When my husband Dana and I started Haglin Automotive, our loyal customers found us from The Yellow Pages.
Things have drastically changed since then thanks to all the technology advancements. Online reviews and Google play a big part in whether a customer will set foot in your shop or return for future repairs.
At Haglin Auto, we always adjust to meet customers, and whether they’re a return customer or a new customer, we prioritize how they feel.
It’s important to meet your customers where they are. We even offer customers free vehicle pick-up and delivery service, free shuttle services, and free loaner vehicles.
But, more importantly, we make sure they understand their repairs and can see everything that’s going on with their cars.
Build Trust with Digital Vehicle Inspections (DVIs)
Haglin Auto has been around for 41 years in the Boulder area, and twice a year 30,000 people come in and out because of Boulder University of Colorado, so we’ve always had an influx of students.
And in order to cater to our college students, we started implementing DVIs.
The reason we made the change in the first place was because our service writers would call a local college student and say, “You car is doing this, this, and that,” and a lot of the times a student would respond with, “I don’t understand,” “I’m not the one paying,” or “Let me call my mom or dad.”
From there, the student would make a phone call home, they would ask questions, and then the student would call back with questions.
Meet Customers Where They Are
Once we realized this was happening often with our customers, we asked ourselves, “Okay, how do we adapt to meet their needs?” And from that point on, we decided to offer those students the convenience of our service writers sending all DVIs from Tekmetric straight to their parents, so they can see everything going on complete with pictures and videos.
Creating that relationship not only with the students but also with the parents has been great. And I understand firsthand what it’s like sending your loved one to another city or state.
My daughter, Krystine, went to Northern Arizona University. When we dropped her off for her freshman year, I made a point to drive to the local shops and based on who they were, I was able to determine which one she should go to if she experienced any car issues.
“We want parents to feel comfortable with their children taking their cars to our shop.”
Knowing that someone was there for her if there was an issue with her vehicle was great, and that’s always been our philosophy. We want parents to feel comfortable with their children taking their cars to our shop.
The parents can see everything, and with Tekmetric, they can actually authorize everything and even check out using Text-to-Pay.
Adopting the FORD Strategy
At Haglin Auto, we treat all of our customers like family.
Tekmetric standardizes how every auto repair shop operates
Running multiple shops should mean more revenue, more repair orders, and more momentum. For most MSOs, it also means more complexity, inconsistency, and time spent putting out fires instead of building the business.
The problem isn't growth. It's that most shop management systems weren't built for it. Separate logins for each location. No unified view of revenue or performance. Processes that drift from shop to shop until every location is running differently and nobody can figure out why the numbers don't match. Tekmetric fixes that at the root — one platform, every location, standardized from day one.
Tekmetric shops see measurable revenue growth as they adopt platform features. Shops average $612 per repair order (ARO), but that number climbs to $741 when they use Digital Vehicle Inspections and reaches around $800 when they add MotoVisuals videos. The lift isn't about charging customers more; it's about transparency, showing them what their vehicle needs so they can make confident, informed decisions. It also builds trust.
The operators running on Tekmetric show what that looks like in practice. Main Street Auto, a nationwide network of community-rooted shops, grew from six locations to more than 115 with Tekmetric at the core of every one. Rush Automotive, in Austin, Texas, saw $9,000 in new revenue in the first month across five locations. CarTech Auto Center, operating across multiple locations in Puerto Rico, grew monthly revenue 48% in nine months. The platform didn't change their ambition. It gave them the infrastructure to act on it.
Customer Experience
Customers Don't Know Which Location Is Your Best. Tekmetric Ensures They Can't Tell the Difference.
Inconsistencies across locations cost you. Skipped DVI photos, estimate delays, and declined jobs that nobody follows up on quickly add up, decreasing your revenue, and negatively affecting customer experience.
The shops that grow their ARO, earn repeat business, and generate the kind of reviews that actually drive traffic all share the same foundation: customers trust them. And trust isn't built in a single interaction — it's built through consistent, transparent communication every single time a vehicle comes in.
Tekmetric gives you the tools to make that consistency automatic. Inspections follow the same template at every location, with photos and video built into the estimate. Customers get their quote by text, approve the work from their phone, and can pay before pickup with Tekmetric Payments built in. Text-to-Pay, card-on-file, and Buy Now, Pay Later options make checkout faster and remove friction from bigger approvals. Their vehicle history travels with them, so when a customer visits a different one of your locations, whoever's at the desk already knows their vehicle history.
