Detail/prep pay plans

[tomsp8]

Our new/used detailers are on a stictly commision pay plan. They are paid exactly like a line technician. (Except for one hourly guy who's primary job is wash & vacs.)
They range in hourly rates from 9.00 to 11.00
an hour. (Hourly guy at 7.75). Full details (customer pay & used cars) pay 5 hours. New cars pay 1.5 hours. We use a base labor rate
of about 34.00 an hour.There are three full detailers.
How many other dealers are set up this way?
Any suggestions you've tried that you would
recommend? How about a team plan?
We do all types of detailing including acid rain corrections, overspray, etc. Various hours are charged, but mostly we use a fixed
menu for pricing.
Thanks.

[Mike Vogel]

Congrats on being able to get $34.00 per hour. We also have our detailers on flat rate for doing used car details, paint & fabric protection and buff outs on scratches, fall out etc. We bill out used cars at 76.00 labor and 9.00 supplies = 85.00 and pay them 4 hours. If it is a large truck/van we bump it or if its in poor condition we charge more. Paint&fabric is billed at 3 hours 54.00 labor 6.00 supplies.
We dont hold much gross but 95% of the business is billed as internal and the owner is ok with the lower gross since we get much better productivity than when they were hourly.

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Mike Vogel
Claremont Toyota
Claremont, CA

[sallen1]

Faced this issue a few years back.

The old system was similar to what you are using: flat rate commission for detail, etc.

The motivation is pretty clear: get as many cars detailed as possible to earn more money. System works o.k. for the techs, so it should work for detailers, right?

Well, assuming you want a clean car on the line and every car is detailed prior to being put on display (new and used). What happens if you need to detail the car again, say at delivery? Do you charge car again? Who pays?

It grew to a crisis since the managers wanted to charge the work to internal without any recovery.

So, we went off the flag system and pay everyone in the dept. by the hour. We hit every car (even w/s junk) $100 ONCE and use that fund to pay the detailers and get-ready manager. Now, we can detail a car several times and thru the years the fund balances pretty close. Obviously, if it becomes out of balance, we can adjust the charge.

The tough part is personell issues. To be fair, we calculated the hourly rate using the annual earnings of the detailers divided by the clock time they worked. But they were not very productive (ha!) and we replaced them. The current team has been with me for 5 years and everything works smoothly. The goal is to keep everyone busy doing something.

scott

ps. some of you may notice that this is a change from my normal 'compensate based on productivity', but we have much, much higher quality with this process and believe me, every car gets proper attention.

Your pack may be different. Figure it this way: Divide your total get-ready pay for last by the number of cars sold (new/used and w/s). I'd adjust it up 10% to be conservative.

[This message has been edited by sallen1 (edited 01-25-2002).]