Internet Business Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

An auto repair shop lives and dies on the trust of it’s patrons. This is especially true in cities of less than 500,000 people.

If you have a poor reputation you can watch your business go down the drain. However, if you develop a good reputation, you can get so much business that you won’t even have to spend money advertising.

My car heater was not getting hot this winter. I know a little about cars and I knew this could be caused by a lack of coolant. I had a drive-thru oil change place change the coolant. Still luke warm air.

The next thing I did was call the repair shop. They told me it could be a plugged hose, the water pump leaking, or the heater core.

After doing some research on the internet, I figured it was the heater core. The mechanic told me that there were no plugged hoses and the water pump was leaking.

A day later I get the car back with a new water pump. Still cold air.

The shop re-diagnoses the car and now tells me it is the heater core.

Because of the trust I have in this shop and in particular this mechanic, I believe that he wasn’t purposefully trying to rip me off. He put the new heater core in and the heat works great.

A shop with trust like this isn’t built with advertising dollars but on word of mouth.

An auto repair shop that wants to build business must build trust first. Unfortunately that can sometimes be expensive.

A customer like me who comes in for a repair, and gets repaired without fixing the initial complaint should be compensated (I got a $25/hr discount on labor for the heater core installation).

Compensation could be made up of discounts on the next repair or credit for future use.

It isn’t good business practice to give money back after a customer has paid, but you can still keep customers happy, and grow you business at the same time.