Did you know that;
- In BC, anybody with tools can call themselves a Mechanic or even a Technician.
- Some tire manufacturers have reduced tread widths to save money but compromise safety.
- "Meets O.E.M. specs" has everything about 'fit' and nothing to do about quality.
- You are held legally responsible if a part fails and causes an accident and/or injuries.
- We used to be on guard for cheap, counterfeit parts trying to infiltrate our markets, and now they are mainstream?
And don't get me started about 'parts pricing' or training or...
What are you going to do about it?
These are just a few of the many issues we deal with every day, and here's the kicker, everyone loves to whine and cry about issues on how it's hurting their business, hurting our industry, or making us look like fools.....and that's where it ends because we think there's nothing we can do about it!
So, what can you do about it?
In the past, some of you have taken the time to try and contact the source of some issues with hopes of a positive outcome, only to realize that your concerns have fallen on deaf ears. If you did get a response, it's either "Wow, you're the only one with that issue" or "I'll pass your concern on to someone who can help," and that's the last you hear of anything.
Well, I can see their logic. In our multi-billion dollar corporate-run industries, who will pay attention to a small, two-bay shop in, let's say, Fort St. James, B.C.?
But what if that same complaint is voiced by nearly every business owner, operator, or technician in every business region throughout this huge B.C. market?
Yes, they would take notice.
ASBN, "Connecting Our Industry Together"
At the central hub of the Automotive Service Business Network is the communications platform that incorporates all the popular types of internet communications like forums, comments, personal messaging, and social pages. These are all interconnected to the central core to allow the sharing of an individual topic and allow everyone to communicate across multiple platform types. That way, everyone's voice can be heard.
Let's use that.
The first question about an issue is to determine how widespread it is or even if it is a real industry-wide issue. Maybe it's just a local problem that has a solution.
You wouldn't know if you didn't start asking the community.
The next step in talking about it is generating solutions. Well, guess what? Our minds are highly conditioned to fixing things. That's what we love doing, and we're good at it. So, for most problems, we can generate our own solutions and share them within our community.
For those issues related to products (parts, tools, equipment, etc.), we invite the manufacturers or suppliers to join in on the conversations. Who knows, maybe it's the first time they've heard about this issue, and they are more than willing to help fix it. It's their market, too, and they certainly don't want us to stop buying their products.
For larger issues, we bring in our associations to join the conversations and, with them, generate an action plan that works.
So, you now know you can do something about the issues that seem to plague us. All we need to do is explore outside the bubble we have created for ourselves.
You might make some new friends along the way.
What do you think?
