Earlier this year, Entrepreneur magazine ranked Millennials as the number one small business trend in 2016. How is an entire generation a trend? With the oldest millennials now in their early 30s, they are beginning to represent a large portion of the consumer base – and employee base – for most small businesses. Every year, successful businesses will need to dedicate more focus towards their desires and interests. And that’s as true for independent auto repair shops as any industry.
So what makes a Millennial a Millennial? Here are three factors that Entrepreneur magazine argues are uniquely Millennial – and our take on what this means for your repair shop.

“Millennials demand comprehensive leadership and opportunities for growth within every position they fulfill.”
One of the biggest complaints young technicians have against shops is that there are few training opportunities – tire techs get stuck fixing tires, without a lot of training opportunities provided. They don’t have the opportunity to collaborate with Master Technicians. Smaller shops, however, require employees to be more versatile – because at smaller shops, sometimes there aren’t any tires to change. This means that younger techs will have opportunities to assist Master Technicians, which they wouldn’t have at dealerships. If this sounds like your shop, make sure to highlight that in your job descriptions, as it can help attract hard-working young technicians that want to learn more advanced skills.
“For entrepreneurs from the millennial generation, the ability to rapidly spread information is key to successful marketing.”
It used to be the case that some businesses had an online presence, and some didn’t. That’s generally not true anymore. Some businesses manage their online presence, and others allow it to be controlled by everyone else – their customers, their competitors, and information brokers.
Even repair shops without a website have online reviews. They may not know it, but their customers (and, in some cases, people who aren’t their customers but are pretending to be) are talking about them. Some of these views are positive and some are negative, but all provide an opinion to the world about whether they should visit the shop or not.
This makes it more important than ever to manage your online presence – to have professionals who know what’s being said about you, and helping you project the best possible image of your repair shop. That’s because, if your image becomes negative while you aren’t around to combat it, it will take many months to address the damage that’s been done while you were absent.
“And because millennials place so much value on quality and ethics, they prefer to use technology to take care of the busywork.”
Millennials are accustomed to switching tasks very quickly. The world moves faster to them than the rest of the population – they maintain communication with a larger group of people than ever before, thanks in part to social media.
With so many things competing for their attention, they aren’t willing to spend as much time on tasks and decisions as other people. It’s possible they’ll select a shop in 3 minutes of online research – and they expect to be able to book an appointment 3 minutes after that.
This is why our websites make communication with your shop easy. We do this in a number of ways:
- Phone numbers are placed very prominently on our sites, in part because of the number of users you lose after only ten seconds on your site!
- Many of our customers take advantage of our online appointment request forms, because some customers prefer not to communicate via phone at all.
- We also provide drop-off forms for shops that want to allow key drop-off before work.
To learn more about how to attract Millennials to your auto repair shop, call us at 855-219-7506 or email Team_RSW@repairshopwebsites.com