Every fall it’s the same scene. The service schedule is full, and if you had a couple more technicians, you could keep them at capacity. The phones don’t stop ringing, service trucks are running the roads until dark, and your technicians are living on gas station pizza and Subway. Everybody is working hard, and customers are getting taken care of.
Then the October and November financials come in, and service didn’t make the money it should have. Sometimes, the full picture shows up even later because work in process (WIP) hasn’t been closed out and billed.
Most established dealers already know how to get ready for harvest. They stock critical parts, line up after-hours coverage, watch open work orders and stay in touch with key customers. Those fundamentals still matter. But for a mature dealership, the harder question isn’t whether you can handle harvest. It’s whether you are spending your limited shop capacity on the right work and getting paid fairly for it.
Good Service and Making Money Are Not the Same Thing
A lot of dealers assume that because they give great service, the money will follow. It doesn’t work that way. Giving great service doesn’t automatically mean you’re getting paid for it. You can jump through hoops and work into the evening, and the customer raves, but that doesn’t translate into profitability.
Here’s how it usually happens. A customer calls with a combine down 40 miles from the store. Your best combine tech gets pulled off a job or redirected. He drives out, finds a failed feeder house bearing, and the part isn’t on the shelf, so someone runs it from your other store. He’s there four hours. When the ticket gets written, the travel time gets trimmed because “he’s one of our best customers,” the freight gets absorbed, and the labor goes on at a discount because he bought a lot of equipment last year.
The farmer is back running. He’s happy. You did good work.
But look at what that ticket actually cost you: half a day of your top tech’s time, a truck, a parts transfer and freight. And the job the tech was on now runs a day late. Multiply that by every call in September and October and you have a busy department giving away its margin one ticket at a time.
Good service and good economics shouldn’t be opposites. But they don’t line up by accident.
To be clear, this isn’t about overcharging the customer. It’s about really knowing what great service costs. It’s easier to stand behind the bill when you showed up when you said you would, charged what you said you would and got the customer running again.
Your Customer Isn’t Just Paying for the Repair. He’s Paying to Get Back to Work.
I learned a key lesson from a dealership that supports paving companies. When a paver goes down, the customer has four loads of asphalt cooling, a fleet of support equipment parked and a crew waiting to get back to work. The first question isn’t, “What will it cost?” It’s, “When can you get it fixed?” They know the cost of sitting still adds up by the minute.
I’m not talking about overcharging anyone. But think about what is happening on that farm when the combine goes down.
The combine is sitting. Three semis are parked at the field edge with drivers on the clock. The grain cart and tractor are idle. Back at the farm, the dryer may be running out of grain. Every minute that combine isn’t moving, the producer is paying for it.
Put a pencil to it. These are rough numbers, so plug in your own market: a combine covering 10 acres an hour at a $40-per-acre custom rate is $400 an hour of harvest not getting done. Three trucks and drivers sitting idle add another $200 or so. The cart and its operator add more. Before you count any field loss from crop standing longer than it should, that customer can easily be losing $700 to $1,000 or more every hour.
When he is losing that kind of money, does it really matter to him whether the repair bill is $1,800 or $2,000? What matters is how fast you got there and whether you fixed it right the first time.
That is real value, and you should be paid for it. Sometimes discounting isn’t intentional. It’s due to the chaos that exists, and sometimes everyone is moving so fast that the little things that eat away at our profitability get missed. Charge a fair after-hours or emergency rate, bill the travel and stop waiving the freight. If you want to reward your best customers, do it with priority response.
Set the rules before the season starts, not in the middle of a 7 p.m. phone call:
- What qualifies as an after-hours emergency?
- How do we handle all the exceptions, like running to get parts at other stores or the depot, airfreighting parts or the other hoops we jump through to keep things moving?
- Is there an approval process before we move a tech off a committed job for another job?
- How do we track those exceptions and make sure the extra time and costs get captured on the ticket?
Plan for the situations versus hoping they don't happen.
Promised Jobs vs. Scheduled Work
Harvest doesn’t stop the rest of the work. You still have other equipment scheduled with a promised completion date, a tractor you promised to have ready next week and the skid steer a customer dropped off three weeks ago. Then the breakdowns start rolling in and everything else gets bumped.
The jobs you promised are commitments. The breakdowns are emergencies. Both matter. The trap is letting the emergencies swallow every commitment you made.
A few things that help:
- Keep promised jobs visible on the schedule board, with a promise date everyone in the shop can see.
- Hold back part of each day’s capacity for breakdowns during the season instead of loading every tech at 100%. Expect to have calls, and if they don’t come in, pull work from the backlog into the schedule.
- Decide who has the authority to bump a promised job. It shouldn’t be whoever is yelling the loudest.
- When a job does get bumped, call the customer before they call you.
That last one costs nothing. A customer who hears from you that his skid steer will be three days late is a lot more forgiving than one who drives in to check on the progress and finds that no one has touched it in a week or that it’s still sitting outside.
Use Triage and Put the Right Tech on the Right Job
Not every breakdown needs your best diagnostic technician, and not every call needs a truck rolling out the door.
