"How I Came To Choose ServiceShop."

This article was written by Chuck Arnold of The Power Shop in Enumclaw, WA for "Western RV News", for which Chuck is a regular contributor. He sent it to GenesisFour along with an email which read as follows:

"Gentlemen: You are about to again suffer the penalty for befriending a writer. I have been so absorbed in ServiceShop that my magazine article deadline has come today with no subject at hand so I decided to see what I could do with ServiceShop. The attached text will be published in the February issue of Western RV News. (12 states and something like 40,000 copies) You might want to catch up on your sleep a little. I think a few hundred shop owners are among the readers. Have a nice rest of your Sunday."

- Chuck Arnold

It should come as no surprise to my readers that the source material for my articles is from life in the trenches of the RV Performance business. The last several months of my (and The Power Shop’s) life have been impacted tremendously by our computer system upgrade project.

What does our computer system, or that of any service provider, have to do with you, your pickup, SUV or RV vehicle?

I would submit that three main factors contribute to any service oriented business attaining the critical mass, which guarantees the consumer gets what he or she pays for. These factors are the basic foundation for all the rest. Without a solid foundation any organization, regardless of accumulated asset or political capital, will spiral towards failure.

The foundation factors, of a successful service business, are:

1. High integrity from top management down (including techs and support staff down to the janitor)
2. Strong technical competence in the company’s service area from top to bottom.
3. Ability to manage all details of the business efficiently.

These foundation pillars form an interdependent triangle. If any of them is weak the other two are diminished. Raise one to a higher level and the other two are pulled up. Myriad other junior factors are part of the equation, adding and subtracting from chances for survival. Promotion, location, finance and exact targeted market etc. are important, but rely totally on the foundation pillars above for success to be durable.

A single person, with a strong foundation as described above, can start a business and have more happy clients than he can serve just by word of mouth advertising alone. Far too many businesses are barely alive because one or more elements of their foundation are not supporting natural growth. The buying public will flock to a service provider with a strong ethical, technical and detail oriented foundation.

I ran a shop for 18 years with completely manual record keeping, bookkeeping and invoicing. In 1988 I realized that I would never get control of the scene without using computers. My third foundation pillar, the one about detail, was weak. I was working 15-hour days and slipping backwards. The manual system was too labor intensive. Little forgotten details kept becoming BIG problems. I was coping with, not controlling, the scene. I had to quit or get a computer system in place to turn details from problems to profits.

I soon found the sobering truth that no affordable shop management program we could use existed. A competitor hired a programmer to do a custom system but gave up, wasting $200,000 and several years. Without a full system solution, we did what we could. Soon a little four-computer network, with an old 286 server, was in place. QuickBooks saved hundreds of hours and our DOS contact manager let office and service track customers, quotes, and promises. I created my own network work order system in Lotus. My program was driven by hundreds of macros. We soon had computers in the parts department and in the shop. All employees got paid to spend fifteen minutes each day on a typing tutor program. The contact manager program had a record for every work order. The technicians would enter their notes about what they had done and we began to see the power of the whole group being able to share information.

Our system was a hodgepodge but far better than the old way. Our programs didn’t talk to each other. A fast typist spent weekends copying work order data to the contact manager program so that we could find the work order number and thumbnail detail for all the service performed. At this point we had a system that let us field a call from a customer and put a copy of the order on the screen along with any notes about his issues.

My humble, homespun solution worked for seven years and handled almost 30,000 service orders. My home office walls were papered in macro printouts covering all but the window. My order system, written in the totally wrong software, could: 1. List all jobs in progress. 2. Make copies for each tech assigned to work on the vehicle. 3. List incomplete labor operations to keep track of stops to delivery of jobs. 4. Quickly sort open orders alphabetically or by number to make finding a job easy. 5. Provide parts and labor subtotals and grand totals with tax. 6. Put every work order ever done on the screen in seconds. I could not confront automating parts. Parts and parts pricing were manually entered. The parts department ran by the virtue of a genius (many of you know as Mike) who today keeps at least 7,500 part numbers in his head along with where to get them and what they sell for.

The first order of business for The Power Shop before opening the doors July 1st 1997, was to buy a shop management system. My software research led me to Al Cath. Al’s company, GenesisFour, had a fascinating and unique shop management system called Senior Service Manager. Senior Service Manager everything we wanted with one exception: it did not give parts and labor subtotals for individual labor operations - it lumped all parts together from all labor operations. Our performance business requires us to quote and bill each labor task as a subtotal of parts and labor, or our prospects don’t become customers due to confusion. We picked another software product from Winworks that we felt met our criteria better.

Winworks estimates and invoices worked for us, but inventory control was bad from the start and “canned jobs” became a nightmare over time. As we added more customers and prospects Winworks became unstable and crash prone. The primary tool of our detail pillar was stunting the growth of our new company. By the time we reached 7 computers and 12 employees, Winworks’ crashes, slowness and inventory problems made me miss old system. (I shouldn’t be too hard on Winworks. The real problem was our bad initial choice. It took several years for us to see this fact). We needed a better solution to get our detail pillar back under our company.

About a year ago I discovered that GenesisFour had a new product: ServiceShop. The GenesisFour website (www.genesisfour.com) described a completely new concept in auto shop management software. The demo product overflowed with features and power. I called for more info and found myself again talking to Al Cath. I studied ServiceShop with great excitement but found that some aspects of the system were still under development and not yet available - ServiceShop was not quite “ready for prime time.” But the core design was so clean and innovative that I decided to stay in touch with Al and wait it out. I reasoned we could tough it out with Winworks a while longer.

In October, I took another look at ServiceShop – a real close one. I found that Al and his crew had come light years. On the surface it looked like ServiceShop was now very close to our dream come true. I spent 50 or 60 hours immersed in ServiceShop and about 15 hours on the phone with Al. A couple of months and 133 emails, and a week of first-class on-site training later, The Power Shop ran its first business day on December 17th 2001 with ServiceShop as our primary detail and business management tool.

Al Cath and his crew are amazing. Al has answered his phone more than once at 11 PM when I called to leave a voice mail. We have talked software issues till 1:00 AM on more than one occasion. This is remarkable because GenesisFour is located in Boston. I have emailed his programming department after midnight and received a response within five minutes. His on site trainer, GT, is the best possible guy to help a company be up and running with their new system, once the groundwork has been laid. Al and I must be kindred spirits. His view of what a shop management system should do is remarkably like the vision I started with in 1988.

At the end of our first month with ServiceShop, the struggle of all hands learning is easing. The training wheels are coming off. We are becoming comfortable with our new management system. It is especially gratifying to be so certain now that we have done the right thing. The proof piling up day by day shows that our detail foundation pillar will not be letting us down again.

I am proud to recommend ServiceShop to other shops and confident that RV'rs will profit greatly to the degree more companies make the change. With the details of business under control we will all be better off. I am also proud to have gained able and loyal new friends like Al Cath, Fred Vibert, Dimitri Patakidis, and GT during this process.

-Chuck Arnold

The Power Shop
1920 2nd Street
Enumclaw, WA 98022