Navigating the Automotive Service Industry in 2025 S6 Ep1

Hello, and welcome to season twenty twenty five of Talking on a Motive with Mark and Job. Hopefully you've enjoyed our previous seasons, and today we've got Rob from Mentone Motifix is going to talk to us about the after sales and. Service business and where it's at currently and where it's going. Let's jump into it.

Rob, thanks very much for joining us today. Great to have you on the show. Maybe to kick things off, can you tell us a little bit about your company at hard or started? Certainly so.

Our company is called Mentone Motorfix. We're located in the heart of Mentone's business district. We've been at that site for thirty eight years, I think it is this year. It was my father's business before mine.

He bought it when it was an operational mechanical workshop at that stage, but it has grown and changed a fair amount since then. I think that was eighty eight when he brought in. He had a smaller workshop somewhere else in ment Tone before he got to the site we're currently on. He's been retired for the last five years and I took the reins.

We do everything from a routine maintenance through the full drive modification and suspension work. We tend to stick to a lot of the Japanese models, Australian models, American models more so than the European ones. We do do a lot of Volkswagen Audi Scotera Group, though there's a high content of them around our area. We're a five hoists workshop with four or five fully qualified including myself, four mechanics and one full time order electrician, and then I have two part time office admin staff that helped me out on a daily basis, and I would say we're probably about as big as a small workshop can get.

So he hadn't just started in the business, was a dead a tech and he decided to go out on his own? Or what how did you get in? How did your father get into the business? His stories, He started university after high school and flunked out in his second year and started an auto electrical apprenticeship at that point forward.

He's always told me he won apprentice of the year when he was qualified in his final year, and within about three years after his apprenticeship he started running his own business. He quite often said that during his apprenticeship he was often teaching his boss certain things that he wasn't privy to. So yeah, he's always been a very very smart man, my father, and checked into anything he does, replies himself fully. I think the electrical trade was probably a lot more evolved back then than what it's sort of come to now.

I think these days a mechanic and auto electricals you almost need both trades to be a mechanic, whereas back then it was a very different mechanical and auto electrical trade. He's run his own bususiness, I think it was since eighty three, and I've probably learned everything that I know from him. Definitely. How I got into it was I left school the end of year eleven, but I had previously worked as a casual cleaner for Dad since the year seven, so about five years of schooling.

Every night after school I'd be at the workshop, sweeping floors, emptying bins, washing cars, picking up bits and pieces as I went along. And yeah, when I finished well finished year eleven, I knew I didn't want to go to university, so year twelve wasn't going to be the best path for me, and Dad had an apprenticeship ready and waiting for me, so I jumped straight into that. It's interesting that you've already talking about the migration of say the automotive tech and the auto electrician.

I recall we've been being a tech from way back when that you're right, there was very much the mechanical because cars were very mechanical, and then there was the electrical side. And as the years have pass has been more and more developed with electronics and electrics. And obviously now that we've got electric vehicles, where do you see the place for the old school tech. You need to have both sides.

To be a good diagnostic mechanic. You can't just be a mechanical mechanically minded. You need to have a very good and understanding of wiring diagrams, how electrical components work, and being able to apply that knowledge with your mechanical knowledge to diagnose cars. Yeah, that all probably started changing with the introduction of EFI, mainly back in probably the early eighties, and as just every generation, new generation of car that comes out, they get more and more into one together rather than being a two separately sided views on the automotive on cars without proper information these days, it's almost impossible to work on and diagnose vehicles.

You need the wiring diagrams you need technical information, you need to know when programming is involved with new parts, they're very much I would say that elect the old school terms forward electrical is almost a thing of the past, and a mechanical tech needs to be an auto elect as well. If you want to be a very good diagnostician in your work. So apart from the technical side, what else do you believe you need to do to make the piece of successful. So is the skill set of the repairing and diagnosis, but what are the elements?

Customer service is probably the biggest number one thing you need to be good at. You need to retain and keep your customers. You need to obviously provide the good service in the first place with what you're doing on the cars. Our philosophy at Motifix is what my father's taught me is to be truthful to customers at every turn.

