If it worked that way...
Question for ya Reeb. Being at a Canadian dealer, aside from whether it's right or wrong to go south of the border to buy the sled, what do you think of BRP denying warranty on those sleds if they are brought into a Canadian dealer??? Would a dealer want to make the $$ from warranty service? I mean if you saw an extra 50 sleds for warranty work, wouldn't that still be $$ in the pocket of the Canadian dealer without ever having to floor a sled? In my eyes it seems like BRP is bending over the Canadian dealers twice....once by having the big "initial" price difference, again by not allowing them to make $$ on the service of those sleds. But then I'm not in the dealers shoes, so I don't see what you do. opinion?
If we actually made money instead of breaking even when it comes to warranty work......or sure we would love the extra business. However(and I'll use a recent example) we just repaired a seal on a Honda generator that pops out of place when the oil breather hose freezes up, builds pressure and pops a seal, we've seen 2 of these do this now.(even though we tell customers about the problem and how to fix it) The first one we did took 6hrs to change.....the second one took 3.5hrs......Honda gives us 1hr of labour in total. We lost a bunch of shop time, and my lead mechanic was working backwards on a warranty job instead of making money by billing for a normal job.
Now I don't expect to make money on warranty, but breaking even would be awefully nice. It's a service OEM dealers provide to our customers because they bought new and bought something not made for Walmart or Costco to sell.
Last years clutching woe's.....we got 1hr to do the clutch updates.....call the customer, get him to bring in the sled, unload him, fill out the workorder, get the mechanic to find the sled, haul it ot of storage/sea of other sleds in the backyard, take the clutches off, to the updates, put it back together, run it up, make sure everything is proper, take it back outside, finish the workorder, send it up front, I call the customer, and then help him load up when he finally comes to pick it up.
Usually this process takes twice as long as I get to cover under warranty, a lot of it being talking to the customer and friggin' around getting things in order. The best one to date was 1.5hrs from start to finish. All business, no BSin' just get it done and out. And the customer waited for us to do the service so there was no nonsense in terms of dragging the machine back and forth. That's still half hour I can't sneak in under warranty. Times that by 30(conservative) machines and you have 2 days worth of shop time being lost because of why?
Now I could be more organized, or have a strict schedule for my mechanics, I could(and would love) a service writer to make sure the mechanics don't do anything but work on the machines. But being a small dealership I'm both the Service/Parts Manager/Writer and sell units when customers approach the counter. I have a hard enough time getting my parts people to do anything but look up parts all day.....I mean, they do their job but ask them to do something other than what they know, or try to train them to look after the mechanics is like poking my eyes out with a blunt knife......not a good scenario.....haha
I'd love to do nothing but warranty work and make everyone happy but it just doesn't pay. Like I said, it's a service. But damn when the boss goes over the monthly reports and sees the service dept struggling to make our marks instead of blasting through them like we normally do....well things don't go too well until he settles down or I lay off the warranty stuff and start pumping actual work through a bit more.
Here's the kicker.....I have a Savage X Nitro truck.....bought in the States.....all parts, tools and even fuel gets bought in the States......that's my take on the situation.
