GSNL UK February 2024

The Mini Repair Shop Know your garage

Name: Steve

Number of sites:

Number of employees: Three techs,

Time as LKQ Euro Car Parts customer: Since day one

Quantity of ramps/MOT bays: Three lifts

Company: The Mini Repair Shop

Time in business: Two years

One site Looking for another at time of writing

Chambers Co-owner and manager alongside Kyle Berry

two front of house

What do you tend to buy from LKQ Euro Car Parts and why? Our brand is very important to us, and we’ve set ourselves high standards to uphold. We’ve got more than 25 years’ experience as senior technicians within the dealer network, and when we decided to set up on our own, we wanted to deliver a similar quality of work and customer experience… but without the dealer prices. LKQ Euro Car Parts stocks the quality brands we want to fit on our customers’ vehicles, like Mann, Pagid and Mahle. And critically, they have a massive amount of stock that’s ready to be delivered quickly. We’re buying the exact same parts now as we were when we worked in the dealer network – but with two key differences. They’re not co-branded with the OEM logos – and they don’t come with the OEM price tag.

Why do you choose to spend with LKQ Euro Car Parts instead of our competitors? There is another motor factor with a branch just around the corner from us, but they can’t match LKQ Euro Car Parts on availability. Where we can, we order up to seven days in advance, but we can never be 100% sure what we’ll need – something unexpected might crop up, or we might spot an opportunity to upsell. Between the two LKQ Euro Car Parts branches near us, we have total confidence that everything we might need is in stock and can be here within the hour.

What’s your relationship like with your local LKQ Euro Car Parts branch? It’s great to have a single point of contact – we have a direct number to our dedicated rep, who understands our business and is always on hand to help and advise.

How do you tend to place most of your orders i.e. online or by phone? We place a lot of orders online through TechMan, which builds estimates for us and links into Omnipart so we can buy in what we need for every job. It’s seamless, it’s accurate and it saves us lots of time. We tend to go through the diary and order seven days ahead. It’s easy to cross reference from the dealer parts catalogue to the LKQ Euro Car Parts range on Omnipart, and there’s no need to pick up the phone. The phone is there for customer service instead.

Page 14 | Garage Support | 2024 Issue 1