5 More Reasons Service Managers Get Fired | SDR #205

Welcome, everybody, to this episode of Service Drive Revolution, where we're going to talk about.

The five additional reasons or five more reasons service managers get fired. So we originally did this. We're going to add five more to the list, which I believe you think are going to be even better than the first list. We're going to talk about Christian's trauma as a four year old.

What'S in the news, and all kinds of other fun stuff. So I'm Chris Collins, and this is Chris Joan.

Hello, everyone.

Lafferty, because he's been making people laugh for generations. It's generational.

Yeah.

It's in your genetics.

Oh, yeah.

So join us on this episode of Service Drive Revolution.

One of the things, this company that really bothers me sometimes is the lack of concern for my personal safety.

Really?

Yeah, really.

What do you mean?

Oftentimes people here make decisions that put me in life or death situations, like extreme risk. Extreme risk.

High chance of being harmed.

Like right on the front lines.

Do elaborate, Chris. I can't wait.

Well, I don't know why this happened, but for some reason, the plan today was that I was driven here. I wasn't to drive on my own.

Yes.

I think in anticipation of the fact that we're going to a dinner and your son is at my house, swimming in the swimming pool, hanging out with the ladies.

And how are you getting home tonight?

Yeah. So when I was being driven here today, I said, so I'm gonna Uber from the. From the restaurant tonight home. And I was told, no, Christian's gonna drive you home.

And what was your initial reaction?

That's not safe.

Yeah.

But I do think that you're driving is legendary.

Remember the time in a. In a client's truck because we'd all had a little bit too much to drink and you had only had iced tea.

Yes.

And what is. What are those things in the middle of the road that people drive around?

The most worthless thing on the planet?

Just answer the question. Let's not. Let's not.

Roundabouts.

Roundabouts. You. Your. Your distaste for roundabouts had you jumping it like a Dukes of Hazzard episode.

Could you hear the soundtrack in the background?

Yeah. Like, we're running from the police.

It's not safe. So we got that going on, you know? Everybody, please say a prayer for me.

He's gonna. He's gonna be fine.

Think good thoughts and. Yeah. What else is. Is there any. Oh, the other thing that I'm super excited about. I cannot tell you guys enough how fun this is gonna be. And even. Even if you're on the service side of things and not on the parts, I bet you, you end up wanting to subscribe to parts hold that Christian is doing. They've worked really hard. And it's a. It's a podcast. Four parts. I think we've recorded eight episodes.

We have eight episodes.

The team here has done a great job. We're learning. But trust me, if anything, it's going to be informative and bring kind of everybody together. It'll be a platform for us to have guests and talk about what's going on, but just include parts in things. And yeah, like I said, a lot of you are going to end up listening to it. It's going to be fun.

It's really entertaining. I think that coach Cliff brings a lot to the table from his parts lens. So he spent the majority of his career, he was.

You're not going to sell it like that. Like, you need. You need to talk about Cliff like he's like James Bond or something. Because when you say he's a parts, people are going to be like, yeah, that's like going to an accounting convention.

Okay, so we have this guy. He's dangerous now. Sometimes he disappears, sometimes he doesn't. I don't ask questions.

I know one of the episodes that he was on, he parachuted in from a black jet at 27,000ft, landed right in his chair, and we started filming. It was pretty impressive. But, yeah, he's. He. He's taking this thing really seriously. And I love some of the ideas that have come out of the recordings already.

And then on the. On the other side of things in our. In our software, which I always make the joke that Christian is the kryptonite to software. But.

There. There is a side to Christian where he. He took over our.

Software that does two things. One, it has the dashboards for our clients and the competition for the advisors. The service advisor competition. We call it Top Dog Underground. Yeah, officially, that's the name. He's taken that over for years. And it. It's. It's good. Like, he. By take it over, I mean he interacts with the coders. Like, he tells them what we need and goes back and forth. And it's. That part has worked out pretty good. So you're good. You're a good leader, you're a good supervisor. Just the. The technology, maybe.

Yeah, I'm an idiot when it comes to most technology, that one particular thing.

