Business set up

I do not know if the title is appropriate or not . But via general conversations and on the hpacademy podcasts as well as my personal experience its really hard setting up a healthy business . I have just recently done the jump to open my own shop yet I feel like I am running a child care centre or something of that sort . Customers coming in and even after spending hours of explaining agreeing etc. Yet do not understand .

An example I had a customer bring me his car for diagnosis due to oil pressure. I told him we have to pull the engine apart no worries we do it . I was right oil pick up broken , crank pulley broken , metal shaving , crank damaged the whole lot . We discussed his options . He decides to go to forged. He askes me if its OK to bring his parts as my parts one of suppliers is his mate and the one that introduced us . I agreed . 4 months later he brings the parts and tells me you know what you should hurry up cause you have the car for so long here . I explained to him it was impossible for me to assemble the engine without rods . Anyway a whole drama of a person .

I have another customer for whole rebuild which brought me the engine after I gave him the time frames and explaining if we need to go just through a general recondition x amount of time then if we need to do oversize pistons etc x amount of time . All agreed upon. Yet he calls me up after I have taken the engine out , and tells me keep in mind that in 2 weeks I am going on vacation with the car . Yet that wasn't either discussed nor was i informed nor is it in either time frame .

I have heaps of example for only a short time of period of operation. I work on almost exclusively atm on a specific brand and it's a nice market .

My question to anyone is how do you deal with these people? They do not say the truth when they are on the forums or car meets , they will easily talk bad about you and your shop regardless and i can't find a way to work things around this issue . How many customers can you fire ? How many times can you make each of them come over to sign a paper stating your communication and what was discussed. Like you are a grown human being you have the right to vote and Yet I have to sit you down all the time and spend x hours unpaid? Or do I have to tell you come over sign this paper and I am not doing anything till you come ?

TIA

Sorry for the slow reply here, but these are great questions, and honestly, you will find advice on this from any tradesperson out there. They all have the same problems just wrapped in a different industry.

The only real answer is 'experience'. You learn the right questions to ask to avoid some of these situations, and to be honest, people.

It is hard to turn away work, especially when you are starting out, but some jobs are not worth it and you almost need to get burned a few times on those to really learn that. I'm not talking about people not paying, it's scope creep without proper conversations, borderline jobs that cross the border into unchargeable hours when with hindsight it was obvious that was always going to happen etc.

Not allowing customers to supply their own parts rules out some aggro, or setting a deadline where they either have them by X date or you will sort for them. Good to have a waiver when using customer-supplied parts too. Generally doesn't really absolve you of anything but it does at least prompt more thought from the customer, maybe.

Not letting them drop the car off till all their supplied parts are ready would be another way to avoid that one. You can also charge for storage; that usually gets people to account better for the time it takes to sort things, or pick a car up, better.

Making sure you ask when a customer needs the car back by is another, ideally via a form they fill out that has a bunch of standard questions. I would say this is probably one of the most important things you could do. It helps you, and also sets the right expectations for your customer. If it's too short a time frame, you can talk about it up front. It's a two way street.

Within that you can make your own exceptions, and people will appreciate that more as being above and beyond. It's not about getting as much money as possible from people; it's about being able to maintain a standard of service for ALL your customers, which you have a view of, but an individual customer does not.

Reading between the lines you either are not cutting out some customers from the start that are simply bad customers; they do exist, or the expectation management from the start is not quite on point. You can think one thing knowing what you know but it's not always easy to communicate that. It's a skill that we all need to build.

Running your own business is not easy, but that's also why it can be so satisfying.