Bridgestone Select franchise business tour

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes while you get your tyres changed or car serviced?

Bridgestone is one of the biggest brands in tyres and automotive across the globe. 

With franchise owners from non-automotive as well as an automotive background, a significant number are multi-location owners operating large businesses.

Dane Dovell, Franchise Owner, Bridgestone Select Victoria Point, took us on a tour of the business and explained the operation and some of the impressive equipment on-site in detail.

The Tour (in text)

"Hello and welcome to Bridgestone Select Victoria Point. 

My name is Dane and my wife and I are the franchisees of the store. 

Well, come on and we'll go show through the store. 

Customer service area

So this is our customer service area. This is where people can wait for a short time, they take the keys to their car service or their tyres done, or they can wait for a couple hours. 

We've got the coffee machine, we've got the water, and we’ve also got the toilets there, too, and a charge station for their convenience. Also, we've got a little office in the back there where we do all our admin work. 

The workshop

All right, so welcome to our workshop. This is a fully equipped workshop, we’ve got our certain individual zones, we've got our tyre bay zones, we've got our tyre storage upstairs, we've got our tyre change machine and our tyre wheel alignment and balance machines. 

We've also got a fully equipped workshop here with our lube station. 

What I’ll do now is I’m going to show you quickly the zones and we'll go from there. 

Okay, so this is our tyre change machine. We've got our state of the art tyre fighting machine, where we change your tyres.

We’ve also got our brand new state of the art balance machine. Over here we can see that we've got the cars up on the hoist, this is our belly lifter hoist. We can do all sorts of mechanical services on this hoist, but mainly it’s used for our tyre changing puncture repairs and to check your car out. 

Mechanical zone

Okay, this is our mechanical zone. 

We've got three hoists here, we've got four mechanics. We do everything from air conditioning services, we also do major minor servicing, we do repairs on vehicles, we do suspension work, we do lift kits. We do a lot of mechanical work. Now we'll just take over to the wheel on machine, which is most of our work. 

So this is our state of the art wheel alignment machine. We do everything from two wheel, four wheel, four wheel drive wheel alignments here, and we've also got our nitrogen to top up if the customer requests that. 

As I said, it's a state of the art machine. It uses lasers to guide the tyres and where they are. 

Tyre storage

Also, we've got our tyre storage. We'll go up now and show the tyre storage where we stack our tyres. 

Okay, so here's our tyre zone. We've got a storage zone, we can store up to about 600 tyres here. We’ve got a tyre lifter that lifts the tyres up, so we're not bringing those tyres up from the stairs. 

We've got our Bridgestone brand tyres, we've got Firestone's, we've got Supercats and we've got our budget affordable range Dayton and tyres. 

As I said, we've got everything to meet the customer needs here. If we can't, we can always order on express or order for next day delivery, which is brilliant. 

So that's it for our Bridgestone Select Victoria Point. I hope you got a lot of our tour and we look forward to seeing you soon."