The Trainer #37: Make oil changes an opportunity

“Hey, Pete. I need you to take care of a ‘waiter’ oil change for me.”

Oh, how I used to hate those words. Usually elbow deep in a repair that would actually pay me something, I had to stop what I was doing to take care of a job that paid a lousy 0.3 flag hours. I would grab the keys from my service advisor’s outstretched hand with a mixture of annoyance and disgust, and do everything I could to get the task done and out of my hair as quickly as possible. “Heck”, I thought to myself, “it’ll take me 0.3 of an hour just to get the car on the rack and up in the air!”

Then later in the day, when the scheduled work had been completed and there was nothing left to do, I’d complain about the lack of work and my shrinking paycheck.

But I had a change of heart when I realized that those pain in the neck oil changes were actually an opportunity to create additional work and even earn a new customer. The shop owners I worked for spent a lot of time, energy and money in an effort to attract new business, and often it’s that coupon in the Sunday paper that brings them in. Yes, many that redeem the offer are there only because they wanted to save money on a service they know they have to get done occasionally, but there are those that use the opportunity to check out a new service provider, hoping to find the one they will feel comfortable taking all of their business to. And more business in the door means more for flag hours for me.

I also soon came to realize that performing these “extra” checks was not only helping my paycheck, it was a moral and ethical obligation I had to the customer. After all, how would you feel if the shop that took care of your mom’s car failed to tell her a tire was about ready to go flat or the brakes were worn well past the replacement limits and then she has an accident or is broken down on the side of the freeway at rush hour?

Taking a more professional approach to the routine oil change taught me even more, and I’ll share it all with you in the January 2015 edition of “The Trainer.”