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| To twist this a little bit, I'm curious what the customer view on what their GPS support guy at the local dealership is worth. What $ per year should they be making? How profitable should the GPS department be?
For me personally, I usually go on 2 training trips per year. Between course fees, flights, hotels, food, that's probably $10,000. Then there's my vehicle payments, $7800 a year. Insurance, $1600 a year. Cell phone $100-600/month, let's say $4500 a year. Fuel $4000 a year. Vehicle maintainence $2000/year. Tooling, $1000 a year. That right there, a portion of my yearly expenses, is enough to hire another apprentice mechanic. I also have office space, hundreds of thousands tied up in inventory, work a few trade shows, and pull a salary. There's probably other costs to keeping me that I'm not even aware of. Also, I'm the only guy working this location in an industry where demand for GPS guys far exceed supply. So my manager has to deal with attitude when I get overworked and grumpy.
How much do you pay for a mechanic's time? I know it sucks when it takes 4 hours to track down a faulty cable. Often in that situation a lie on my paperwork and cut the time down in a big way to soften the bill. But at the end of the day I also know that if I don't show a profit I'll never get a second guy working with me. With only one guy, support quality is going to drop when demand starts climbing.
A LOT of time and effort has been spend trying to find the fair spot for precision farming billing. In my area, the majority of companies still use it as a loss leader. Operate the GPS department at a loss and hopefully it helps us sell enough machinery to offset the costs. Sooner or later though, we need to find a way to pull our own weight. | |
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Precision Ag Repair Charges
