Attracting Advisors In Remote Areas

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To your Friday drive by. This is where we answer your questions. What's on your mind? What's keeping you from being the best version of yourself? We are here to help. I'm Chris Collins and this is Chris Joan.

Hello everyone.

This is how it works. You call the number, the hotline, the 8333 Ask SDR. That's 8333 Ask SDR. You ask your question, you just ask it and then you hang up and sooner or later you hear it on the show or you get a call from somebody going, well, your question's a little out there, a little inappropriate or whatever it is.

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My favorite ones are the ones that aren't really a question. It's more of a statement about how great they are. It's not a question, it's just them talking about how great they are.

One of my favorites are what are you gonna do when it doesn't work questions. Those are cool too.

That's a statement also. Yeah, the self professing prophecy.

That's good stuff.

Okay, let's go to the question.

Hey guys, thanks for taking my call here. Two part question number one. I'm currently looking for service advisors or a service advisor trying to find someone who could potentially develop into a top dog advisor. So living in Canada. Canada, there's not a whole lot of people around that have backgrounds. So just looking for, I guess, some tips on where to start looking, who to start looking for, what you guys would do. And then the second part of the question is what sort of compensation is usually good for, for people? Maybe somebody who's starting out and then somebody else who might have some experience. What do you think the, the best way to go about that would be to, to attract somebody.

So the first thing that I would say is I personally wouldn't try to develop an advisor. I would try to go find somebody who's already developed and has a track record of performance. The way that you can determine that is ask them to bring their numbers. The other thing that you can do in an interview is ask them how many techs are going to follow them. The, the best advisors.

Have technicians following them or wanting to follow them. It's a little podcast. So if the advisor says, well, how many do you need?

When you ask them that question, hire them. You might be onto something.

That'S great. So I would go out and recruit I might even relocate somebody. So I would proactively start asking who are the best advisors you ever worked with. I would find out around you're. I'm getting the sense you're in a remote area. So I would try to figure out who the best ones are and then I would go after them. I would overpay for somebody really good.

And jump start. You know, the customer can pay for the advisor because it's as a. They're usually paid on a percentage of what they produce. So the customer is going to pay for it. You can raise your prices to cover the. The advisor. So it's a cost of sale most of the time. Depending on the. The brand advisors are 8% of the gross. Some of the brands spread the advisor with parts or you know, depends on if you have a parts transfer or not. So think about that. But at the end of the day it's usually 8% of gross.

Is what you pay for advisors as a whole.

Right. Not just on the individual. So like if I look at my total sales and gross profit, I want that compensation number for all advisors to be around 8%, right? Yes.

Now we don't pay the advisors on gross, we pay them on sales. But it comes out to you.

Yes. We have to do math behind the math. Right.

But we might pay him 4% plus some bonuses of their sales. But it's going to average out to about 8. Now you might have some advisors that aren't performing very well making 5% and we might have a couple advisors performing really well making 10, but the average is going to be around 8 at the end of the day.

And then there was, it was interesting. So he said that they're western Canada and that there might not be a lot of people out there. So I would just say that, you know, when you're thinking about western Canada and maybe you're in one of those places in B.C. or Alberta that might not have as big a population, but there's people even in western Canada that have been doing it at a pretty good level for a long time that I like the idea of relocating in that particular instance. So I might be marketing towards Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver to try to reload people. If you live in one of the smaller areas in the Western Canada area.

You'Re in a pretty remote area. You have an advantage because.

They can get more for their dollar.

Yeah. Walk outside and take a picture. Like it's just beautiful out in that area. You know what's funny though is that this question keeps. I'm getting asked more I don't know if you are, but I think that the advisor thing is demand is starting to catch up to tech demand. Have you heard a lot more people asking you about trying to find the best advisors lately?

I didn't think about it that way in the sense that they've kind of always asked that. But the tech thing, yeah, it's bigger news.

Right.

But I'm always surprised when people say, oh, we just got three new advisors. And I'm like, oh, where they come from? They're like, oh, well, one was a waiter and one was star. And I'm like, you started three advisors that have no experience. And like, oh, yeah. I'm like thinking in my head, yep, one of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would start one. If I had six advisors, I would start one newbie. And that's only after I had a bunch of rock stars. Yeah, because you start. You start that many newbies, it's like, you know, the culture is one of doubt and mistakes.

Like, there's just a lot of learning going on.

That was one of the first pieces of advice you gave me.

No, the first piece of advice I gave you is don't eat yellow snow. Remember when you were out there at three in the morning plowing the lot?

Oh, I remember.

Do you remember me asking why you were doing that?

Yeah, I just thought that that's what a good service manager did. I do remember that.

Remember when you were in the showroom unclogging the toilet? I'm joking.

Well, that certainly would happen.

No, but I remember I came in and you'd been there almost all night.

Yeah.

Plowing. It all looked good. You plowed it for sure.

Now, is that more amazing now that you know how terrible of a driver I am that I was able to make all that happen?

Oh, I never thought about that.

But at any rate, so besides the yellow snow advice, which was solid and I still use it to this day, especially here.

One of the first pieces of advice you gave me was, you cannot have more than one project at a time. And it was about advisors when you're talking about adding to the staff. And I was like, what's a project.

Getting somebody up that has no idea.

Yeah. So my comment to you is like, well, I just interviewed this person. They don't have any experience, but she was so great with people and like, you could see that. I think she was a waitress or something to that effect. Like, it was a customer service job. She was wonderful. And you're like, yes, but you've got this project over Here. And you can't possibly run the department and have two projects at a time. You can either manage the project or manage the store.

You know, the other thing too, that is a byproduct of this advice is like, let's say you're gonna start three Starbucks baristas and they're all sudden gonna become advisors. Just in our experience. What's the six months down the road? What's the success rate on that?

One in three? I would guess one out of three of them.

What's the success rate when you have one project, one person, you pick the best one of those three and make them your project.

Probably 80, 90% would be my guess.

So what happens is when you start three, they are all disenchanted by the industry, the stress, the whole thing. But when you have one, they're surrounded by experienced advisors and they see the poise and how it's supposed to be. So I would overpay for experience and then grow my own. Same thing in the shop. I got to fill the shop with good attitudes and experience and then bring in new guys. A lot of times you bring in new guys, they end up just like those old dogs that don't want to do anything because that's who they're around. That's their.

Yeah, we have to be very conscious of the environment we're bringing people into.

That's their example of tenure and success is the guy that doesn't want to work on warranty. Yeah.

You know what's funny is I'm even now thinking that I said one out of three. But the truth is when you start three at the same time, the best chance is that none out of three make it.

That happens more than not.

Yes. I think that I'm wrong on the 1 out of 3. I think it's typically 0 out of 3. Whereas 1 out of 1 would have made it. Yeah, like that's completely the situation because.

They'Re around advisors that are pros and then that rubs off on them. Yeah, there's no reason to be stressed. You know, it's just we go to work every day kind of a thing.

Yeah. Oh. I mean, and imagine all the other things that come with having. Let's say you have six advisors and three are brand new baristas. Like as a manager, you're volunteering to drive to purgatory because the customer issues that come up with a new advisor, the other advisors, numbers suffer because they're doing the. They're backstopping the three new advisors. Like the whole thing is like if you sit and think about it before you do it, you don't do it.

Good stuff. Great question. That was fun.

Yeah. See you next time on Service Drive revolution.

Thanks for watching this week's Drive By. I hope we gave you something to think about over the weekend. 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. The that's 8333 Ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers Chris Collins inc.com Now that's offers.chriscollinsinc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.