Make sure you're telling them what's going on with their car, even if sometimes you've got the diagnosis wrong or something's gone wrong with their car. Being upfront and truthful with them is the best way forward. It's how you build a good relationship and build trust between your customers. So that's extremely important.

I would feel that a good fifty plus percent of my customers. I feel like I've got a personal relationship with them because they're coming back every year for servicing and maintenance, and you've got to build on that relationship. So that's very important. Customer relations is probably the top priority.

Getting the correct technical information on vehicles is difficult, but making sure you've got all the programs at your fingertips to do that. So we use a number of different programs. We've got the vACC platform with vACC Online and the Haynes Pro programming. We use auto data and we also use Voices Auto Library, and you know, they've all got their strengths and all got some weaknesses, but you put them all together and you've got a lot of good information there.

So that's key. And retaining good staff. Finding and retaining good staff members that you trust and you know are going to do the work the way that you expect it to be done and do it correctly. Talking about customer services, people say I do good customer service, but it's the devil's in the detail.

Are there any protector things that you really concentrate on? You mentioned being truthful, but how do you go about that? What do you actually do to make sure that all comes across. Properly, recording all that information.

I think our invoices are probably one of the most detailed mechanical invoices that you'll see out there. Making sure that you really record everything that you have done to the car potential issues. Yeah, giving the giving the customer all the information on a document, I think is key. It also gives you a very good ground to stand on when something in the future arises.

You can refer back to that information that you recorded. Anything from as simple as a fold code logged in history of an ECU may not have been a problem for the customer back then, but if you're recorded in your information moving forward, if it reoccurs, they've they've then got a bit of a bit of background information that it might have been a problem that was arising. That's definitely something that we do at Motifix, being truthful, as I said to the customer, never telling them lie, keeping old parts and showing customers failed components or even just worn out components, whether it's something as simple as a cabin air filter or a leaking EGRC or that we had this week.

Being able to show the customer the actual part that you've replaced and what's gone wrong with it and why you've replaced it. That builds a good rapport and a good trust as well. Are there still instances I remember way back in my time and deal a service land where you get the odd customer would get it like a texture and mark the oil filter to see whether it's been changed. Is there's still that level of cynicism towards the repair industry or is that something that's.

Got no Definitely still see it a bit. It's not. It's probably not quite as bad as that anymore as marking and oil filter, but I do get customers that will double check their oil level and pop the bonnet after after we're finishing finished with it. I also find that that's usually new customers to us, once they've been with us for a service or a pair once or twice, you find moving forward they don't feel the need to do that.

But it is out there. There is always a stigma around mechanical workshops because there are still a number of places out there that don't always do the right thing, and that does give us a bit of a bad name. The dealer networks often get a bit of a reputation for not having the best customer service as well. So and a lot of people go to the dealer network because obviously the convenience, the cat price servicing, which the value you just can't beat.

Being a small business, it is out there. But I definitely find with my clientele once they've been with us for a little bit of time that that's not an issue anymore. But I think also that I think which I was quite interested in is because I've had the privilege to come and service with you for a couple of years now, is that you meet every single customer and do the handover when he picks up this cop So it's like you're just occurring as to some junior person to do the service of ours or someone to hand over the coin.

Even if you speak to the cold and go through in detail through the invoice and everything, that's it. So to me, that's fascinating an interesting way to approach. It, and I think that's an important part of customer service, having that direct link with the people that are working on your car, and sometimes that is myself. I spend about twenty percent of my time in the workshop.

Having that link between the car and the customer is very important, and I think the dealers miss that a little bit with their customer service team compared to their actual mechanical team. But the bigger of the scale is the harder is that to do so on our small business scale, which is a very very busy small business. But we're still able to do that and I will do that with at least ten to fifteen customers a day. Using the iPad as well is great.

We take a lot of photos and show customers photos of things underneath their car. Take to that really well, and again it's just building on that trust between us and the customer. So what's the photos to use any particular platforms or you just use you just teach the truth. No, yeah, we just take them on the iPad and send them or email them through if the customers requested them.

