Can Tablets & Video Inspections Save Your Service Drive? | SDR #234

Welcome everybody to the big show today. We're going to talk about do tablets and video inspections. Save your service department. Is that the way to go? Also we're going to talk about some upcoming exciting things we have going on here at Chris Collins Inc. And Christian's going to go over the news. So that and much, much more coming up right now on Service Drive Revol.

I don't know about you all out there. There's a little Morgan Wyland. I'm listening too much of Morgan Weiland. But I don't know about you all out there, but we're having a lot of fun around here. So we've, we've been doing the Technician Tree bi weekly calls. So we have, we have this thing we call Technician Tree Live which is to help you recruit technicians. You can do just the online or you can get a coach that will kind of help you through it. You're want your one on one coach. We got a ton of people in, in the.

In the program that we're doing. And was it last week we hired.

66 techs the last two times we've said how many, how many of you hired since the last one? And it was 66 was the total number in basically two weeks.

And so if you, if you just think about our industry and how hard it is to find technicians and then think about. So in this group we've hired 66, but with our coaches and all our clients out there, we're, we're hiring well over a hundred techs a month and you know, very good at it. So if you're struggling and you need technicians, make sure. I'd go to ChrisCollinsInc.com and sign up for that. I don't know how long we're going to do it, but we're doing it now and it's a lot of fun and so get in on the, get on the action while you can. If you've missed the first three calls, they're up in our on demand so you can access them and catch up really quick. And we're going back and forth in the content but you know, some of the content's pretty deep like SEO and you know, we're not, we're not leaving any stones unturned in our approach to it.

It's way deeper than anyone thinks that it is.

The reason why it works is because we're not, we're not everybody else.

Yeah.

If we were just to be everybody else, it wouldn't work.

Yeah. At the end of the day that, that recruiting Thing. The thing that's the. It is a standard of operation. It's a minimum standard. However you want to look at it. Like, the hard work and the. The intentionality of everything you do is required if you want to do that. And then us going into every single little detail is just kind of proof of that. That, like, you would never leave anything to chance when it comes to, like, how valuable a technician is in your stall. You have to put that kind of effort into finding them.

So if the average tech is 15,000 in gross. Right. Let's say we added 120 techs last. It's more than that in the last month, but that's 21,600,000 in gross.

What would we do with an extra $21,000,000?

Buy another commercial building with no parking that has a leaky roof.

That will burn through that 21 million like its cord would.

Yeah, we could probably do that in a couple of months.

Like kindling. Burn through it. Like kindling.

You really are affected by that Morgan album. It is crazy how many songs are on that thing. And they're good.

It's a great, great album. The other thing, too, just a little housekeeping, is we are having our next boot camp here in the office, and then the one after that should be in the library. The carpet is going down.

So by next week, we will be putting the bookshelves together and going. So it's coming. We see daylight at the end of that tunnel. But we're going to be able to start hosting things here at the building, which will be great. We also, for the library, have some pretty cool guests lined up to do workshops and some. Some different stuff here, which will be great. We have a Facebook leadership group. It's called the Leaders Syndicate. We did a contest in there where I gave away a signed edition of Rick Rubin's book. I would say new book, but it's his only book, which is great. And Kurt Wilde won it. He great guy. It was about participation in the group and activity and all that. And. Yeah, but he won it by a mile. And if you're not in that group, I would encourage you to kind of go over there and sign up. If you request access, the team will let you in eventually after a background check and a colonoscopy.

Oh, they went just down to colonoscopy.

Yeah.

That's good. That's nice. Yeah. Gosh. You know, the funny thing is about the leaky roof. Like, you understand. Normally we wouldn't have figured that out in California. Right.

Oh, this has been the I've never, I've lived here over 20 years. I've never experienced anything like it.

And I think that that's. The funny thing is about people from California and their response to rain is so humorous for me, coming from the Midwest, like.

Well, first of all, before you say that, let me tell you what's very unpopular here.

One is driving a jacked up pickup truck, listening to country music.

Yeah.

Which I miss.

I miss that.

But the second one is where is this drought and global warming everybody's talking about? Because it is colder and wetter than I've ever. This is like Seattle weather.

It feels very Seattle. Or I was thinking like springtime in Chicago. It feels like March in Chicago, not in la.

It's not that bad.

So it's super fascinating. But the thing is that people in LA absolutely have like this unrealistic fear. It's like, it's not rain. They're worried that like hydrochloric acid's falling out of the sky, which, with smog, maybe that's a little bit true, but it's so funny. Like at the lightest sprinkle, like an amazing amount of umbrellas come out. And I don't even know, like, maybe I've owned one umbrella in my life. But like, literally, I promise everyone, the rain won't kill you. You'll be okay. You could get wet and you'll dry afterwards. It's super crazy how that works, but people really respond and they drive terribly in the rain here. So it's so funny how Californians respond. Southern Californians respond to, to the rain. It's pretty nuts.

