Recently, Chrysler announced that they reached their goal of having 80% of their stores opened on Saturday. In the pre-Fiat days, the number was closer to 60%! How exciting! What are the other 20% of their stores doing being closed? How can you NOT open your service department at all on Saturday? Even if they are there to support the sales department, they need to be open. Unless of course you have a CBA saying you must be closed which, in that case, the person who negotiated the contract, should be there every Saturday!

ALL the IRF's (Independent Repair Facilities) have their biggest day of the week on Saturday! These Saturday-less stores are just giving the work to their main competition. Dealer service departments should be open as a full day on Saturday. Give everyone a day off during the week and have a full Saturday crew. We need to be a convenience to our customer and most of your customers are off Saturdays. If they can't come to you, they have many options to choose from. EVERY store that I worked at had their biggest sales day of the week on Saturday, losing 4 or 5 days of gross every month is just plain insanity!

As you may be able to tell, I am very passionate about this. In my early dealership days. I worked at a store that was open until midnight which, at that time, was just plain crazy considering the one advisor and 3 technicians played stickball in the parking lot more than they worked. During a staff meeting one day the FOD asked where our biggest potential for gross growth was (we already had a monster Saturday business). I opened my mouth, which I tend to do, and suggested building up the night service. The idea was liked so much, I was made the 2nd night shift advisor. There was already a part-time manager in place and on my second day, he was replaced by a full-time manager and business started to build up to the point where we were grossing almost $15k per month in labor. 

About 9 months later the manager quit and they didn't have a replacement. I moved all my belongings from my advisor desk into the manager's office and claimed the position. The DP came down and saw me working out of the office and offered me a six-month try out and I have spent the next 20 years in management.

Two and a half years later we were doing $150k per month in gross, there were 5 service writers, a dispatcher and 18 technicians working that four to midnight shift. We were responsible for about 30% of the service departments total gross. Ford was so impressed that they came in and filmed a training video named, "How to run a Successful Extended Hours Operation".

We started our midnight operations in 1985. Since then many dealerships have extended their hours for the convenience of their customers. We used to get calls for help from roadside assistance from all over the country for help. Locally if roadside had a vehicle broken down which would have been towed to another dealer normally, brought the vehicle to us.

Bottom line of this piece is that we serve at the convenience of the customer. We need to be open when they want us open. Survey your customers and see what they think. I had a talk recently with a dealer from upstate New York who had his service department closed at 4pm. Showroom closed at 6pm. I asked why they closed so early and he said they surveyed their clientele and overwhelmingly the customers did not want them to be open later or open on Saturdays. He looked me straight in the eyes when he said it. I find that hard to believe.

So take a look at your customers. What a sales tool you would have telling customers that they can get their car service at night or on Saturday I think that can help you to sell a few cars as opposed to telling them that service is open 40 hours a week. We proved it. In my situation we had regular customers from Connecticut and Pennsylvania who came to us in North Jersey and purchased their vehicles from us just because of our service hours. 

I have lived it.....it works.