While many shops pay service technicians by the hour, Darry Stuart expresses their value another way. A simple calculation, he says, will show that an average technician’s time is worth at least $1 a minute.
Think about how that equates to lost revenue if time is wasted searching the shop for tools, parts and supplies.
As important as the volume of work may be, profit margins are largely dictated by the efficient use of every employee. In a typical shop, nearly 90 percent of a technician’s time should be billed back to a customer, says Stuart, who counsels shop managers through DWS Fleet Management Services. Even an eight-person shop that services a wide variety of vehicles should be turning wrenches more than 80 percent of the time.
This may seem to leave plenty of time to address the other tasks that fill a workday, but consider how quickly the minutes can tick away between one job and the next: A technician asks the service manager about the next truck that needs to be repaired (tick); cleans up, grabs the keys and heads to the lot (tick); finds the vehicle and jockeys the truck (tick, tick); pulls inside the bay doors (tick); gets his tool box and opens the hood (tick).
“That is more like a 20- to 30-minute process,” says Dave Scheer, president of Inland Truck Parts, which has shops in 10 Midwestern states.
It’s why he believes every shop needs to include at least one support person for every three technicians – complete with a “jack of all trades” who can jockey vehicles and address cleaning needs.
“Your technician is your income generator. He’s turning a wrench and everyone around him has a supporting role,” Scheer explains. “Some shop owners lose track of the importance of efficiency and how the little differences can make such a significant change in productivity.”
