Greg, a service advisor at a small East Texas Chevrolet dealership, asks Chris Collins how to move into management. Chris says focus on profitability and customer experience, read The Millionaire Service Advisor and The Irreplaceable Service Manager, and track your effective labor rate.
Let's go to the question. We have a question. I think this question comes from Texas.
Beautiful Texas.
Should we move to Texas?
Yes. I mean let's think about it.
This question is from. Let me tell you his name. I wrote it down earlier. Greg. Hey Greg. We might be moving to Texas.
Good morning guys. My name's Greg. I'm with a small east Texas Chevrolet dealership. Been here about four years just or just over four years. And Amy, with no experience in the automotive industry, came from a pharmacy background. And my service manager is in between two different dealerships. He's got a total of over 40 years technician and service manager. He's kind of old sucking in place. And I really want to in the future I want to be the service drive in our area that people want to go to. He's kind of. It is what it is. And so it's always been.
Managed like you should. Most of the duties I perform, my dealer and general manager.
Have made it known to me that they're grooming me to eventually be the service manager. And in the near future I'm working on moving up, crossing over from service advising to being fixed ops.
Manager or just working parts in service.
To help us get parts more profitable or get profitable period because we're losing money. And I've got two female service advisors with me right now trying to get them to handle all of it on their own so I can go to the parts more.
I guess. Long story short, in my questioning, what advice do you have.
For somebody that is being groomed up to be service manager or fixed ops manager in the future and any tips or advice for that. I just got your books, the Millionaire Service Advisor and the Aeroplane Service Manager. So I'm going to read those a couple times and go from there. But I just want to know if there's any extra advice or tips or anything, something I should do extra on top of just my job plus some of the service manager's job and helping out with parts. I do have several key throwers, as we call them that they want to come in and see me. But it's hard right now with having those key throwers and trying to transition them to the grills and kind of work over towards parts more. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
Okay, Greg, the first thing that I, that I would say is I would be interested if you wanted to call into the show after you've read the books because I think the books are going to answer a lot of questions. But you might, you might have questions from it but definitely the irreplaceable service manager is going to give you a roadmap and a foundation. And a lot of it is about the customer experience, the systems, your, Your strategy, your leadership and how you manage. But, you know, focus on profitability. I think the biggest mistake that service managers make is because the dealer or the general manager isn't talking about profitability. They think profitability isn't important. But we've seen, I don't know, 50% turnover in service managers last year in, in some areas.
And it's always about profit. And so the service manager isn't looking at the profitability. They're not asking to understand it. And they're driving the bus without a steering wheel or a front wheelchair windshield for that matter. Right.
Yeah.
So profitability and the customer experience are the two most important things in anything that you do.
Yeah. And I think the other thing is that like you were saying, with the high turnover, I would say learn as fast as you can because your chance might be coming faster than you might think. Like, that turnover is unbelievable right now. And I think that they're just looking for people that understand the business portion of it, which as a group we've probably, as an industry we've done the worst at, is teaching those service managers.
You'll get this from the book, but pay attention to your effective labor rate more than your hours per row. Your effective labor rate drives your profitability.
More than anything else. But thanks. Thanks, man. Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driving 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 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.chriscollinsinc.com now that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.
