Become the G.O.A.T. in your Service Drive (Service Drive Revolution)

Foreign.

Welcome, everybody, to Service Drive Revolution. We are super excited today. The number one podcast show for service drives, here to help you increase your customer experience or better your customer experience and your profitability. Have more fun, and we hope to give you some tools in the journey along the way in you trying to get better. Today I have a trusty sidekick, Mario. How are you doing, Mario?

I'm doing great. I really like the way that you said fun.

Fun.

Yeah, it's always fun.

Today we're going to talk about an article that I saw on LinkedIn about how teams are going to great lengths to acquire better coaches for their NBA teams. And I think it's a. It's an interesting conversation, and it also resonates because you're a big NBA fan, right?

Yes, sir.

So you're such an NBA fan that you named your son after an NBA player?

I did.

Or did you name him after a shoe?

No, it was the player.

Are you sure it wasn't the shoe?

It was the player. Definitely the player. But no, it's the goat. For those of you guys that know who the goat is, that is great. Michael Jordan.

Let's try it. Really quick to think, who can I slip in there? It wouldn't be Kobe, right?

I mean, he. I won't take anything away from Kobe. I mean, he was better.

Kobe or LeBron.

Man, that's hard. That's. That's one in the air. I'm gonna say Kobe for what he's done, but I think. I can't say, man, I like both of them. And I know some people would kill me for saying, you know, I like LeBron, but you can't deny talent. That guy is just. He's an animal.

LeBron's never had the team coaching that Kobe or Jordan had, right?

True.

I mean, they both had the triangle. LeBron's had the, hey, everybody clear out to the right and give LeBron the ball.

Yeah, you know. You know what? To go with an answer on that, I'm gonna have to probably say Kobe, because he had that assassin type of. I want to finish the game just like Michael Jordan did. And if you remember a couple years back where LeBron was always passionate, he didn't want to take the last shot. And I think that takes a lot away from legacy. Right. If you weren't the one, give me the ball. I'm going to finish it. I'm going to do it my way. LeBron was more willing to pass the ball to someone off.

Yeah.

I don't know.

There's a. There's a lot of games where the strategy of the other team was just double team. LeBron, sure. I mean, he wasn't surrounded by talent.

Kobe had a lot of.

The Shaq hack days, right?

Yeah.

Stop them. So let's double triple team.

Well, before Phil Jackson took over the Bulls too, like Jordan, when they would play Detroit in the playoffs, they would just double team him and kill him.

It was a difficult. It was a different league.

You just beat him up. Yeah. It's funny. So you, you're. You're pretty fast. You're a big basketball guy. Do you think if you and I played one on one, who do you think would win?

I'm gonna say me if you give me an opportunity. And I don't want to talk about the past.

But I think how many.

Times in the past have I beat you in basketball, do you think?

You know, I'm having loss of memory. I just can't recall anything past a year. So, yeah, I can't remember, Chris.

You know, my memory is really, really good. And I think it was 11. 11 games, something like that.

12 games. I think some of those games we could have broke it into two games. Once you found out the, the rule that I didn't share with you.

Oh, the. What is that rule called?

The skunk rule.

Skunk rule?

Yeah. Basically when you're beating me by like 8, 9 points, I have 0.

Yeah. What were we playing to?

I playing a 15 after a few games went down to 11, it's 8 to nothing.

Then it's the skunk group.

Right.

Because we're going to. Yeah, I remember a couple times it'd be 12 to nothing. You'd be like, that's the last time you're gonna score. You talk so much trash. You definitely won at chalking trash. You never give up on talking trash, no matter how. How the score is against you, whatever. You never stop talking trash.

Can't quit.

You believe in yourself.

I kept trying to get in your head and little did I know I was gonna get with Yoda here.

Gotta get up. Earlier in the.

And I was. It was the East Coast.

So this is a LinkedIn article called how the NBA's Top Teams Recruit top coaches and what you can learn from them. So in a close fought series, the difference between winning and losing may hinge on if they get the right players on the floor at the right time with the right plan. So the right players with the. At the right time with the right plan. So while it's mission critical for NBA teams to find and field the, the best players in the world, Club owners and executives will also go to great lengths to land the best coaching talent anywhere, employing many of the same tactics that recruiters use. Like many of you, they put a premium on finding leaders with skills such as adaptability.