I have seen again a lot of the dealers that they will send a certain amount of photos with every service as part of their invoice. We don't really have that ability and have an invested in multiple laptop laptops or iPads for each staff member. We've just got a workshop one that we all share and use. That's probably something we can look at it in the future moving forward.

It's probably the next logical step to have that into our invoicing software because it definitely shows that you're doing something that you're doing and easy for fault finding when you're showing customers oil leaks or tie aware or things like that. So definitely something we could probably enter into our business in the future. Rob Where do you think are the biggest challenges or a small service business going forward? I would say there's probably three main areas there.

The first is something that we've experienced over the last six to twelve months, and that's staffing shortages in our industry. We've been looking for a qualified mechanic that had been in the trade at least five years, and it was very, very difficult to find someone. There was a couple of times that we'd get contact with them either through our seat ad or word of mouth, and you'd organize an interview and they wouldn't even show up because they'd already found a job before they would come down and see you.

We even went to the degree of advertising on one of those big road led road signs out in the front of our workshop, which I think helped. It definitely showed the community that we were looking. We were lucky enough to put on a new employee at the start of this year who's been a great fit and I think will be a real asset to us. And where did you find him?

Hadn't you through our seat ad? And I think we were just lucky that we got in quickly. He was a local to Mentone, to our shop, so we were able to get him down for an interview and then what I presented I was hoping was going to be enough, and sure enough he gave us the thumbs up. And we're a couple months in now and it's looking very positive.

But finding good staff members that are trustworthy, punctual and going to turn up and also that know their trade. I think there's a huge shortage of them in Australia. That's been probably something that it's been an issue not just since COVID, but before COVID, with a lack of apprentices coming through the industry. And yes, since COVID, a lot of I would say older mechanics have either got out of the trade or retired.

I know, local to us in the Cheltenham Mentone area there's been three workshops all about the same size of us, or run by gentlemen that are in their late sixties, a bit like my father, and they all closed and weren't able to sell their businesses. With those people exiting the trade, it's definitely left a big hole of the today late twenties to early forties age gap in our industry. Why is that? Because this is something that John and I've spoken many times, and it's not just the auto industry.

It seems to be anything associated with the metal trades. Why is it that this gap between say a twenty three year old and a sixty year old in the technical trade of any sort. That's a good question and a hard one to answer. Me.

I'm thirty four myself, and I know of the group of guys that I went through trade school with, there's very few of us that are still in the trade. They've all moved on to other industries. Cars and vehicles are still their hobby and still something they get involved in, but not something they work in on the day to day. It is a difficult trade.

A lot of it is repetitive work with servicing. A lot of it is oil and filter changing and break changing and stuff that you would do, you know, dozens of times a week. You can't always have a complex timing belt or a suspension upgrade to give to your workers every day. So keeping them interested is a big part.

I think pay is always a factor in a lot of industries. If you compare the auto industry with something like working on any of the big road projects we've got in Victoria at the moment, you just can't compare those the wages there. So the award how Base award definitely could do with some looking at the fact that the guys that are good at it can make money on the side doing mechanical work as well as have a full time job. Another factor there.

It's something they can do is more of a hobby or a backyard working. It's hard to say why there's the gap in the guys that have left the trade. To be honest, Mark lack of a lack of an apprentice drive probably ten years ago has got a big factor to it. Maybe more incentives to have apprentices in the auto industry as well.

There's another question I'm trying to ask that we've just had a massive what John, It's one million immigrants have turned up here in the last two years, so we've had this huge immigration in flux. Have we got any mechanics in that world. Definitely, there are quite a few that I think we were actually by lobbying from the vACC with the government, they actually got us into the critical sector. So there are quite a few coming coming through now.

Yeah, I think a lot of them have flowed through to dealers. To be honest, and how a small business gets gets in contact with the with employees is difficult. Compared to a dealer network where they have whole teams searching for people, interviewing, vetting, finding people even if they're not in the country to come over and work. Compared to a small shop where it's only myself and one other add new staff that are checking seat ads or making phone calls to try and find an employee, there's a big difference there.

