this?”
Dad shook his head, and went on to explain, “Well that car that we worked so hard to build was your first passion, because you knew that the girls would go crazy over the car, and want to take a ride, and during the ride, might actually like you more than the car, but the car made it possible. Hot Car + Hot Chicks = Hot Mess, right?” (For the record, that girlfriend/Hot Chick at the time of that car is now my wife of almost 30 years, so this analogy holds true it seems.)
Dad added, “Well, think of your industry as being that first car. You start with something of an idea, build it, work on it relentlessly, and after some fine-tuning, you start attracting customers. All of those customers have your head swimming, whether loyal and knowledgeable or not, and you start listening to everyone, doing all sorts of goofy stuff, and ignore some or most of the core things that made you what you are. People do these things because they are looking for a similar passionate feeling, yet fall short because the core effort required in the beginning does not apply to attaining a similar result involving newer ideas.
“Newer ideas require newer advice, not newer opinions. In other words, I helped you rebuild a 302 Ford Mustang, and you took my advice because you recognized that I knew how. If you wanted to put a turbo on it, I’d have no clue, but could offer my opinion. That’s the real problem with most industries, not just yours. Everyone want’s to turbocharge their business, looking for that next big thing, and fail to take good advice, or follow the same basic principles that made everything possible.”
Turbochargers and pretty girls? What’s not to like? However, both do require a degree of higher maintenance. I was lucky enough to keep my pretty girl, even without the turbocharger. I guess I was a decent core product, plus I grew a mullet, permed my hair, and bought parachute pants, despite the advice of my parents. I survived it, but hate to see some of those pictures from the 1980s.
As for our industry, let’s get back to the basics. Focus on distribution, inventory and customer service. Take it from me, if I see a sales rep that walks in dressed like Adam Ant complete with a feather earring, I’m not buying anything. No more window dressing, goofy advertising or other ridiculous stuff. I think the oil light is flickering.
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