This week we are joined by Jonathan Sharman, CEO of AutoBi. Jonathan has a wealth of knowledge and experience in the trade from selling cars to managing large dealer sites. He now focuses on aftersales and bringing real time reporting enabling teams to catch issues quickly and react to changes.
We discuss the importance of being able to pivot quickly whilst implementing changes, keeping your WIP low and looking at the volume of parts stock.
As we know part of the key to selling a second, third or fourth car to customers is the service department, so this episode is beneficial to all.
Here are the highlights:
{12:19} Experience all parts of the business
{19:35} Motivating Technicians
{28:35} Two ways of making money
{39:51} WIP Control
{42:59} Parts Stock
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon’s words ‘real world’, it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visitwww.symcotraining.co.uk
Time, welcome to the Selling and the Motor Trade podcast in Association of Car Without. The online Car Changing Destination. Together we share tips and ideas on how to sell more cars, improve your service department, and generally put more profit into your department, dealership or dealer group. I'm your host, Simon Bowkett, or some of you might already know me as Skippy. First thing, I just want to say thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Hi, welcome to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. Today I'm joined with Jonathan Sharman. Now I first met Jonathan and a Persia dealership back in 2000 and I think it was two or three. We were just having a conversation trying to work out when it was, but it made me feel very old.
Okay, so maybe Jonathan will tell us exactly where that was. Jonathan is the managing director of Auto BI. Jonathan is going to talk to us about a little bit about his background, what he's done, but we're going to put the world of right in the after sales department and what you really need to be looking at 2025 to get the best out of the after sales teams. So Jonathan, welcome aboard. Hi, Simon. Good to see you again after all those years. It was a long one. It was a 2002, 2003. I think it had been 2003. Yeah, I'm just trying to think back. It's a bit of a haze there, if I'm honest. I was much younger, clearly.
I'm going to take 2003. Bear enough that it's one of these things that I know Jonathan's brother. Jonathan's brother said, oh, Jonathan knows you. He knows you as Skippy. And he started describing who Jonathan was. He worked in the BMW dealership. I have my mind. We've never done any training for BMW. I don't know which BMW dealership it is. Okay. Well, actually, Sean Kelly, we do training for Sean Kelly and Vines Group, but he didn't work down there. And it's only when we spoke to Jonathan recently, he said, no, it was Robinson Day, so and it all just come flooding back to me. And you were the sales manager then? Yeah, so I joined, I mean, it was Robinson Day then, but we're still known as George Heath.
It was that old warehouse on the Digworth High Street, Birmingham. I joined there. I was working previously for Elkiston Co-op Motor Group, as I joined as a track and sales executive, which would have been 2001, and a very small Mazda dealer in Loughborough. And then my first sales manager's job as a use car sales manager with Jason Chick, and John Stuleton and the team at what was then George Heath Park Robinson Day in Birmingham. Yeah, I hadn't been that too long when we met, actually. It was a lot of sales process training. I had a team of four sales people. We were doing about 100 cars a month. And we were doing some, you know, the old four square and closing.
Yeah. Yeah. More like that stuff. Oh, good. So tell me, how did you get started in the motor trade? What was your background before cars or was it straight from school? I'm not sure whether I should say this. It's slightly worse than traffic wardens. I was a door-to-door salesperson, so... Ah, see, that doesn't bother me at all. What industry? What were you selling? I was selling cable and broadband. It was MTL in Derby. But what you would have learned there, resilience, keep going, measure the activity. You would have learned all of that right from the beginning, I'm imagining. Oh, yeah. It was a real eye opener. I was 18, 19 years old. I'd had a choice of staying at university or venturing out into the big, brave world.
And I rightly or wrongly chose to venture out into the big, brave world. And got a job with NTL as they were then. We had a few days training in Manchester, and you were given this little course automatic as your company car, which, you know, somebody was 19 then having a little course automatic. Intuored, yeah. And you didn't have to pay for it. Same had NTL down the side, but there we go. And off you went with your little pad and started knocking on doors trying to sell. And I can remember, you know, some days there was one day where I knocked on 10 doors and did eight deals. Wow. That's got to be rare in that world now.
This is literally one after the one after the other. It was a relatively new housing estate where they'd actually also just put it in. So that probably didn't help a little bit. Yeah. Don't tell anyone else that bit. But then, you know, there were plenty of days where you'd knock a hundred doors, because that was your target every day, knock a hundred doors. And you'd, it'd be eight o'clock nine o'clock at night. The two or three appointments that you'd set up, you'd go back and husband says, no, or they'd just gone out or you can see the lights were on. You could hear the TV, but nobody's coming to the door. And it's pouring with rain or blazing with some snow coming in from the side.
So yeah, it did really, did really galvanize. But I've done it for about 18 months, maybe not quite that many 15, 18 months. And you get a bit sort of bored of it. And I picked up the left record on the way home. Can I ask a question, when you're doing the door knocking, then the reason why I say I wouldn't have an issue with that at all, I've stroked to lots of salespeople over the years that start in some sort of door to door selling. And they really learnt activity, get the activity right. And the results look after themselves there. Is there anything else you learnt on the door knocking that is a, is a relevant now to starting on auto BI and the motor trade?
