Joe Hinkens from Mainline Autobody in California recently shared with Gavin, the history lesson that he has gone through after 39 years, starting back in June 1981. Like many in the industry, Joe transitioned from technician to business owner, starting out small with himself and a couple of helpers. Within three years he was pretty good at fixing cars, he had learnt a lot about the processes and the mechanics of it all and was involved with the insurance carriers or work providers as we call them. Joe got his head around the way the game works, but he remembers vividly stepping back and taking inventory of what he was accomplishing and realizing one component was missing. Despite having fixed a lot of cars and developing a solid reputation and learning a lot about the business, the missing component was he hadn’t made any money and that was a rude awakening.
Joe asked himself, what’s wrong with the picture?
He was working long days 7am – 7pm and after all the investment, time, effort, heartache, and risk, he had not made any money. Joe stumbled across an opportunity to attend a workshop where the management end of the business was the main area of focus. He took the plunge, coughed up the money and drove to Los Angeles. Suddenly he was surrounded by a lot of people like himself, but also in the mix were people who were highly successful in the auto body business. This gave him the inspiration and passion to pursue what they knew and right out of the gate, it was all about the numbers.
Its about running your business by the numbers.
That was his first step and there was a book along the way that gained a lot of traction called “The Game of Work” by Charles Coonradt. It was an easy read; you could flick through it in an hour or two but that book illustrated the major flaw in most businesses. The lesson learned was that in the sporting world, we are littered with score keeping mechanisms. Every inch of the game is analyzed and sliced and diced to where the data can be extracted in any which way. This information allows people to evaluate the sporting world, whether it be a statistic on a player, a team, or a league. It is always rapid-fire and in real time but when you switch gears and go into the working world, we learnt really quick that in many cases, we have no idea how we are going performance wise. What he also learnt was that by measurement alone, you can improve performance, productivity, and profitability.
Measuring productivity and output
There was a methodology what was proven years ago by a manufacturing company where they decided to do some testing on the impact of lighting on worker productivity. They went to one of their facilities and they measured the baseline of productivity and output. This was then shared with the workers, their intention of installing new lights to really light the place up and see if it improved performance. They did just that and tested over the next few weeks and months and after the increase in lighting, the productivity and profitability and all things that go with it had improved greatly. So, they increased the level of lighting even more and it went up again. Their next measurement was to turn the lighting back down and typically you would think that productivity would go down but that was not what happened. For the third time, productivity went up even though the lighting had been dropped. They were puzzled, so delved deep into the data and tried to peel back the layers to find out what had happened. It was determined that yes, lighting did have an impact on productivity, but the major driving force was that the people knew they were being measured. So, measuring alone is one of the most powerful drivers for any company.
When looking into a body shop and knowing the numbers, most people default to the mindset that it must be financial data. In a body shop you can measure anything, there are endless opportunities. You can measure cars per day, buff frequency, cycle time, customer satisfaction and throughput, the list goes on.
Joe shared one story that proved his point, that measurement alone can improve things.
Back in the day, they used lacquer thinner a lot. They used it to clean guns, to reduce primer, wipe down panels and all sorts of things. They would buy it in 55-gallon drums. It had a big pump on top and each tech would fill their one-gallon cans to have handy with them in their workspace. This stuff was expensive, and Joe was thinking they must use this pump like a tap because they were always buying another drum of thinner – he wanted to know where it was going.
Joe decided to measure it, so he got a clipboard and made up a little form which had name, date and how much they used. He hung the form next to the drum and put a lock on the pump. The ironic thing was, he put the key next to the pump so in reality it was open season, they could come and get all the lacquer thinner they could possibly want and just write it down. The funny thing was that within 30 days, they had cut the usage in half and when he tallied the score in the subsequent weeks of using that system, he found out they were now getting 58 gallons out of a 55-gallon drum, so that was pretty good!
Usage was cut in half, just by measuring it.
What are you measuring in your body shop? Planning Plus can give you the numbers – book your Industry Expert Consultation today.