Some years back I was at a tire store next to a Jiffy Lube and I was getting my tire fixed or something. I had been looking for a spot to go indoors for maybe a couple days a week or maybe set up some sort of refferal program. So I decided it couldn't hurt to go find out who the manager was at the Jiffy Lube and so I walked over and explained what I wanted to do. Much to my surprise they didn't tell me heck no and boot me out of the store for soliciting, instead they gave me the area managers phone number and said they thought he would be interested in talking to me. We called and set up an appointment to go talk with them the following week. When we laid out our plan they seemed to know a little more about this program than we did and so they laid their program out to us. Apparently they were already doing a windshield repair program for 25 of their JL stores in Utah. The franchise was called Lube Management and they owned 12 stores in Oregon and 25 in Utah. They had another windshield shop doing repairs inside their stores and it was very successful in utah (which has about 10 times as many chips as we do in Portland). They proposed that we place our own employees in each of the stores and that they would get $500/mo rent in each store, regardless of whether we had an attendant in it or not. After much consideration we decided it was something we wanted to chance and so we dove in with just over $1000 saved in the bank and started hiring people slowly at first and it worked out great. The problem was that our guys needed to get paid before 30-45 days and that meant we couldn't wait until the money came in from the insurance company, which meant we needed capital up front.
This leads us into our second phase .... we had a friend of my brothers approach us and mention that he knew a businessman who might be interested in joining a situation like this and that we should talk to him. Well the biz model penciled out VERY WELL so we threw some papers together and made a makeshift presentation. We needed money desperately for payroll so we walked out that day with a $20k check as a "loan" until we could arrange partnership papers. It wasn't long after that that we started opening up more of the 12 locations and needed more money, so we went back and they hemed and hawed about it but decided to invest even more money into the venture because they believed so intensely in it and it's future potential. Long story short this phase took a GREAT deal of money and was sinking fast ... we couldn't get people who could sell to work in Jiffy Lubes and we couldn't get people to work in Jiffy Lubes that were reliable, which of course made it very difficult to stay above water. Our programs for proccessing claims was very insufficient for the amount of business we were doing and an estimated $100k would need to be put into the system to make a long term solution to our problems ... well no one was willing to put $100k into the computer system nor were they eageror willing to put money into staff to support the claims handling. They wanted us to work 15 hours a day both repairing then processing the claims later in the day, but they did not want to hire staff to help. This was a constant struggle between us and so they kept shuffling their feet on the partnership papers with the ace in their pocket that every penny put in was a loan until the papers were signed. Even through all of these struggles they still held firm that this was a fantastic business plan and so we decided that we needed to market our services to more Jiffy Lubes. Well there was a JL comvention coming up in Arizona at the Biltmore in just a couple months and we all decided it would be best to go ... problem is it was invite only. If any of you have heard me speak at the Delta Kits training you realize that nothing holds me back when I am trying to sell something. So I reframed the problem and came to look at it in a different light. With my new frame of reference I decided that they wanted me there they just simply didn't know it yet ... so we bought tickets and hotel rooms and just went. Since we knew some names in the JL franchise system we were able to get around and make some very important acquaintances to our future progress. Not only did we just come into the entire show but they fed us daily at their buffets and took us out with them to their cowboy night out at this amusment park that was rented just for our group ... unbeknownst to them of course
Phase three>...We came back with some names that we had no idea were so big in the industry, and quite a few other very good leads. Over a short period of time we figured out that everyone we talked to was more interested in having their own guys do the repairs rather than having us in their shops doing them ... so we halted and had a big Pow Wow and decided to change our business model completely. We fired all of our great group of guys we had developed by the end (lots of sales training and hard work went into building good guys) and kept just 2 to help us manage the new Jiffy Lube in store trainings. We decided we were going to do something different than A.C.T. was doing with billing and supplying equipment, we were going to continually train and update supplies and monitor progress through an area manager. 1 manager would have 20-30 stores to look after and everyday he would be in his stores helping with sales tips and keeping stock up and such. Where this was miles and miles better than what everyone else (essentially A.C.T. at the time) was doing is A.C.T. would get an account ... bring the equipment out and train a manager from each store all in one big room and for about a half a day. The managers then had to go back and TRAIN others to actually do the repairs after only a couple hours of training from a manager who didn't know much more than them to start with. the repairs sucked none of the guys liked doing them because they were unsure of what they were doing and their equipment was constantly missing important parts because the liquid resins stuff was so awful and had so many small parts just to work it. Every store we switched from A.C.T. just loved our Delta tools and loved our new system where instead of making a phone call to ACT and waiting 10 to 15 minute on the phone ... we would do the phone call for them LATER so there was no need for them to call at all. Our attrition rate (percentage of losses due to unbillable claims) was less then 5% and usually around 2% even though none of the claims was called in until later. The problem wasn't getting JL's to get on board with us it was again the computer programming and back office folks to process the claims.... which the partners (not signed on paperwork yet) still refused to pay for as they thought we should just tough it out for a little while longer until we can get things sorted out and profitable. Problem was nothing could get sorted out because we had no staff. We landed the single most influential Jiffy Lube chain in the entire system a group called Doorknob out of Willsonville, Oregon. The main owner had previously been the franchise director for Jiffy Lube international and therefore every franchisee in like the past 15 years had been trained and set up by HIM. When we took him from ACT, it was a BIG coup and all of a sudden we were a player. getting them and 2 other franchises was the measure of whether or not the partners were going to go into this full boar. I think they doubted my abilities because when we went back to them 2 weeks after we decided to change our focus and start training Jiffy Lubes and told them we landed all of the accounts we had talked about they just fell silent .... still no large capital investment and no employees. They had already dumped $80k-$100k in to the failed employees in Jiffy Lube part of phase 2 and they were excited but leary about dumping large sums into a new concept even AFTER we all agreed on it and I went and did my part of getting the accounts ... in record time I might add
Anyhow our only option at this point was to take less than half the money we knew we were going to need or just dump the idea and go back to doing fleets ... the choice to a risk taker like me was not even really a choice at all, we jump in with no fear.... and we did. We accepted the check for half of what we told them we needed and another promise that they had just been busy and that the partnership papers were coming shortly. Naturally we were so excited about our new success that papers were no concern to us ( us means my brother and I who were in the biz together). So we forged ahead going deeper in debt, but all the while, thinking they would come and get us out because everything was going as planned and every account I tried for I got with our outstanding program and equipment. As time went on we started to nto be able to make payments to the stores for the invoices processed because our expenses kept piling up on us and our processing was taking too long. We started to get phone calls from the owners asking where the checks were and so forth, still no help from the partners on our staffing needs. After a year or so they got tired of our constant requests for more capital and pulled out ... of course they never got our partnership papers signed and so about $150k in debt personally signed for was left behind.
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