Co collaborative problem solving and especially effective communication. As a result, many NBA teams have embraced an approach of hiring for skills over experience and, and promoting from within. So the thing that, that I think that's interesting about that when we talk about fixed stops, is most of the service managers come from the shop. And in the, in the shop, when you're attack, you're, you're not so much a team player as your flat rate. And your job is to turn hours. And you know, you work with advisors or a dispatch or whatever the system is, but at the end of the day your results are more dependent on your ability to turn hours. It's not so dependent on everybody else. I mean, to a varying degree of course, the car line, the, you know, the dispatcher, all that, do you have a say in it? But at the end of the day it's, you know, how effectively can you manage yourself? And then when you move up to shop foreman and then you move up to manager, the, the game changes. Right. It's like, how well can you get other people to perform? And I think that's where a lot of managers struggle is in, in these things that I, you know, effective communication, they're not great communicators. A lot of time. Collaborative problem solving. So what does collaborative problem solving mean to you when you hear that?

I'm thinking, you know, you're going to get your team together and together we're going to come up with an agenda, a plan or a process to put in place.

Yeah. And so you're not just a manager sitting in an office saying do this, do that. Right. You're asking everybody, you're saying like, hey, our goal is to win a championship and whatever that might be for you and your dealership. How do we define a championship? That's a part of figuring. You got to figure that out. You got to figure it out. Right. Do we want to be number one in csi? Do we want to be, you know, this percentage net to gross profitability? What, what is winning a championship?

Right. It, you know, when you said that, it just reminded me back in the days when I ran track. Right. Because goes similar to a technician. Right. It's a team sport, but you have individual contests within. And every time we had a meet, my track coach, Donald Burns, shout out to Coach Donald Burns out there, he would sit us down and say, okay, what place do you think you can bring in? And then he'll calculate the points and see where we're going to be at. He'd look at the other schools and average what they would score and then say, okay, you, you can't come in third, you need to come in second. And that's the way he would game plan with us. To know you have to be in these positions in order for us as a team to win. And individually, we're just thinking about ourselves. Right. And if we go out and perform and do what we need to do, then we know ultimately the whole team wins the meet.

Yeah, that's, that's good. And so I think a lot of managers struggle with that. Yeah. The, by the way, we were talking about this kind of before the show is your son Jordan. How old is Jordan?

13. 13 going on 17.

Still can't beat you in a foot race.

No, sir. No, sir.

Still faster than him in a foot race?

Yes, sir. Hey, let's be clear. I am 120 pounds heavier than him too.

Yeah, but you're one of the fastest people I've ever seen. Like, I've seen, I've seen you race in when we've been in dealerships, I've seen you beat guys in, in dress shoes that were, in tennis shoes.

Oh, yeah.

John Bart challenge you to, to a race. So you got the, you got the, got the speed thing down. I've actually, I don't think I've ever raced you.

Yeah, because I talked about it, but we have it.

But I know, I know I could beat you in basketball, but I don't think I can beat you in a foot race. I'm sure of it. I'll just give it to you. You beat me, there you go. And then I don't run the chance of pulling something or whatever. But the what happens to you? I'm asking, and this is a serious question, what happens to you the day that he can beat you? So two things. So I think two things here. Okay, so let me, let me back up a little bit is one is as a father, if he can't ever beat you.

You'Re gonna blame it on his mom, that it's genetics, that he's not as fast as you. Right. And then if he does beat you, what, like it's a, it's a weird.

It'S a double edged sword.

It's a weird thing, right, because you want him to on one hand, but on the other hand, you still want to be dad and you want to be better, right?

Well, see, I have the, I have the mindset of I want him to be better, taller, stronger, faster, smarter. Like that's what I'm pushing him to. So I want him to beat me, but it is going to be a shed eye tearing type of moment, you know, and like I said, double edged sword. I'm proud that he did it. I'm pissed off of myself that I lost though, because I'm so competitive, right. And so I think that's why I, I train them to get faster, but at the same time I'm out there running with him. I'm not just having him train and run. I'm like, hey, I'm going to do these two. Because I said, hey, if I'm not getting myself in shape, this guy's going to pass me up sooner than later. Right? So I'm not going to let that, let it become an easy victory for him. But when it does, he's going to earn every bit of that.

Is there ever a point where you just stop racing him and you don't ever let him win?