Well, also, I was gonna say a lot of them stay home. Like you. If you're like us and you'll walk around in the rain, you pretty much have the run of the place.

That's right.

Because people are inside, they're not going anywhere. It's like kind of like when I was a kid in Seattle and it would snow.

Yeah. You know, it's funny now that you say that. Three weeks ago it was a Sunday morning and I was getting ready to go to a Zumba class and the guy canceled because it was raining.

Yeah. No, they think it, they think it's life altering.

Yeah.

I mean, if the, you know, not to make a joke of it, there are places in California that are flooding and.

But it's not here.

Yeah. How much longer are we going to stay in California? I was having a. I was explaining to somebody last night. Well, caught myself making excuses, kind of like, I can't explain how how this place is rent, how you pay the most taxes in the country, have the least amount of money invested in school. Like, the schools are terrible. The crime is high, the homeless is high, the morale is low. Because I think that's the other thing that people don't talk about. But when you have this sort of chaos and crime and disorder, you also have low morale. Like just the general way people treat each other isn't good. People are, you know, and kind of the low end of self esteem.

Yeah. I think our lives greatly improve if we're not in California.

Our taxes do for sure. Okay. What's in the news?

I wasn't sure. Did you. Did you get my request? My vacation request for August?

I'm not signing that.

Why?

You're not going to a naked car show.

Yeah.

So.

So of all, if you could pick a state that there's going to be a naked car show, what would you think it's going to be?

North Dakota in January. It's in January.

No, it's in August.

Yeah. It's beautiful. In North Dakota in August.

Actually. It is, but. But it's Wisconsin, so they're having a nude car show in Wisconsin, which is not the place. I would have thought that there would be like. I really thought Florida would be a nude car show place. But. But apparently it's Wisconsin.

I mean, not. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how to say this nicely, but not the most fit. Attractive.

There's no way to say this nicely.

Yeah, but not where. But I mean, your vacation is your vacation.

Yeah, that's right.

But I don't condone it. I certainly don't want you doing a remote episode of Service Drive Revolution where we'll just.

I'll take Kevin with me and he'll just have to blur everything out.

If we have a remote, we're like sponsored by. What is the name of the thing?

The nude car show. It says it's like a remote.

Classic cars, right?

Yeah. It's a classic car show. Yeah.

They're just trying to get attention, which worked.

It did. Because we paid attention.

We sent it to everybody.

We thought it was hilarious. That was one of the best texts.

I don't know that anybody signed up for it, but crazy. Okay, so we're gonna talk about can tablets or video inspections save your service drive. And the reason why we're talking about this is because it comes up that people perceive that we are anti tablet.

Yep.

That we're anti video inspection.

Which is not the case.

It's so funny. Though, because I don't know how often it happens to you, but it happens to me all the time, where people come up to me, like, I know how you feel about tablets. I'm like, really? It's funny how they pass that on.

So let me give just a simple analogy to that conversation. Is like, let's say that you are.

Living in Alaska somewhere and you're out of food. Like, you have no more food.

Got it.

And you're snowed in. And I go, hey, Christian, should we pull out the fine china?

And we argue for 25 minutes about whether you should pull out the fine china or if we should eat off of the, you know, regular plates and bowls that we're using. Yeah, we don't have food to put on it.

That's right. We're just gonna look at the plates either way.

Yeah. And so most of the time, what happens is we have managers that are very ineffective, that don't have systems in place, haven't built a very good team, and then they think that there's this Hail Mary called video inspections. Or. I mean, I remember. I remember very clearly when I was the general manager of Crevier, sitting at the LA Auto Shows. BMW's like, their little area.

They have. Yeah.

And so it's a bunch. All the local dealers are sitting around tables with the vice president of BMW and the local market team and all that, and they're talking about. What was the name of that inspection? Soft mpi.

Yeah. Where? It was a. It was like a novel that you had.

So MPI had a deal with BMW and they were trying the BMW field reps. Their job was to get you to sign up for MPI, which was $5,000 a month, like a bunch of colored printers. It was literally a joke. And so they were talking to us because we weren't doing it, and we were number one in the country. Right. So we were influential or whatever. So they're talking to us about doing it. And I remember the dealers at my table, I go, well, how much did your. How much more are you making in profit? Oh, I don't know. You don't know? And I go to the next guy, think Dennis Isaiah or whatever was his name. I go, how much? How much more are you making? Goes. And that was after he'd said how much they love it and how great it is. And I'm like, this is like, you guys with CRMs. Like, everybody has a CRM, but nobody knows what it is or use.

The value is. Right.

We are not against anything that makes you better. We were. We are against changing the subject of the fact we don't have food, we don't have systems, we don't have talent. But we think that bringing out the fine china is going to present the greatest meal that we've ever had.

Yeah.

And it's not a band aid. It's. It actually is a level of complexity to execute. And so if you can't execute with paper, you can't execute with digital. Has been my experience.

