TO BUY OR NOT TO BUY?
Buying new machinery is daunting for most of us, no matter your business's size or profit margins. The automotive locksmith industry is known for the need to invest to stay on top of your game, but do you really need to invest?
Unfortunately, the answer is yes! Failure to invest will stagnate your business with machinery that only works on predominantly older vehicles. Your investment may be on new software, updates for your existing machines or maybe even adapters for tools you already have. The investment will help your business to remain relevant in the constantly evolving world of key programming.
We all know that times are getting harder for automotive locksmiths, with the need to spend high amounts of your hard-earned cash on expensive equipment to complete jobs on the more advanced and secure vehicles, and even then, we can't do it all!
SO WHAT SHOULD YOU SPEND YOUR MONEY ON?
You need to ask what you are struggling to complete with the current machinery and what jobs are you turning away? Next, think about the payback periods of your investments. For example, if you're getting two calls a week with a 50% conversion rate for a spare Mercedes key, your payback period would be around 10 weeks! 10 weeks before breaking even on a tool may sound daunting, but after those 10 weeks, you will quickly begin to turn a profit. However, there is no doubt that investment can be a struggle with cash flow for some. Therefore, it may be worth considering taking advantage of either 0% finance or leasing to relieve such financial pressure whilst allowing your business to grow simultaneously.
DOES GOING FOR MORE EXPENSIVE MACHINERY PAY OFF?
You've no doubt heard the phrase 'you get what you pay for, and this cliché is incredibly relevant within the automotive locksmith industry. Development of diagnostic tools is both expensive and time-consuming, as vehicle manufacturers spend vast sums of money making their vehicles a complete closed circuit – and therefore much more secure – and in doing so, it's harder for the aftermarket to interfere. This means that good machinery undoubtedly costs more money.
Buying a machine for a small one-off fee should always cause alarm bells to ring in your head! Let's take the SKP900, for instance: At around £500 with free updates and no tokens, the SKP900 was a great machine, but it was always going to have a short lifespan. How can anyone keep spending time and money on updates and bug fixes with no additional revenue? Imagine if you charge £150 for a replacement key, but every month you had to go back out and plug in your machine to keep working – it would quickly become unprofitable.
Just because the price of a particular machine is high doesn't always mean that you're getting ripped off. Actually, in most cases, developers within the industry are very fair, and many of their machines are, in fact, very reasonably priced. The higher the device's cost, the more time and effort has been spent on development and the lesser the distance between what the application list says it does and what the machine actually does in real life.
CAN ONE MACHINE DO IT ALL?
Funnily enough, we get asked this question very often, and we always have to give people the bad news: Many companies try, yet they all fall short somewhere along the line. Those developers who specialise in a couple of brands will always be the better developers in that particular area; they spend more time looking in-depth into a smaller number of specific vehicles and try to cover every possible issue within them. Most of us know that just because the same car has been sold for a few consecutive years doesn't always mean that everything is the same – OEM suppliers change, parts supersede – and this can all affect how the systems inside the vehicle work. This is where those that specialise stand out because you will get closer to a 100% success rate rather than a 50% or less success rate with a machine that attempts to cover a wide array of vehicle manufacturers.
Let's look at the Autohex BMW software. This product falls into a high price bracket, but the developers say you will never kill a BMW with Autohex software! Yes, this is a bold statement, to be sure, but the fail-safes developed into the machine are designed specifically for the BMW range of vehicles. Their understanding of BMW vehicles has meant that an advanced tool has been developed that can reassure you that what it says it can do, it really can do, and do it safely.
WHERE TO GO FOR HELP ON WHAT TO BUY?
Still not sure what to buy? 3D Group offers the handy Geekey Advice service that will allow you to get free, non-biased advice on the available machines in the industry. Geekey Advice is available at trade shows or via [email protected]. Our technical advisers are there on hand to answer your questions!