A surprising number of shop owners discovered that their service advisors had never tracked their average repair order and had no idea what it was supposed to be. This came up in a recent Autoflow webinar with veteran shop owners and trainers from ServiceAdvisorTraining.com, where an audience poll showed the same gap at other shops.
What Average Repair Order Actually Measures
Average repair order, or ARO, is the average dollar amount of every repair order an advisor closes over a given period. While gross profit dollars still matter more in the end, ARO is easy to track consistently, and it smooths out good days and bad days into a baseline you can actually compare over time.
The Real Cost of Not Knowing
A $100 gap between two advisors sounds small on its own. But, run it against real car count, and it isn’t. A shop doing around 4,000 repair orders a year can turn a $100 gap into $200,000 annually, and most of that flows straight to the bottom line since the cost of writing the ticket barely changes.
Industry data shared on the panel, pulled from Paar, Melis, & Associates’ work with Hunt Demarest, put the top 10% of shops at an average repair order of around $729, with a wider gap in labor and gross profit versus the bottom 10%. Note that comparing across shop types is misleading, since a transmission specialty shop and a tire store will never share the same baseline. Within your own shop, though, the number is worth watching closely.
Why the Gap Usually Comes Down to Training
If two advisors work the same customer base and the same cars, and one consistently runs $100 lower, that’s indicative of a training gap, not bad luck. A technician’s job is telling a customer that a car needs a battery or a tie rod. An advisor’s job is explaining why and what happens if the customer skips it.
One useful comparison to note: track your shop’s overall ARO against ARO on repair orders where the customer actually opened their digital vehicle inspection. That second number usually comes in higher, sometimes by a wide margin. That tells you the inspection itself isn’t the problem. Getting the customer to open it and talking through it is where the challenge is.
How to Start Tracking It
Don’t turn this into a way to come down on your lowest performer. The goal is visibility. An advisor who sees their own number daily, alongside a few other basic KPIs, tends to start managing toward it without being told to. A simple daily tracking sheet, whether handwritten or logged through your shop management software, works fine here.
Once your advisors know their number, the next question is how to raise it without leaning on pressure tactics, and that starts with how well they’re using the tools already in front of them.