That activity piece is, it's probably really the most important thing. We have a sales process being after sales or being in sales, which is actually it's a bizarre process because it's going to fail more than it works. Yes. Yeah. But you know, that's the reality of the situation. You said to somebody, look, you're going to close about 25, 30%. So seven out of 10 times the process isn't going to work. If you studied manufacturing crisps or cars, but seven out of 10 times it didn't work, it's not going to be the process that you were taught, does it? Yeah. But I think that example of, look, I knocked on 10 doors and did eight deals.
You never know which 10 doors are going to deal. But you had to believe that I'm going to knock those doors. And as long as I put in the activity and I keep doing it, and I do it consistently and I do it well, the result will come. Yeah. Yeah, you have to. I think that was probably the biggest, the biggest lesson. I still use that today. You know, it's a process that's designed to fail more than it works. So true. But get your hat around that and get comfortable with it. Yeah. And if you did it for 80 months, listen, I understand why you didn't do it for the rest of your life. But I just, I listened to a lot of podcast, as you can imagine.
And Stephen Bartlett, regularly, the diary of CO says, people starting out from school, go and work in some sort of call center or some sort of direct sales or some sort of door knocking because you'll learn so much from there. And it's the old phrase, some will, some won't. So what next? I mean, that's so true. So I understand you gave up. You went from there into selling cars. Is that right? I did. Yeah. So I think you have been a particularly tough. I'd always been, I'd always been interested in cars. I think everybody that says that comes into the industry probably says the same thing. I probably don't say that same enthusiasm today, but I tried a couple of times to get into the industry.
And you know, at only that point, I don't even say it may be six, 12 months. I'm still only 19, 20 years old. And, you know, going through the usual process of sending off your CV and whatever. And it wasn't working, not really getting any interviews where I was getting interviews as far more experienced people than I. So I picked up the left record on the way home one day. The jobs page, it was a Thursday afternoon when the jobs were in. And they were advertising for sales, exactly at the Oakson & Caught Mazda, which happened to be literally around the corner from where I was living in left for the time. Thought, just go in.
You're used to knocking doors. And the guy was a guy called Andy Vasolescus, not sure if you've ever heard of him. His name was on the job ad. And I literally walked into the dealership and said, can I see Andy Vasolescus, please? That is calling. Kind of had to get past the service advisor. Yeah. And got past the service advisor, Andy came out. So he kind of helped you. And I said, yeah, I'm here to fill your sales exact position. And that was literally the opening line. We sat down, had a chat and he gave me a call. I think the Monday or the Tuesday later, and week or two later, I was selling cards.
You just don't hear of that anymore, do you? And if it does, maybe I don't hear about it. But I just smiled there because I'm thinking of people like Davey Igo. I'm thinking about people like in Australia who have done that, who were ended up, most of them, being the top salespeople. Because I had the balls to get out there and do what I suppose. And a good mate of mine, Pat Casey and I, we come over to the UK in 95. And I said this people all the time. In fact, I get people all the time saying, son, I'm going to Australia for the working holiday thing. Can you introduce me to a few dealerships?
Can you get me a job selling cars? I said, very easy. Okay, go and put a suit on, get a CV, start at one end of the Paramount Road in Sydney. If that's where you're going to be. And I promise you, by the time you get to the other end, you'll find two or three different places. But just, but I don't know if it happens enough anymore, Jonathan. I can't say that once I sort of progressed into the management, I can't say that I remember too many people. Who kind of showed up at the door. A few more that we'll kind of maybe do it from behind the phone. Maybe I just wrote some tinted glasses on going through there too.
Yeah. So started there at the Mazda dealership. At the Mazda dealer. Okay. The days of the one, two, one and the three, two, three. I mean, the one, two, one was a Ford Fiesta. It's not the badge on the back. And the RX8 was coming around kind of the pinnacle product of Mazda, you know, the new rotary engine. So it wasn't launched yet. It was coming out. It was coming out. Yes. The product range was pretty old at the time. I think we still had a Zados 6 in the showroom, if we're in the right room. Wow. Wow. And obviously the MX5 was a big popular seller. People listen to this and Australia. That's the UNOS in America, UNOS, same car.
Okay. But I forgot that one. Yeah. Yeah. And did you remember a guy called Roger Pitcher? Roger Pitcher. I know that name. How? We don't know that name, Pitcher. He's a fellow sales trainer. Okay. We were sent. I got the job. I was in the dealership for maybe a week or two and wasn't allowed to talk to customers really. You got sent away. To a residential place. It was up near Wakefield. It was like going back to your old school. I remember having this canteen with like an old school dinner lady. And it was two individual weeks separated by a week or two of intense sales training with Roger. There'd be an induction of new recruits, maybe 10, 12 of us.