A triage approach puts an experienced tech or service advisor at the front of every breakdown call. Before anybody gets dispatched, that person asks the right questions, pulls up machine data if the customer runs telematics like JDLink, AFS Connect or Fuse, and gets a head start on diagnosis when that information is available. Sometimes it’s a fix the operator can make over the phone. Sometimes it’s a code and a quick reset. Sometimes it really is a field call, and now the tech leaves with the right parts on the truck the first time. The challenge is that if we always tie up our best tech on large jobs, we can’t use that tech’s diagnostic skills on incoming breakdowns, and the process slows down. Remember, the quicker we get a tech to look at a machine, the quicker we can identify and order the parts.
Triage also forces you to look hard at your technician mix. If your senior combine tech spends October changing feeder house chains and greasing corn heads, you are paying top dollar for work a developing tech could do. Keep your strongest diagnosticians on the complex problems. Put your developing techs on routine repairs, PDIs and maintenance, with a senior tech they can call when they get stuck. Your best people get more done, your newer people learn faster and your labor recovery improves.
Overtime Isn’t the Enemy, Unless It’s on the Wrong Work
A lot of managers flinch when they see the overtime line in the fall. Overtime by itself isn’t a bad thing. In many cases, it’s not as bad as it looks.
Here’s why. Most of a technician’s benefits, like health insurance and retirement contributions, are fixed. You pay them whether they work 40 hours a week or 55. Every additional billed hour spreads those fixed costs a little thinner.
Run the math. Say a tech earns $35 an hour and carries about $18,000 a year in benefits. Spread over 2,080 hours, those benefits add roughly $8.65 to every hour he works. At time-and-a-half, his overtime hour costs you $52.50 and nothing more in benefits. Bill that hour at a $140 door rate and you are still keeping better than 60% gross margin. Charge an after-hours premium and it gets even better. It may not be as profitable as an hour worked at regular pay, but knowing how benefits and fixed costs affect the gap in your labor margins is important.
So, decide what overtime ratio makes sense for your shop, watch it, and quit treating every overtime hour as a problem.
Where overtime does hurt is on internal and setup work. Paying a tech time-and-a-half to set up new equipment, recondition a used trade or catch up on your rental fleet means paying a premium for work you are selling to yourself. Worse, it means internal work is competing with paying customers for your best techs during the busiest weeks of the year.
Some internal work can’t wait. A combine you sold needs to be set up before it gets delivered. But most reconditioning and setup can be planned for the slower months. Schedule it, price it and prioritize it with the same discipline you use for customer work. Internal labor shouldn’t become invisible just because you’re selling it to yourself.
Multi-Location Dealers Share Resources on Purpose
If you run more than one store, harvest lets you move techs, parts and equipment to where they’re needed. It can also move inefficiency from one location to another.
A transferred part saves a customer’s day. Transferring the same part every week tells you your stocking doesn’t match the machines in that territory. Sending a tech from another store solves one problem and may create another one back home. Sharing techs takes discipline. Whose store gets the job? What happens if the home store needs that tech back? Decide how to handle those questions before the situation comes up. Conceptually, it sounds good. Executing it is much harder and takes discipline and communication.
From Too Many Customers to Not Enough
Every service manager knows this whiplash. In the fall, you have more customers than you can see. By Thanksgiving, the phone has gone quiet and you are hunting for work to keep your techs busy and trying to get winter service inspections on the schedule.
The time to fix December is in October. Every machine that comes through your shop during harvest is a lead for winter work. The tech who fixes that combine in the field sees the worn concaves, the weeping hydraulic lines and the rasp bars that are about done. Write it down. Quote it. Get it on the schedule before the customer parks the combine in the shed and forgets about it.
Dealers with strong off-season inspection programs don’t start selling them in January. They start at the field edge in October, when the customer remembers exactly what that breakdown cost him.
Measure the Quality of Your Harvest Revenue
Most dealers will look at sales and gross margin once harvest wraps up. Go further and ask about the quality of that revenue:
- How much revenue required overtime, and was it billed at a rate that covered it?
- How much margin did emergency freight eat?
- How many hours did your techs work that never made it onto an invoice?
- How long did completed work sit before it was invoiced?
- How much rework did we do?
- Which jobs just wouldn’t go away—the ones we seemed to be chasing every three days—and what could we do differently?
- Where did we overcommit and drop the ball on the customer?
- How many customer-pay hours got pushed aside for internal work?
These questions separate profitable growth from expensive activity. The goal isn’t to turn harvest into a spreadsheet exercise. Harvest is unpredictable, customers need help and good dealers show up. But you can’t keep delivering great service if the way you deliver it wears out your people, ties up your cash and doesn’t make money. You also can’t justify a solid rate with mediocre service.
Use Harvest to Learn, Not Just Survive
When harvest is over, everybody wants to take a breath and move on. That is exactly when you should sit down with your service and parts managers and look at what happened. Which customers and machines drove the most work? Where did freight, overtime or discounts eat into margin? Which parts kept running out? Which promises were hard to keep? Where did you lean on your people working themselves into the ground to make up for a broken process?
Those answers should shape your stocking, labor rates, service agreements, staffing and training before next fall. The end of one season should drive how you handle the next one.
Harvest will always take urgency and flexibility. That’s the business we’re in. But being busy isn’t the goal. Knowing where your capacity went, what it earned and whether you can do it again next year is the goal.
Harvest will keep your dealership busy. The real question is whether what you earned was worth the work and stress it put on the dealership, technicians, parts team and ultimately the customer.
