If someone were to ask you what your most valuable asset is as a business owner, what do you think you would tell them?
Many business owners would say their customers. Some might say the quality of the service they provide. Still others would say their most valuable asset is the high quality products, tools, and equipment they have.
While all of these things are certainly important, none of them have any potential without a great team of employees. Who else will keep your customers happy? Provide that high quality service? Who would be using the great products, tools, and equipment you have?
Hands down, your most valuable asset is your employees.
If that’s the case, it makes perfect sense that you would want to invest in your most valuable asset, hence, employee training is a great way to improve and expand your business and potential profits.
In a moment, we’ll take a look at how successful auto shops train their employees. But first, let’s clear up a big concern and misconception some business owners tend to get tripped up on…
What if My Employees Leave After They Get Training?
This can, of course, happen. However, if you make sure to implement the strategies outlined in our post The Secret Auto Service Providers Use to Reduce Employee Turnover Rate, it’s significantly less likely.
In a nutshell, the key is to provide your employees with so many great incentives that they wouldn’t dream of leaving after receiving training—you’ve made it too good for them.
On the off chance that you do invest in one of your “most valuable assets” and they do leave your business, there’s a pretty good chance you wouldn’t have wanted to work with them in the long run anyway. The benefits of training your loyal employees far outweigh this surprisingly uncommon scenario.
Furthermore, consider this: would you rather train a small number of employees who eventually leave you, or never train any of your employees who want to stay with you for decades? When you think of it like that, training takes on a new light and starts to make a whole lot more sense.
Mandated Training and Continuing Training Are Great
In many industries, employees are required to go through continued training programs. Doctors, lawyers, salespeople, IT professionals, and many others in a wide variety of industries never stop learning and expanding their skills. Why, then, should we in the automotive industry not follow this tried-and-true formula?
It’s impossible to give you a cookie-cutter training outline for your employees, since only you know their job description, skill level, and experience level. However, a good starting point is to set aside 3-4 days per year exclusively dedicated to professional training. This isn’t much in terms of time and likely won’t be cost prohibitive for most businesses, but the returns on the investment will be well worth it.
Consider that not all courses need to be specifically automotive-related. You might choose to enroll your employees in a course that makes them better at sales or customer relations, for example. If your team is already highly competent at the technical aspects of their jobs, this can be a real boon to your business.
Aside from that, if you’re not sure what kind of training your employees should receive, it can usually be sussed out by taking a closer look at their personal skill sets and going from there. Let’s discuss that in a bit more detail now:
Provide Customized Training to Optimize Employee Skill Sets
Something you likely noticed pretty early on as a shop owner is that no two employees have the exact same skill set. Everyone has things that they’re intuitively great at, and other things that they’re not as familiar with.
Fill in those gaps by providing training that helps employees learn the skills that need the most improvement. Even just from a financial standpoint this makes a lot of sense—what point is it to attend a course if the employee knows what they’re doing with the subject at an expert level already?
No two employees are the same and, likely, no two training schedules are going to be the same either.
Once You Have the Best Employees, Get the Best Products
As we’ve established, your employees are your most important assets. Give them the highest quality products you can find so that they can do their jobs even better. BG Services has a wide variety of gold-standard automotive products, ranging from engine performance products to the best ethanol defense products you’ve ever had the pleasure of working with and everything in between.
If you’d like to learn more about BG or discover how you can become BG certified, please feel free to get in touch. You’re also more than welcome to request a demo to see BG Products in action—and we’ll come to you.