But in there, we've created this thing called S POP which takes the. The parts Department's dashboard and the service department's dashboard. And it's kind of like a fixed absorption number in a sense, but we call it S POP S. POP stands for service imparts operating profit. And then we have the S POP Percentage of gross.

Yep.

So which is a net to gross for both combined. It is so cool. Now when we're going through those numbers to see, oh, the parts department is 35% net to gross and service is 10, and the combined is this. But if you see the service one and then the SPOP is lower, it means POP parts is pulling them down. If SPOP is higher, then it means parts is pushing them up. And so that's. That's been a fun new thing to look at on our dashboard. That. That is great.

Yeah. Getting some good collaboration between the two departments.

Yeah. And it's. It's all new, but it's. It's very fun and exciting.

So you know what's not fun?

No, Christian, tell me what's not fun.

I would like to tell you what's not fun. Cleaning my house.

So you clean your house?

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

When do you do that?

Usually on the weekends.

You're always hiking or at like Six Flags on the.

Yeah, we. We tag team that house and clean it. But I wasn't able to clean over the weekend because my. My vacuum broke. But it's okay, because you know what I did? What? I put a Nickelback sticker on it and then it started to suck.

When all else fails, punch down and blame Nickelback.

It's Nickelback's fault.

I was punching down a little bit. That's funny. Nice. I like it. Okay. Anything in the news you want to talk about?

We've got an article in the Automotive News that says that GM and Ford are going to overtake Tesla in the EV market by 2025.

So this is.

Is anybody told Tony Stark?

No, I don't think that Tony is in even remote agreement with this. But essentially, kind of the climate of today, Tesla's got a 70% market share in EV and they're projecting that by 2025 they're going to be down to 11%. I don't know if I'm buying that.

Well, you might want to take the number of.

11% of a bigger number. Might be more cars. Right. So if. How many new cars sell in China.

Every year? Is it like 30 million?

Oh, God. It's more than the US for sure.

So let's just say it's 30 million. He. He's not even making a million. Cars right now.

Yeah, that's true.

So the, the, the pie is going to get bigger. So his percentage of the pie might be smaller, but it could be more units.

Yeah, but they're not going to do worse. No.

I think when he comes out with this truck and all that, he'll, he's still going to sell cars.

Yeah. It says Ford and GM both project that they'll each sell 2 million EVs globally by 2026.

Yeah. And that's because they have them available. They're making them and they're making that Ford electric truck is really cool.

Yeah, I think they did really well.

I would love if my mom would get one of those.

Oh, you think she would do it?

You know the thing that.

That makes me want her to have that is that she can charge her house on it when the power goes out. Her power goes out all the time when it snows and that sort of thing. And so I think that was by.

Far the best part of that commercial.

That and then I could put you in the frunk and close it and you could survive in there for a week.

I'd be willing to try it for sure.

There's so much room.

Yep. It's pretty impressive. All right. And also in the news, GM and Ford again, they're seeking to get us. Okay. To deploy self driving vehicles without steering wheels, which they've already.

Yeah, say that again.

GM and Ford are seeking an approval to deploy self driving vehicles with no steering wheel.

Huh.

How about that? Right? But yeah, General Motors and Ford have asked the US Auto safety regulators to grant exemptions to deploy a limited number of vehicles that have no steering wheel.

Essentially it says without human controls. So it's coming, it's on the journey.

So what would you do in a situation where.

The software didn't work or whatever? Well, you're just 100% dependent on the software because even like airplanes have autopilot backup.

Right?

There's a backup. And that's why those guys sit up there with the door locked.

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Because it looks like from this what happens is that driver seat just becomes an extra passenger seat. But there would be no manual human.

Override where a passenger bed like a.

777, you take the world's greatest nap.

While the, while the computer bought traffic.

So let me ask you this. Would you rather, let's say that we had to go to Denver. Would you rather fly or do a self driving car overnight where we could sleep?

Okay, so first of all, the way that would you Rather works is there's options that are like, it's a no win situation, no matter what.

Like, would you rather catch a venereal disease and have no steering wheel? Would you rather like, that's how would you rather work? Oh, would you rather marry your, you know, cousin? I don't know.

It's okay.

We must have played that game before.

