Casual Articles - Business

Going Back to Work
This is a tricky one, you are going back to work after being out of the employment market for a while. Maybe you have been travelling, raising a family, going back to college or running a business and now you want to be employed again, have an income and be in a working environment.Don't try to hide gaps in your CV, potential employers will always pick up on them and it makes it appear that you think the gap is a problem. It should not be.Be open and describe what you have been doing emphasising the benefits, the new experiences you have had earned whilst away from the work environment, what you have learned and any new skills you have acquired.Perhaps you have been doing odd jobs while you were travelling, studying a new language, waiting on tables - no better way to improve your language skills, than taking orders from hungry customers who don't speak your language. You may be looking for a language job when you return.If you have been running your own business, you will have acquired skills and experience that some employees can

The way we measure and how efficiently we bill out those minutes is usually called Revenue Recovery. The percentage of minutes each day that can be charged to revenue jobs compared to the lost minutes to non-revenue is called Revenue Recovery; in other words how many of our available minutes are we charging to paying customers ?

There are service departments who are consistently charging out 90% of the available minutes every day; that means they are achieving a 90% Revenue Recovery. Those managers are watching the details and paying close attention to all their available minutes every day. But there are many service departments far below that number, some as low as 50% Revenue Recovery. Those who have revenue recovery rates less than 85% have opportunities to improve the profitability of their department and in a dramatic way. Here is an example of what it looks like to have a revenue recovery rate from a high of 90% to a low of 50%, knowing we have a t

Let’s Talk Recruitment
Recruitment consists of knowing exactly what you are looking for, determining how to know when you’ve found it and making employment offers that get accepted. The first step is determining exactly what level of competency you are looking for:THE IMPLICATIONS OF COMPETENCIESPeople have and get COMPETENCIES (Combinations of knowledge, skills and attitudes)We apply these in the form of BEHAVIOR (Actions, thoughts feelings)Our behavior produces OUTPUTS (Products and services)How this is done yields RESULTS (Criteria for managing the prior three steps)In order to determine the kinds of people you are looking for, it sometimes helps to start with a picture of the “ideal candidate.” This person would possess the competencies and exhibit the behaviors that generate ideal results.What would happen if someone:• Negotiated the best deal every time you placed an order? • Romanced the Reps that call on you? • Aggressively worked on getting the right new lines? • P

Benjamin Franklin is attributed as the first person who said, “Time is money.” Well, that was over 200 years ago and you know, for Service Managers, it couldn’t be any more true today than it was back then. That is the essence of what Service Managers do everyday. They turn a technician’s time into labor revenue. For a service department to be profitable they have to turn the time paid to technicians into dollars and do it efficiently.

Many dealerships are not paying enough attention to the relationship between time and money. And that one area represents one of the greatest opportunities we have in improving service departmental profits. So let’s see how we can improve this situation and start returning the profits we need and deserve.

We will start at the really basic level. What does a Service Department do to make money? They hire technicians who work on equipment and they charge the customers for doing that. In other words they hire techs and bill out their time one way or another. Sure there can, and should be, other income streams such as outside labor and materials, sublets, shop supplies, vehicles etc, but the basis of any service department is to sell time. They buy time from their employees and the sell it to their customers, and hopefully at a profit.

OK, so now that we all agree that the function of a service department is to sell time can we also agree that the service manager has to manage this resource efficiently so that at the end of the day he produced a profit? We all know that the way we measure time is in years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, nanoseconds etc. The most common measurement for service departments is in hours; that is the one we are most accustomed to. We pay technicians by the hour; we have a labor rate by the hour, our reports account for billing hours, etc. But I propose and strongly believe that hours are not the best measurement for managing a service department. A much better way is to manage by minutes and to measure those minutes every day.

We will soon see examples of how minutes can add up to make the difference between making a profit and losing money for a service department. At $80 per hour, one minute per day per tech is about $2,700 in a year! Did you ever think that one drop from a leaking faucet can fill a swimming pool in a year! You don’t need a calculator to imagine how many dollars are going out the door when you think that just one minute per day for just one tech represents that much potential revenue.