The first week you learned sort of sales process, sales process, up to negotiation. And then the second week it was negotiation clothes and kind of hand over like that stuff. And once you passed them, you got your badge. You were allowed to go back to the dealership. And I think what they did incredibly well at that time, and I've never really seen it since, before you kind of passed that whole training those two weeks, you had to spend time on the service desk. You had to spend time in the parts department. You had to spend some time in the workshop control as I proceed. It was all part of this assessment to understand the retailer.
And that was so beneficial. I still remember doing all of that. After about six weeks, I was then validated and set loose. Yeah, it does still happen. And I've got to say, I'm someone who benefit from that as well when I started. I 18 months old. I started washing cars. At the time, I hated it, Jonathan. But it was just to give me the grounding. And I renamed the service department, the winch desk. When they put me in the parts department, I was so bad at that, they put me on the parts of day in. Just to go into the middle stuff. But the understanding of what happened in the whole motor trade and whole dealership, invaluable, it does still happen.
But I don't know if enough of it. It definitely should happen. It was a really valuable experience. So selling cars then, progressing them too. I've been selling cars for SEO into the new Scarsales Manager, which is at Robinson Day, where you and I met. And then with Robinson Day, I moved to General Sales Manager. When they closed, what was the old clock garage in Birmingham and reopened the new site on Tibern Road. I think it's still there today. It was a new development back in the time. Yeah, Salesforce, they called NASA. Was it at clock garages, I think? We're going back in time now. You have got a wonderful memory. Yes, NASA Kajavi. Oh, that's the man.
Okay. So I worked with NASA in a General Sales Manager. Absolutely. Lovely, lovely fella. It was an amazing salesperson. I had so many customers who would just come back to him time and time again. We were in the days of 253,000 units a year. Very, very clever, very skilled guy. Then, so I spent a long time with Robinson Day to be on a assignment. I went from used Scarsales Manager to General Sales Manager, at Birmingham North, and then went up to the Northeast, Newcastle and Gateshead as Manch Manager and Dean of Principal at Gateshead. And then in a round of cutbacks, which was kind of unfortunate, because I'd been with them for about nine years, I think, took voluntary redundancy and went and spent some time still with the Persian Brown, but with Evans Halshaw.
Then went from the Persian Brown to Mercedes-Benz, Marshall Motor Group, Mercedes-Benz. And then finished off with BMW. First of all, with Cupers, inscapers, as they are now, all the way. And then what was nights, obviously became look as BMW for the final three years of my career, finished an era as head of business. So we're talking about after sales today, and I want to talk about AutoVI and everything. But you've come up through the sales side of it, not the after sales side of it. Any advantages coming up the sales side, not the after sales side of the business? Yes, I think the sales side, you kind of touched on there with the daughter also, and the sales side teach you the resilience, the reliance on process, the focus on trying to follow in everything through to the conclusion.
You know, it's very, you know, you kind of refer to the service department there as the Winged Department. You know, the sales department often don't always have a great relationship. But when I kind of got my first general manager's job, I'll be honest, I thought that the bill and end all of the retail at Wall Street. But actually, in all truth, when you talk about absorption and paying the bills, the after sales department is really where it becomes, you know, very, very crucial. It's a big, big contributor. You know, use cars then kind of takes you into profitability, and new cars is the icing on the cake if that manufacturer is doing a good job at the time.
But I think what I took from the switch over to kind of focus after sales was, there was a huge amount of processes in both sides of the department, which worked very well. That focus on management inquiries in sales, for example, you know, how many people have we seen today? How many of those did we take on a test drive? How many of those did we give a quote to? And how many of them did we sell a car to? You go to the after sales department, how many people have been in today? How many people did we do a vehicle health check on? How much did we identify and send them a video and give them a quote?
And how much did we sell? And that kind of didn't seem quite as common or quite as prevalent in the after sales department as it did in sales. So I think that was really useful to be able to cross those two things over together. Or to be like, where I'd, as I'd progressed through the ranks and gone into the general manager roles, most of the businesses that I got into, typically the general manager role was vacant, and there's a reason why that's vacant. And sometimes it's internal promotion, but invariably it was, you know, performance was where it needed to be. And very quickly, I had to learn to understand the after sales department and make a difference.
The industry does three things. We sell cars, we sell parts, and we sell hours. And the great news is with a car and parts is if you don't sell it today, it's still there tomorrow. It might not be worth the same. It's still there. And you can dispose of it and realize the catch. With hours, that's not true. If you don't sell those hours today, they're not there tomorrow. They've gone, they've disappeared. You've bought them, but you've not sold them. And there's no way for you to claw that back. Whenever you went into a review, we'd often look at a set of management accounts, or maybe the quarter before, or the month before. And that was probably the best you could ever get to.
So you were reviewing something that had happened a month ago, two months ago. You didn't know whether any changes that you were making were actually having an impact. And of course, if you were losing, I don't know, 10, 20 hours a day, and you weren't reviewing that for a month or two, when you've lost another 40 days of 10 or 20 hours, you know, the sort of wastage. So the idea for Auto BI was, can you look at this on a daily, or what we would call near real-time basis? Can I spot where the problems are in terms of inefficiency, in terms of lost time, in terms of productivity, not necessarily being where it needs to be?
