Tour blog 19

Tour blog 19

03 Nov 2008

Email this article to a Friend

Aftermarket heads through Glasgow and catches up with regular Top Tech finalist Jerry Carroll

Monday 3rd November . . .

4:49pm – Goodbye Glasgow and hello Falkirk. We’ve now been to 71 garages, so it’s only 29 to go and a long drive to the isolated wilds of John O’Groats.


Sean McGettigan at Direct Automotive Diagnostics in Glasgow
Travelling through England, several technicians mentioned Sean’s name and said Aftermarket On Tour should pop in and say hello.

It’s clear that Sean’s diagnostic expertise is well-known and well respected. He doesn’t do mechanical work. He doesn’t really do jobs direct for customers. And he definitely doesn’t like the way dealer workshops are run!

He’s worked in them before but much prefers running his own business where he can do things to his own standards. He's not a fan of bonus systems which, he reckons, basically encourage people to skip corners in order to boost their pay packets.

Sean specialises in top-end diagnostic and electrical work on BMWs, VAG cars, Renaults, Vauxhalls and Porsches virtually exclusively for nearby franchises.

He says all-makes diagnostic tools are not powerful enough for his needs so he doesn’t really have any. He bought a Tech 2 Vauxhall dealer tool from the US before it was available in this country. The only down side being that he had to wait four months for it to be repaired.

"Generally, the public understand if a job takes longer than expected," he says. "Especially if you explain how the systems work. A lot of the owners I deal with are enthusiasts so sometimes you can learn stuff from them too."


Jerry Carroll, Michael Spence and Shaun O’Keefe at Carroll’s Garage in Glasgow
Jerry is a regular face in the Top Technician competition and has made the finals on numerous occasions. He even posed for some fetching publicity shots at the live finals of the competition in Birmingham using his best male-model poses!

So when he tells us he does “mainly servicing and a little bit of diagnostics” I suspect it’s more out of modesty than anything else.

The desk of his reception area is covered in a Top Technician finalists trophy and cuttings from the local newspapers about his Top Tech success.

Jerry says that while he has got ATA accreditation, he worries that the BSI Kitemark is too expensive for smaller garages. Over a cup of tea, he says he'd like to see a scaled system of payments based on the size of a company.

Rightly or not, a number of garages we've spoken to have said they think the Kitemark is too expensive. And you could argue that it's odd that a workshop with nine technicians pays the same as a one-man band.

After catching up with Jerry, we hit the road and head for Falkirk where we'll start the day tomorrow.

Email this article to a Friend

<< back