Veteran Vehicle Repair
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin · Family-owned · #1-rated shop in their region
Mike and Jen Hayes opened a two-bay shop in 2020 with no marketing budget, no CRM, and no call recording. Five years later they're booked two weeks out, pulling customers from three states, and running the operating system the rest of Worxflow's customers are about to inherit.
How it started
Mike Hayes spent years in the U.S. Army before he ever picked up a wrench professionally. After service, he spent two decades in automotive repair — earning every certification, learning every system, building a reputation for honest work. He kept running into the same thing: too many shops were more interested in selling services than solving problems.
In 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, Mike and his wife Jen opened Veteran Vehicle Repair on Madaus Street in Lake Geneva — a shop where you get a straight answer, a fair price, and work done right the first time.
A year in, Jen left a stable career in law-enforcement administration to join the shop full-time. She brought the operational backbone: scheduling, vendor management, insurance claims, customer communications. Mike could stay in the bays. Two bays became three. Three became five.
By 2024, the shop had a problem that wasn't a problem: more demand than they could route. Every software vendor in the industry was in Jen's inbox promising the same things in the same language — words that didn't mean anything to her advisors, contracts that hid pricing behind demo calls, systems that wanted her team to switch screens. None of them listened to a phone call.
Worxflow is what Jen and Jeff Sperandeo built for VVR. The metrics above are what happened next.
Where Worxflow came in
We embedded the platform inside VVR in late 2024 — first as the customer portal, then as the call coach, then as the marketing engine. Every feature on worxflow.io was tested against VVR's actual customer base before it shipped to anyone else.
Sarge listened to roughly 2,300 of VVR's calls before we let him coach in real time. The findings below came from that corpus — and each one became a coaching rule the platform now fires for every customer.
Aggregate counts pulled from VVR's live database. No individual records, names, or contact information are exposed.
What an exhaustive read of 2,308 calls surfaced.
The platform doesn't just record calls — it learns from them. Here's what came out of VVR's call corpus, and how each finding became a coaching rule Sarge fires in real time.
Closing pattern decoded
The literal phrase "Sounds good then, I'll..." appeared in 73 of 81 booked calls and only 8 of 81 lost. It's not generic — it's the action-confirmation language. Sarge prompts when it's missing past minute 3.
Price-shock playbook
Of 244 calls where the customer balked at price, 104 still booked (42.6%). The recovery move was always the same: pivot to scheduling, not justification. Now codified.
Time-of-day truth
11am Mon–Tue: 30% booking rate. Friday 4pm: 11%. The platform's scheduler now optimizes outbound campaigns to the high-conversion windows.
Voicemail SLA cliff
Callbacks under 1 hour book at 38%. The 4–24hr window collapses to 7%. We added the SLA timer + advisor SMS — single highest-ROI change in the platform.
Per-make conversion variance
Mercedes owners: 80% conversion. Honda owners: 8%. Same shop, different buyers. Loaded into make-specific scripts Sarge surfaces on call ID.
$130k+ leak found and plugged
1,082 calls had booking intent — only 433 booked. Of the 558 lost, 82% called back later. Recovery rate before Worxflow: 6.6%. After the workflow: target 18–22%.
Where VVR is today
VVR is the #1-rated shop in its region, pulling customers from three states, booked out two weeks. They've added bays, hired technicians, and are scouting a second location. Referrals account for 32% of new customers — up from near zero before the platform.
Mike Hayes
Owner, VVR
We tried TekMetric, Mitchell, the whole list. None of them listen to our calls. Worxflow does — and our close rate jumped the first month. Sarge catches things our service writers miss. It's like having a sales manager standing behind every advisor, every call, all day.
Jen Hayes
Owner, VVR
It runs the parts of the shop I used to spend my Sundays on. I get to be in the bays now, with the team and the customers — not behind the screen.
Want a private walkthrough of VVR's actual dashboards?
Numbers above come from the same platform you'll use. We'll show you the screens, the call playbacks, and the coaching cues live.