But rather than a month later, maybe just a couple of hours later, or certainly by the following morning. And initially, what I kind of got to understand from technicians was, these guys generally actually want to do quite well. They are like salespeople. They have a basic salary and a bonus. The drivers are not too dissimilar. So they want to be able to maximize their commission and things like that. And so they would really understand their bonus programs to make the best of it. So the initial product actually was a screen that went in the workshop. So a little bit like you might say, I don't know if you were McDonald's drive, if how quickly you're getting your food, or how many bags you've processed at an airport, which was basically telling technicians how productive and utilize they were, how much idle they got, and how many hours they'd sold.
So that through the course of a working day, they could figure out for themselves, but if I can find another hour or another half hour on an invoice somewhere, I'm on track for a good bonus this month. And so it switched the idea of a service manager or a workshop control of managing kind of downwards, if you like, to allow the technicians to manage upwards. You get stuff in, voice, get it on my screen, get it off my working progress, drive my productivity, because I can then see that I'm on track for a good, good month. And that's where the initial product came from. That's what it was. It was a screen in the workshop to allow the technicians kind of in exactly the same way, I guess, as the old deal boards in the sales office, you know, of all the cars that you sold.
That was the idea. And in 2020, kind of while I was still working in dealerships, we piloted with a couple of customers who are still with us, actually, this idea of putting these screens in. And of course, the screens went in, it proved incredibly valuable for the technicians. You always knew if there was a problem, because if a screen stopped working, you can guarantee that somebody would be on to you within about 10 minutes, you know. And yeah, that was it. And of course, from there, what then happened was we love the technicians. Can we put this across the entire department, which is where essentially the AutoBI Hub as we call it, what was the product that we had today was born from?
So give me some ideas, some advice if this is right, for someone who starts off as a head of business, a general manager. They come up the sales side of it, they get introduced to this department that they don't know a lot about. What advice do you have? Because you went through that transition. What would you start looking at? What advice do you have for that? The first time, general manager? I think the first thing I would say is get comfortable with being uncomfortable. There's going to be a whole bunch of people who's technical knowledge of how these things work. These are technicians, our workshop controllers, our service advisors. These guys have got a wealth of knowledge.
I maintain that probably one of the worst roles in a current retailer today is that a service advisor. Let's be honest, you're only ever really delivering average news. Best. Your cars come in, there's no work needed to be done, but you're still only a few hundred quid for the car park. The only thing that you see is a bit cleaner than it was when I brought it in this morning. All the watches happen that you can't see. To me, of course, the things broken down when you're on the way to a wedding and all that kind of stuff. It is the worst job to really make friends with these people. They are the custodians of what's going on in your retailer.
These are the people that are going to make sure your customers are coming back time and time and time again. Jonathan, isn't that the key? My first service manager said, so I remember car salespeople only saw the first car. When you're a service advisor, we saw the second, the third, the fourth car. And so true, it's still true today as it was back in 90 when I started. Absolutely. I think it is kind of, I don't want to say the most underappreciated. That's probably the wrong wording, but it is the, I think, the trickiest role in the business still today and is vital for customer satisfaction and retention. I think as well, you need to, at first, I was trying to manage things a little bit from a distance actually from an after sales perspective.
I got so much more understanding by sitting with a service advisor, and then when that customer checked in, holding on to that job card and walking right away through the business, the process of the car every day and watching and understanding and trying to learn. You know, the old mantra is saying, isn't it, seek to understand, then be understood. And I think that was really important. When you come from the sales background, you don't necessarily understand just how many links in the chain there are from customer dropping off to picking up again. And this is a long time ago. You know, even today it's much more complicated with different ways to pay and, you know, different offerings and all that kind of stuff.
And I think that you have to get a real in-depth knowledge. That's not to say you need to be an expert and have to fix a car. The great news is you're paying a bunch of guys and girls in the workshop to do that for you. But understand their challenges, their journeys, their frustrations, and look, these people are going to make you a lot of money if they're happy and know what's expected of them. Yeah, that is good advice. Go and sit there with a service advisor and follow all the way through. I just really like that. Now, again, we have lots of service managers, dealer principals, general managers, heads of businesses will be listening to this and thinking, OK, 2025, my after sales department, we need to get the best out of it.
And what's your predictions for 2025 in after sales? Is it going to be nice and easy and steady? Is it going to be hard work? I think actually there was a report released yesterday from the, the Motor Ombudsman, I think, that referred to 2025 as a bit of a perfect storm. And that report, I think, really resonated with me and probably would, you know, form my view of what 2025 looks like. We've gone through where our post-COVID world, it seems a long time ago, but probably isn't in the memories of most of us. You know, where there is, there's been a shortage of stocks, there's been a shortage of cars, there was a shortage of technician and skill.
