A short Service Driver Revolution video (hosted by Chris Collins) arguing that technicians are the single most important asset in a profitable service department because the commodity sold is technicians' time. Collins emphasizes recruiting, training, and retaining good technicians to deliver quality work and strong customer experience; he warns managers not to over-focus on secondary metrics or advisors. A second speaker concurs, stressing focus on the "end product" (profitability and customer experience) and cautioning against over-complicating productivity metrics. The clip closes with subscription and contact/promotional information.
Chapters
And so if you're not starting and building something backwards with the intention of I'm have a very profitable department with a great customer experience. Just about everything else you, you're going to do is going to put you in purgatory because you're never going to have a sense of accomplishment. You're never going to be driving the business forward. You're just going to be maintaining.
Somebody else's system that they created and invented. And you'll always be just a manager. That's it. Best a middle, you know, a middle manager. Now, when we get to the profitability side is the thing you have to understand is what you're selling is time, right? It's like a, a lawyer or a doctor, in a sense, you're selling time. The only person that can produce that time is a technician. So the most important asset that you have is your technicians. Nothing else matters until you have technicians. You have nothing to sell of quality. And you can't create a great customer experience if you don't have good techs, advisors, warranty, administrators, porters, none of you yourself, none of that matters if you don't have technicians that can turn the hours and turn the hours in a way that doesn't create comebacks and makes the customer.
Feel good in a sense. So just to recap, you want to run a profitable department, and you want to have a great customer experience, and to run a profitable department, you got to have technicians because the thing you're selling is time, right? And so it takes a lot of work to build a shop and recruit good technicians and keep them happy and motivated and, you know, that sort of thing. A lot of times we spend our time on advisors, and advisors are important, but they're not as important as the technician. So so far, just think, you guys, thinking back on our experience.
What are your thoughts on the profitability and the, the customer.
Experience as it, as it relates to Ms. Dawn?
Yeah, I think one thing that I wrote down that is key that she said is she said the end product. How do I make the end product? So kind of like you're saying there's only two things that really matter, profitability and customer experience. And I think a lot of times as a new manager, the lines get blurred so much as to what's the most important metric, what am I chasing? You know, all of those different things. And it doesn't, it doesn't seem in the moment when you're new that it can be that simple, that it can be just these two things. So one, don't over complicate it. Like you're looking for the end product. Those are the two most important things for sure. So, you know, stay focused on that. And, and, and don't. Yeah, don't over complicate it. Our industry, I think, you know, one of the, one of the things about having time as the commodity that you sell is it is easy to, to complicate it. Right. You have unproductive tax and you have all these different things. And that's always been a funny thing. And I know, you know, we've talked about it before, but it's always kind of a funny thing to me, all the different ways they measure that, from efficiency and proficiency. And productivity. And then you go to this group or this manufacturer and they define proficiency or it's the same word with a different formula. It's so funny to me. And then they want to fight about it and like, what are we fighting about it? And it's funny, too, because some people, you know, just want to fall on the sword of, oh, look at my spreadsheet. My shop is productive and their cost of sale will be $60 an hour. They're losing $60. And, you know, like, none of the math adds up at all. But they want to say that, you know, they, they look good on, on this one report. And it's funny how many metrics in our world.
You know, will feel good about the metric and the department's just hemorrhaging money. So don't, you know.
Yeah. Don't buy into all that.
Don't fall in love with any.
Yeah, none of that.
Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driver 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.chris collins inc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.
