From Broken Ops to World-Class Service: The BMW of Louisville Story

Hello everybody. Scott here again in place of Jake. And I got a great guest today for another volley rally. John Frazier, fix ops director in Louisville for BMW of Louisville. And he's got quite a lot on his plate. John, how are you doing?

Doing great. How are you, Scott?

Oh, good. So I thought it'd be great to get together. John is, is kind of the fix it manager and he's been in his career, he's, you know, if you followed him on, on LinkedIn, I, I highly recommend you follow him on LinkedIn. He's very active and has a lot of good inspirational posts and stuff.

So.

But John, you, you go into a place and we're going to talk about breaking things down and starting from the ground up. You're kind of the rebuild guy, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's demolition on day one. Seems like, you know, I've, I've not found myself stepping into stores and departments where, you know, the torch was shining brightly already and I just pick it up and keep going. It's, it's often that as opposed to fix ops, it's broken ops and somebody's got to fix it. And processes non existent, no standards, expectations, accountability is an afterthought. You can tell it's departments that have been ran reactively rather than proactively.

Sure. So, and I want to get to the BDC in particular but, but you know, before we get there. So what, what are your main, what are the main things that you had to come in and walk in outside of the bdc?

Ooh, you know, I came into when I actually two years ago when I got here to Kentucky, coming into a, a store that for 10 years had it been broken under, under our, our company's ownership and it was the wild, wild west to say the least. I mean it was things going out the back door. Process is not being followed. Documentation was, was non existent, I mean just was bleeding from, from every place it could bleed from. And that, that was a. Probably the most complete rebuild I'd ever done from staffing processes everything and solid nine, 10 months, but completely flipped that around to a profitable customer, satisfactory operation.

So you've been on volley six, seven months, but that wasn't the first thing you did. What was your first priority when you, when you came in and took the job?

You know, to find out where, where things were seeping out at, find out where we were bleeding. Looking at the schedules, the open RO list, walking the lots, touching cars, you know, seeing where we are just to get a grasp on the, on the business, you know, traffic wasn't too much of an issue. We had a pretty good inflow of traffic, but we didn't really know what to do with it. Once it hit the service drive, it was kind of all over the place. So it was just creating order around the, the service process itself.

Any advice for people when they step into this, what, what their first month should be? I mean, you probably wore lots of hats.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. This one store in particular that we completely redid, it was. I was writing service, doing internals, dispatching. We didn't have a warranty administrator, so I was doing that after hours and trying to manage all the fires in the interim. And that was a solid four or five months till I started to get some of the right people on the team. My advice would be look at everything and watch everything. A minimum for the first month. You know, don't jump right in and, and change things until you see how it's working. Because, you know, you might have the right people, but they were just under the wrong leadership. So you don't want to make any, any permanent decisions off of a temporary situation.

Yeah, I, I think that's great advice. And, and when you said it, I know you're right. It's super hard to follow, though, at times. Right. Just because you want it all all fixed tomorrow. So.

Yeah, no doubt.

Did you have, did you turn a lot of people? You probably found some big winners and who you already had also, you know,

I, I gave a lot of grace initially, you know, for three, four or five months. And I found that this particular store, from a staffing standpoint only, we only have one person there that was there when I got there. Everyone else came in new, and this is, you know, 10 technicians, three parts people, two managers, three advisors. You know, never my intent to terminate anybody. I actually let, When I come into a new place, I sort of just let people decide, and I let them decide by, hey, this is how we're going to do it. This is the process. I allow them to have some ownership in it, you know, and helping create it, you know, how could we do this better? The wrong people tend to exit stage right, if you will. You know, they just, you know, if they're not there for the team and not there for the customer, when you try to put those processes and standards in place, they normally just, they show themselves. They'll let you know if they're part of the problem or the solution.

You know, I had a friend who always said, you know, some people have too much of a past to have a future. You know, they may be good people, but they might need a change to do that.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, exactly.

So the BDC is. You'd never had technology there and you, and you run three stores with your bdc, all different types of brands, of course. Tell me what it was like starting up and adding technology to the bdc.

