5 Characteristics Of High-Quality Technicians | SDR #231

Welcome everybody to the big show. Today we're going to talk about the five characteristics of your best technicians. This is what you want to look for when you're interviewing, when you're trying to recruit. We give you some ideas on questions to ask and kind of how to interpret those questions. It's a great list that Christian came up with. Say hello to everybody, Christian.

Hello, everyone.

We also are going to talk about a date night.

Experience that Christian has that applies to how our customers feel.

Some interesting stuff in the news and much, much more Coming up on this edition of Service Drive Revolution.

How's it going, Chris? Joan.

So took my girlfriend out to dinner.

A date like d. It was date night.

It was nice.

So you're going on date night to a fancy place.

That's right.

Is it a bad experience?

No.

Did you get dressed up?

Yeah, fairly dressed up. I would say we both looked very nice.

Okay, so it's date night. Romantic.

Yeah, romantic. French. French cuisine. Just something really interesting happened and I don't know, I've been starting to notice this lately and I don't know if you have either, but. So the fancy restaurants, they come out and like they want to bring the menu and also the wine list. Right. And then I've started to notice when I tell them because, you know, I'm not ordering a ton of wine these days.

Are you ordering any wine?

No.

So they bring out the menu. They bring out the wine list.

Yes.

And then you're not ordering wine.

That's right. So I order an iced tea.

So do you hand the wine list back?

Yes.

You go, I won't be ordering wine. You announce it or what do you do?

Yeah, sometimes I'll catch it before they hand it out because you can recognize it.

I'll keep that.

Yeah. Don't need the wine list. You can take the glasses.

Your girlfriend. Girlfriend, yes. Is anti drinking completely, isn't she?

She'll drink every once in a while, but probably even less than I do, which is never. Yeah, so I've seen her drink twice.

Okay, so your normal MO you order an iced tea and what, she orders a water.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's exactly what happened in this particular case. But I noticed something interesting is like the whole demeanor of the server changes.

It's like, oh, you're just here for an oil change.

It brought me into advisor world about I wonder what this is, what a customer feels like when they come in and they're just there for the oil change and the advisor demeanor changes and stops and I felt the exact same way and again, much like that customer that comes in for just the oil change, don't judge the book by its cover. Right.

So if you do you feel like then they treat you different. Like, they come slower. Your food comes out slower.

It seems there's not as much pep in the step is what I would say.

So do you think that customers that come in and we're like, oh, it's an oil change. And then do. Do you think they perceive that the wait time is longer because they're not doing more? Like, the way we treat them?

Yeah. Well, if nothing else, it seems like we're not as important.

Like, I feel like you're sensing the lack of enthusiasm.

Yeah. So, for instance, like, there's a. She had a table, let's say, five tables within, like, eyesight of where we were at. I felt. I felt my feelings, but I felt like the other tables got more attention.

So you want me to tell you what it's like to order wine?

Yeah.

So I went to a romantic dinner on Valentine's Day.

Oh.

And I ordered a really expensive bottle of wine. And Wolfgang Puck himself came out and said hi to me.

That must have been an expensive bottle of wine.

Let's see what happens. And everything was very prompt.

So you're supporting my theory here, aren't you?

Remember when we had a dinner in Miami at Nobu and the chef came out?

I do, yeah.

That's the kind of thing that happens when you order wine. Remember how many bottles of wine we had that night?

Yeah, there was a lot of wine that happened. That was a great dinner, though.

The lesson here is if you drink excessively, you get better service.

And even if you don't, you feel great, so it doesn't matter.

No. Your story here is that you feel like a customer that just came in for an oil change and declined on the tire rotation.

Yeah, I did, but asked him to air up the tires.

Yeah.

That's you.

Oh, good Lord. That is me. Yeah. That was one thing that I noticed. There's another. Like, I don't know. There's a lot of stuff going on. I don't know if you've been paying attention in the news lately, but, like, there's all these fires and, like, trains getting overturned and, like, all the pollutants and acid spills and everything like that. Like, we really have to start taking care of our environment. Like, it's just worldwide. I just heard last week that there was a factory in France that exploded. It was a cheese factory, and debris was everywhere.

That's a joke. On brie. Brie Cheese.

Yes.

Yeah, I got it. That was funny.

No, I thought the lesson was you need to start drinking.

Yeah, let's say that's a lesson.

So the point of that, though, I think all joking aside, is we project on the customers and they pick up on it, even if we don't mean to.

That's right. Just be aware.

