Just ONE Thing
More Cars, More Sales… Still No Money? Fix Your Numbers
Episode 255
with Rick White, 180BIZ
Good morning. My name is Rick White from 180BIZ, and this is my Just ONE Thing.
I'm gonna ask you a really hard question. Are you running a business, or are you just really working hard inside one?
That's a really hard question to ask because there are so many shop owners right now working 60, 70, 80 hours a week, and they're barely making a living.
I just recently talked to a shop owner paying themselves $300 a week. I mean, who can live on that? But I need you to understand it's not because they don't work hard. It's because how they're thinking. It's their mindset, right?
There are three mindsets that I see shop owners come to the table with, and this is what I really wanna talk about.
And please, I'm on my hands and knees, groveling. Please share this video because there are too many shop owners out there struggling every single day, working ridiculous hours and barely eking out a living.
I want to talk to you about the three mindsets. I'm gonna do this as quickly as I possibly can.
Number one is they're shop owners with what I call a technician mindset. What does that mean? The mindset is your focus. They think, "I just need more cars. If we stay busy, we'll be fine." Everything is activity-driven and reactive. You're turning wrenches, solving problems.
What I need you to understand is shop owners with a technician mindset, they confuse motion with movement. They confuse motion with progress. See, 'cause the reality is more cars typically leads to more chaos. More work—guess what? It's gonna be for the same or less money, and everybody ends up burnt out.
You can't outwork bad numbers. If you don't have a great profit model, if you don't have the foundation, the structure in place, more cars doesn't help. It can actually hurt. So I need you to hear that part of it. And as I'm going through this, I wanna just ask real quick: which mindset do you have? This is super, super important.
So the second mindset that I see owners with is a shop owner with an advisor mindset. And this is where the focus is on the dollars, the sales, right? "We just need more sales. We just need to sell more." And it's completely focused on the sales, the number of tickets, and the closing ratio.
But here's the thing.
Listen to this close. Shop owners with an advisor mindset confuse sales with success. And what ends up happening is you're getting lots of dollars to come in, but over time, if the focus is just on the revenue, you tend to lose the gross profit, right? So you got lots of dollars coming in, but you don't have as much profit, and you're still stressed—you're just doing it at a higher volume.
Sales without profit—it's just expensive activity. There's a huge difference between making a sale and making a profit. What do I mean by that? There are some sales you should walk away from. There are some sales you should not do. There are some things that are not in your wheelhouse. You're not gonna be profitable. Stop doing them.
"But Rick. We got nothing else."
No. If you need more work, get more of the right work in. This is huge, and I hope you're hearing this.
But now let's talk about the last mindset. This is a shop owner with an owner mindset and owner focus. Okay, what's their focus? It's, "What's the profit? What's my cash flow? And where's my community?"
It's all about those three things. I really need you to understand this.
You gotta understand gross profit, net profit, cash flow production. And then you gotta make sure you know people. Those are owner mindsets. And when I say people, it's internal, external. You gotta understand that.
They understand that the business isn't there to get more cars, more activity. The business isn't there to get more sales dollars. The business exists to produce a profit. Okay?
And this is—you know, I love the cha-ching, right? And that doesn't mean we're dollars-driven. We just understand, as owners, what the purpose and goals are of a business. Because if you don't have that solidly in place, you are gonna be chasing your tail until the cows come home.
You are gonna run yourself ragged with almost no results because you do not have a foundation that actually helps you to create something that serves you, your team, your family, and your community. And that's the problem.
Now, when a business owner, a shop owner, has a shop owner focus, right—a mindset—they don't chase work. They build profitable systems. And I think that's super, super important to understand because you could do all the work, but if that system isn't in place, you're in trouble.
Now here's the problem. Most shop owners don't even realize which mindset they have. Here's the truth: with a technician mindset, you're exhausted and stuck; advisor mindset, you got bigger numbers, but you got the same stress; and owner mindset, you're profitable and you're in control.
Now, don't get me wrong. There's always some chaos. There's always a little bit, but here's the truth.