Well, you know, the BDC was on my radar. You know, day one, I knew that we needed some sort of order to it. I initially didn't have a BDC director on staff. You know, it was just, it was a few people in a room answering calls and you know, there was just no direction. Most importantly, you know, there was, there was no visibility around what was going on in the, the time that, you know, when I was first here, I'm, I'm thinking about fires on the ground and trying to watch appointment count and you know, some of those things that the BDC has a direct effect on and, and call handling and things. But you know, it was, it certainly wasn't a priority at first because I had to get things on the ground fixed. So, you know, the BDC initially was, it was, it was kind of all over the place. It just wasn't. There was no order to it, There was no process.

Well, you know, I will say looking at your numbers, when you guys started out answering the, answering the phones was a little bit variable. Now these stores have their phones answered at a world class level.

They do, yeah. Yeah. Most certainly the process that Volley creates for it is it's hard not to answer the phone.

Well, the feedback is pretty immediate. If you don't, and I mean literally for anyone reaching out and if you feel like you're in John's shoes, we've got a lot of people. I mean, the BDC is just one part of it. John is a good mentor and he's very generous with his time. You guys are world class at answering the phone. Probably have some opportunity and speech. Beating them up on outbound too though.

Right.

So what, what were the biggest learnings that you had adding technology to the bdc.

And the most obvious is, you know, the things we weren't doing, the things we weren't saying, the way the calls were being handled. You know, we, you don't know what you don't know and, and Volley sort of peels back the, the, the layers of things that go into a BDC and from its ability to, you know, give you an idea of what your, your, your most busiest times are, your peak times, the heat maps the, the ability to grade the calls and to hold the agents accountable to what they're doing. Man, that was the biggest thing for me to be able to see

all

the stuff we couldn't see before because you know, before it was just phones ringing and we hope somebody answers, you know.

So what are your goals for 2026 for the department?

The goals definitely traffic. We've got to increase traffic and outbound. We've been working very closely with your team there at Volley. Theresa and I just had a call actually yesterday with Madison and we're finding a lot of opportunities to increase our outbound. Teresa is on this. That's our BDC director. She is on this treasure hunt to find any VIN number that's tied to a phone number that she can stick in volley. And so traffic is big for us this year. We had an incredible, just by flying, fixing our processes year over year. Not really much of an increase in traffic, just fixing our processes. We had an incredible year over year in, in profitability. So this year is going to be tough to beat unless we do one thing and that's traffic. You know, we're going to have to get more, more tires across the drive.

What else outside of the bdc, Any big goals for the, for the, the department, obviously traffic. Any other technology you're looking to bring on? Any staffing changes, not subtractions. I meant as far as new things that you haven't taken on AS, etc.

You know, for me this year some other goals are, are growing our wholesale. Our stores do pretty good in wholesale, but we do a lot of wholesale outside of our market. And I think I've got some relationships to rebuild inside of our market with wholesale. My biggest goal obviously the past two years has been rebuilding and we've got a lot of new staff. The past year I've been at our BMW store. I've got an all new service drive. Pretty, pretty green guys and gals on the service drive. Elevating the, the customer experience. That's top of the list. I think that's our best form of advertisement. So you know, this year is going to be polishing the edges, increasing traffic, increasing wholesale, repairing relationships because now we've got the stores pretty solid. We're like, we're, we're operating really well now. I need everybody to know about it.

Well, you know, it's one of those things. I, I was on with another one of our dealer customers and, and he said, you know, and, and definitely you can take BMW or Volvo especially. I know cdjr that that's the third store. But you have very little competition for new stores or new car sales in Louisville. But you have dozens and dozens of places where they can service it. So.

That's. Right.

A lot of service. It's just simply making it easy for them to come in and feeling good about it. It's not even about pricing, right.

It's really not. Pricing becomes an afterthought if the service is there at the forefront.

Yeah, I think you've nailed it. Again, everyone go on LinkedIn. And I don't know if it's called friend request, but connect with John Frazier. He's a great follow. He's inspirational. Just a dang good dude. Any other advice for people today at all?

Grace 2026 is. Is my. My word is grace. This year. I, I've. I made a post today, in fact, about it. It just seems that everybody's a little bit on the edge and, and there's the, the society economy, the just things we're struggling with in life has got us in a. Almost a survival mode, if you will. And I, I think in a business like the automotive industry, where the goal post is always moving, there's a lot of things to navigate. I, I think Grace, we need to have a lot more grace this year.

Yeah. Well, good, Good stuff. And, and you're totally right. So, John, thanks again. And it's another volley rally. Appreciate you being on.

Yeah, thank you.