Mechanic Meets Marketing Guru

However, my self-satisfaction promptly evaporated one early winter’s day in 1980 when a rather strange bearded and pony-tailed man stood at my counter and opened a conversation with the fact that he did not own a car and did not need my services. He told me he was the founding partner of Australia’s leading marketing agency and complimented me on my advertising (I did my own ads to camera, and he’d caught them on TV the previous evening). He then critiqued my ads and told me he could show me how to vastly improve them, and the rest of my marketing, and my business as a whole. He then recommended that I should pay him $5,000 a week for the next month to show me how!

He was clearly nuts!

And yet, he was fascinating and, for no reason that I can put a finger on to this day, I wrote him a cheque for $5,000. It was to become one of the best business investments of my life.

His named was Dr Peter Kenny, he had a PhD in psychology and was, as it turned out, a genuine, died-in-the-wool marketing genius. (It also transpired that he was a matrimonial idiot on the run and in hiding from his 7th wife! But that’s another story.)

Marketing 101

For one short month (before his 7th wife tracked him down) Dr Kenny was my marketing guru and changed forever the way I looked at – and presented – my business.

He began by getting me to accept that my customers didn’t understand the technical excellence of what we did – they didn’t even understand it when I explained it to them, regardless of how carefully I did so. He taught me that my customers formed much of their opinion about the quality of our work from “clues” that they did understand that they gathered while I was telling them about it.

Those clues included:

• Our presentation. We were “functionally neat” but 60% of our customers were women and the place smelled of transmission fluid had Playboys in the waiting area and was not girl-friendly. We did a major refit of our reception area with our women customers in mind and saw an immediate and positive change in their comfort levels when they were making the decision as to whether they would trust us with their repair or service work. Our close rate improved.
• Our brand. We were “Bullitt Transmissions”. Our logo was a transmission silhouette – and none of our customers had a clue what it was! We switched to “Bullitt Automotive” and, with our women customers in mind, underscored our new name with a long-stemmed red rose and adopted that as our new logo. We received on-going positive responses. Such a tiny change!
• Our manners. We drilled ourselves to be professionally polite to each other (it felt strange at first but we adjusted surprisingly quickly) and polite to our customers. I started to receive compliments on the manners of my team – and more customers came.

We got the hang of what our Guru was up to pretty quickly, and went on to extend his ideas to include our dress, invoicing, sales techniques and warranties. He had lead us to realise that clarifying our brand, improving our presentation, and improving our manners could have immediate, bottom line pay-offs. So, we didn’t stop there; we carried his ideas through into:

• Our uniforms. We chose a uniform and agreed a standard (back in 1980 that was a bit revolutionary). The company paid 50% of which meant things were looked after. All were logo’d. The boys worked neater and cleaner, and their attitudes continued to lift. Productivity went up.
• Our billing. It was pre-computer days, so we typed the invoices, wrote a detailed story of the repair, and talked each customer through every line item. There were more lines, less arguments, more money – and more customers. It was working.
• Our selling. We moved from “fixing the problem” to “consulting to our customers to understand fully what they wanted from us”. We did this courteously and respectfully, and in detail. They asked for lots! Our work expanded into power steering, differentials, conversions, turbo-charging, brakes, suspension and performance work – all areas that fitted well with our core abilities. The team grew in size and skill as we put on two fitter & machinists, set up a full machine shop within the workshop, and started to remanufacture a range of assemblies. Profits soared.
• Our warranties. We worked out that our failure rate on remanufactured units was less than 1% and, when all of our competitors were trying to offer little or no warranty, we offered 2 years to begin with, then 3 years – all tied to a chargeable annual service routine. We were double the price of our competition, but doing three times their combined volume. Our reputation for quality work spread and we started to pull some very challenging and interesting (and very profitable) jobs from interstate.

Learning the Lesson

I already knew that, as technicians, our focus had to be on making sure that the workshop was well equipped and arranged to facilitate quality work, and that it was just as important that our staff be well trained, skilled, drilled and motivated to strive for excellence.

So what was it that I learned from my Guru?

What we hadn’t been doing, up to that point, was understanding how we looked from our Customers’ point of view! We had been doing a first-rate job of fixing cars and a second-rate job of communicating that fact to our customers! We were not providing them with any of the clues they needed to appreciate how well we were working.

What we came to accepts was that, since people were basing their initial decision about bringing their car to us or to someone else on what they could see and understand from their perspective, hen those things were important to us tool

We came to appreciate that we did need to invest time and thought in matching our appearance, dress, neatness, manners, smell, expression, language, attitude, presentation and behaviour to the quality of our technical work.

When we got all of that into synch, everything changed!

We also realised very quickly that our systems – our drilled ways of doing things right – coupled with our presentation were major sources of confidence for our Customers, and very often made the difference between their choosing our higher-priced services over those of our less well organised and poorly presented competition.

Bottom Line

Most of the best technicians I know put a high value on being “effective” – in producing the result that their customers want and require – and they know that this is what keeps those customers coming back.

But when you put a high value on being “effective at all levels” (including the levels that the customers understand) you find that this is what keeps a steady stream of new, quality customers coming to you and then staying, and it is what keeps your existing customers referring their friends. It’s worth the effort!

(^1. We wrote this article for the first edition of the Bosch Future Workshop magazine, published in June 2009)