Chris Collins runs a coaching competition for service managers that measures their performance before and after. Over 20 entered. Winners improved CSI by 5+ points, raised effective labor rates by $15.78 per hour, and boosted net-to-gross from 10.8% to 27.5%.
Chris Collins here and I want to talk to you today about the $50,000 Service Manager Challenge. Now, if you were on our coaching webcast earlier today, you know that Jair announced the finalists and I'm really excited. We got over 20 entries, but if you're not on the webcast, you don't understand what it is. I want to explain to you what the $50,000 service manager challenge is. So being a service manager in our industry is one of the loneliest, hardest jobs sometimes, sometimes with the least amount of training. Most of the time in our industry, we come up through service and we were taught by the manager before us. But there really isn't, besides Service Manager university that we have, there isn't a place for a service manager to go and learn all the things that they need to know to be effective in today's competitive market, like pricing strategies, hiring and recruiting, how to increase sales, you know, just basically how to fundamentally run a department. And in our industry there's so much talent and good natured managers, but they just don't have the resource. So we came up with the idea of the $50,000 Service Manager Challenge that when somebody comes into our coaching group, they compare their numbers previously to the numbers that they get after they learn our systems. And I want to tell you the results for this year. So this is over 20 entries that we had. The CSI was up over 5 points. The average effective labor rate was up $15.78. But here' real one, the average net to gross went from 10.8% to 27.5%. The average store is 27.5% net to gross, which is three times the national average. It's actually more than three times the national average. So you're talking about dealerships that are taking their fixed ops back. They're getting higher fixed absorption, they're increasing their retention, and they're really thriving and growing. You know, I love that saying that the best defense is offense. And the managers that entered this definitely are moving forward and they're having great offense and success. So if you didn't enter it, please, let's support the managers that did. We have our big Top Dog event coming up this weekend and we're going to announce the winner on Sunday. But also Mario is going to be doing little teaser videos every day, kind of telling you what happened at the event and all the fun. So make sure that you tune in and watch out for these videos and the updates. And then you'll see on Sunday who actually won $50,000 for having the best increase in CSI ELR net to gross and writing an essay that is inspiration to all the managers coming in and kind of a road map on how you progress through this. So thank you and we'll see you in a couple.