We have. That wasn't. That was just. I was just genuinely curious.

So you clearly have an opinion because you're asking what is. What is your opinion?

I don't know. I feel like.

Like I'd give it a shot.

Well, how long can you get there in a plane?

Three hours.

And then how long to drive?

I'm gonna guess it's 12 or 13 hours, maybe more.

Yeah. Plane.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't trust planes right now.

Or you trust cars without steering wheels, kind of. Well, let's. Why don't we let them figure that out?

Why we don't want to be the first ones.

Why don't we see it unfold? We know that airplanes are pretty safe.

Yeah, that's true. But they're just not reliable. I feel like the cancellation rate is crazy.

Yeah. That's why those, the driverless cars will be safer. Because of people.

Yes. Because there'll be no humans like me on the road driving straight over roundabouts.

Yeah. That's funny.

That's good.

Would you rather. You gotta work on your. Would you rather. Would you rather have beaks, beef stroganoff or lasagna?

Like it's just two acceptable options.

Yeah.

We have another list today. It's an extension.

Yeah. So we were going through our most downloaded episodes and one of the most downloaded episodes was reasons why a serviceman. Why Service Managers get fired. And we looked at that. So the reasons we had on there is they think like text. They're scared of change.

Their followers, not leaders. They're, you know, in a closed loop system in that sense. They don't do any training and they don't understand or direct their activities from the perspective of the financial statement kind of run it. They're there. They're in a sense driving their departments without a steering wheel.

Oh, yeah. Good way to pull it all back together. Yeah.

Way for Ford and GM to be consistent in their support of service managers.

That was organic. We didn't plan that.

Yeah. And so we came up with five more. So this is a Five More Reasons Service Managers get fired. Different than the first list, but maybe better.

I thought that first list was really good.

I think this list was better.

Okay.

Okay. So let's start with number one. And I actually have six on here. Even though we're saying five. So there's a bonus.

We get a bonus. But we're not going to call it that because that would make it an even number.

Yeah, I don't like even numbers, you guys. We'd have to go to seven.

So the first one that we have number one is that most managers manage out of fear and reaction. So most of what they're doing is a reaction to something that happened. They're not building something that is in a sense bulletproof and scalable to foresee things happening. They're spending most of their time reacting to things which is very inefficient.

Yes.

You, you get caught.

Not looking.

Right. Because you're, you, you're so stretched reacting that you never really get the time to reset and plan ahead.

Yeah. Because you can't control the clock on a reaction. Yeah.

You only have so much to give.

Right. And then anything having to do with like the way that things should be done, like the, the managers that are using fear as their, their moral compass.

Really basic things we second guess like having techs do inspections or advisors do walk arounds. We don't say anything because we're afraid they're going to quit and leave. Like everything is about they're going to quit, they're going to leave. Well, if you're going to keep managing like that, then you don't run your department.

No. So the thing would be stop reacting and go out and get better at recruiting people that aren't going to put you in that situation.

That's right.

That want to, want to work for somebody like you and appreciate that and are willing to do their part and contribute. It's same thing happens in the shop. Right. Is we, we can't get the work done because we don't have enough text. The text we have don't have. The greatest attitudes are stretched a little thin. They, they bark a lot. Right. Someone described like, oh, my shop is cancerous or you know, negative all the time. And so then we're not getting work done. The work that we are getting done sometimes isn't of the highest quality. So we have a lot of comebacks. So the manager spends most of his time managing dissatisfied customers and the turnover and advisors managing. Because you can't keep good advisors if you don't have the production in the shop. Right. And so we start doing things like, oh, we gotta pay the advisors more and we start making all these Compromises when, when, when, when, when, when the fix was get good at hiring techs. Number one, we manage to fear and we're reactive, not proactive.

That's right.

Number two, we treat the symptom, not the cause.

I feel like anytime I try to say that, I would say it wrong.

How do you say it?

I think we focus on the effect, not the cause. But symptom, not the cause is the right thing.

Interesting. Yeah, I think cause what happened in your childhood that you want to say it that way. I'm not sure there's trauma in your childhood, Christian. Someday we're gonna talk about it all over the place. Kept it secret, but now is the time for you to come out, share with everybody your deep rooted trauma.