You got to overemphasize the enthusiasm because they will apply that to every disappointment and think that it's punishment when if they hadn't felt that it would be irrelevant. They could have waited 45 minutes either way. But the one who felt like we were disappointed because it's just an oil change is going to say, oh, I waited 45 minutes because they didn't like me. And the other one's going to say, wow, this 45 minutes went by quick. That was easy. It's all in how we make them feel.

That is the point.

That's a great point.

We control that.

What's in the news?

All right, so a little bit in the news. The Tesla semi, or as they call it in Canada, semi.

Process.

Yes, the process in the semi. Elon promised a lot with the Tesla semi, and here's how it stacks up. So they're talking about.

In California, actually, here in the great state of California, we have PepsiCo, which.

Can you refer to California as a democracy anymore?

Or cssr.

Yeah, you'll have to figure out what I mean by that later, I guess. But.

So, yeah, so there's PepsiCo, which owns Frito Lay, has a fleet of Tesla trucks that are being piloted and tested. Like they took delivery. Yep.

So I didn't. I was not aware those things are coming off the line.

Yeah, they're coming off the line. They're done. There are a ton of those bad boys sold.

Yeah, he sold out tens of thousands of them.

Sold. I'm pretty happy with this only because I think that in general, most of what, what most truck drivers do, the charge 425 miles is what the trucks.

Are getting under load. Right.

Yeah.

You know what was interesting that I didn't know is that Volvo already has electric trucks out there and they're already using those. And so the Tesla semis don't have the self drive. Self drive. They don't have that.

Yet, but it's coming.

I think Volvo means business. I think they're gonna. They're gonna make some heads turn. But yeah, so it says that the full range is supposed to be 500 miles, but they're using for the furthest one is a 425, but they also use it on a lot of hundred mile daily routes or a 3 to 400 mile run to other warehouses. And they're, they're saying it's actually working really, really well for those that care about the environment. 91% reduction in greenhouse gas with the switching over to electrics, which is interesting.

So that's good. Trucks coming and going. We were chatting with some of our friends saying that that could change the way the heavy truck market is. And then kind of along that same line, there is a huge expectation that there's going to be a large breakout year for electrical vehicle sales.

Tesla in 2022 sold almost a million cars and they're expecting that that dominance is going to continue this year. But worldwide actually they're selling more cars than the United States. So China selling a ton of electric vehicles. So breakout year for electric sales, more players in the market. And then last little tiny bit of news is that Benz is really eyeballing that direct consumer thing.

Cutting the dealers out.

Yeah.

Oh, Benz has got incredible dealers. How would they do that?

I don't know, but I love a lot of the Benz dealers in the United States.

Wait, what does it say?

So they're starting, they're looking to go direct consumer in Britain and Germany. So I think that, that because they're saying that the company's not going to make as much money because of the dealer, they're saying it's because we have the dealer level on there, that they can quietly go to a direct sales model and keep more of their profits. Selling directly saves costs for the company, removes concerns for customers that they could get a better price at another dealer. So they're saying that price protects the customer, at least the perception of such.

They were not the ones I would expect to do that.

No, I'd never heard that discussion before. That article.

BMW. Yeah, Interesting. Okay, let's talk about the characteristics of the best technicians. So you thought about this? I did.

And.

The ones you came up with I thought were really, really good. And at first I was like, oh well, you can't really.

Generalize, but actually I think you can.

Well, I think that you can acknowledge that there's a bunch of similarities. So if you think back, so service managers, general managers, service advisors, think to your best techs that you've worked with in your career, that there are striking similarities between them all. So there's always exceptions. You could pick this list apart, but when we think of the best of the best of the best, almost all of them have all of the things on this list. So if I'm interviewing or I'm trying to capture some talent from another place, I would want to look at these things.

I think that there's questions you could ask during an interview that'll help you to kind of uncover this stuff. In general, being able to identify who the top techs are can help you to cut through some of the clutter. Because I think in this day and age, we have to definitely get away from the whole, like, we're hiring somebody with a pulse to come into the shop, and that's not exactly where we want to be. It's not a guarantee you're going to get better.

Okay. So I'm going to read them, and then you say what you were thinking.

Okay. Okay.

So the first one you had was a clean stall.

Yeah. So all the really top performing technicians that I know, they look at every second as money. And if they have a clean stall and everything's organized, the tools always go back into the same spot. The box is pretty clean. They've got the little area where they like to use for their, you know, if they're putting information, the computer's got to be cleaned off. Everything's got, you know, a really good proximity. I'm gonna guess that they probably do. So the things they put in the places are. Because they're the things that they'll use the most during the day, but they've got a clean area, and it drives them nuts. Like, they're the ones that if there's an oil spill, they clean it up right away. And at the end of the day when they go home, it looks really, really good. I remember my best techs. It wasn't a requirement because I had somebody that I paid to come in and do this, but they would mop their area even though someone would come in and zamboni the floors. But it was always the best techs that did that. It wasn't everybody. I thought that was interesting.

