You may have caught our recent news article about one Lincolnshire garage’s struggles to get their apprentice enrolled at college (spoiler: they succeeded), or you may have caught Director Diana Whetton’s talk at last year’s The Blend event, and if so, you will know that PW Auto Repairs is a garage which goes above and beyond when it comes to providing a great service to their customers. We visited the garage and had a chat with Diana about the balancing act of building a loyal customer base.
The essentials
Name: PW Auto Repairs
Location: Newark, Lincolnshire
The team: Diana and Paul Whetton, owners. Callum Cook, vehicle technician. Josh White, vehicle technician. Ted Baumber, apprentice vehicle technician (year 3). Lewis Monks, apprentice vehicle technician (year 1). Aiden Johnson, service advisor. Craig Lear, service advisor
You’ve had some difficulties securing a site for your garage, why is this a problem for many garages, not just yours?
The independent aftermarket suffers from a bad reputation, often their not the best managed places in the world. A lot of it comes down to Phil Mitchell type characters, wide boys with an attitude. Because of that image, people sometimes associate garages with crime. And elsewhere on TV, let’s just say that garages are never very modern or caring on TV and I think that’s a misunderstanding.
I do think, however, that the independent garage’s ability to change people’s minds is changing. I think when you look at garages that have put forward case studies a business plan to a landlord and said “this is what our garage is going to be like. This is what we are. This is the plan. This is what we’re going to do financially. This is what the floor is going to look like. This is what the walls are going to look like. This is the customer waiting area. That’s what we’re going to do”, then you meet the landlord halfway and they say, “oh, that’s not so bad, we can do that”.
Tell us about the new site
We have seven bays, across two units. Across the road we do servicing, fast fit, tyres, brakes, suspension, engine work, clutches, whereas over here, where we are now, is for ADAS and diagnostic work. Three over here, four over there. Over here, we need peace and quiet. We do the work here where you don’t want customers popping in the whole time, standing at the workshop door and looking over your shoulder, asking if it’s done yet. When it’s over here, you can just say it’s being dealt with and leave it at that.
Customers can go and interrupt the service advisors all day long and they’re happy to answer their questions but the customers shouldn’t just walk up to the workshop door and pull the mechanic away from the job. Like in here now you wouldn’t know we’re in middle of an industrial estate – you could be anywhere. It’s our secret!
How do you build up a solid customer base?
I think building a customer base is about building a community, it’s about your reputation and the trust you earn, eventually people start referring their family members. And it goes both ways, they know us but we also know them. One of our technicians Aidan has a fantastic memory for reg numbers, so when a customer walks in, he’ll go, “yep, I know that reg, I know about that”. It’s just built up over the past 10 years and there’s a good mix of customers between the elderly customers that we take care of right through to the small business and small fleets. Before we got Garage Hive I had everyone’s phone number on my phone, had everyone’s name, I knew everyone’s style.
Is customer behaviour changing?
What we’ve found is increasingly, customers want a price and they want it now. Customers have got used to the fact that they can get a price from everywhere else through Google. But my biggest bugbear in the industry is there is no such thing as a fixed, no interim service. No full service is the same, everyone does it differently. So how can we provide an immediate price? What we’ve done is go and do a bit of market research and thought, who do we respect in the industry and what are they doing?
Ultimately, the ideal customer is one that comes in and says, “this is the history of my car, tell me what I need” and we can just give our recommendation. That allows us to be able to give them the price as best we can in advance. It can also be a problem, though, if a customer says, “just do whatever you have to and it’ll be fine, don’t bother me. I’ll pay it, whatever”, because if you do that, you’re never 100 per cent sure the work will be confirmed. In fact, there’s only one customer we will do that for, because we can rely on him to never argue about the work that’s been done.
What labour rates do you charge?
In 2019, we were charging £35 an hour for trade, which we did a lot of. I think at that point we were still probably 60 per cent trade and 40 per cent retail. And the retail labour rate was £40 plus VAT. And we didn’t have set structured margins or price matrixes. We weren’t charging what we should have been charging. We never used to charge for diagnostics, for instance. We just used to figure out what the problem was and try and hope that the customers would pay us enough to do the job once we told them what it was going to be. Then you get the times where they decide against it, and you’ve just wasted three hours doing that whereas again now it’s every booking has an initial diagnostics fee for a set process.
And finally, what’s on the radio on a Friday afternoon?
Paul has Kerrang and I’ll have, depending on what mood I’m in, an audiobook or a true crime podcast on. With my earphones, in my office. But Kerrang is what everyone else’s general default is.
