Pros
The franchisee paid everyone more than the industry average
Cons
The Regional Operations Managers are universally disliked by nearly everyone. AAMCO did a horrible job recruiting employees. Basically found people who were oil change level of experience and expected the owner to hire them for a job they were not qualified to do. The shop locations are horrible. Zero accountability from AAMCO. They always pass the blame elsewhere despite being the ones who caused the issue in the first place. Corporate likes blaming the CSM for a center's bad performance even though I was averaging over a million dollars with jobs sold. The technicians were the bottleneck and were not skilled enough to finish the jobs on time to make them profitable. The owner was always having disagreements and arguments with AAMCO corporate about not holding up their end of the franchise agreement. Once AAMCO had his money he was on his own for the most part. They even stole potential employees who were scheduled for interviews by contacting them and telling the person to interview at a different center. The ad pool is a joke. Nobody ever came through the door because of their advertising. Everyone came in because of Google. When subcontracting transmission rebuilds to other centers, since we did not have a on site builder, there was a high level of transmission failures. One other center had every single front wheel drive transmission fail they built for us. When another builder at a privately owned shop opened the units, he said that he wouldn't of even called the transmission rebuilt because there were so few new parts inside of it. Keep in mind the owner bought entire rebuild kits to have it done right. AAMCO corporate, especially the ROM, did not care about this and took the side of the offending center. The ROM made offending remarks about the employees and on many occasions made them want to quit. He even threatened to fire every single one of us. I was scheduled to go with the ROM to take a trip to some places and work on getting corporate accounts set up. He no showed. Later on those accounts went to another center, not ours. The number of AAMCO shops out there has dropped over the years. They talk a big game about "their brand" yet the way they go about treating their brand seems to be a big part of why it's going away. When I was there more than half of the other center owners all said they wanted out and their business was for sale...