Referals

[atag]

Hello all. I have been doing WSR for about 5 years doing it pretty much as a side thing to make spare money, however I have recently been laid off & as i'm sure everybody knows there are no jobs out there. So, I am turning to the old trusty wsr kit to make the bills! I usually go out & walk neighborhoods & go door to door cold calling, but the winters here in Montana can be brutal so I have been thinking of ways to keep busy during the cold months. I have decided to approach detail shops, body shops, quick lubes & any other shops that deal with a volume of vehicles & offer them a referral fee for jobs that they send my way. Seems logical to me that if you’re having your car detailed, why not have your rock chip fixed at the same time! My question is, what is a fair referral fee I was planning on $15 with a $25 bonus for every 5 jobs, but I don’t want to give away more profit than what I have to, but I want to keep the shops motivated to refer jobs to me.

[Roo]

First of all, welcome to the DK forum! Do you mind sharing your city/state with us? In my opinion that is way too high of a referral fee. Say you are getting $50 for a repair, for every $250 you make you would be giving 40% or $100 out in referral fees. Another way to look at it is you are doing 5 repairs and only getting paid for 3. That is a huge commission and you could hire a saleperson to make calls for you paying that kind of money out. It's your call though just my opinion. I personally think 10% of the job is plenty to pay for a referral fee. If you wanted to pay a bonus I think I would set the number of repairs higher than 5. Make it a monthly number to hit and throw a pizza party for the shop if they hit it. Everyone in the shop wins this way and you'll get all the employees looking for chips!

[atag]

Thanks for the feedback Roo! I am in Kalispell, Montana (northwest). I was thinking that it was to much, but like I said, I want to make the shops motivated to basically sell this to there customers for me. I saw on another post, somebody paid $5 for each job. I dont know if $5 would motivate me to even bother with it thow.

[candyman]

I just read your post! I pay my detailing shops $5 for each repair that I do at the facility and the employee that refered the customer $5. I dont charge as much for HLR as most on this site. One shop is paying me my discount price and adding the cost to the detail bill when the customer picks up their car. I also pay the tire shops and inspection stations $5 for each referal. It has taken a few months, but my detailing shops are trusting me now and Iam picking up more referals each month. Inspection stations are still a little reluctant to send me customers. They are too busy pushing tires, wiper blades and selling headlights to the customers that need to pass the state inspection. Its more profit for them to replace the headlight than the $5 referal fee I pay or if they sell the tires they fudge on the headlight inspection part. Thats not suppose to happen but I see it done. I offer a $25 bonus after 10 referals. On one busy day at one of the detailing shops, I bought lunch for the guys. By 6pm they had me 3 headlight job's to do. On one slow day I had them detail my vehicle. I off loaded all my equipment and did two of the employees vehicles for half price while I waited. Building rapport is critical in this business. The customers testamony as to the quality of my work goes a long way in generating referals. I Repaired a WS Sunday for a owner of a Bails Bondman Service. He was so impressed, I have an appointment with his brother that owns a used car dealership, for HL & WSR services. As I said on other post. You never know where a good job will lead to. Good luck! Candyman