With Tekmetric Marketing running in the background, customers get automated appointment reminders, follow-ups on declined services, and service reminders based on real vehicle data. Online booking lets them schedule service 24/7 without picking up the phone. Google Review requests go out automatically after every completed service, turning great work into lasting reputation.
When shops share eight or more inspection photos with customers, ARO goes up because customers can see the repairs their vehicle needs. Euro Car Doctors, in Orange County, Calif., used that approach and grew their average ARO to more than $900. Garagisti, in Houston, Texas, built a practice around transparent, DVI-driven customer communication from day one and has averaged a $1,600 ARO since opening.
"Tekmetric makes it simple to present everything to the customer in a transparent, easy-to-understand way. That combination of ease of use and trust really improves ticket development and boosts ARO." -Austin Reid, Director of Systems, Main Street Auto
What This Looks Like in Practice
Standardized DVIs, streamlined customer communication, and shared vehicle history across every location so every customer gets the same experience regardless of which shop they walk into
Text-to-Pay and Buy Now, Pay Later built into checkout to speed up payments and boost approval on bigger repairs
Automated follow-up on declined services and service reminders that run from real vehicle data, not generic time intervals
Online booking available 24/7 so customers can schedule service without waiting for business hours
Google Review requests sent automatically after every completed service — no manual steps required
Permissions & Access Roles
Tekmetric Puts the Right Data in Front of the Right People Across Every Location
When you add a location, you're not just adding bays, you're adding staff, risk, and the need for accountability at a distance. The right access structure makes all three manageable.
Most MSOs hit a wall when they try to manage growing teams without the right controls in place. Too much access creates risk such as errors in repair orders, incorrect discounts, and sensitive financial data visible to people who don't need it. Too little creates friction, leaving advisors waiting on approvals, technicians without job visibility, and managers unable to make calls on their own.
Tekmetric gives you granular, role-based controls across every location. Technicians see their job queue, their assignments, and their hours. Managers have what they need to run their shop without touching another location's data. Advisors can build estimates, communicate with in-store customers, and process payments. Owners see the full portfolio in real time from a single login.
Before switching to Tekmetric, Will Rivera, owner of CarTech Auto Center in Puerto Rico, had to log into each of his five stores separately just to check sales or inventory. There was no unified view of the business, no way to enforce consistency, and no clean data to make decisions from. Within nine months of switching, CarTech had grown monthly revenue by 48%. Once CarTech had the structure to run five locations cleanly, expansion became the goal instead of survival.
Cross-location visibility for owners and ops leaders, with shop-level access for everyone else. Accountability is built into the platform and not enforced manually.
Controlled access to sensitive actions like unposting ROs, giving the right people the ability to correct errors without opening the door to bigger ones
Change Management
Switching Shop Software Doesn't Have to Disrupt Your Business. Here's How MSOs Make It Work.
Adopting new software across multiple locations is a real operational challenge. Tekmetric is built for it, from contract to live in a few days.
Christian Brothers Automotive migrated about 200 stores to Tekmetric in three months. Main Street Auto onboards 20 to 25 new locations a year and keeps growing. These aren't small transitions executed by large IT teams — they're operational rollouts managed by auto repair shop employees, built around Tekmetric's onboarding process.
Every new Tekmetric customer gets a dedicated onboarding manager who builds a rollout plan around your schedule, not a generic timeline. Data migrates. Workflows get configured. And most teams are fully operational within a week of going live, with results measurable within 30 days. That's not a promise. It's a framework Tekmetric has built and refined across thousands of shop launches.
The platform itself is designed to be learned fast. SJ Automotive cut estimate creation time from 40 minutes to about 10 minutes after switching. That's not a team that spent weeks in training. That's a team that picked up an intuitive tool and immediately got more done. When the platform is easy to use, adoption isn't a change management project. It's what happens when the tool earns buy-in on its own.
"Tekmetric has built an auto repair platform that anyone can use, whether you're running a single location or managing a multi-store operation, and it comes packed with features and flexibility." -Austin Reid, Director of Systems, Main Street Auto
What This Looks Like in Practice
A dedicated onboarding manager, data migration support, and a go-live timeline built around your shops, not a one-size-fits-all playbook
An intuitive platform with a training hub, knowledge base, and U.S.-based support, so your team gets productive fast and stays that way
Access to the Tekmetric User Group, a community sharing what works, so you grow alongside operators who have already been where you are
Inventory & Parts Sharing
Stop Paying for Parts You Already Own. Tekmetric Gives Every Location Real-Time Visibility Into Stock.
