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When you talk with a customer about bringing their neglected car up to grade as far as services recommended, I have learned from first hand experience, that you need to be very pragmatic about what you suggest. Too much money in the initial stages of maintenance will cost you a large number of customers and the potential for the prifit from keeping their cars on the road.
Most manufacturer recommended service intervals are not centered around the customers willingness to spend for unrealised gains. A good example was my Honda Civic VX. When I sold it to a woman, I had never done a valve adjustment at 62,000 miles. The recommended service on the valves was 30k. When I did the adjustment as a condition of the sale, I found every valve to be within specs, checked them before any adjustment. The car was 15 years old and had sat without running for 13 of those 15 years. The engine was clean as new inside.
Not saying do not advocate preventative maintenance, just understand that there is a fine line between being a hard core advocate of overmaintenance and undermaintenance. I have put plugs in cars that were supposed to be replced at 30k and the car had 100k on the original plugs. Powerful modern ignition systems can provide an ungodly amount of spark for neglected plugs and I noticed almost no perceptable difference in performance with the new plugs.
I just replaced the original platinum plugs in my recently purchased Ranger at 15 years and 125k miles. In this case I did notice a difference. I am sure the coil packs are not working as hard to fire the new plugs with half of the gap as the originals. I made a lot of friends and good customers who trusted my judgement by being honest with them when it came to what they needed imediately and what they could wait to do a a later date. We would list everything on their repair order and prioritise the recommended services and repairs.
They became customers for life, and when work got slow we could call them and in many cases they would bring their cars in for additional service, which kept the shop busy all of the time.
A lot of it was due to their perception that I was not going to try to sell them anything that I thought was not close to absolutely necessary. If they were in the minority that believed in overmaintaining their vehicles then I would try to explain that overmaintenance was not necessary, but I certainly appreciated their love of theor vehicle and would work with them either way.
regards
Mech
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