Now, that's that's fine because there's something that we're very curious about, and it's something that's been around for quite a while. It's been a challenge for as I said before, COVID, but we're just we're thinking with this influx of people like we've seen, it seemed to fill the all the transport logistics spots have been filled by a lot of these recent arrival, which was fantastic. We needed that. But I'm just wondering whether the whether the government's been focusing on getting these skills in for the auto industry.

Jeffn that you know, we've been screaming from way way way before the pandemic. We did do a little bit of investigating to a company that is through the Capricorn Society that actually brings in workers from the Philippines that are qualified in Australian recognized qualification from a light vehicle or diesel mechanics. Still a lot of the onus and cost is on the company bringing them in to find housing, to set them up, and that's before they even start working, which again for a small business is hard to do.

The option is there, and once they are here there is some government help, but the upfront and finding the right person, the right fit for your business, I think it's a bit of a It's not an easy stepping stone there. And I think what's the big challenge of that is retaining them because after two years or three years, it's hap to often move on. So I think a lot of leaderships have to struggle with that whole concept. They continue to bring in people and it costs.

The cost is quite huge. Easy process. Correct, Yes, we did look into it, and it's at that stage it wasn't something from a cost point of view I could even consider. But yeah, I've definitely heard that it's a two year sort of contract that they come over on and if you'd want to try and keep them if they're a good worker and know their stuff, but it might not be the primary goal of the person with the.

Move here in terms of looking after your staff. Is there anything in particular that you do to try and retain stuff? Would you said that's your biggest challenge. It's definitely one of the challenges for sure.

I think we do a pretty good job of it at Motifix, treating everyone equally and being a hopefully a stress fee environment. I don't do a clock on, clock off times for jobs. I know a lot of other workshops make employees I've got to set time and log their hours for each job. We don't do that at Motifix.

I feel it probably puts a little bit of unnecessary pressure on my text I believe in the quality over quantity. Some days one of my texts might only get through three services a day because we've taken extra care in a few things that we've done. That's definitely one part of it. Not logging times.

I think that's good. We do lunch shout lunch for the staff once a month. I think that's a good team exercise. We will sit down and eat together, which is nice.

Definitely, pay rates are a big part of retaining staff, so we're well and truly above the award. I think any workshop will be above the award because it's just astronomically low. But yeah, good hourly rates is definitely a part of it. Making sure you work with the employee if they've got any special requirements.

I've got one employee that only works four days a week because that's what suits him, and I'm more than happy to work around that if that's what they want to do. Making sure that you provide their holiday time almost whenever they request it, as long as it's only one person off at a time for a small business. But saying yes as much as you can to any of their requests is a big part of it. Trying to always relate to them on a human level and on a friendship level more than a business side of things.

I like to see myself as a manager more than a boss. Everyone sort of knows their roles at Motor Fix because we've retained our staff very well over the years, so making sure that they have got the room to do to do their job as well and all the support from me as well. It sounds like you've got it sorted as far as looking after the team, which is so critical and so often in the industry, because when you talk about the clocking on clocking off, it's I know that when I've the roles I've had running like dealership, service departments, et cetera.

The hatred that the techs have for the clock and they despise the clock for they've got a clock on, clock off, and then they're measured around that. Nowig candess a question we talked before about electric vehicles. What do you see as the impact from a long term perspective with your business with evs. Yeah, well, definitely they're making a huge impact on the scene at the moment.

With hybrid vehicles. First, I don't think it's going to affect our industry too much. Hybrid vehicles still have an internal combustion engine and still have all the serviceable components that are standard vehicle without electric assist or hybrid systems have. Hybrid vehicles not going to really affect the service and repair industry.

Fullric vehicles are different though definitely. There are less moving parts, less serviceable parts, less maintenance all around. We don't sell tires at Motor Fix, so that's a big part of electric vehicles. If you can still fit tires and sell tires for them, that is a plus.