That is. But in commonality, they. They take ownership of their space very much. So it's designed for performance.

Yep.

Then the next one was that they follow consistent system in how they inspect, how they do things, how they get parts.

Yep. So if you watch your best technicians from the second that they grab an RO to the second that they start working on the car, they typically go through the same exact thing every single time.

So what I thought when you were saying that is when you're interviewing a technician, you could ask a couple questions. It would tell you if they think this way. Like, you could say, so what's your process for this? And see if they have a process.

Yeah, like, if I mentally can follow them around the shop, it's a good sign. And I want to hear, I mean, selfishly, I want to hear stuff like, are they looking? Are they checking history, Are they road testing, Are they checking the vehicle out? All that stuff has to happen in order for them to qualify as a good technician.

Then if you. So there's probably people listening to this that are saying, well, you could make up a process. What I learned in my CIA interrogation training is people can make up a process going forward, but only people that have really done it can do it going backwards.

And it's not general. Remember, we've talked about that. Like, if you fix something, you can go really in depth on what you had to do to fix the thing. But if you're general about it, means you probably haven't fixed too much.

Next one. They self educate.

That's great. So my thing with that is that I always had a couple of technicians that even though I would come in in the morning and I would have, like the day's bulletins printed out and everything like that, and they were always coming into my office before work started me like, hey, Christian, did you hear about this? Like, they were so far ahead of me. Or they also, you know, they also had.

The latest and greatest, essentially. I mean, the tools are a pretty big thing.

So that was the next one. They invest in tools.

Yeah. So let's kind of put those together only because I think that both are for the same thing. Right. They look at information as the law of this is an advantage, and they look at the tools as an advantage. Right. So my favorite thing was. And the thing that you brought, you said, brought this up and you said you've seen the same thing too, is that I had shop battery chargers. Like, if I had two sides of the shop, I had two big chargers that you would just hook up and then you do it during reprograms or whatever. But my best techs had their own. And it was so funny that I couldn't figure out why they would spend their money on something that we had as a shop tool. And then it kind of just hit me like a ton of bricks. And it's because it was worth it to them to not ever have to wait.

And I thought that that was really, really. That's a telling thing, is that, you know, and they love to talk about having the latest and greatest tools too. Like, they always had the. They always had the best inventory.

The next one was they're proud of what they do.

So I think that that's probably the thing to recognize most. And you might be able to get into this question on an interview by talking about comebacks. Like your best technicians, they handle comebacks very, very differently because what they say is, that's a representation of my work. And they don't want a comeback to be the thing that defines them. So they typically like drop everything and figure out what went wrong.

Yeah, I would say too, like, if you asked them about comebacks and their answers were deflecting and blaming on others, they're not proud of what they do because they're deflecting. But if you asked them about comebacks and they stopped for a second and kind of exhaled and it was like, yeah, like, that's not. That's not okay. And then they like, kind of slowed down and were like, were very serious. That's somebody who, like, they're gonna be harder on themselves than you could ever be on them. And that's what you want.

The best techs know the customer's name. Like, they owned it so far. To be like, oh, this comeback affected Mr. Smith.

Yeah.

That's a high level thing. When the techs know the customer's name.

And then the last one, they're curious. They'll figure it out.

Yeah. So it's not. It doesn't have to be in the script. They're gonna get there one way or another.

And it's fun. Like, they like figuring it out.

Yeah. So in many cases, their joy and their curiosity wasn't trying to figure out something that could beat the book. They were trying to find a better way than the engineers that are writing the manuals. And I think that that's really cool to watch.

How would you ferret that out in.

A interview about curiosity? Yeah, I'm not sure.

So you could ask them just straight up, like, what are some hacks that you've found? What are some. Have you had issues that nobody else can figure out that you did? And what was your process?

Oh, that's good too.

And if they show enthusiasm towards that. Right.

Yeah, that's really good.

They also tend to be. When they're curious, they're less judgmental. They're usually more of a team player because they can see both sides.

Yeah.

If that makes sense.

Cool.

So let's recap characteristics of the best techs.

Clean stall. They have a system, a process they follow. They self educate and invest in their tools. They're proud of what they do and they can figure it out. They're curious.

It's a good list.

Great list. Good stuff. Well, thanks everybody, for tuning in. We'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution.

Thanks so much for watching watching this episode of Service Job Revolution.

We're uploading new stuff every day, so.

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I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.