Keys To Making 2023-24 A Huge Success For Your Auto Body Shop

Stopping daily work to work “on” your business instead of “in” your business is essential in order to deliver change in the new financial year.

Tracking Your Metrics

Speaking of procrastination, if you haven’t been tracking your performance and following your business’ metrics all year, now is the time to start. Hopefully you made it your New Year’s resolution to get your business organized: Set a budget and your performance goals, create your metrics and a system to track them, and evaluate against them every week, every month and every quarter to stay on track.

With your team, you should closely track our performance all year long so, as the year draws to a close, you can look back on how our facilities performed financially and see how we did against our key performance indicators (KPIs) and customer service index (CSI) scores. Not only does this help us identify what we need to do to close our books on the previous year, but it also helps determine opportunities for growth and improvement in the year ahead.

Five Steps

Here are a few steps we take for a comprehensive wrap-up:

1. We should start our year-end wrap-up process at the beginning of February. We should work closely with the accounting staff at each store to make sure they’re on top of all receivables and payables. We also make sure that the accounting system is clean with no errors. We should be adamant that all parts credits are collected before year-end as well. The accounting team knows that your goal is to have all the financial reports ready to go to your accountant for tax purposes no later than 15th May, 2023, so the planning starts before we ever hit March.?
2. It’s important to assess the operating expense increases you incurred throughout the year so that you can prepare for the budget changes needed in the coming year. If you have experienced large increases in our yoperating costs over the past two years, and it’s important to know what percentage increases you’re seeing in order to plan accordingly going into the new year. This allows us to create an accurate budget when moving into 2023-24.?
3. You should have team meetings at each of our stores to discuss our wins and losses. You should look back to see what your biggest areas of improvement need to be, and build a plan to drive those changes in the coming year. It’s important to do this as a team so everyone is invested in the plans for improvement.
4. It is important to have a budget. If you do not have one, it’s truly time to start. You should prepare a budget each year for each location. This allows you to know your operating costs and establish our breakeven performance for each store. This is an essential piece needed in order to set goals for your staff for the upcoming year.?
5. Set goals for the new year. You should work on your sales and growth goals for the year ahead. You should also pick our three lowest-performing areas to improve. You should evaluate our staff, determine our staffing needs and adjust accordingly.?

Summary

At times, it’s hard to step out of the whirlwind and chaos of everyday life in a busy collision repair facility. But stopping daily work to work “on” your business instead of “in” your business is essential in order to deliver change in the new financial year.