The Anatomy of a Great Inspection
Our shop management platform, built by us and for us, started life in 2006 with one overarching theme: “Audacity.” In fact, that is still on our login screens 20 years later.
One such audacious feature was the integration of vehicle inspections into the full vehicle history in our database.
This offered so many advantages: a great report for you, generated as a PDF; automatic references to context-based vehicle history (e.g., when looking at your front brakes, our system gives our team everything we know about them — every previous inspection / every previous service / even the expected mileage range for that service). Moving away from paper also let us add significantly more technician comments per item, clean up spelling and formatting and generally messy technician handwriting (pro tip: technicians are like doctors — this includes their penmanship), keep the report for future use, etc. In 2006, this was a genuine game changer.
The Industry Got It Backwards
Today our industry has caught on to this and fancy inspections are standard fare. “DVIs” or “Digital Vehicle Inspections” became the accepted name (one I don’t love, but that’s an axe to grind on a different day) and gave the off-the-shelf software systems big reasons for shops to adopt their way. The problem is in these very reasons: they were designed around increasing sales and decreasing liability — both benefits aimed squarely at the shop.
This is backwards to our philosophy. Our inspection is about empowering our client / not controlling them.
Interestingly, what drove us to create this system was one huge weakness in the old way: when done on paper, the vehicle owner typically doesn’t even see the report until after the service visit is complete. How can we be this owner’s advocate if we don’t give them the report first? The answer was to email it to them first — at the start of the visit, before important decisions get made — and that one requirement is what pushed the whole system electronic.
Shockingly, this point is completely missed with other systems. Instead you get a nice report and pricing for recommendations. No consultation / no prioritizing / just a quick menu for you to choose from. You’d never accept this approach from other professional services (e.g., your family doctor) because you expect, when you hand your keys to a shop, that the shop will be providing expert advice. I know a lot of shops and I know they want to do exactly that, but this inspection-report-as-a-menu lands completely wrong.
The inspection, instead, should be about empowerment — i.e., “here’s the data” — and the next step is what matters most: helping you triage.
A Story That Shaped This System
If you’ll indulge me, here’s a story from many years ago: a neighbor of mine called me up on a Sunday, apologetically, asking for help. His son and daughter-in-law were traveling across the country to get the son to medical school on time. They were in a fully loaded little Nissan and, as the story goes, the car had been given a good tip-to-tail look-over — with this very trip in mind — by a shop owned by someone in her family. A few hundred miles into the trip, the car was running rough and struggling up hills, dash warnings were flashing, and they were genuinely panicked that their careful itinerary was at risk. I was shocked, completely, to find how simple the problem really was: very old spark plugs that were misfiring under load. I actually had to hesitate and re-think “could it really be this simple?!” It was. I performed a full ignition tune-up and was later given the happy report that their trip was uneventful from that point — landing them in New York (from Utah) in time for the start of his semester.
What stayed with me was the simplicity of the fix, and the “green light” her family gave her to take the trip. My suspicion is the family shop gave her a pat on the head instead of leaning into the difficult truth that the car needed work before being expected to perform well on this exceptional journey. I was just a young technician at the time, but the lesson stayed with me: the people who loved her most gave her a green light — and it took a stranger to tell her the truth. Being an advocate means sometimes telling uncomfortable truths.
What Our Inspection Covers
So let’s dig in. First, there is a difference between the condition of something and what you should do about it. A vehicle used casually as an errand-runner is providing a different service than the one going across country tomorrow (like, say, from Utah to New York). Our inspections put this very thing first:
1 – Estimated Monthly Mileage
This is critically important, and our system generates it from the vehicle’s mileage records we’ve captured. The more history we have on your car, the sharper this number gets. Why it matters: low brake pads on a vehicle going 2,000 miles a month are far more immediately in need of service than the same pads on a vehicle going 450 — so this single figure quietly reshapes what we’d recommend, and when.
2 – Vehicle Usage
This is reviewed at every visit, and it calibrates our recommendations. It speaks directly to the cross-country trip problem. The Nissan we discussed earlier likely checked out fine in a “daily runabout” context — fine for errands around town, but a very different question asked to climb mountain grades for 2,000 miles with an impressively full cabin of worldly possessions. Had that trip been made explicit, even a young technician like I was at the time would have re-calibrated both the depth of his inspection and the priority of his findings. That’s the whole point of capturing how you actually use the car: the same vehicle, headed somewhere exceptional, deserves a different look.
