Nobody gets excited about taking their car to the shop, unless you are lucky enough to have a project car that is being restored.  Ahhh, wouldn’t that be nice?  Back to reality, most of us have a car that we use daily to get kids to and from school and activities and get ourselves to and from work.  So, when your one car needs repairs, even if your spouse has their car, it’s a pain in the hiney.  And, we all know why, but I’m going to list the reasons I can think of…

  • Finding a trustworthy mechanic
    • Will they create problems to fix?
    • Will they actually fix what is wrong?
    • Will they fix it in a timely manner?
    • Will they charge a fair price?
  • Cost, cost, cost
  • Having one car for however long the mechanic decides to take

As you can see, most of worry comes from the mechanic or shop itself.  This week, we were lucky enough to sit down with the owner of Friendswood’s most trusted repair shop, Jeffrey Klima of Eagle Transmission and Automotive Repair.

Here’s the background.  I’m not selling his shop; I’m telling you what he does to be successful.  Last year, starting in February, both of our cars took turns for almost the whole year breaking different things.  Our cars are old and paid for, so, so far, it’s worth it to us to pay the repairs rather than a car payment.  The first time we dropped a car off, we saw a mission statement about doing things ethically, particularly in the automotive repair industry.  We liked that, but anyone can type up a nice statement and post it.

Then, we got a text message saying what was wrong with our car, the cost to repair, pictures of the area, and we could simply approve or not the itemized repairs.  That was pretty cool.  We went to pick up the car and the total was several hundred dollars less than we expected because when the techs go into it, they realized it wasn’t exactly what they thought.  So, instead of just charging us what we approved, they charged what we actually should have been charged.  We knew we had a trustworthy mechanic.  And, so it went on for the year as our cars broke in different ways.  The manager came to know us by our first names.

We finally got Jeff on our podcast, the man behind the ethical shop.  It wasn’t a surprise to hear him say things about putting processes and procedures in place.  He has a robust history of improving businesses in different industries, so it made sense when he opened his shop to improve the automotive repair industry. 

The processes and procedures that Jeff has put in place with his team have certainly worked to impress this Quality Management firm.  While we often argue that a great QMS will improve your bottom line, and it will, Jeff gets the people side of it.  He gets the culture, something else we talk about on our show a lot.  His statement that I mentioned at the beginning says, in part, “…the fact that establishing a culture of ethics is not only the right thing to do but will have a profound impact on the long-term profitability of their shops.”  Jeffrey is a guy that gets the whole picture and that’s hard to find.

If you are in the Houston area and need automotive repair, I highly recommend Eagle Transmission and Automotive in Friendswood and Spring.  Their processes are second to none.  All those reasons I listed to hate car repair?  They are gone for us…except cost, but nothing is free.

Eagle Transmission & Automotive https://www.transmissionshopfriendswood.com/

Eagle Transmission & Automotive Facebook https://www.facebook.com/EagleTransFriendswood

Darci Chambers, Host of the #QualityMatters podcast https://www.linkedin.com/in/darci-chambers-b2196683/

At the heart of it, this is what the ISO 9001: 2015 standard is searching for in clause 5.1 Leadership and commitment and 5.1.2 Customer focus by taking accountability for the effectiveness of the quality management system and placing the the focus on enhancing customer satisfaction.

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