A short service-drive tip video by Chris Collins advising managers in automotive dealerships to "avoid terrorists"—a metaphor for employees or interruptions that steal time and reduce productivity. Collins argues most on-the-spot interruptions involve issues advisors already know how to handle; managers should ask advisors what they'd do, encourage ownership, and invest time in praising top performers to reduce interrupt-driven time loss.
Hi, this is Chris Collins with your service drive Tip of the day. Today I want to talk about how you can avoid terrorists. It's kind of an important thing and you probably think, okay, yeah, Kris, tell me how I can avoid terrorists. What do I mean by terrorists? I'm talking about the people that come in and interrupt your day and keep you from doing the things that have the highest leverage, that make the most profits, improve the customer experience and time management more than anything. What's stealing you from having good time management? So I travel all over the country and work with dealers and service managers all over. And. And the one common thing that I see early on with any new clients is that when I'm sitting in their office, people constantly come in and ask them questions. Now, let me tell you something. If you've been in our industry for more than a year, there aren't any situations that you don't know the answer to. You don't. So when a service advisor comes into a manager's office and says, oh, manager, I got this comeback. He's been back twice. All I do is I stop the manager and say, let me ask you a question, Mr. Advisor, what would you do? And the advisor usually says the right answer. And I say, why aren't you doing that? Let's face it, the difference between an advisor doing a great job and coming into your office and asking you and interrupting you is them just wanting to go the extra step and them owning it. Most of the time, service advisors and employees in dealerships come into your office because you. You're not giving them the attention in the right place. And so they're trying to get dad and mom's attention, and they want to be touched and felt. So what you have to do is tell them when they come into your office, what would you do then? Whatever their answer is, say, why aren't you doing that? Because 99% of the time they're going to be right in their answer. And then the next thing you need to do is flip your time around and go out and make deposits in your employees and encourage them for doing the good stuff and really encourage your top performers so they're not coming to you asking for attention from mom and dad. So that's my tip. Avoid terrorists. It's a killer of time management and performance more than anything else I see in our industry. I'm Chris Collins, and that's your service drive tip of the day.