3 – Client Concern Review
No other inspection system does this so explicitly — not as the first thing on the page, structured, reviewed, and answered concern by concern. Some may have a notes box somewhere; none build the whole inspection to open with you. Stephen Covey said it best: seek first to understand, then to be understood. An inspection can be packed with great information, but if you don’t feel heard first, your read of the whole report gets overshadowed by the one question quietly nagging at you: “but what about the things I asked about?” So your concerns lead, stated in your own words and answered line by line.
4 – Recall Check
A recall is a real thing to know about — and it might be the free answer to the very thing you came in worried about, or to something else we found. So before we ever talk about a fix we’d recommend to you, we check whether the manufacturer owes you one for free. We surface the exact recall, straight from the manufacturer, both for your safety and so you can take full advantage of what your vehicle’s maker already owes you. This is Advocacy 101.
5 – Reference to Previous Services
Notice this isn’t a recommendation made in a vacuum. As our technician inspects this system, our software automatically feeds him everything we know about it on your car. In this case: when the A/C was last serviced, what the last inspection found, how long ago, and at what mileage. It’s all right there, in the moment, without our team having to go dig for it. We’re not guessing what your car might need; we’re reading what your car’s own record tells us. The recommendation stands on years of history, not a single glance today. (This is that 2006 “audacity” from the top of the page, still earning its keep two decades later.)
6 – Describe the “Why”
Our industry, and by extension its inspections, have a bad history of simply saying “this is bad.” That’s incomplete and doesn’t work in an Advocacy model. It is also, in my opinion, why motorists approach a lesser inspection with a sense of dread: I’m sure you would like to do this service, but why should I agree with you? This is a big deal. In this small case we’re describing the benefit to partially answer the “why,” but this is still incomplete. The next step — consultation between advocate and client — requires putting this in context with the rest of the inspection. This human touch is why we are against the inspection-as-a-menu approach.
7 – Line Numbering
It’s a little thing, but since this report is intended to be an artifact that outlives the visit, it’s nice to have a simple way to reference parts of the report. What I tell people is: “our inspection follows the vehicle in a physical order, but our work orders sort in a priority order. This can get confusing, so having a line number reference cleans this up.” Most inspection software is built to make saying yes frictionless; we built ours to make asking frictionless. A shop confident in its inspection wants you pointing at it and asking questions — not quietly approving a menu.
8 – Pictures with Descriptions
Confession time — I resisted adding pictures to our inspections for a long time. My reasoning was solid enough. I believed the pictures could create a dysfunction in the Advocacy process (allowing someone to lean on the picture instead of helping their client understand the why) but, more importantly, we dislike pictures that are used as a “future defense” artifact. You’ll see this in some other inspections: pictures of the four corners of the vehicle as it arrived and/or pictures of dash lights on at arrival (I particularly dislike this one). The message — and how off-the-shelf inspection systems are sold to shops — is working against Advocacy. The service experience at a great service provider (auto shop or otherwise) should feel like a partnership, and defensive posturing works against this.
9 – Untangling the Puzzle
With vehicle history tightly integrated, we can make short work of a puzzling situation. Here is a Porsche with low and yet very clean power steering fluid. But why? Well, our inspection system provided the answers. Fluid was flushed recently (hence clean), and a previous inspection revealed the vehicle had a power steering rack that was leaking and in need of replacement. Additionally, in our standard spirit of “provide solutions, not problems,” we have two solutions already here for our client: 1 — we’ll top up the fluid (this is a courtesy, not a billable service), and 2 — if/when the client is ready, we know how to fix the root cause, which is to replace the steering rack as previously mentioned. As a corollary to “provide solutions, not problems,” another driving goal for our inspections is to anticipate the question. An advocate says something like: “I anticipated your question about this steering fluid issue, so I made sure I had a full answer before calling you.”
10 – “Ah-Ha” Moments
It’s gratifying for us and comforting for our client when we can pinpoint a failure like this. In this case, it’s the very thing that brought the client in. When we can connect what they’ve been feeling to exactly what’s causing it, and definitively show the problem, we remove the worry. That’s what a great advocate does.
Why Every Item on This List Exists
Upon reflection, that Sunday afternoon I was called upon to help with the Nissan did more for me than it did for my friend’s family. It taught me about advocacy and how it should be applied in my industry. It was the genesis of this very inspection system — years before it entered a design phase. Every one of the things you’ve just read exists for one reason: so that no client of ours is ever waved off the way she was.
Ultimately, this is a service business, and I like to believe there is a nobility in that. In being a true advocate, I’m grateful for friends who trusted in me long before I ever even owned a shop. Today, thanks to my friend and countless others who guided my path, we have a tool built from the ground up to produce “great inspections.” Like every great tool, it was born from a deep understanding of its use. We won’t stand still / it will continue its legacy as a pioneer.
