CMI Pack June 2024

Recruitment and staff retention has been a problem for years and will continue to be a problem for years to come.

What do you think are the keyopportunities for workshops in the next 3 years?​

There are several opportunities often spoken about, such as EV, ADAS, commercial vehicles and tyres. My advice is to position your company to not commit to any single path but be ready to change direction quickly when the time is right. The industry is at a bit of a crossroads between fuel types and technologies and you’re going to get different advice, sometimes extremely different, depending on who you speak to. At Lindleys we’ve decided to focus on our servicing, MOT, tyre and fast-fit offerings as these products and services apply to all fuel and vehicle types. We do have EV trained technicians and we are also marketing that we are EV ready, for when the time is right. What do you think are the key challenges workshops will face in the next 3 years?​ Recruitment and staff retention has been a problem for years and will continue to be a problem for years to come. I do find that some garages are having much more success than others though when it comes to recruitment. A mistake I see often made with some job adverts is the lack of a clear salary instead of a wide-ranging salary or the very common “competitive salary”. From our experience anything other than a clearly

defined well paid salary doesn’t work. The problem is, in order to be able to advertise a clearly defined salary you need to be paying the existing staff in line with what you’re willing to pay a new recruit – this can be an expensive exercise!​ In the coming years there will also be a significant reduction in diesel vehicles coming through to the independents – this is backed up by vehicle registration data. The challenge with this is that over 60% of the revenue in independent workshops comes from diesel vehicles, with the average invoice value of a diesel being more than £100 over any other fuel type. Independent garages must be thinking about ways to fill this revenue gap.

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