AI marketing for auto and marine repair shops, where bays and slips are fixed and the schedule is the variable. Rhetor builds the local visibility and intake routing that keeps every bay and slip filled.
Auto and marine service businesses share a common math. Your bays and slips are fixed, your schedule is the variable. A shop running at 60% bay utilization is operationally completely different from one running at 95%. Your marketing engine has to fill your schedule, not just generate inquiries.
Most independent shops underinvest in visibility and overinvest in word-of-mouth hope. The result is unpredictable booking density and revenue that swings month over month. Rhetor builds the visibility stack that smooths the curve.
The intake side breaks for a familiar reason. A service writer answering the phone is also writing repair orders, also walking the lot, also fielding the parts counter. An agent handles inbound across voice, web chat, and SMS, qualifies the work, and books directly into your shop management system.
Marine specialty work runs on its own seasonality, its own buyer base, and its own service mix. The system supports both auto and marine inside one engagement when your operation does both.
Visibility work prioritized on the service categories that actually have bay capacity to fill. Brake jobs versus full restorations versus diagnostic-only work each get their own keyword and long-form editorial content, sequenced to your margin map.
Voice, web chat, and SMS intake that qualifies the job and books directly into your shop management system. Bay assignment and tech-skill matching happen inside the call. We work with Tekmetric, Mitchell 1, Shop-Ware, Identifix on the auto side; Dockmaster, MarinaOffice, BoatCloud on the marine side. Custom shop-management or marine-specialty integration is handled per engagement.
Marine business runs on a different cycle than auto. Winter storage, spring commissioning, summer service, and fall winterization each get pre-season visibility work and dedicated content, scored continuously through the Lighthouse Local audit.
We audit your bay or slip utilization against service-mix margin, build the visibility and intake routing that prioritizes the work with capacity to fill it, and ship the rebooking automation that keeps the schedule dense across seasons.
Integrates with whatever shop management system you run. Marine-specific systems supported on request. Custom integrations built during the engagement when needed.
Both. Franchise engagements respect franchisor brand and ad-fund rules. Independent shop engagements have more flexibility but the same operational fundamentals.
Specialty work needs a different marketing approach. Classic restorations, performance builds, marine restoration projects. Higher-ticket, longer-consideration buyers research for weeks before calling. The intake handles the long-form qualification (project budget, timeline, scope, prior shop history) and routes to your senior estimator. The visibility work lives in the publications and forums those buyers actually read. Hemmings for classic auto, Soundings for marine.
Yes. Diagnostics, routine service, repair, and restoration each route through a different qualification flow inside the agent.
Build fee plus monthly retainer. Retainer scales with bay count, service-category coverage, and whether mobile or marine service is part of your operation.
Tell us where your business is stuck and we'll walk through how we'd run it. Marketing that gets you found across Google and every AI platform, agents that handle your inbound and follow-up, and engineering when your business needs custom AI built around how it actually runs.
