Category: Blog – Diesel Engine News & Updates

At Highway & Heavy Parts, we believe that knowledge is the key to making good decisions for your business. Because of this, we strive to continually provide our diesel repair shop customers and industry associates with useful, educational information that may help them improve their business.

To reduce the risk of failure and ensure the success of your diesel repair shop, you must take measures to continually increase the net worth of your business. This requires reinvesting time and money into the people and processes that run your repair shop in order to achieve the best return on your investment and grow the business.

Overhead costs are the expenses associated with running your diesel repair shop that are not directly attributed to a sale or a repair order, such as rent, insurance, utilities, office staff, etc. Overhead is identified on your Profit & Loss statement as a summary of these expenses. The cost of overhead should be no more than 10% of your sales. Any increase in overhead expenses takes away from your profits, unless your sales increase as well.

When it comes to recruiting new, talented employees, we could all learn a thing or two from college athletic coaches. Every year, there is only a limited number of prospective, star athletes graduating from high school that have the talent to compete at the collegiate level. Each of these exceptional student-athletes are simultaneously sought after by numerous college coaches. The competition for recruiting these athletes is fierce. So what does it take for a coach to land a top recruiting candidate?

Managing labor to maximize profits can be challenging for any diesel repair shop owner. There are many aspects of labor that need to be scrutinized in order to get the most out of it. From recruiting, to training, to efficiency, to compensation, these components all have an impact on your bottom line. The question is, how do you know what that impact is? The only way to find out is to thoroughly analyze each aspect of your labor to determine how well it is performing toward achieving your overall financial goals. For a typical diesel repair shop, labor should account for 30% of total sales. In this article we will provide some insight into managing your labor to get the best results for your repair shop.

Your parts department plays an important role in generating profits for your diesel repair shop. A typical diesel repair shop should keep the cost of parts at or below 25% of sales. Making adequate profit margins on parts and having the right parts on hand is critical to long-term profitability. Balancing these two components to ensure speedy service and customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal of your parts department. They need to make a fair profit on parts sales, minimize repair cycle time, and give your customers a good reason to keep coming back. This may sound like a big responsibility for your parts department to assume, but their performance plays a key role in the overall profitability of your shop.

90% of Diesel Repair Shops fail within 5 years due to cash flow problems. Don’t let your Pricing Strategy take Profit from your Pocket.

At Highway & Heavy Parts, we believe that knowledge is the key to making good decisions for your business. Because of this, we strive to continually provide our diesel repair shop customers and industry associates with useful, educational information that may help them improve their business.

Research has shown that most diesel repair shops are having difficulty finding and keeping good employees. This presents many problems for a repair shop. It forces owners to work longer hours and in other areas of the business just to get jobs done. This prevents the owner from doing the important work of managing and growing the business.

So, your diesel repair shop has a great brand identity, you’ve developed compelling marketing messages, and you know where and how to reach your target customers. But, have you determined what you want to get out of all this? Have you established goals and objectives that you must meet to achieve a return on your marketing investment?

Many diesel repair shop owners view marketing as a necessary evil. They do it because they know they need to, seeing it as more of an expense, rather than an investment. This is primarily because they don’t measure the results of their marketing efforts, so they don’t know what kind of return they are getting on their investment.

Once you have established a great brand and created compelling marketing messages, it’s time to spread the word about your diesel repair shop. With the wide variety of marketing and advertising channels and methods available today, determining where, when, and how to promote your diesel repair shop can be the most difficult aspect of marketing your business.