RR 363: David Justice – You Must Manage Your Labor Profit Before Anything Else

David Justice has been an auto care professional for over 30 years. He grew up in the family business working for his father. At, a young age David purchased his father’s business and went on his own. Over the years David had multiple Shell Gas stations.

In 2001, David got out of the gasoline business and bought an old closed BP station with 3 bays. Within a short time, he added 5 more bays and did $1.8M. (Parkway Auto Care). In 2009, David built an 8500 square foot store in a neighboring city from the ground up producing over $1 million in the first 12 months. Then in 2012, he built a 10,000 square foot store again from the ground up in another neighboring city producing over $1.2 million in just 12 months’ time. The 3 stores were Express Tire locations and grossed over 5 million a year. David was elected and served a 2-year term on the NAPA National Auto Care Advisory Council from 2012-2013.

In search of a way to better manage labor hours, David created Labor Profit Management. LPM is a web-based time management system for the service professional.  In June of 2013 NAPA launched Dave’s LPM solution nationally and since then David has been helping shop owners across the country create more net labor profits by having them measure and manage their labor dollars with his product.

David was a featured speaker at the NAPA National expo event held in Las Vegas. David presented 5 seminars to over 3500 people on how to manage your labor factor.

In 2016 David received an offer from the largest automotive chain in the industry and sold his 3 stores in September of 2016.

Once again David had the opportunity to follow his passion of helping people and created Repair Shop Of Tomorrow with Stan Aten an electronic marketing social media expert/website designer.  RSOT is a completely comprehensive program for the independent automotive repair facilities encompassing done for your marketing, SOP, and labor tracking complete with accountability coaching that creates real-world results.

David has been happily married for over 22 years to his wife Tracy. He is the proud father of 5 children and a grandfather of three.

Key Talking Points:

Wants to Give Back, Do More

• Repair Shop of Tomorrow
• Strong vision for labor profit management A look at the labor side of the business, NAPA looked at it and asked us if we would share it with other dealers.
• His giving bug started from here.

• Most shop owners are almost slaves to their business. He wants to help them.

3 Legs to the Stool

• Education: learning the SOPs, how to run the business, scoreboards
• Communication word of mouth, social media communicating to the right client
• Implementation with repair shop of tomorrow, we know marketing and implement it for you since life gets in the way, we want to get it off the dealer’s plate.
• He believes in marketing programs not marketing pieces
• The real goal is to allow shop owners to do what they do best and that is building relationships with the community and fixing cars.

Marketing Pieces vs. Marketing Programs

• Market to bring the right client in with the right kind of value-added offers and predictive marketing
• Marketing programs are the total package of building a branded look, branded content, branded message, overall different media, and the right clients, we get results.
• Number one reason we lose clients is we don’t get in front of them.
• The main problem arises when a person gets an education and there is no implementation.
• People want your business because of Net Profits. That’s what makes your business valuable to them.

Other Points

• Networking is a strong asset. Being in a group and be around like-minded professionals is life changing because you will learn so much.
• The first thing to fix is the labor side of the business because it is the number one opportunity for profitability. Most business owners do not understand the labor rate, productivity rate, efficiency.

Major Pivot

• If you operate your store correctly, put clients through the doors, and have the right pay plan,  technicians and customers come to you.
• Technician shortage can be attributed to not thinking right. We need to re-evaluate the value of our technicians and not be afraid to charge what we’re worth.
• Charge the right amount of money for our services.
• Own a business not work in it.
• Excellence should be rewarded.
• Regrets. Missed his techs and his clients

A sincere thanks to David Justice for being on the podcast.

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