You want to start when I was 4.

That was very serious, the way you said that. Yeah. We're treating the symptom, not the cause. So in the same sense we hear this all the time. I can't say this enough.

Maybe we say it too much, but it keeps happening.

Chris, what I need is I need you to train my advisors. I'm looking at a questionnaire. They're booked out two weeks. They got more work than they can handle. And if I guarantee you the reason why your advisors aren't selling isn't because they're not trained, it's because they can't get the work done. And the cars they took in yesterday haven't seen the shop yet. They're not going to sell something else. So I look at these service departments and they, you know, they're writing up a thousand customers in a month. They've sold 15 alignments. Well, we need to teach our advisors to sell 15 alignments. You're not going to sell any alignments if you don't have text to do them.

No.

If you're going to put the customer that waited two weeks to get in diagnosis or maintenance to the side, they're not going. The advisors are human. They want to take care of customers. It's our job as leaders to create a scenario where that's possible. But we're treating the symptom which we think is advisor training. It's not advisor training. Advisor training's way later.

The best thing that. So I got to listen in on a couple of calls this week that you did with some prospective clients. And I think that the best thing that I heard you say was I'd be happy to train your advisors. I just want to let you know that when I'm done, they're all going to quit. And the Person on the other end was like.

It was like the light bulb went off, the whole thing. But that's exactly what it is like if you make the advisors better, then they just don't want to be in a broken system.

Well, same thing in the, in some of those scenarios. What I was saying is they have turnover and advisors and they think that it's the pay plan, which it might be the pay plan, but if you, if you pair the pay plan with the fact that advisors are just fading heat all day and you know what happens is if you're booked out two weeks or, you know, five days, depending on the market and the brand, if you're booked out, customers will just come in kind of like you with an oil change. You're just going to come in. You got to get it done. Like you can only, you know, you can't. Some people just can't leave work on a Tuesday. Yes, come in, you know, and so, yeah, I thought you were going to say the, the.

Best thing you heard me say is don't eat yellow snow.

I don't think I heard you say that this week. I have heard you give that advice in the past. It's not bad.

Okay, number three.

In five more reasons service managers get fired.

What about a snow cone? Like a yellow snow cone?

Well, you can, but.

Not gonna be good.

Hiring compromises. The way that you said this is they hire somebody with a pulse. They're just checking they know ADP or they know Reynolds, whatever it is.

They make compromises in hiring because it's a, it's a warm body. They're not actively recruiting. Most of the time. You, you, you ask a manager that's been fired, who are the top five advisors at your competition? And, and at your competition could be in the same auto mall or it could be across town, whatever, I don't know. The good managers are people collectors. They're asking every tech they interview who's the best advisor. They're asking every advisor who's the other advisor there. They are constantly trying to figure out who the best are and get them to come work for them. They're customer collectors because the best advisors, the best techs, create an environment where everybody's kind of on the same page and there's like a certain, certain professionalism and enthusiasm for, for our industry.

Yeah, they're like, they move around as, as little units. If it's time to go, they go as a group.

So.

Hiring people, the pulse is number three, number four. And this is going to be a bigger, more service Managers get fired over this in the, in the next two years.

They are not marketers.

Most service managers take for granted the fact that the sales department's handing them customers. They almost feel entitled to the traffic. It's like.

Even though we lose 80% of those customers after they go out of warranty, we feel like we're entitled to those customers. And we're not marketers. We're not marketing. We're not getting new customers that didn't buy there, let alone retaining. Because here's the thing. You want to know what happens, Christian, when you get good at marketing?

There is a big aha moment that happens when you get good at marketing that blows the top of your head off. Do you know what that is? And if you don't, it's okay. I'm going to tell you.

I don't know. Tell me.

You realize that it's cheaper to keep the customers you have than to go get new ones.

And yet we lose up to 80% of them instead.

And we think it's okay for service advisors to write 24 and for customers to be booked out two weeks and for, you know, you can have it in any color you want as long as it's black.