When parts data is fragmented across locations, technicians wait, repairs get delayed, and margin slips through the cracks. Tekmetric centralizes inventory across every shop so your team always knows what's in stock, what's on order, and where to find it.
Multi-location inventory has a way of quietly breaking down. Parts get ordered twice because one location didn't know another had them. Technicians start jobs they can't finish. Reconciliation eats hours at the end of every month. The fix is straightforward: one centralized view of what's in stock across every location, updated in real time.
Will Rivera at CarTech Auto Center was blunt about it before switching to Tekmetric.
"We were losing a lot of money in the small stuff that our old system couldn't track," he said.
With no unified inventory view across five locations, parts costs were adding up without anyone noticing. Tekmetric closed that gap.
With Tekmetric, every authorized user sees real-time parts availability across every location. Orders happen directly inside the repair order — no supplier portal, no manual entry, no switching systems. When a technician picks up a job, they can see immediately whether parts are in stock or on order, so they're never starting work they can't complete. And when inventory hits a minimum threshold, reorder alerts surface automatically.
"Tekmetric will scale with us — store by store, bay by bay." -Will Rivera, Owner, CarTech Auto Center
What This Looks Like in Practice
Real-time parts visibility across every location, connected directly to the repair order workflow so technicians, advisors, and managers always know what’s in stock
Parts ordering through PartsTech and others, directly from inside the RO. No portal toggling, no duplicate entries.
Automatic reorder alerts, purchase order tracking, and parts usage reports that give ops leaders a clean view of inventory performance across the portfolio
Profitability & Reporting
The Gap Between Your Best Auto Repair Shop and the Rest Isn't a Mystery. It's a Data Issue.
You know which locations perform. Tekmetric shows you exactly why, in real time, so you can act before the day is done.
Most MSOs are managing with last week's numbers at best. Reports get built manually. Data gets pulled from separate systems. By the time you know there's a problem at a location, the opportunity to act quickly and solve it is gone. That lag doesn't just slow down your decisions, it costs you money in real time.
Tekmetric's portfolio dashboard puts every location's data in one live view. ARO, car count, close ratio, gross profit, and technician efficiency are all filterable by shop, advisor, and date range, giving you a complete picture of what's working and where the gaps are. Seeing your top performer and your underperformer side by side makes it clear exactly what the best shop is doing that the others aren't.
The operators who use this visibility don't just track results — they act on them. Branch Automotive used Tekmetric's real-time data to build nine straight month-over-month increases in ARO, driven by stronger inspections, clearer recommendations, and the kind of customer trust that leads to consistently higher-value work. These aren't outliers; they're what happens when operators finally have the data to make better calls.
"Tekmetric is very user-friendly and easy to navigate, it is fully customizable for your shop needs, the multi-shop dashboard is great for businesses with multiple locations." -Colin Bailey, Verified Multi-Shop Owner, G2
What This Looks Like in Practice
A portfoliowide dashboard showing ARO, car count, close ratio, and gross profit across every location in real time with shop-level filtering so you can see the full picture or drill into one location
Built-in reporting on technician productivity, DVI impact on ARO, end-of-day reconciliation, and discount and fee analysis — no exports, no spreadsheets, no five-hour Friday afternoon
Labor and parts matrices that lock in consistent pricing across locations, protecting margins and making every shop’s numbers comparable
Your auto repair labor revenue and parts margins are critical for enhancing your shop’s profitability. Adjusting your pricing on parts to make a profit is pretty straightforward.
But when it comes to labor times for auto repair shops…that’s where things can get a bit tricky.
Yes, you need competitive labor rates, but you also need to keep those rates reasonable so you don’t scare off your customers with sky-high prices.
3 ways your shop can make more money on labor:
By using a labor matrix
By creating custom labor rates
By applying a labor guide markup
Before we dive into the differences between these three methods for setting the best labor times at your shop, here’s a quick refresher on the one thing these methods have in common: the labor guide.
What is a Labor Guide?
A labor guide is like the gospel of labor times for auto repair shops. It tells you how long, on average, it takes to complete different types of repair work.
