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'Five in the Back'Posted 8/11/2003By George Witt, AAM Four years ago, I was concerned that we had no shop owners' association in our town or in our state. I put the word out that we were having a meeting at my shop and it drew a pretty good crowd. I explained that business was getting tougher and we needed to begin sharing information and experiences in order to better ourselves. We began to meet monthly at a different shop each time. Sometimes we got a mailer out, other times we didn't. The crowd dwindled and finally there were five guys, sitting in the back room at Blum's Automotive, wondering what we should really do about our association. I finally said, "If there are only five guys in this town who really care about their businesses, that's good enough for me." We decided to pick a location we could use every month, to make it easier for people to attend. We found a restaurant with a buffet and a meeting room we could use if we ate. We'd invite a speaker for a 30-minute presentation. We had someone from the Health Department talk about hazardous waste handling, the city prosecutor talked about our legal rights dealing with customers, manufacturers' reps talked about systems and products, and on and on. Attendance grew. We elected officers and drafted a constitution. We became good friends and looked forward to our meetings. We helped each other out and had fun. We began to ask our vendors to help us by buying dinner for the group. In return, we'd give them 15 minutes of fame to say whatever they wanted. To this day, if you want to pitch our group, you have to buy dinner. We sent out mailers advertising, "FREE FOOD!" We set a goal to become an ASA affiliate. There are about 107 independent shops in Lincoln, Neb., (pop. 225,581). The most we could get to join our local group and ASA was 12 shops. It took 30 shops to become an affiliate. We just couldn't get any more people to the meetings; too many conflicts. One day at lunch I went to five shops. I asked if they'd join if we sent them a written summary of the meetings so they wouldn't have to attend. This new approach worked great! Our "We want you to come to our meetings" pitch was replaced with a new pitch: "We just want your money." In January 2003, I began an aggressive mailing campaign targeted at all ASA members in Nebraska. The message proclaimed, "We don't want you to come to our meetings, we just want your damn money!" It was very successful. We began mailing to more and more shops. "Give us your money!" we asked, and the checks came in. I started calling ASA shops and so did Todd Mahalko, an ASA membership recruiter and account manager, who helped us out. We now have more than 50 member shops statewide and just became recognized as ASA of Nebraska. It wasn't that hard, once we just asked for the money. It was easier to get their money than their time, at that time. Funny thing, attendance and enthusiasm at the meetings have really grown too. Apparently, the key issue was that the group was an unknown. It's very difficult to get people to commit time to an unknown. Writing a check is an easier commitment to get. Once they've written the check, they've made the commitment and the pressure is off. Then, curiosity gets them to come to a meeting. At that point, we've got 'em. George's Rule No. 1 to start an ASA affiliate: Money first, time later.
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Copyright (c) 1996-2008. Automotive Service Association. All rights reserved.
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