But from a maintenance point of view, I know on a Tesla we've had a few of them through for road worthies, not for servicing, but for road worthy inspections. There's a transmission oil filter on them, there's a cabin air filter on them, and they're about the only replacement filters on the entire car. They don't wear out brake pads nearly as fast. They last four to five times longer i've set of brake pads.

Sometimes on electric vehicles, you'll actually be replacing brake pads because of the age of the pad, not because they're worn out. That's just because the regenity breaking through the electric system slows the car down and you don't need to touch your brake pedal nearly as much. So it's definitely going to have an impact on our industry or gearing up to work on electric vehicles. For a workshop of our size hasn't been required yet, but I would say in five years from now that'll be a very different story, and we will need to have the equipment and the training to be able to work on them, hopefully diagnose them.

And it's definitely going to take a lot out of a smaller business's revenue stream. Is there any other revenue streams you can add on to counter that? From a small business point of. View, that's a very very good question, John.

From an electric car point of view, learning or knowing how to replace their batteries will be probably the biggest one once they are ten to fifteen years old. When they drop a sale inside of a battery, it can render the whole car immobilized, so being able to replace them. Having an industry in Australia that can even repair the batteries and known in the US they've got a bit of a battery repair industry which will be definitely a lot cheaper than replacing a whole battery unit, which I'm not aware of here in Australia at this point, but I'm sure that's something that the battery companies are looking at, or even the manufacturers are looking at.

Setting up so yeah, being able to replace the batteries is probably the biggest part of an electric vehicle down the track for an industry, for a mechanical workshop like ours, because if you can't do that or find a battery a faulty battery, then there's not going to be too much else that's going to go wrong on those vehicles. Yes, you'll have door locks that will fail, or wiper motors and items like that, which are very similar systems that we've already got in our vehicles that we're working on at the moment, but the main component is obviously the battery side of things.

So without being able to diagnose and repair or replace those batteries, there really won't be too much else for us to get into on them that I'm aware of. At this stage. It seems much based on the on the on the basics of the human bit, first, the human bit from a customer. That's how you differentiate the human bit from a tech perspective, how you at track and retain them, but ultimately knowing your stuff, which is the technical both mechanical and electrical.

But then the migration of electrical, the increase in that the requirement to do the diagnostics is very much coming through. So if you if you human humanize the skill set, you'll be successful. But notwithstanding that, there's the risks of the evs. But you're already looking into oka and you raise a really good point because it breaks absolutely there's going to be less of that.

But you know, there's the wiper motors are still there. There's other elements that are still there, and and there will be opportunities for as you say, replacing batteries and I dare say, replacing electric motors at some point. Circling back to the current of about technical information, that is also definitely something that affects the industry. I mentioned that we have a number of programs at our disposal, but none of them are perfect, and there are so many different variants of every car out there.

You can sometimes we start a diagnostic process, we get what we think is the right wiring diagram, we get halfway through it and we realize, oh, hang on, no, this wiring diagram doesn't match up to what we've actually got in front of us. We've got to go back to the drawing board. So getting the correct technical information, which will be extremely important with electric vehicles as well, is difficult and something that is hard for a small business to always have at our fingertips.

Obviously the dealers have it. You can pay the dealers for subscriptions to their information, which is part of that freedom of information in the auto industry, but it's expensive and it's only You usually only pay for a day or a week or a month that a time, and it's usually only specific to that model of car that you've requested, not say the whole of the Toyota's information or the whole of Nissance information. So getting the correct info and correct wiring diagrams on vehicles is definitely a problem within the industry.

It has been for a very long time. On electric vehicles, that's definitely going to be key. But it's quite interesting you're talking about the freedom of information because under block exemption in Europe, if you wanted to become a service dealer for say, to Yota and our work for Toyota the manufacturer, I couldn't stop you becoming a service dealer as long as you met the requirements of a service dealer that Toyota specify. So once they specify the requirements, every single of their dealers had to meet those requirements.

Hundred percent and any other service out there to want to become a dealer. He's about that and then he has access to all the information or their models and everything. So it's quite fascinating it all works. It is.