No. If he beats me, I'm going to come back and win back. I'm going to, I'm going to challenge him until I win again or I pull something, whichever one comes first.

Oh, man, that's f. It's fascinating because it's like, you know, that's a part of who you are is you're so competitive and fast that then you talk so much trust. You talk trash to him like you do to me.

Oh yeah. Sometimes I have to watch it because I get so comfortable and I treat him like a friend, right. And I, you know, we'll play, you know, FIFA or Madden and we play 2K. And you know, I get a competitive spirit even in a video game and I start kind of saying some vulgar stuff like. And he's pretty good. You know, these kids come up with these electronics and technology more than you. Yeah. And so sometimes he has beat me and yeah, he gets in my head and I just, I get frustrated and I'll just walk away. I'm like, oh, this kid. But he's me, right?

Yeah.

Learning that, the art of getting people's head.

Man, he looks like such a teenager too. Yeah, Mario's been bringing him to work this week. And so he, he's been around and he looks like a teenager. Okay, so back to this. Like many of you, they put a premium on finding leaders with skills such as. And here's the One that I think most managers struggle with. Adaptability.

Yeah.

How many managers, how many service managers out there don't want to change? Even though everything around them's changing, the industry's changing, their results are getting worse. They're doing the same thing they've always done. It's not working anymore.

Yeah.

And they don't want to adapt. They want to be right. They want to argue forever about how their way. Right. Even though the results aren't there, their way is the way. And their way was handed down from the manager they worked for before. Before. It's not like their way came from Harvard Business School or, you know, they know.

Right.

The 1985 Bulls. Their way is just, you know, what they're comfortable with because it's what they've always done.

Right.

Not the system that will get the best outcome, but they're stuck in it. Right.

That. That's to create a bad culture within your department.

So we have the experience of being in, you know, I don't know how many dealerships I've been in in my career, but, you know, now we have hundreds of dealerships that, that we work with. And the thing that we see in the service drive is when you go in and you have a weak leader as a manager, they have a hard time finding talent.

Yeah.

But as soon as we teach that manager leadership and they start understanding how. How to be a leader, how.

Then we start attracting the right people and then. Then those people attract the same. Right. Because winners attract winners. And so I don't know how many, how many times does it happen that nobody wants to work at a dealership in a market, and a year later they have hitters row. They have all the top advisors and techs from around town because word gets out and people want to come to a place where they're having fun, where they're being led, where they're being challenged, and you're attracting the talent that wants to be challenged. You're not trying to motivate people that don't want to be motivated.

Yeah. You get a bench of applications at your leisure. Like when you're ready for them, you just call them up and you bring them on board. But you already have the infrastructure up, so they know as soon as you come in, it's a performance environment. So.

But how many managers spend their career trying to motivate people that don't want to don't care? You're trying to motivate an employee that doesn't care.

Right.

And you spend all your time on these losers that really could care less. And in the end, they're going to go out with, you know, with a. With drama and as much noise and wake behind them as they can. And you've invested all this time in your emotions and you care about their performance and their livelihood more than they do.

Right.

That's a weird, that's a weird thing to, to be in. I mean, imagine when you were single or whatever and you're. You're dating a girl that you really, really like, but she doesn't like you, and you're, you're buying her things and you're investing her. At the end of the day, she's in love with somebody else and she doesn't care about you.

Right.

It's the same thing with trying to motivate techs and advis. Just don't care. What you need to do is create an environment of performance and start going after the people that perform at a high level and create an environment where they can thrive. Right. Create an environment of performance. Because people that want to perform at a high level want to be coached, they want to be challenged, they want change, they want to constantly get better.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, you've built a team of people that don't want to change, don't want to get better, and basically just, you know, want to survive and get through the day.

Right.

Instead of getting better every day.

Now, how do you feel about before we let someone go, say you're. You've been coaching them. Right. What I find out in managers coaching is they coach them the way they would like to be coach, and they don't really understand how that advisor, that person should be coached. Right. So which. How do you perceive that? Should you spend the right time coaching them in the right way or just kind of. They ain't working. I coach to and kind of let them out there.

Well, let's clarify that a little bit because I think that's a good question, but it's kind of a complicated one. Right. So say, for example, Jordan, when he turns 18 or 19, comes to me and he wants to be a of part.