Two shops can do the exact same sales, and one shop owner goes home broke, and the other one goes home wealthy. Why? Because they look at different numbers.
The goal of a business is not to pay your bills. We gotta do better than this.
So technicians track cars and hours and how busy we are and everything like that. And honestly, technician mindset, they really don't even track hours. It's just number of cars, right? We gotta get it so that we're moving.
So you need to understand gross profit. That's what happens when you have sales and you subtract the cost of those sales—labor, parts, sublet—what those cost you. You have to have gross profit left over because that gross profit pays the bills and gives you net profit.
Now I'm gonna tell you, overall, you want a 65% gross profit. Just putting it out there, all right? There's gonna be some variances, but I'm gonna tell you that that's pretty much a doable thing.
Now, what do we wanna do then? We gotta monitor and watch sales every day. We wanna look at gross profit every week, and we wanna look at expenses, net profit, and cash flow every month.
Weekly, daily, we wanna see our sales goal, and that should be our hours built per day, plus making sure we hit our other targets. So we got that. And then the second part of this is gross profit.
So I need you to understand your expenses. When I have 65% gross profit—and that's 65% of sales—so for every dollar you sell, 65% is gross profit, 65 cents. Then I want to keep expenses 35 to 45%. If you're under that, that's awesome, but I wanna keep 'em 35 to 45%. That gives me a 20 to 30% net.
Now that's 20 cents, or 30 cents, out of every dollar being net profit. That allows you to reinvest in the business with equipment, training, having an emergency fund, paying your taxes—everything else that really makes a difference.
So what I need you to do is step back. Recognize technicians are focused on cars, advisors are focused on dollars.
Owners are focused on profit and cash flow, okay? So instead of asking, "How do I get more cars?" or "How do I sell more?"—how about asking, "How do I get more profit?" or "What are my numbers telling me?" Because the reality is better questions build better businesses. That's the truth.
And here's the thing. I just want you to, every day, look at your sales. Every week, look at your gross profit. Every month, look at your expenses, net profit, and cash flow.
Because you can stay a shop owner who owns a shop—no problem. You can become an advisor that chases sales, or you can step into being an owner.
But only one of these builds a business that actually works for you instead of you working for the business. And it starts the moment you decide to face your numbers.
I get it. They're scary, right? This is an issue. They're scary. When you don't understand your numbers, you feel stupid. You don't understand them. You don't wanna know what they really are.
But how many guys—please give me an amen—when you figured out what your numbers were, it was a game changer in your business?
That's what you've gotta be able to do. You've gotta be able to step back. Recognize that this is not a failure. This is not a thing of being stupid. It's simply a skillset that you don't have yet.
What I really want you to understand is, for those techs that are out there that love diagnosing vehicles, you're gonna really dig the numbers. Because basically, those reports are like data from a scan tool that you've gotta dig in and start running tests to see what's going on to get your numbers better.
You're gonna live or die by your numbers. That's just a fact. Being able to know what they are, to set that foundation, and then confirm it with your numbers is everything in business.
So what I want you to understand is that you are gonna live or die by those numbers, and we gotta stop pussyfooting around on this, and we gotta do it.
So please share this with other shop owners. Share 'em with your friends. Please share this video. We need this to be in front of other people.
Now, if you're listening to the podcast, share the podcast. This was a 10-minute, really quick, eye-opening lesson. That's all it was. It took me four years to figure out the numbers over time, and I'm not the brightest bulb, right? But it took me four years to figure that out.
Now, if you are one of those shop owners and you're really struggling, and you're figuring like, "Man, this is hitting home, but I just don't know what to do," and you'd like to sit down and talk, please just reach out to [email protected]
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And also, put my cell number in: 5 4 0 8 3 0 2 2 9 3.
You can text me or email me, and we'll sit down and just talk. Let's see what's going on in your shop and see if we can help.
Thank you for all your participation today. I wanna say God bless, have fun, and go make some money this week, guys.
We'll talk to you later. Bye-bye.
