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For garages and mot centres
Book the ramp, order the part, remind the customer.
The ramp is the asset. Everything else exists to keep it busy.
A garage lives or dies by ramp time. A ramp with a car on it and a technician working is earning. A ramp with a car on it waiting for a part, or a customer decision, or a phone call that has not been returned, is costing you exactly the same in rent and wages while earning nothing. Most of the profit problems in a workshop are really scheduling problems wearing a disguise.
The front desk is where it all collides. Somebody is on the phone asking whether their car is ready, somebody else is standing at the counter, the parts supplier is on hold, and a technician is waiting for approval on an extra job he found on the ramp. All of it goes through one person who is also trying to book next week. That person is the bottleneck, and no amount of working harder fixes a bottleneck.
Meanwhile the most reliable revenue a garage has is the work it already earned. MOTs and services repeat on a fixed cycle, and every one of those customers is a person who has already chosen you once. Losing them because a reminder did not go out is the most avoidable loss in the trade, and it is also the most common.
Sound familiar?
- MOT reminders that never go out, so the work goes elsewhere
- Parts ordering tracked on a whiteboard
- Customers ringing to ask if the car is ready
- Job cards on paper, lost by Thursday
What we do about it
- Automatic MOT and service reminders, the cheapest work you will ever win
- Ramp scheduling that shows what is in and what is waiting on parts
- Customers get a text when the car is ready, so the phone stops ringing
- Digital job cards with photos, approved by the customer from their phone
A day that probably looks like yours
Nothing here is a disaster. That is rather the point: this is an ordinary day, and the cost is spread so thinly that nobody ever adds it up.
- 08:20Three customers drop cars off at once and the desk phone is ringing.Details get scribbled on paper job cards that will be hard to read by Thursday.
- 10:05A technician finds a corroded brake line and needs approval before going further.The customer is at work and does not answer, so the ramp sits blocked.
- 11:30The part needed for the car on ramp two is not in stock locally.The car occupies a bay all day and tomorrow's booking has to be moved.
- 13:45Four calls asking whether cars are ready yet.The front desk stops booking work to answer questions a text could have answered.
- 15:50Last month's MOT reminders never went out.Those customers renew at whoever posted them a reminder instead.
- 17:40Invoicing the day's work from a pile of handwritten job cards.Two jobs are undercharged because the extra parts were not written down.
Reminders are the cheapest work you will ever win
An MOT is due on a known date, every year, forever. So is a service, roughly. That means a garage always knows, months in advance, exactly who should be coming back and when. Almost nowhere else in small business is future demand that predictable, and most workshops still leave it to chance.
Automatic reminders by text and email, sent a few weeks ahead with a link or a number to book, tend to be the single change owners notice fastest. It is not marketing and it does not feel like selling, because you are telling somebody about a legal obligation they have and offering to sort it. Sent early enough, you get to the customer before the fast fit chain's mailshot does.
The knock on effect matters as much as the booking. Work that is booked three weeks out lets you plan technician time, order parts in advance and stop living week to week on whoever drives in. A predictable diary is what makes the rest of the workshop calmer.
Digital job cards, and getting approval without a phone tag game
The paper job card is where most workshop money leaks. Extra parts fitted and not written down. Handwriting nobody can read at invoicing time. A card that has gone missing under a bench by Thursday. And crucially, no evidence of the condition of the car when it came in, which is the thing you want when somebody claims a scratch was yours.
A digital job card fixes the evidence problem first: photos and a short video of the actual worn pad or the split boot, taken on the ramp, attached to the job. Customers approve far more additional work when they can see it, because they are not being asked to trust a description over the phone while they are at their desk in a meeting.
Sending that to the customer for approval on their phone also stops the ramp sitting idle. Instead of ringing a number that goes unanswered and waiting, the technician sends the photo and the price, gets a tap back, and carries on. The bay keeps earning, and the customer feels informed rather than sold to.
Take the pressure off the front desk
Most of the calls a garage receives are one of three questions: is my car ready, how much will it be, and can you fit me in. All three can be answered without a human at the moment they are asked, which frees the person at the desk to do the thing only they can do.
Status texts handle the first. A message when the car goes on the ramp, another when it is finished and ready to collect, and the phone simply stops ringing about it. It also gets cars collected earlier, which matters when you have nowhere to put tomorrow's arrivals.
The other two get handled by online booking and by a call answering service or a missed call text back for the times when everyone is genuinely busy. Cloud telephony is published at £18 to £35 per user each month and call answering at £300 to £800 a month, and either can pay for itself on the enquiries that currently ring out at ten past eight in the morning while three people are at the counter.
Parts, ramps and knowing what is actually happening
A whiteboard is a perfectly good system right up until the moment someone rubs part of it off, or two people update it differently, or the person who understands it is on holiday. The information a workshop needs is not complicated, it is just constantly changing: what is in, what is on a ramp, what is waiting on a part, what is waiting on a customer.
