John Bouras Email and Phone Number

An opportunity like no other. An opportunity to work for the oldest Cadillac dealer in the Washington Metropolitan Area, selling and servicing Cadillac, Buick, and GMC. I was humbled by the fact that over half the employees here have worked for the company for 30+ years. However, the company is paper addicted, and has not fully embraced the computer in the shop as a way to take the service department into the 21st century. It was not a good fit.

I jumped at the opportunity to work for Lindsay Cadillac. With an inherent love for GM products, I was well aware that any new and innovative tech usually appears first on Cadillac.Since I began working for Lindsay Cadillac, I was introduced to some practices of work flow that were archaic, by industry standards, and lobbied to see them improved.*Shop-Parts-Lane-Parts-Shop work flow has a few extra, inefficient, steps*Addiction to paper in Parts and Service, no electronic dispatch means wait customers see their vehicles enter the shop as much as an hour later. Parts order record keeping in binders means records retrieval taking thrice as long to confirm.*Poorly trained Parts personnel means ordered parts with no ETA, and usually incorrect part arrival*Tool Room reformI also submitted many ideas on improving the day-to-day for techs, and was happy to see some of them implemented.And, as I had in previous jobs, my excellent customer service skills were called upon daily by the better advisors in the lane.

I returned to Pohanka a second time, mainly because a friend that I worked with at Koons Chevy mentioned that my "Hell Week Eliminator" idea had been implemented, although I was not credited with the new schedule.During my second time of employment at Pohanka, I took on a project of reorganizing the much neglected tool room. Looking for a GM special tool was a task that took anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes, but should take only 5 seconds.The project was originally slated to be only 2 weeks full time, but turned into 2 months. The project entailed adding our tools to the GM Tool Organization website, organizing tool locations for present and past tools, making it easier to add future tools, and eventually locking the room with only key people having access.At the end of the 2 months, I was asked to return to work, with the project being only 98% done, and the tool room was not locked as planned.It wasn't long before the children in the shop returned the tool room to it former glory.

Perform diagnosis and repair of customer vehicles in all areas with the exception of major engine work, transmission overhaul, automatic transmission removal, and diesel repair.During my tenure at Westover, I recognized that the company was not looking after their internet presence. I created a report on how to promote the business on review sites like Yelp and Angie's List, getting involved in social media like facebook, creating new salutation scripts to encourage customers to use these sites to grow the customer base using existing clientele, and the need for a website that better reflects the company and it's services.Although I had originally volunteered to perform these duties, the company is using an outside firm, and already I have noticed the improvements. Some erroneous and nondescript reviews on Yelp have since been taken down.

Maintain, Diagnose, and Repair customer vehicles.During my time at Pohanka, a 7 days a week dealer, a 2 month schedule given to all tech required them to work three, 12 day straight work "weeks", also known as "Hell Week". In my spare time, and utilising the existing roster of techs, trainees, and inspectors, I created a Hell Week Eliminator schedule.I was commended by the management for my ingenuity, but my schedule was rejected.

Maintain, Diagnose, and Repair customer vehicles. In the three years that I worked at Koons Chevy, I had the highest CSI rating of all the techs in the shop. This was due, not only to my "find the root cause" and "fix it right the first time", but also to my personal interaction with my customers. My CSI record was so good, and lasted so long, that management stopped giving out monthly bonuses because it wasn't fair to give them to me every month.