It's a bit different. In Australia. They've always been the dealers and the dealer networks have always been very closed off to other workshops and even just sometimes we need dealers to do software updates on vehicles and even just to get a foot in the door to get them to be able to help us out, or it's just easier to send the customer there rather than us trying to connect with the dealer. Whereas other small workshops in our area, we've got many friends, you know, and we will help each other out if we needed to borrow a vehicle specific tool or bring up about any information, or we've got a problem job that we need help with, which I've done many times before.

You can't do that with the dealer network and they're closed off unless you're paying. You really don't get anything out of them. For some fantastic insights to where the service network is right now, as far as we will truly in the midst of that transition that we often talk of. John, I've been doing these podcasts for a few years now, and we sort of were saying, well, this is what's going to be happening.

But the beauty is, and it's funny. It's the things we think are going to happen fast usually take longer, and things that we think are going to be long term happen quicker than we think. So it's interesting that you're already saying that the hybrids aren't going to be a problem because they still have the ice internal combustion engine, all the associated components. It's interesting that they're they're the volume or they're the vehicles that are actually selling well now, so that that means that there's still going to be a fair amount of traditional ice engines for longer than what people thought, because everyone thought we're just going to ditch ice and we're going to be evs, and we're seeing this trend in Europe very much so pure evs have sort of hit a bit of a plateau.

So other than countries like Norway, which ironically for everything with the oil that they sell to everybody else, but they drive around in evs. So here we have, you know, the rest of Europe is still very much hybrid and ice and ice is going to continue for longer than what most of us thought it would because there still is no silver bullet with EV So it's great for your industry that that's going to continue and it's going to be for many, many more years and what a lot of people anticipate.

I think the hybrid suit Australia very well, particularly at the moment, for a couple of reasons. We do long distance travel more so than Europeans, so the ease of filling up your tank rather than having to plan out a trip and you can charge is a benefit with the hybrid. Yeah, I don't want to paint our industry and or doom and gloom either. It's I think for a business like ours, we're thriving and I think we've got a great workplace and westantly learning and adapting to what's going on around us.

And I think for anyone that wants to get into the trade, there is still a lot of a lot of interesting mechanical work out there and it will be for quite some time. And definitely if you're keen on it, to get into it when you're younger, because by the time a young person is in their thirties or forties now, I would say that, and they're good at their trade, they will be highly sought after in another twenty years from now. Actually, one last question I was going to ask you of just before finishing up.

With the high interest rates and cost living crisis, et cetera. Has that impacted the service industry in the after sales. Area definitely us. Our our hourly rape had to go up fairly significantly last year to definitely counteract higher rent energy bills.

Cost of parts skyrocketed after COVID. They're starting to seem to actually plato it or come down a little bit now, which is good, but definitely I see it even with our a lot of our customers, they're very mindful on what they're spending and the question of how long will something last? I'm asked on a daily basis now when I'm ringing a customer, whether it's regarding suspension breaks or tires, the question is how long will it last? So I've definitely noticed that from our client's point of views, the cost of living has definitely had an impact for sure.

And as far as is there less work people sort of kicking it down the road or is there volume still coming through. We're lucky, as I said, we've got a strong client base in mentone that we haven't got a lot of dealers right around us either. We're quite isolated in the way of a lot of other workshops, so we're not competing for work in our immediate vicinity, which is a real benefit of our location. Definitely, people putting things off, more cars rolling in with metal to metal breaks than I've almost experienced before in the seventeen years I've been in the trade, So that's and that's very noticeable.

Definitely reporting to customers that they've got unroadworthy tires on cars and they're not calling back for another month or so before booking into us to sort tires or to sort suspension and things like that. So yeah, it's had an impact from every level. We've noticed it in the running a business side of things. That's the cost of doing that as skyrocketed the last two years.

Thanks Mark, pleasure to meet you and. You too, Really good luck. Sounds like a terrific business and all the best here. Thanks very much, appreciate it.

Thanks again, Rob, thanks for listening.