That's driven over the last couple of years, I think probably the most significant rise in technician wages. Coupled with, you know, some guys do this really well, some groups do it really well, others not so much around, you know, the apprentice side of things, it's not necessarily has much focus as it should have done. So you've got a skills shortage, you've got the transition to EV, ice, all taking place over the last couple of years. So you're saying a lot of revenue, going to EV from ice? Absolutely. And our technician costs have started to rise. If you want to retain those good technicians, you're having to pay, I think probably far more than ever you would.
I couldn't tell you the percentages, so I don't deal with it too much, but, you know, from what I talked about, our customers, they are seeing that, you know, lots of independent repairs and lots of other groups, you know, really pushing those basic salaries and pushing those bonuses. That's before we take into account NI in the UK is. And then of course, you have the national insurance rises, you have the taxation rises, we have an energy cost, which are higher than they've ever been. And of course, it doesn't take a genius to work out when you work into a workshop with heating and lighting and ramps and everything else. You know, that's a very expensive thing to operate and run.
And I think, you know, looking the outlook for 2025 is that consumer confidence will be more depressed. It will be lower. People may be not repairing their cars or having their cars repaired as often as they should. Of course, there's options available for customers now to spread those costs and things, but it kind of does make for that perfect storm, I think, that the report was talking about. You know, you've normally got one thing, a bit of a recession, a bit of lack of confidence, but typically with that cost, cost would come down too, and that just doesn't seem to be happening. So I think for after sales, the key is going to be you and the who I first started with.
He had two great phrases, which still stick with me. There's two ways of making money was the first thing you would say. You sell more and you spend less doing it. Yeah. But he then also bracket that with, but you can't cut your way to making a million pounds. Yeah. Which I thought was really valuable. You have to control costs. You have to be aware of cost. But just getting rid of it doesn't necessarily deliver the returns that you need. So I think for anybody wanting to run a successful after sales department in 2025, it's going to be lots of little things that you can shift a little bit to drive that profitability and to combat some of that headwind coming from cost and national insurance and lack of confidence.
Great motor trader, Bill Tillsley. Ran for many years, the Smives organizations R.R.G. group. And Bill Tillsley always said, Simon, there's only so much of the broom handle you can cut off before you stop them in sweeping. And it's very similar to Andy's phrase there, isn't it? You can't cut your way to the millipounds. It's so true. So again, for 2025, you're a service manager in a dealership. What would you start looking at now? Where would you start focusing your attention? I think in terms of recruitment and training, or rather not as a recruitment and training, but retention team becomes very important. Investing the people in terms of the training that's available, investing the people in terms of the skills and resources that need to be able to do their job.
We talked about then, get comfortable with being uncomfortable, wonder around, know and understand your technicians and help them understand the challenges of the day. You're all in it together. I think that's, you know, you've got to try and hold on to the resource that you've got. I hear people say that you need to go and get more technicians. But that kind of makes sense. You know, you have more salespeople, you'll sell more cars, you have more technicians, you should sell more hours. Can we get more technicians in 2025? But there is the problem. Where are they? There is a skill shortage and they're expensive. But we see within the system, you know, a customer tends to go live with us when we start to look at things like idle time.
On average, across a month, there's about a tech to a tech and a half worth of idle. So before you go and spend that money on another technician, is there something that you can do to stop that bit first? You know, this is about putting the plugs in the bottom of the bucket, first of all. Now, sometimes that might not be possible. If you're in a older location and things are generally a bit tight, you know, there can be issues around why a technician is idle, not because of the fact that they don't want to work, the logistics of the location just maybe don't allow it to happen. But at least you can have a look at things that you can change.
And let's say you take that from one and a half average idle text per month to just half. Not only have you saved yourself 35, 40,000 quits, and then turned that into revenue at 70, 80, 90 pounds an hour. You haven't gone and bought another one either. And I think that it is about those little things. Then going through looking at the small things, look at recovery rate, for example. You know, I appreciate customers are under pressure in terms of their spending. You know, that take the car in, it's broken, it needs some work done into it, it needs tires, it needs brakes, whatever that may be. It would generally be unexpected the fact that you've taken it into the retailer.
But what can you do to drive the recovery rate upwards? You know, let's not just look at discounting, first of all. Let's look at other options. You know, can you give the customer the option to pay in different ways, split these unexpected bills over maybe three or six months. And we generally see that, you know, where people do use alternative payment methods, the recovery rate can be a few quid higher, maybe five to six pounds. Well, if you're an average retailer at sort of 30,000 hours, of which around about 15,000 hours of those are retail, if you're adding the three or four quid to your recovery rate, that's no more customers coming in, that's seeing no more vehicles, that's just going straight on to the bottom line.
You know, if I rate you a check today, so I'm for 90,000 pounds for next year, just by controlling discount, I think you'd work pretty hard to find it. Yeah, also upsell, red and amber work. Again, if things are going to get tough, we need to get better at that. Do you experience the clients you're working with? What's that process like? Is it still some of those you would go, it still needs a lot of work? I think probably the sales department can learn a huge amount from the after sales department. So true. Because what after sales department is really good at, because of the fact that hours are there today but gone tomorrow, is focusing on daily.
