The Penygroes Service Centre located in South Wales was founded in 2014 by Jonathan. He has extensive 17 years of experience in the industry, once he built his own business and has used other garage management software. However, Jon found himself at a point where something was missing to minimise his manual labour for data management. They switched to Garage Hive in March 2021 and has already seen a significant improvement in the garage, an increase in gross profit and have achieved a great NPS® Score. Read the full case study to find out Jonathan’s story.
Jonathan has been working in the automotive industry for just over 17 years and has run his own business for the last 8 years. He has had the privilege to train as a Suzuki apprentice technician and has also worked in several independents. Jonathan found himself running the day-to-day of that last independent he worked for which prompted him to take the leap and start his own business in 2014. The Penygroes Service Centre is based in South Wales in the village of Penygroes, which was a business Jon took over. Not long after taking over, two employees decided to leave. “I think that was my first scary moment as a business owner, worrying about how I would overcome this. It was a challenging time but I’m glad to say that we are now a team of six, consisting of myself as owner/director, four techs and one front of house. We are in the process of building two extensions, one Diagnostic Bay and a new store room.”
Before joining Garage Hive, we were using another Garage Management Software that had the basics i.e. electronic diary, SMS and email reminders but it lacked the capabilities of Garage Hive. We were running Quick Books alongside that management system and had nominal codes for almost everything, it worked but was very laborious to extract the data we required to keep our finger on the pulse of the business. The switch to Garage Hive was like switching a light on in a dark room, the Garage Hive Reporting – Power BI reports have everything we want and more.
“I was fortunate enough to meet one of the Garage Hive team (Dawn) at the Automechanika Birmingham trade show held in the NEC. Then some two years later, after hearing nothing but good things from other Garage Hive customers, it felt like a no-brainer to join, and we were very excited to do so.”
“I felt the transition went extremely well, the team at Garage Hive were extremely proactive and went out of their way in helping us convert over from our previous GMS. We used the pandemic and the first initial lockdown to our benefit and beef up our IT systems, we also had WI FI fitted within the workshop in readiness for the switch over.”
“There is a lot to learn which is probably the biggest challenge we found in using Garage Hive, but anything that’s great takes time and patience to learn. There is no doubt in my mind that you get out so much more in comparison to the effort put into learning it. All of my employees can see the benefit of the system, and it gives all of us a sense of professionalism by having the right tools and the Garage Hive team behind us. The onsite training that is provided is fantastic, it’s a real must for getting the most out of the system.”
“There are so many features that we love! Emma who is our Front of house has worked at a couple of dealerships and had not previously experienced a system that combines everything into one as Garage Hive does, it makes everything a doddle.”
“Some of the features that I really like are the reminders as this helps with limiting no-shows and helps with diary management. The ability to keep consistent with customers’ expectations by using the customer notes feature really is ingenious, it means that whoever is serving a particular customer, important information we’ve written within their customer card pops up as a reminder so we can use this to be more personable when booking them in. There’s also the versatility of the system to mention, it’s possible to completely customise the data displayed in a certain area, for example, I recall a time when we were receiving training from Rhys at Garage Hive and he showed us a button which is effectively a cog, once pressed has a personalise section where you can add and remove fields for the current screen such as customer phone number etc.. “
"The Garage Hive community is something else, everyone is sharing that one common goal of continual improvement, it’s amazing to be a part of that."
“Now that we have been with Garage Hive for a full year, we are able to see data on Garage Hive reports that give us a real retrospective insight on how we performed and where we can make improvements going forward.”
“I’m confident in saying that with a little bit of attention to two key areas we can increase our gross profit by £40k based on the same number of jobs we did last year. Above all, we are really proud to say that we achieved a Net Promoter Score® of 94 for the year with the Garage Hives customer surveys, and we aim to do the same year in and year out.”
“I can highly recommend Garage Hive to any garage who wants to improve their business, it’s a real pleasure to work with such an innovative team.
It would also be discourteous of me if I didn’t mention Auto IQ and John’s Business Accelerator program both Garage Hive and Auto IQ are key factors to building a great business, thank you both for assisting us and helping take us to the next level!”
The Penygroes Service Centre located in South Wales was founded in 2014 by Jonathan. He has extensive 17 years of experience in the industry. However, Jon found himself doing a lot of manual labour for data management to keep a finger on the pulse of the business. Therefore, joined Garage Hive's garage management software in March 2021 and has already seen a significant improvement in his garage, an increase in gross profit and has achieved a great NPS® Score.
Tom and Kayleigh runs their garage TR Autos in Yeovil, Somerset. They joined Garage Hive last year. Tom has two decades of industry experience , both practical and technician side and now business as TR Autos was founded in 2008; since then the team has grown, practices have moved away from paper diaries to garage management software, their productivity has increased and they also have moved into bigger premises.
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