And then the kind of more subtle thing is if I go and get you a Kobe Angus steak from Snake River Farms and I pepper that thing and cook it just right. Do you care if it's on china or on a regular plate?

It could be on a paper towel.

Yeah. And so what happens is if you get good at paper, you realize you don't really need. The china isn't going to make the.

Thing taste better, the plate, it's not the meal. Yep.

You know, you, you have a level of complexity when you have technicians doing video inspections in the sense, you got to train them on videos. You got to train them on what to say. You got to inspect what they say. Well, you're not even inspecting now. If you do it on paper and the quality, you're not re rack. You're not doing any of that. And so most of the time, like when I, when I was taking my car in and I got a video insp. It's not, it's. It's not the best presentation. They're giving you price right off of the top. They're confusing you like it's not, it's not well executed. And so if you can't do it with paper and execute it well and present it in a way that's quick and friendly to the customer with all the information they need, how are you going to do it on a video with, you know, a technician that isn't used to being on video?

Yeah. Certainly not trained to do the presentation portion of it. Right.

So I find that those conversations are changing the subject from what the real fix is. We're treating the symptom, not the cause. And believe it or not, if we build the thing to address the cause, you don't really need a lot of gadgets.

Well, I don't think it's gonna make it better or worse. I think that the only thing that, that we have to accept is that a lot of the manufacturers are going to this, and if they require it, they require it. It is what it is. But I think that the fact that people Think that just having it's going to fix it is a different thing. But like what you're saying is you're adding more processes to your system and it's harder, probably not easier.

Well, here's another layer of complexity that people don't think about. So if you own a tablet company and you go into a service drive who has no processes, can you raise the hours pero.25 by. By actually putting a process in place?

Yes.

Yeah. Now if you have a process in place, what I've found is the tablets actually make your numbers go down. But they're comparing it against people with no process. But let's compare it in a situation where you have a process. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

It's not a fair comparison.

It is. One of the advantages I put down is I do think that, you know, with all the tattletale reports that are on these tablets nowadays and the programs that run almost forces you into a process. So I do think that it helps when you're going from lawless to lawful. It's not the tablet, it's the fact that you're putting a process in. So it's like an excuse to do it. I also wrote down here that I think that the tablet is the customer's language. Like they're comfortable with the technology so it makes them feel more like it's their home field when they see everybody using a tablet that they use. So I think that that's kind of an advantage. There's other things I think that help out the recall thing. Like so Chrysler is that I thought about is that they have like a pod tablet combo and hooking the car up to the computer while you're doing the write up, you're going to catch things like open recalls, extended warranty coverages, maintenance packages, stuff like that. So there is technology that's good. But I still support your theory that if there's no process or if the process sucks before, it's not going to get better after.

I would also say this, and I haven't done this in a while, but I would go ask the technicians and I would frame it before I ask them, before I pose a question. I would say we're going to do great inspections on every car that comes through here and I promise you the advisors are going to call and present it in a way that our closing ratios are going to be worth your investment in doing the inspection. Right. Because you know, the demotivator is the technicians spend the time to do good inspections. The Advisor doesn't call, there's no accountability. And so then they kind of give up, which is natural. Like, it makes sense. Right. So I. I promise you technicians that we're going to do that and I'm going to prove it. Like, you know, we're going to show you, but I need consistency. Would you prefer to do it digitally or with paper?

Oh, and if you ask the technicians what do you think the main reason is, in my experience, they want to.

Do it with paper because it's easier than clicking through.

Well, because they got to go to a computer over here.

Yeah.

Then it's got to go to parts. Like they do it on paper. They're right there. It's intuitive. And then they're on to the next thing. All I care about is the consistency of the inspection and setting the technicians up for success. If I'm going through the ros and I'm rechecking re racking cars, I don't need the digital reports. They're nice, but I don't have to have them. And if I go through 10 ROS and one is missing an inspection, they all might as well be. It's the end of the world to me.

Yeah. That's the way to treat it.

I don't need to go through a hundred ros. Yeah. Nobody asks the text, by the way.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Tell them they have to do it, but we don't ask them. If we wanted to be consistent doing inspections, what would. What's the most intuitive thing for you? Paper has always been the answer. Yeah.

Speaking of intuitive, there's this dead homeless guy outside my apartment yesterday. So I kind of.

In California, there was a dead homeless guy.

Yeah.

I thought we didn't have homeless.

We do for sure. So I go out there, I'm just kind of watching and like.

These two detectives are there, and I'm close enough that I can hear everything that's going on. And the one detective, he's like, looking over everything. He's like, I suspect foul play. And the other detective was like, oh, you think he was playing with birds?

Oh, foul. Poultry. Yeah, got it. That's awesome. Well, let's end on that. Let's end on a little levity.

The abrupt. The conversation's over.

Thanks, everybody for tuning in. We'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution. Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Job 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.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.