Owners should plan all their management and employee training a year in advance. There’s too much to do to think it can be handled in a last-minute fashion. Because proper planning is required to ensure the team continues to develop…
Fred Hules II, AAM, newly elected general director of the Automotive Service Association (ASA)…
Case studies illustrate diagnosing a vehicle’s misfire and a customer’s misfire. If your shop is like ours, Honda CRVs make an appearance weekly. Mostly…
Mary Barra, GM’s CEO, recently stated that the car industry will change more in the next five years than it has in the past 50. I don’t know about you, but I think the past five years have been a…
House passes repeal of McCarran-Ferguson Act for health insurers. Two major national issues have pushed insurance reform back in the national spotlight. First, efforts to reform or repeal Obamacare have produced a renewed interest in the repeal of the McCarran-Ferguson…
The more advanced our vehicles become, the more exact each system within them needs to be, especially with developments made in the past 15 years.
Tradition is often cited as the reason certain processes exist, and, sometimes, the tradition makes sense. Other times, though, learning the reason the tradition started can make you roll on the floor with laughter. For example, one of my favorite…
With the average age of a shop owner in America at 55, they’ve been through many generations of customers. But when considering marketing to millennials, many shop owners say, “I’m not sure who they are, and I’m not sure anyone…
Something unique is going on in the black-land prairie city of McKinney, Texas. Located 37 miles north of Dallas, this community of just over 150,000 people boasts the presence of a company…
In the May-June issue, AutoInc. conducted a Q&A with CCC Information Services about its newly launched Secure Share Network, a significant change in terms of how shops using CCC’s estimating system can share estimate information. Readers of this article suggested…
In 43 years of shop management and ownership, I’ve made every mistake possible. There was a year when my accountant had to prepare 102 W2s. Imagine how broken my systems and procedures were to go through that many employees in…
Many complexities of our business are now front-and-center. Consider the following: The independent sector of the automotive service industry is experiencing a crisis of profitability, retailer attitude and public perception. Most shop owners have bought themselves a job, not a…
An ASA member writes: I have a customer who has spent thousands of dollars with me during the past several years. Eighteen months ago, we installed genuine Toyota brakes on his 4Runner. A month later, the customer returned to my…
When the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released its Federal Automated Vehicles (AV) Policy in September 2016, the focus was on NHTSA issuing a guidance document and its four key sections: vehicle performance guidance; model state policy; NHTSA’s current…
Jim Maddox learned a lesson growing up in rural Los Lunas, N.M., that he has not forgotten: The value of a good education. He uses that lesson every day as a guidepost for his…
Twenty years ago this December, the Prius was introduced to the world. Three years later, it came to America and the quintessential hybrid was born. Everyone has heard of Prius. The Plug-in Prius came out in model year (M/Y) 2012…
This is my first article as ASA’s chairman of the board. And I thought this would be a great time to share how I got involved with ASA and with two of my mentors. First, I had the opportunity to…
NASTF and the VSP Registry provide security and service resources to meet any shop’s technological and information needs. The National Automotive Service Task Force (NASTF) was created to provide a technology solution to ensure ongoing access to the technical information…