Now if the product that our service departments sells is time and we measure it in minutes let’s see what a typical day might look like. For our hypothetical service department on a typical day for the sake of simplicity we have 6 technicians working an 8 hour day. Each tech has 8 hours or 480 minutes to work that day and for the service manager to sell that day. Our six techs have a total of 2,880 minutes available that typical day which the service manager can try to sell.

Every morning your service manager starts the day with a fresh inventory of 2,880 minutes and he has to do the best he can to utilize those 2,880 minutes wisely. At the end of that day he has no carry-over of those minutes; the minutes that were not sold are gone forever and he has to start off the next morning with another fresh inventory of 2,880 minutes. His inventory has a shelf like of exactly one day before it goes bad. If you think a meat market has a perishable product just think of what your service manager has. His product is gone every night, never to be sold again. That is why it is so important for him to manage those minutes everyday so that he is not wasting his available inventory of minutes.

Accounting for all those 2,880 minutes for our 6 techs is so important that the success of your whole service department depends on it. The way we measure and how efficiently we bill out those minutes is usually called Revenue Recovery. The percentage of minutes each day that can be charged to revenue jobs compared to the lost minutes to non-revenue is called Revenue Recovery; in other words how many of our available minutes are we charging to paying customers ?

New England and Economic Recovery
New England area is experiencing some good economic rebounding finally. Those markets, which involve larger consumer items are finding life a little tough, smaller manufacturers are waiting for orders and everyone is waiting on cash flow in the New England rural areas and cities under 150,000 which is nearly every city in NH, VT and ME and that 85% of the cities (calling a city that which is over 10K pop.) in CT, RI and MA. In some NH cities those involved in custom manufacturing are talking in terms of a “Train Wreck” when discussing the economic calamity. They were being promised by the Democrats who wanted a good showing in the NH primaries complete economic recovery, not sure how that was going to happen. Why is politics so important to these issues? Well because the rhetoric and bullshit has a lot to do with consumer sentiment and spending behavior. Since Summer is here now the New England area is happy to have the big events such as Bike Week, which brings in 2 million dollars to local rural areas. The forth of July will also help out. The charge of cust

and bill out their time one way or another. Sure there can, and should be, other income streams such as outside labor and materials, sublets, shop supplies, vehicles etc, but the basis of any service department is to sell time. They buy time from their employees and the sell it to their customers, and hopefully at a profit.

Instant Drug Testing Methods & Procedures for Employers, Staffing and Temporary Employment Agencies
Drug testing involves many different methods and devices that detect whether or not a person has been using drugs or is currently under the influence. Drug testing products are available for home and office use that help concerned parents or employers find out the truth about their teen or employees. Likewise, drug testing procedures assist employers in creating a workplace drug testing program that ensures the safety and wellbeing of their employees while still protecting their rights.On Site Drug TestingSubstance abuse testing works by means of testing a sample from an individual to find out if drug use has occurred. On site drug testing is typically best for the office and workplace environments as the results can be obtained quickly and action can be taken immediately. On site drug testing can occur in a number of ways. Urine drug testing is the most common drug testing products. It works great as an on site drug test because after a sample is taken, test results are typically available within a few minutes.Saliva (oral) drug testing i

ervice department. A much better way is to manage by minutes and to measure those minutes every day.

Why Choose Blackpool As Your Conference Venue
The Labour party has held their party conference in Blackpool on a more than one occasion. The fact that such a large conference has been held in the area more than once is an indication that Blackpool is more than capable of playing host to conferences of almost any size. The scope of most conferences would be dwarfed by the size of those party conferences, but even for those that are almost the same size there is the reassurance that Blackpool can accommodate that conference. The infrastructure of Blackpool is very accommodating for those people attending the conference as the advent of the part conferences in the area has lead to a general increase in the number of conferences hosted in the city.The amount of accommodation available for conference attendees is considerable since the area has at times had to play host to extremely large numbers. The types of accommodation available can help to ensure that no matter their resources, any attendee of a conference in Blackpool will find appropriate accommodation. The accommodation that is offered can be i

ix techs have a total of 2,880 minutes available that typical day which the service manager can try to sell.