Getting that onto one screen everybody can see changes how the day is run. You can tell at a glance that three cars are waiting on parts from the same supplier, that ramp two is blocked by an approval nobody has chased, and that Thursday has space you did not know about. Decisions that used to need a walk round the workshop take a look.
It also connects the ends together. The parts ordered against a job land on the invoice, so nothing is fitted and forgotten. The invoice feeds into your accounts package rather than being retyped. The job history stays against the registration, so next time that car comes in you know exactly what was done and what was advised and declined.
Real examples
Illustrative cases drawn from the kind of work we do. Tap one to see what happened and what could have been done. We do not name clients without their permission.
The MOT that went to the fast fit chain
The case
A customer has used the same independent garage for six years. Her MOT falls due in March. The garage knows the date but nobody has time to send reminders that month. A national chain posts her a discount offer three weeks before it expires, she books there because it was in front of her, and while the car is up they find and fit a set of tyres. She has no complaint about her old garage. She just was not reminded.
What could have been done
Automatic reminders going out a few weeks before every MOT and service due date, with a link to book. It requires nobody to remember anything, it reaches customers before the chains do, and it turns known future demand into a booked diary rather than a hope.
The ramp that sat idle for three hours
The case
A technician finds a badly corroded brake line during a service. He tells the front desk, who ring the customer. The customer is in meetings all morning. The car cannot be finished and cannot be moved off the ramp, so a bay that should have turned over two more jobs earns nothing until half past one, and the afternoon booking is pushed to tomorrow.
What could have been done
A photo of the corroded line and a priced extra sent to the customer's phone for approval. People answer a message in a meeting when they will not take a call, and seeing the actual part removes most of the hesitation. The job is approved in minutes and the bay keeps working.
The job card that lost the money
The case
A car comes in for a service and ends up needing two additional items, fitted the same afternoon by a technician who is flat out. He writes them on the paper card, or thinks he does. At invoicing time one is missing and the handwriting on the other is unclear, so the desk invoices what it can read. The garage has bought and fitted parts it never charged for, and nobody notices because there is nothing to compare against.
What could have been done
A digital job card where parts are added as they are fitted, feeding straight through to the invoice and the accounts package. It is not about mistrust, it is that a busy technician should not have to also be the accounts department.
What garages and mot centres usually ask us for
Custom CRM and business systems
The system you actually need rather than the one you can rent. Built around your process, integrated with what you already use.
£20,000 to £40,000
VoIP and cloud telephony
Business phone systems that follow your team anywhere. Number porting, call routing, voicemail to email, and call recording where you need it.
£18 to £35/user/month
Call answering and reception
Your calls answered in your company name, triaged, and passed on properly. Nothing goes to voicemail.
£300 to £800/month
Local SEO and Google Business
Get found by the people down the road who are ready to buy. We fix your Google Business Profile, get your Name, Address and Phone matching everywhere, and win the map pack that sits above the normal results.
£500 to £1,200/month
Website design and build
Fast, accessible sites that load in under two seconds and read well on a phone. Built to be edited by you, not held hostage by us.
£4,000 to £8,000
Common questions
What is this likely to cost a garage with three or four ramps?
The parts most garages need first are cheap. Cloud telephony is published at £18 to £35 per user each month, call answering at £300 to £800 a month, and local SEO at £500 to £1,200 a month. A website build is £4,000 to £8,000. A fully bespoke workshop system is published at £20,000 to £40,000, and we would usually rather fix the reminders and the phones first and see what that does to your diary.
How long does it take to get running without disrupting the workshop?
Reminders and phones are usually days rather than weeks and can go in without touching how the workshop runs. Job cards take longer because the technicians have to be comfortable with them, so we would rather trial it on one ramp for a fortnight than switch the whole floor over on a Monday morning.
Is the customer data ours if we stop working with you?
Yes. Your customer list, vehicle history and MOT due dates are yours and exportable in full at any time. Those due dates are effectively your forward order book, so we would never hold them hostage, and your phone numbers stay yours as well.
Will it work with our accounts software and our parts supplier?
Invoices and payments should push into Xero, QuickBooks or Sage without retyping. Parts suppliers vary enormously, and some connect neatly while others really do not, so we check yours specifically before anything is agreed rather than discovering it halfway through.
Half the team is not comfortable with computers. Will they use it?
They will use it if it is faster than the paper card and useless if it is not. On the floor that means a phone or tablet, big buttons, a photo in two taps and no typing of anything that can be scanned. We set it up with your job types already loaded and spend time in the workshop with the technicians rather than training the office and hoping it spreads.
Not quite your trade?
Plumbers and heating engineersElectriciansSalons and barbersAccountants and bookkeepersContact centres and sales teamsBuilders and construction firmsJoiners and carpentersLandscapers and grounds maintenanceCleaning and facilities companiesDental practices and clinicsCafes, restaurants and takeawaysEstate and letting agentsCare homes and home care providers
Admin Rescue for garages and mot centres
A job management system built around how you actually work. Missed calls text back automatically, quotes go out in minutes, and everything lands in your accounts software without you retyping it.
from £2,400 setup then £150/month