But how many sales departments do you see that sell 60 cars in a month that are delivering 40 on the last day? Yes. So I think that sales have a huge amount to learn from after sales. But I think the converse is true when it comes to upsell, is that service advisors are not generally the most confident when it comes to talking to customers about the fact that they can't use additional work and the reasons as to why it's so important to have that done. Now, of course, there's different ways to attack that. You know, what we've already said, the service advisor is probably the toughest job. It is, yeah. And is it that you have a specialist within your organization whose sole focus is just watching as a car comes through your workshop and that work is identified.
Seeing it super quick, the car is still on the ramp. The technician is still doing the service. That person is on the phone to the customer, talking to them about why it's should be done now, how we can do it now, what different options there are to pay for it. And before the technician has even put the wheels back on, the customer said, yes, and we've got the parts and we're fitting them to the car. That then really becomes a very, I think, from a customer satisfaction point of view, the customer thinks it's amazing. They haven't got to wait. You know, it's all from a technician perspective. It's efficient. I'm not putting a car outside and bringing it back in.
The time that takes, that's where your efficiency goes. It's got to sell it when it's on the ramp. Okay, getting it back in, it just doesn't happen. We often say that the most perishable item in any car dealership is red work. If you don't get red work done now, it's going to the independence. They're not coming back in to do it. Something I'm seeing all the time is the vehicle health checks. When they have to be done first thing in the morning, there's nothing worse than a poor service advisor finally gets the vehicle health check for the customer at two o'clock, three o'clock in the afternoon. That needs tires. It needs brakes. The air conditioning needs to be serviced.
Okay, all the stuff that needs to be done. It just can't be done. We've got to get that vehicle health check in some of the places we work with are brilliant, absolutely. But some of them, it's got to be done early on there. And then we have a number of our customers have those, what we call the VHC today boards. Those VHC today show you the amount of customers you've got coming in today, you have retail and how many of them should be having a VHC. And it shows you the time that the car went into the workshop. So every five or 10 minutes, you can glance up with that board and go, we're still, it's 12 o'clock and we still not had three cars in or four cars in or whatever that might be to do the VHC.
So very quickly, I'm going to reorganize that workshop board and make sure those three or four cars are next into the workshop. Somebody's back off the lunch or whatever, or what have you. I think it's just putting that information in front of people so that you can, you're walking past to pick up something from the parts department or drop off a set of keys and you go, ah, we need to get that car in the workshop. Whereas perhaps if the information is a little bit more buried in your dealer management system or in some of these systems, they have great management information, but that ability to respond within a few minutes becomes really important. I think that's where these things become very, very valuable indeed.
Yeah. And it's, I love the idea of it's the 1%. You mentioned before, you just go look for all the little things to improve in the service department, if it's going to be hard work. What other things are you looking at then? What are some of the gotchas that you find because you have so much data, so much information. What are some of the things that people can fix quickly? And so I think the, I'm going to put a bit of a piece of advice that was given by a guy at Red Bull Racing when we went for the bumper 10 year anniversary. It was really interesting is that he was talking about the new, I'm not a Formula One person, so please forgive me if I get the wrong, but he was talking about the car going into the wind tunnel.
The wind tunnel doesn't know much more than about two weeks in the future, what's actually going to be in it. Because they have this sprint cycle where they're constantly spinning and adopting and pivoting based on the results and feedback that they get. And it really struck home with me that whatever they were doing to improve performance, these were tiny little changes that they're making, I don't know, to the shape of the spoiler or to the engine or whatever. And then they test it and if that didn't work, they weren't wasting six months, they were pivoting super quick, which is why the wind tunnel doesn't know what it's doing two weeks time because they don't know what they're doing two weeks time.
And that to me is a great thing for after sales. You need to pick the few things that you think are going to make the difference first of all, and then watch them very quickly over the course of a few days, a couple of weeks. It might be that you get the right thing, it might be that you get the wrong thing, but the ability to be able to pivot very quickly becomes really important. So that information being there and available to you, no more than 15 minutes, half an hour at a date is crucial. But in terms of what I look at, we said that you can't cut your way to making a million pounds.
Another one I always remember, I can't remember who said it to me is Cash's game. Looking at the whip control, for example, how much of you got sitting in your working progress that you haven't invested in. How much of that is still not actually cash in the bank? You've done the work, you've paid the technician, the service advisor, the customer's gone home, but three, four days later, you still haven't built that work or invoice that work. And of course, looking at today's payments, you might also then take that money on a credit card or something like that, which will take another couple of days for it to arrive in your bank. To get used to daily making sure that you get as much money in the bank as you can.
One thing that we see as well is kind of more prevalent in some franchises than others is the volume of work that can't be completed because something is on back order. I recall a particular job, I won't reveal where or which franchise. There are about £7,000 worth of labour and about £20,000 worth of parts on the working progress. But you couldn't complete it and you couldn't complete it because they didn't have two bolts. Those two bolts cost about seven quid. I think they were £3.50 each. They're obviously very special bolts, but they didn't have them. It was part of a relatively big group and they had a number, you know, five or six of these locations.