Medical Billing - Hidden Costs
It isn't easy to get into the field of medical billing and not get hammered by all the costs. It's bad enough having to deal with the costs that you are told about up front, but when you get hit with costs that nobody told you about, that's when things can get very frustrating. The purpose of this article is to prepare you for what you're in for should you decide that you want to get into the medical billing profession.The first thing you're going to need is software to do your billing with. This isn't a hidden cost as the company will tell you right up front what the software is going to cost you in order to do your basic billing. That is the key word here, basic. See, the stock medical billing packages don't really come with a lot of extras. As a matter of fact, many things that you would think would be standard turn out to cost extra.For example. In most packages, if you want inventory control features, that's extra. If you want the ability to post payments from Medicare automatically from a downloaded Medicare batch file, that's extra

Sold Minutes Lost Minutes Recovery
2,592 288 90%
2,304 576 80%
2,016 864 70%
1,728 1,152 60%
1,440 1,440 50%

So in the first instance the service manager who really has a handle on his workload and his technicians billed out 2,592 minutes for his 6 technicians that day had only 288 minutes that went to non-revenue. That is excellent and is being done today by some departments. But on the other end is the manager who is only able to bill out 50% of the available minutes and is losing 1,440 minutes each day!

That is a huge swing and makes all the difference in the ability to make a profit for the department. If we can assume the labor rate for our typical department is $80.00 per hour this is what our example looks like:

Gross Revenue Lost Revenue Recovery
$3,456 $384 90%
$3,072 $768 80%
$2,688 $1,152 70%
$2,304 $1,536 60%
$1,920 $1,920 50%

The gross revenue difference from our 90% Revenue Recovery to our 50% Revenue Recovery departments for just one day is $1,536! For a 5 day week that would be a difference of $7,680 for a week. For a 4 week month that would be $30,720. And for a 52 week year our two departments will have a difference in gross revenue of $399,360. Now remember that doesn’t change your expenses at all. What would an additional $400K do to the bottom line of the non-performing 50% Revenue Recovery department where the minutes are not being managed!

This is one area that the service manager can control and have influence over the productivity of their department. By diligently managing his available minutes he can improve the revenue recovery. The net effect of doing that is to move minutes from a non-revenue account to a revenue account. That increases revenue without increasing costs.

When our company conducts a thorough analysis of a service operation we often find many areas that cause a loss of revenue by minutes being billed to a non-revenue job. Some of the biggest culprits are techs not having a new job to post their time to, time spent waiting for parts, time spent doing paperwork, and time spent diagnosing problems on the phone. There are many others that we see, but those are the predominate ones. And in many cases these minutes can be turned into revenue minutes.

Can this be done? Is it even possible? The answer to both of these is yes. There are dealerships who have achieved this success, but it takes a tremendous commitment from the entire management team. That includes the dealer principal, the service manager, the service writer, the service secretary and the shop foreman. And a properly designed incentive program can be a help in moving these lost minutes into revenue minutes.

This is probably one of the easiest areas of a service department to fix. Once these numbers are communicated to the service management team and the goals are properly set this area can see an overnight turn-around. There are many ways to accomplish this change of operations and attitudes. The dynamics, strengths and weaknesses of each dealership are different and require different solutions. The improvement plan for each dealership is different but they all have the same affect on the bottom line.

Minutes can make all the difference. It is not enough to measure the hours that are available everyday. At our $80 labor rate our customers are paying $1.33 for every minute we charge to their jobs. We owe it to our customers and to our departments to spend those minutes wisely.

Watch Those Minutes!

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As a busy executive, you face some extremely difficult challenges like creating and dominating new markets or finding and keeping the best people. But then, like many executives, do you find yourself spending too much time solving everyday problems (that only you can solve, right?), which prevent you from growing your ideal business?

We sure hear a lot about advertising fraud, fraudulent sales ads and misrepresentations in advertising, however little do we hear about the fraud which goes on at job fairs, where companies make promises and entice folks to sign up or fill out potential applications. One recent study seemed to indicate that the reason job fair fraud was so prevalent is because those people that work at the booths or tables are trying to compete with each other and therefore try to make the companies they represent sound bigger or better.

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