“It’s a real game changer. I can now see straight away each invoice’s profitability. It’s helped me identify areas where I was overcharging or massively undercharging. No more guesswork.”
Starting a business is never easy, and for Dan Waring it’s been a long road to get to where he is today – one filled with successes and challenges. When you hear his story, you quickly realise Dan is an entrepreneur at heart and his career has been anything but traditional. After leaving school early, he trained as an apprentice mechanic and spent over a decade under the hood. While a lot of his career was spent racking up mileage in automotive, his experience is peppered with all sorts of ventures in banking, finance, real estate, and mortgage broking – just to name a few.
Despite the detours, he always knew he was destined for the sweet freedom and independence of business ownership, inspired partly by his father and father-in-law. After managing a Mazda dealership’s service centre for several years, he finally decided it was time to take the wheel and opened MyServi Centre in Bunbury, Western Australia.
The first 9 months were a touch-and-go period, as they are for any new business, but as the new year rolled in, things started to gain traction. Already on the hunt for a Service Advisor to help with the reception side, Dan’s next goal is to expand the team, bringing in one or two technicians by Christmas. With his eyes set on the next steps, he knew it was time to take things up a notch, and began his hunt for a workshop management system that would keep up with his goals.
When it came to managing his workshop, Dan needed more than just an invoicing system. He started with Square for invoicing, but it lacked the automotive-specific features he needed. He explored some other options but wasn’t successful finding something that was both available in Australia and had the fresh, simple aesthetic he was after. That’s when he stumbled across Auxo Workshop. Initially, Dan was hesitant—after all, the software was still relatively new, and there weren’t many reviews online to guide him. But after a test run, he found it ticked all the boxes.
What stood out to Dan about Auxo was its clean, intuitive design. With expansion in mind, he’s particular about his workshop’s branding and wanted something that was not only functional but visually appealing. Auxo fit the bill, and its simplicity, live chat support and detailed online manual meant on-boarding the new Service Advisor and training future staff wouldn’t be a huge hurdle.
Currently, as a one-man-band, Dan relies heavily on the software’s efficiency. He uses the Weekly View to plan out his schedule and switches to the Workboard to track job progress. One of the stand-out features for him is the ability to track live profitability on each invoice. “It’s a real game changer,” he says. “I can now see straight away each invoice’s profitability. It’s helped me identify areas where I was overcharging or massively undercharging. No more guesswork.” This level of insight is something Dan never had before, and it’s helping him fine-tune his pricing strategy.
With Auxo Workshop, Dan’s been able to improve communication with his customers. The SMS and email features – which he uses to notify customers when their car is ready for pick-up, remind them of upcoming bookings or that they’re due for a service – have improved customer satisfaction and helped speed things up. Customers now get fast, clear updates that they appreciate.
Dan’s goal is an ambitious one, for the next 10-15 years he wants to expand MyServi Centre into a network of a dozen centres statewide. It’s poetic he chose Auxo Workshop to help manage his shop; a fresh new software, built by a company with decades of automotive experience and similar ambitions for growth and feature expansion. The software has already proven to be an invaluable tool, allowing Dan to focus on the big picture while keeping daily operations running smoothly. He’s looking forward to seeing what new features will be rolled out in the coming years that can help him on his journey.