And they asked the question, is there a way that behind the scenes the system can actually look and see all those bolts somewhere else? Because we might have ordered them and then be and then not be used. That's a good question. Let's have a look. And we did do that and we found that there were bolts. So you had a car with all that labour, all those parts. I think you've been off-road for two or three weeks. When actually for the sake of a postage stamp and seven quid, those bolts could have been sent and the car could have been put back on the road. Now, of course, there's a customer satisfaction and retention thing there, but there's also just getting the cash in the bank.
So, you know, focusing on the working progress and doing everything you possibly can to keep it low, the cash back in the bank, any issues that you need to deal with deal with them, if it was your own money, you'd want it in the bank as quickly as possible. And of course, you know, look at the time that it takes for your bank to send the money when it's, you know, they've paid through open banking options, for example, you know, the customer pays are open banking. You've got the money in your account, you know, pretty much instantaneously, rather than waiting three or four days for traditional merchants to send that through. You know, also, I think we're going back to the idea that cash is king.
I remember working with a single site BMW retailer, very ambitious single site BMW retailer. And they were carrying around about 140 grams worth of parts stuck at any one time. And it was actually Andrew Tully, who doesn't own the business anymore, but he was like, that's just 140 gram the bit sitting on a shelf. And Andrew was one of our very early adopters. He wasn't the first, which he reminds me of constantly, but he was definitely number two or three. The huge amount of great ideas came from him. They said, it's only fully grand. And like 20, 30 gram of it was over 12 months old. And he's like, it's just sitting on a shelf.
And he had quite a big site, but kind of the way that it was laid out when you couldn't just easily add to it. And he said, how much of this am I actually selling? So from within the system, we could look at that, we could go, you're selling about this much, this many parts. So why am I carrying 140? That seems massive. So using the system, what we were able to identify is why are you actually selling regularly? What are people buying off you, either via the warranty or via your VHC or just through general servicing? First of all, 20,000 pounds. You go, well, there's no point in having that. So he was able to take action tonight.
I think in some cases, you came to an agreement with the manufacturing, they would buy some bags. Some of it went on online marketing sites, stuff like that. So first of all, reduced to 120,000. Then because he installed this sort of machine, which he allows you to keep the parts and keep them moving very quickly, so that they could sort of be delivered to the workshop, of course, improving those efficiencies and making sure the technicians had what they needed when they needed it. But over the course of about six, nine months, he was working with a parts team and a parts manager on this stock level to bring it down. And in the end, it got to about 80,000 pounds.
140 to 80,000. There's a lot of money back in your wake. It is, yeah. You are still being repaired. Customers are still happy. The technicians still being able to work. But because he was able to see what sells, you know, the old adage, of course, for new cars is what sells well, new sales well used. What's selling well for you in the last six months is probably the ones that you need on the shelf. If you haven't moved it for 12, 24 months, you probably don't need to order any more of those. But if you're kind of to do that in the system, it'd take a parts manager quite a long time to sit in a management system and work all that out.
But you know, the power of kind of data and these new cloud-based tools, they can work that out in seconds and say, this is what I think you should order the next time you do a parts order. So someone listened to this. I want to talk a little bit more about AutoBI and how someone might listen to this thing. Well, I can get all that information anyway. Okay, because this information, why do I come to you guys to do it when, actually, that's why I pay a service manager, a parts manager, to get me that information. Do you know what? It's kind of a funny thing. When I was sitting with customers and we're talking about the system, I'm not going to tell you anything that you don't already know, or that you don't probably already have access to.
These, what we do in the industry, there are tried and tested KPIs, I think it was even yourself, Simon, who introduced me to Jess with the book. And that hasn't changed over the 20 years I've been doing it. The difference with us is it's there. You haven't got to go looking, scratching around, rooting, copy and pasting, putting things into Excel, waiting for a report to run overnight, being an expert in the DMS. It's all online and available to you, quietly updating in the background, ready for you to go and interrogate the information. So you know what I mentioned about that pivot. If you start changing something and the result doesn't start to improve or gets worse, you can stop changing that thing and go and start, you know, go and pick another thing that you want to work on.
But the system is working them all out for you in the background. So you haven't got to spend any time doing that. And I think, you know, there's a couple of groups across the UK where, there are after sales managers, their service managers can't be at their computer from, I think it's nine o'clock in the morning to 11 o'clock, they've got to be out in front of the customers. So you say that we're paying service managers to go and find this information. I kind of would change that slightly. You don't want to be paying service managers to go and be data analysts and miners. You want to be paying service managers to go and affect the change.
We are an organization that can help deliver the information to you and deliver the information to you very quickly. We are not a replacement for good quality service managers, sales managers who know their people and are able to drive performance improvements and changes in their teams. We simply make it quicker for them to be able to do that. So listen, someone listen to this. Thanks. Well, Jonathan, you've done it. You've worked in a dealership. You started developing this idea. Okay, you've built it. You've now, I understand it was October last year. There's a sale that into Bumper, a great organization, friends with the show been on it before. Someone else has got this idea, took me through the concept, the idea, and getting it built.
