March 2021

I f you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves – it’s a saying which could come in handy considering the current economic situation resulting from the pandemic. Garages might be busier than they’d like right now, but in a couple of months when the time-shifted MOTs resulting from the exemption don’t take place when they would have, things will start to get really quiet in many workshops. What will you do with the time gained? How about really drilling down in the businesses, look at the finances; maybe do a really thorough stock-take. Careful with this one though, you may not like what you find. The team at Mansfield-based Top Garage 2018 finalists Yardleys Garage did this – and discovered they were missing thousands of pounds worth of bulbs. Commenting on their experiences, owner Nigel Yardley said “We recently did a stock check, and in six months we had ‘lost’ 200 bulbs with a retail value of £1,000. As you might imagine, I was a little upset. “As far as we could tell, a few were un-invoiced cash sales, some were on our own vehicles, but the majority were simply missed from job cards. What makes it worse is that once we got the techs together and told them the amount missing, on the very next job, the senior tech then missed another two. On how it happened, Nigel observed: “They just forget to write them down on the job cards. We have digital job cards, so as a job comes in, everything is ordered through the office and put on the job card before they see it. Then they just have to put on the consumables.” The business started to see the scale of the problem after taking on a new GMS: “It has happened since we introduced Garage Hive, so now we can track every part that comes through the door. That’s what started it all off. Before, when we didn’t track anything, what went missing we didn’t know about. We stock-check oil every couple of months now, and obviously we are stock-checking bulbs now more frequently.” Do you speak Micro? In the current economic climate, it might be the case that this is the sort of thing more and more businesses need to be doing – looking at the micro as opposed to the macro, with a larger number of garages considering how the death of 1,000 cuts may bleed them dry. At Yardleys, the business side of the business is often the province of Nigel’s wife Rebecca, so we asked her for her insight on this: “I am hoping that with this new system the problem will subside, that is if everyone actually uses it properly. “Because they are so small, I started keeping the bulbs in tubs in the office. We had some in the office previously anyway, because we would have customers come in that wanted just a bulb. It was easier to come into the office, get a light bulb and go again.” Degree of denial Initially, the scale of the discrepancy meant that there was a degree of denial: “When you are losing that many,” recalled Rebecca, “what do you do? It gets to the point where you don’t want to tell them to come and get a bulb from me, or an order number, so you can track it, because at the end of the day it’s a bulb. Then you realise, yes it does add up to quite an amount.” It’s not just bulbs either: “When you think about oil, you buy it in bulk, we must lose 30 litres on every couple of 8 AFTERMARKET MARCH 2021 BIG ISSUE www.aftermarketonline.net TAKING STOCK OF THE SITUATION Big things have small beginnings sometimes, so if you don’t keep an eye on stock control, the costs can mount rapidly