He's back

Monday is here and my radiator man is back to work, still sore but he's here. You sure can tell when someones missing from your business or isn't doing their part especially when you are a small shop. I for one am glad to see  him back.

The red car above is a 03 Honda CRV, it came in with the complaint that he was overheating so an initial inspection showed the vehicle was low on coolant and the fan wouldn't come on as the result so he slowly overheated. I found that the leak was coming from a vacuum sensor tee on the water outlet housing it was loose. Seemed cut and dried all we needed to do was to remove the fitting, clean it and reinstall with a little sealant and he would be all fixed. So I sat down in front of my computer and called up Alldata (an internet based source that provides vehicle manufacturers' diagnostic and repair information) found out how much time this would take as we needed to remove the valve cover and fuel rail to gain access to the leaking vacuum tee. Next I called the customer and gave them a price they agreed and we started the process. About half way in the tech decided it was neccessary to completly remove the water housing to better clean and inspect it and we found the reason the fitting was leaking the housing its self was cracked.

This housing is only available from the dealer and so that means it's expensive. I found all the new parts we need re-calculated the invoice and preceded to call the customer with the bad news (the price almost doubled).
This is one of the toughest parts of my job and it's not good for my business, no one like to have there bill raised and if the amount isn't real large we will just eat it to keep our customers happy. unfortunately this wasn't the case. I call the gentleman and he was upset that his car was going to cost more to fix (as I knew he would be).
Morel of the story is I don't up sell unless I have to. And I know thats not the norm we get customers in on a regular basis that complain about up sales. "We took in our car for a tune up and it cost us $800.00"  Do you think they will be back there? We try and get all the information and call the customer once and only call them back if you have to, this strategy has worked well for us and I don't know why more in our business don't follow suite.