But if we focus on the customer experience and making people like and trust us and come back, it's actually the cheapest form of marketing that there is. But until you go out and try to get good at marketing and understand that it cost you 50 to 100 bucks to get a new customer to come in, and then you got to retain them after that, it ends up that just taking care of what you have is better. Yeah.

Retention is definitely the key to the future.

We gotta be marketers in the future. You gotta pay attention to marketing. You gotta understand it. It's an artist. It's not a. It's. It's not a one plus one equals two. It's a one plus one equals ten. If that's what you make it be. There's alchemy in marketing.

It's.

It's managing psychology, perception, image. Understanding your customer and their. Their deep, deep rooted trauma and motivation. Right. Like you want to understand why that guy that drives the M3 has his shirt open and is wearing a big gold necklace and a pinky, like.

They'Re trying to tell you something.

You want to be heard.

Yeah. They're not buying the M3 because they're taking it to the track. They're buying the M3 because they want people to.

To know that they bought an M3 and they've got it.

Yeah. I might be an example of that. I'm not driving Winston out there with the camo wrap. And to get. It's camo, but it's not meant to blend in.

It is the opposite.

It's not camo in the sense that the military uses camo. So you can't see the camo on my car that I drive is meant to draw attention.

Statement camo.

Statement camo. You gotta understand that you can't market to me like a Toyota.

White Toyota.

Yeah.

With the factory stereo system.

Oh, that reminds me too.

Papichulo.

Speaking of stereos, you're a little bit of an audiophile, I would say. And I've gotten to learn a decent amount about audio. Did you hear about this new.

Record player that they made out of chocolate?

No.

It sounds sweet.

Oh, my goodness.

So what was number four, Christian?

Four is you have to get really good at advertising, marketing, retention.

And then what happens when you start working on that? What's the thing that blows your head.

Off that it's cheaper to keep her.

Little ex wife talked to.

Number five. Five comes in two parts.

Yes.

They don't value.

What they're selling.

You. You go into these service departments. Their effective labor rates at 90 bucks. The market for the brand they have is like 145. And their. Their perception of the value that they're offering the marketplace is half of what everybody else is getting.

Yeah. And they're happy being the cheapest.

Yeah, they're trying to be the cheapest. Which. If somebody's trying to be the cheapest.

What does that tell you about them?

That they. They have a low value of self.

And they're usually cheap.

That's right. So I had.

In a different industry, not the automotive industry, I was talking to somebody earlier this week actually, and they have a business that offers services.

And let's say this business is in the movie industry.

Okay.

So they're offering services to production of a movie and they.

Sort of have competition.

And they're telling me what they want to do, but everything is in the lens of their competition and what their competition charges and what their competition does and this and that. And then at some point, after I kind of take it all in, I understand it. I was like, why don't we just add more value and charge more? Because nobody's doing that. Everybody's in a who can do it the cheapest mindset. Why every industry needs somebody to go out and go, no, what we're going to do is we're going to. We're going to focus on the bigger thing that the person, you know, we're going to, we're going to manufacture this outcome by doing all the things that nobody else is doing and adding services. Right. Instead of taking services away or doing everything at such a discount and so tight that it's irrelevant that you're doing it anyways. And so same thing in our industry, if you can't afford the best techs and your vision of yourself is that you should be the cheapest in the market, then you're not gonna have the best techs, you're not gonna have the best advisors, people aren't gonna come back. It's just, you know, it's a chase to the bottom at the end of the day. There's a quote by Lee Iacocca that he said when he was the CEO of Chrysler way back when and he said if it, you know something to the effect if it's just about who can do it the cheapest, it's just a chase to the bottom. That's it. Because somebody will always do it cheaper. But is it really about doing it cheaper or is it about doing it right, Doing it with some passion, appreciating the craft that we're in and doing it in a way that adds more value than just, hey, this is a dollar for dollar exchange.

Yeah. I think how you said it is way more eloquent. But I always think of it as is. A lot of these managers are bringing Walmart strategy to the high end designer clothes market.

Yeah. And I think that's something that.