Remember that the times listed in auto repair labor guides are averages, so it’s best to treat them as a starting point.
Tekmetric Marketing now builds ready-to-send campaigns. The message is written and the audience is selected. All that's left is to review, personalize, and send.
Most shop owners know the fastest way to fill this week’s bays is by bringing back customers who already trust them — the ones whose vehicles you serviced months ago but haven’t seen since. Re-engaging existing customers is one of the most effective ways to generate new repair orders.
The problem is finding the time to do it. Figuring out what to send, who to send it to, and when to send it almost always loses out to the car on the lift or the customer standing at the front counter
That's where Tekmetric Marketing's Recommended Campaigns come in.
Instead of starting with a blank page, Tekmetric Marketing does the heavy lifting for you. It analyzes your shop’s data and recommends campaigns that are ready to go. The audience is selected, the message is drafted, and all that’s left is for you to review it, make any changes you’d like, and send.
No blank screen. No guesswork.
Just a campaign ready to help bring customers back.
How It Works
Recommended Campaigns automatically surfaces ready-to-send campaigns tailored to your shop using the information Tekmetric already knows — your customers, previous campaigns, location, and seasonality.
You’re always in control.
Review the recommendation, personalize the message so it sounds like your shop, adjust the audience if you’d like, choose when to send it, and you’re done.
What used to take an hour staring at a blank screen can now be done in just a few clicks.
How Fox River Tire & Auto Uses Recommended Campaigns
Like most shops, Fox River Tire & Auto in St. Charles, Illinois, wants to stay connected with customers and bring them back when the time is right. But deciding what campaign to send, then building it from scratch, takes time most shops don't have.
Recommended Campaigns gives Tammi and her team a starting point instead of a blank page. They review the recommendations, edit the suggested content to fit their brand, and send with confidence.
"Recommended Campaigns provide an excellent launchpad for re-engaging with our customers. Instead of starting from scratch, we refine the suggested content to fit our brand and send it with confidence. The process is straightforward, time-saving, and always delivers."
— Tammi Vest, Business Manager, Fox River Tire & Auto
From Reports to Results
Recommended Campaigns is part of a much bigger shift in where Tekmetric Marketing is headed.
For years, marketing platforms have been good at showing you what already happened: campaign reports, open rates, clicks, and dashboards. That’s valuable, but it still leaves the work on you.
Tekmetric Marketing is evolving beyond reporting. Increasingly, it’s helping you decide what to do next, and doing more of the work for you.
You’ve already seen this with Recommended Review Responses. When a customer leaves a Google review, Tekmetric drafts a thoughtful response for you to review and approve.
Recommended Campaigns is the next step.
Instead of simply telling you that you should market to your customers more often, Tekmetric Marketing puts a campaign directly in front of you — already drafted, targeted, and ready to send.
Your marketing should keep working even while you’re heads-down under a hood.
One Year of Continuous Innovation
Since launching Tekmetric Marketing in the fall of 2025, thousands of shops have made it part of how they attract new customers and bring existing ones back.
We’ve also continued investing in the platform based on feedback from shops like yours.
Recent additions include:
Rich text and custom links in every email so you can create more engaging emails and link directly to booking pages, review sites, and promotions. Bold a headline, organize services into a list, and drop in links to your booking page, review site, or a promotion, in both campaigns and automated emails like review requests and service reminders.
Recurring blocks for your calendar for lunch breaks, holidays, staff meetings, and other recurring events. Easily add recurring lunch blocks, staff meetings or holidays to your calendar with a few clicks. No more appointments booked over your team events without you knowing.
Smarter marketing-source tracking on appointments and ROs: Automatically associate appointments and repair orders with the latest marketing campaign or automation that reached the customer. When a customer books after getting a message, the marketing source pre-fills with the most recent campaign or automation sent to them, so attribution is accurate without the guesswork.
Recommended Review Responses, helping you respond to Google reviews in just a few clicks.
Every one of these improvements started with feedback from shop owners looking for simpler, smarter ways to grow their business.
Keep it coming.
Already using Tekmetric Marketing?
Head to Marketing → Campaigns to see what's recommended for your shop and send your first campaign in just a few clicks.
New to Tekmetric Marketing?
See how Tekmetric Marketing helps shops bring customers back with online booking, automated reminders, review generation, and Recommended Campaigns.
.png)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)