Chris Collins critiques how office managers interact with shop profitability: many treat reporting as an administrative task (protecting data) rather than actively collaborating to improve financial outcomes. He notes resistance to change, territorial behavior over data entry, and a systemic failure to give office managers a meaningful role in profitability.
The way that I would frame it with office managers, I would say, hey, so this is what we're at. We're losing money. We're barely making money. We should be making this. I'm going to be spending a lot of time with the manager. We're going to fix some of these systems. Is there anything in there you want me to fix for you? And that was always a test for me to see how tuned in the office manager was. And 90% of the time, like, it was rare that I would get somebody to be like, oh, yeah, well, how are you going to make them profitable? Yeah, look, that would be great. Like, let. Most of the time it's like, you know, the warranty schedule or whatever, that they're not vested in the outcome. They're vested in protecting their department. And they, they run it more like a DMV than they do something that is, you know, having an effect on departments that are moving commerce like that are making money. And so that's a failure of our industry too, is that we've never bridged that gap. We've given the office manager a seat at the table, that they are involved in collaborating with the profitability in a meaningful way. They're just, they're just reporting it. So they, it's like if you can run the report but you do nothing with it, basically is what happens. They're protecting the data. And then they're also very sensitive about if they've been, you know, for the last 10 years, they've been putting something in the wrong place. And one of the first ones to come in and, and say, oh, why is that going there? Isn't it supposed to go here, there? That hurts their feelings so much. They just, you know, they can't handle it.
