Wiper blades? Air Filters?  A better question is do you do a good job of selling them?   An even better question is how do you know if you’re doing a good job of selling them?

If you review these types of “quick service items” the end of the month, you might see that you sold 50 air filters last month and realize that’s a few more than the previous month.  Then you proceed to pat yourself on the back for doing such a great job.  But what if you wrote up 1500 cars last month?  All of the sudden, 50 air filters doesn’t sound like much.  Ever thought about how you would calculate such a number?

You could compare it to what the dealer down the street does.  That just tells you whether you’re doing better than them, and they may be doing a poor job.  You could compare year-over-year or month-over-month numbers.  That just tells you if you’re doing better than you used to.  With a little creativity, we can come up with some real, concrete numbers to tell if you’re capturing your share of the market or if your quick lube techs are letting dollars drive out of the service lane.  How?

Let’s say that the oil change interval for your average car is every 5,000 miles and your average air filter life expectancy is 20,000 miles.  Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that for every 4 oil filters you sell you should be selling (or at least attempting to be selling) 1 air filter (1 4:1 ratio).  Likewise, if brake pads last 50,000 miles than every 10 oil filters sold should results in 2 brake pads sales (one front and one rear, a 5:1 ratio).  Here’s the math for my dealership using the intervals above:

Total oil filter sales for May: 329

Total air filter delta: 82 (329 divided by 4)

Total brake pad set delta: 65 (329 divided by 5)

How did we really do? 21 air filters and 24 brake pad sets. Not so great.  But if we look at our tire sales (assuming 50,000 interval), our objective would be approx. 131 and we sold 135 (4 tires for every 10 oil filters sold).  We do a great job on tires!  But we may have never known if this was good or bad without diving into the numbers.

Adjust the mileage intervals/life expectancies as needed for your situation but don’t try to bend the numbers to fit what you’re currently doing, that would just defeat the process.