What one month of your own data actually says
A real month from a real seven-store group — 4,704 repair orders, every figure unaltered. This is what arrives without anyone asking for it.
Advisor and store names have been replaced with labels. Nothing else has been changed.
Month to date · 1–29 July 2026
$1.41M, 4,704 repair orders, and one number that doesn't survive scrutiny
- Revenue
- $1,410,300
- Repair orders
- 4,704
- Customers
- 4,025
- Stores
- 7
- Trading days
- 28
The month
A steady book of business with one very predictable soft spot.
Sunday runs at 17% of a normal day's revenue on 27% of the car count — 40 to 62 repair orders at a $193 average against $305 on every other day. Whatever is being sold on Sundays, it is small work. That may be exactly right for a skeleton crew, or it may be an under-served day. The file can tell you it is happening; it cannot tell you which.
Findings
Ranked by what they're worth, and honest about which ones hold up.
Maintenance Hunter finds the big tickets — on one repair order in nine
Working, barely used| Repair order | Count | Average RO | Services per ticket |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maintenance Hunter | 525 | $521 | 5.5 |
| Everything else | 4,179 | $272 | 3.9 |
Maintenance Hunter tickets carry 43% more services than everything else. It is doing exactly what it is meant to do — surfacing the vehicles with real work due.
It ran on 525 of 4,704 repair orders. One in nine. Whatever it is worth, it is currently being applied to a small corner of the business.
One advisor uses the tool on 37% of tickets. Another uses it on none.
Process inconsistencyThis is the finding that does hold up, and it has nothing to do with the ARO debate. Among advisors writing 100+ repair orders this month:
| Advisor | Store | ROs | MH used | GP% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Advisor A | Store 1 | 199 | 36.7% | 70.8% |
| Advisor B | Store 1 | 110 | 27.3% | 67.0% |
| Advisor C | Store 2 | 149 | 25.5% | 61.8% |
| … median across all high-volume advisors: 9.9% … | ||||
| Advisor D | Store 5 | 276 | 5.1% | 59.7% |
| Advisor E | Store 4 | 177 | 4.0% | 54.9% |
| Advisor F | Store 7 | 245 | 0.0% | 60.4% |
Two hundred and forty-five repair orders written without touching the tool once. That is not a performance judgement — that advisor's margin is mid-pack and his average ticket is respectable. It is a process observation: the same job is being done seven different ways across seven stores, and nobody decided that.
Whatever you conclude about the ARO question above, a range of 0% to 37% on the same task is worth one conversation and a standard. The two highest-adoption advisors sit in the same store, which suggests this is learned locally rather than trained centrally.
1,023 people walked in for the first time this month
The biggest opportunity hereFirst-visit customers brought $231,598 — 16.4% of the month at 59.2% margin. That is a healthy top of funnel by any measure.
What happens to them over the next ninety days is worth more than every other finding on this page combined. Right now nobody owns that list, nothing goes out to them automatically, and no one will notice which of them never came back.
Newest vehicles: 30% of your traffic, 17% of revenue, worst margin
Mix| Vehicle age | ROs | Revenue | Share | ARO | GP% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0–3 years | 1,432 | $229,258 | 17.0% | $160 | 52.1% |
| 4–7 | 1,216 | $408,312 | 30.2% | $336 | 59.4% |
| 8–12 | 1,006 | $426,822 | 31.6% | $424 | 67.3% |
| 13–20 | 560 | $224,599 | 16.6% | $401 | 67.9% |
| 20+ | 150 | $61,593 | 4.6% | $411 | 67.7% |
Vehicles eight years and older are 39% of repair orders but 53% of revenue at roughly 68% margin. The 0–3 year cohort is the mirror image: a third of the car count at $160 a ticket and the worst margin in the shop — inspections, oil service, warranty-adjacent work.
Shares in this table are of the 4,369 repair orders carrying a readable model year; 335 do not, and are excluded rather than guessed at.That is not a problem to fix; it is two businesses running through one set of bays. The young-vehicle traffic is the pipeline that becomes the eight-to-twelve year work later, if those customers stay. Which makes retention on your least profitable tickets more valuable than the day's margin suggests.
Half your revenue sits with a tenth of your customers
Concentration| Customer group | Customers | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Top 1% | 40 | 11.0% |
| Top 5% | 201 | 34.2% |
| Top 10% | 402 | 53.0% |
Four hundred and two customers carry more than half the month. Worth knowing who they are, and worth noticing that your most frequent customers are also your least profitable: the 61 customers with 50+ lifetime visits ran 234 repair orders this month at 48.4% margin against 64.8% for the 11–50 visit band.
Also visible: 1,023 first-time customers this month at 59.2% margin — a healthy top of funnel. What share of them return is the single most valuable thing this file cannot tell you.If I ran this group
In this order, starting Monday.
- Get labor cost into the export. Forty percent of revenue currently books at 100% margin. Until that field exists, no gross profit number from this system means what it appears to mean — and every decision below is being made on an upper bound.
- Set one standard for Maintenance Hunter and train to it. Not because it lifts ARO — this month's data doesn't show that — but because 0% to 37% across advisors doing the same job is a process nobody chose. Decide what good looks like, then measure against it.
- Name your top 402 customers. They are 53% of the month. Right now they are a percentile, not a list, and nobody owns them.
- Ask what Sunday is for. Sixty-two repair orders at $193 against a $300 shop average. That is either a correct skeleton day or an under-served one, and the answer is worth knowing before you staff another quarter of them.
- Treat the 0–3 year cohort as a pipeline, not a margin problem. A third of your car count at $160 a ticket is how you acquire the eight-to-twelve year work that pays for everything. Measure whether they come back, not what they spend today.
This arrives every morning
Not a report someone builds when you ask. It is waiting when you open your phone — alongside the CRM, reminders, scorecards and vendor numbers that act on it.
One connected system: your repair orders, your customers, your team and your numbers, all in the same place.