We talk about with our stuff. Right. In the sense that, yeah, there's people out there that'll do advisor training. There's people out there that'll do it for less. That's not. By all means, by all means. And they're probably really nice people. The thing that we want to do is when we get a client, we really kind of want to get an outcome. And so to get an outcome and guarantee an outcome, we can't take all these shortcuts in a sense. So do you want a return on an investment or do you want to. You know, it's the other part of that that always cracks me up. So this has happened with, with dealer groups is they will put our advisor training videos or online training against our competition and they'll say, well, your advisor training, your core advisor training is an. I don't know what the numbers are, but let's just say it's 12 hours. Your competition's advisor training is 28 hours.

And I'm like, your point?

Do you want effective or do you want 20? You want me to make 28 hours of content to train advisors or do you want me to make your advisors like what you want at the end of the day is you want advisor training that a veteran can watch and go, hey, that wasn't a waste of my time and I learned some stuff. You want advisor training where there's some ideas early on that they can implement and get some results that'll raise their self esteem and get, get them to then believe that, oh no, there are other ways of doing things right. Get them, get them manufacture a little bit of success. You want advisor training, that's a system that you can implement with your other systems. There's a lot of things that you want out of your advisor training. 28 hours isn't one of them.

That, that was painful. It's a painful number to listen to. It's a lot of training.

I'm going to tell you this, I could care less what they charge for the 28. I'm charging what I'm going to charge for what we're doing because I want to get a result. So just because somebody else's training is longer doesn't mean it's worth more. There's a value to the stuff we're doing and we're not for everybody and you know, we, we don't want to be for everybody.

Right? Yep.

And so it's the same thing with managers is when you come in as a service manager, you have a specific self esteem and boundaries and a value to what you're going to do and you know, what you bring to the table. If what you bring to the table is to play it safe, super conservative, be the cheapest, I'm going to guess you're going to have a couple jobs in your career. You're going to get fired.

Yeah, it's good. That's a really good point.

And then the bonus one.

So I'm ready for the bonus because I didn't, I don't know it, I.

Don'T think most of the time service managers that get fired.

You can look at who they hang out with, who their friends are, who they network with, who they're listening to.

Just what is that saying? Show. Show me what you do and I'll tell you who you are.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Or you're the average of your father.

They're not proactively looking for positive.

Influences in their life. They're not looking for people that are going to stretch them and make them better and maybe not agree with it. Most of the time, managers that turn over a lot are looking for people that agree with them, that make them feel safe. They maybe perform the same as them or worse, so they feel good about themselves. But if you look at your full potential as a leader in the marketplace, do your friends and the people you surround yourself with.

Line up with your full potential or line up with you being average and playing it safe?

I think that you'll find oftentimes that those. I have a friend, he thinks he's so smart. He tried to tell me that the onion is the only food that can make you cry. So I threw a coconut at his face.

Yeah.

There are now two foods that make you cry.

Maybe you're not the example of how to make prunes possible. Yeah. So who you hang out with. So let's recap the list really quick. Number one, manage to fear and you're reactive. Number two is you spend most of your time treating the symptom, not the cause. Number three is you hire people because they're warm, body and they fill a spot, not because you recruited them to a superstar team.

Number four is not marketers spend zero time on marketing. Take it for granted, leave it to chance.

Number five is you don't value what you're selling, who you are, what you bring to the table. And the bonus one is who you're hanging out with. Do they challenge you? Do they make you better? Or do they make you feel good because they're worse than you or average at best? Who are your influences? And that can be the person you go home and sleep with at night. It can be the, you know, the friends at church. It can be family. All of it has an influence. So fitting in is. Is a. Is a gravitational pull. Oftentimes we would rather fit in and underperform, then live up to our full potential. And.

Break a couple glasses on the way.

Yeah.

Or in your case, run over a couple roundabouts.

I like that bonus one. That was good.

Just the good old boys never meaning no harm.

What's the next line? All you ever saw, been in trouble with the loss is the day we were born.

Hope you guys enjoyed that. Thank you so much for joining us and we will see you next time on Service Drive Revolution. Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Job Revolution. We're uploading new stuff every day, so make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show. Call 8333 at Ask SDR and we'll answer your question on the show. That's 8333 Ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chris collinsinc.com. now that's offers.chris collins inc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.