How hard is that to go from zero to hero in this? I think if you asked me to do it again, Simon, I'd probably say no. Was it one of the ones that you knew what you'd go through? You would not start with it. Yeah, I definitely think that's the case. I left school university, I was there for about three months to come into the industry. I was not a computer programmer by default or some kind of wiz with code. What I had a passion for was the automotive industry and all of its nuances and great things that it can do. It's the most complicated form of retail because you sell new, you sell them used, you sell the bits to fix them, and you sell the time to fix them as well.
It's not like any other kind of retail operation. That makes the most straight, I think hugely exciting, but anybody that wants to have a look at it. But I love the fact that you need, I think it was Mark Laverie that said, in God we trust for everything else, we have data. That seemed to stick with me. I love that being able to take the information, go and do something about it. That's kind of where the passion and the fire came from it. I'll be honest, from sort of 2019 to kind of 2021 when we were designing the initial product. So I met my then business partners who subsequently exited as part of the acquisition, Mick Paul and Joe, but they were doing a roll out for some systems for BMW in the night's dealership.
I think all of us would say we've got the scars. On the face of it, it looks quite easy. But genuinely, it's not that easy. Over the last five years, we've garnered the experience, and probably a lot of the scars to help people. And that's really where we want to really work with retailers. Absolutely, if you want to go down, the data is the most important thing, I think the automotive retailer has today. And our product outlook for the next couple of years is incredibly exciting with bringing in things like AI and all of that sort of stuff. But as an automotive retailer, if you want to be able to start to harness that data today and start making changes today, if you don't have anything at all, that journey is going to be quite long and painful because it requires a lot of technical skill.
I think you said it there, I have worked in the industry and then learned how to be a data person. So the great news is when we're talking about recovery rate or whip or idle time or use cost docker or whatever, I know what we're talking about. It's quite a rare thing to find somebody that knows what the story of the data is telling them. And that I think is why we're really in a great position to help retailers is because a lot of our team have been there and done that. So they know what this information means. I'm not sure if I've answered your question there. But kind of not I was thinking about is it something else they want to start their own business, they use car operation, a training company, a recruitment company.
You've gone from the security of working for great businesses. Someone's sitting there listening because this goes out to lots of people who are senior managers, investors, people in business, but lots of managers listen to this and think, hey, I want to do this. I want to row my own boat. Would you recommend that again or not? Not necessary. I can pettitor to you Jonathan. Yeah, absolutely. I think just prior to just prior to COVID, my partner had worked in hospitality for about 30 years running restaurants and hotels, which as anyone listening to this will know is probably even worse than being a service advisor in a car. I think so. However, the passion was gardening.
I've decided I won't be a gardener. And so literally just before COVID finished the September before in hospitality was booked on to a course ready to start in February the following year to go and learn to be a gardener because February was fine. March comes along, the world shuts down and learn to be a gardener. Being out of hospitality is the right time to do it. Yeah, sure enough. That was probably quite fortuitous, but learn to be a gardener online. But of course, a huge passion for it was kind of a thing that my partner had always done. Leaving a good job and you've got a mortgage and all that kind of stuff, it's a risk, but it's a risk that paid off and is infinitely happier today in what they're working full time in a showguard and looking after guests and visitors are not too far from showing people around.
People would say to me, why do you want to leave? I had a business at a BMW retailer. You've got the car, you've got the premises, you've got all the nice bits and pieces that go along with it. And I did listen to a lot of those people. Oh, yeah, you're right. Yeah, it is a risk. Yeah, yeah. And then a friend of mine, we were chatting with friends or we'd met some of something, a friend of mine, Donna. Turn around and say, just remember that all of these people have the autonomy to give you information, but no accountability for it. So it's all great advice, but ultimately you're the one that lives and dies by it.
And I think Steve Jobs said, do what you love and do every day. And coupled with that, I think if you love what you do, brave it, try it. What's the worst? It could go wrong. The initial, you know, I thought we'd be a small company that looked after a few screens and some retailers that just helped a small number of people deliver a slightly increased performance. We are a country mile away from that today, and the future looks incredibly bright. Try it. If you love it, it'll all work out. That's great advice. Great advice. Jonathan, really enjoyed that. What's the best way people can reach out to you? So probably first of all, there are a website, which is www.autobii.co.uk.
All through LinkedIn, the Autobi page, send us a message on there. And one of the team will be, or you can actually email hello at autobii.co.uk. That gets instantly picked up and somebody will reach out and get in touch with you. Perfect. Listen, thank you very much. That really appreciate it. Thanks, Alan. It's a pleasure to see you again. That just leaves me to say that all details of this episode and other episodes on the selling in the motor trade can be found on our website simcotraining.co.uk. Go there to get a copy of our book, Words That Sell Cars. Go there to sign up to a free trial of our sales fitness online sales training program.
Easiest way to get hold of me is Simon Bowkett through LinkedIn. Thank you.
