Gas Prices Are Stretching Oil Changes — Fight Back

Tyreese: Good morning. Welcome in. Saturday morning, coffee is hot, trucks are warming up, so let us get your head right before the first job rolls in.

Tyreese: Here is the signal. Yesterday, Friday, Diversified Royalty reported third quarter results for Mr. Lube and Tires, Canada's big quick lube chain. Same store sales fell five point one percent in the quarter, and total system sales slipped one point seven percent, after growing sixteen percent the same quarter last year. And the company said it plain: gas prices are up more than twenty percent year over year, six months running, so people are driving fewer miles, stretching their service intervals, and putting off the oil change. That is not a Canada problem. That is a wallet problem, and your customers have the same wallet.

Tyreese: Now here is the thing. When customers start stretching, most operators reach for the discount button. Do not. Mr. Lube ran the experiment for you. Back in July they celebrated fifty years in business with fifty percent off basic oil changes. Huge weekend, lines out the door, and the average ticket dropped, because the bays were so full of cheap oil changes they turned away the other work. A discount fills the bay and empties the ticket. The customer you train to wait for a coupon is a customer who never pays full price again.

Tyreese: Here is the tactic. Deferral is a retention problem, not a pricing problem. The customers you need are already in your book. They are just past due. Every one of them has a car sitting in a driveway that is a thousand miles over, and nobody has called them about it. Your job is not to find new customers today. It is to go get the ones you already earned back in the door. And here is your edge as a mobile operator: when money is tight, convenience wins. You are not asking them to drive somewhere, sit in a lobby, and lose an hour. You show up at their house, at their job, and it is done in twenty minutes while they keep living their life. That is worth more than ten dollars off. Sell that, not the discount.

Tyreese: So here is your action, and it is small. Before your first job today, pull your list of customers who are past due, five hundred miles over, or thirty days past their last visit. Text or call the top ten. Not a blast, not a coupon. A real message, with their name, a real date, and a real reason. Something like: hey, you are about a thousand miles past your last change, I can swing by Tuesday at ten and have you done before lunch. Ten messages. That is it. Half of them book, and your week just filled itself.

Tyreese: Look, gas prices are going to do what gas prices do. You cannot control the pump. But you can control whether your customers hear from you before they hear from a chain with a coupon. The oil change they are skipping is the engine they cannot afford to replace. Remind them of that, show up at their door, and go win the day. I will see you Monday morning.