In November, many Canadians flock to their dealership service departments to have snow tires put on their vehicles.

While that might seem like a windfall, a new report from Reynolds and Reynolds shows that’s not exactly the case.

The annual report, titled The Fixed Operations Golden Metrics 2025, focuses on metrics that drive fixed ops decision-making and how dealerships can improve their results.

Like the 2024 report, the data is broken down based on the dealerships’ volume of repair orders and the type of area they’re located in — major urban, metro, community or rural. But this year’s version added individual monthly averages “to show additional trends and work toward establishing a benchmark to measure future findings against.”

Those averages showed a clear pattern in total hours sold, with spikes in the spring and fall — the fall peak in November matching neatly with the switch to snow tires, which are required in Quebec and various other Canadian jurisdictions during the winter and recommended by other provinces.

But Reynolds’ study found more hours does not mean more profit. In fact, average hours per repair order “falls off a cliff” in November and December, the report said, and average profit per customer-pay RO takes a corresponding nosedive for dealerships of all sizes in all types of markets.

That phenomenon “strongly” suggests a high percentage of the ROs in November and December, as well as in April and May, represent customer just having their tires changed, the report said, “and the additional volume may be making it difficult for some shops to find the time to sell additional work,” in line with a general trend that more volume means fewer average hours per RO.

That’s also the case when it comes to profits.

“A clear dip in average profits occurs in November and April,” the report said, “likely tied to the increase in demand for changing tires for driving conditions. Despite the massive increase in demand for work at these times, the data shows us what is being sold in those hours is not as profitable as what is being sold at other times during the year.”

According to Reynolds’ data, service departments for dealerships in large population centers averaged 45% more customers in November (834) than in July (574) and sold some 37% more total hours in November — 1435.25 to July’s 1049.7. But those same service operations averaged about 12% more hours per RO in July (1.97) than November’s 1.76, which was the lowest average for any month in 2024.

Those numbers, the report said, indicate “the infrastructure is there to handle the increase in business” but the problem is inefficiency.

The solution, Reynolds said, is technology, a point the report reinforced by comparing the data from dealerships that use tech tools to create efficiencies for technicians and those that don’t, finding the falloff from July to November levels was twice as steep for those that did not use efficiency tools.

“The data leads us to believe that finding ways to increase hours per RO through finding efficiencies will produce a massive lift regardless of the month, but especially in November,” the report said.

While the monthly pattern is clear among three of the “golden metrics,” the fourth — effective labor rate — breaks the pattern.

In fact, the data showed the ELR, which measures the amount of revenue technicians generate for the business per hour, were actually at their highest for all population categories except rural in April and May this year, when profits per customer-pay ROs were among the lowest of the past 12 months.

That was part of “what seems like a sudden increase in ELR across the board in recent months, in most areas,” the report said. “One of the concerns here should be elasticity,” the report said. “At some point, the market will reach a limit for price elasticity and dealerships won’t be able to keep charging more. Better outcomes will likely come from becoming more efficient and productive.”