Chris Collins (speaking from Los Angeles) explains how to automate a service department by implementing simple, repeatable systems so the business runs without the owner. He contrasts reliance on trendy software with disciplined systems and shares a manufacturer-audit story showing 98% inspection rates and much higher profitability in his clients. He outlines a three-part system (fun, accountability, constant improvement) and gives practical tactics (auditing ROs, re-racking cars, technician competitions) to make inspections and upsells reliable.
Chapters
Hi, Chris Collins here and my trusted sidekicks, Bacon and Lola, the Bulldogs. Ms. Lola is actually pregnant right now. She had an ultrasound the other day. They do ultrasounds for dogs, and it looks like she's gonna have about six puppies. So that's gonna be fun. We're gonna have a bunch of puppies around. Chris Collins headquarters here in Los Angeles. In this video today, I want to talk to you about how you can automate your business and by automating your business. What we want to do is we want the business to run for you, not you have to run the business. We want to make it scalable. Something that's scalable and you can grow as your traffic and your RO accounts increase. Makes me think of a funny story about how we try in our industry to add software to everything. That's kind of the new trend. We think that software is going to be a magic pill that we can take and instantly become amazing and be successful. But the truth of the matter is, successful success all comes down to just simple, boring systems and executing those systems. So I'm going to give you kind of the keys to the systems and what three parts of a system you need to make them really work and successful. And I want to tell you a story about. There was a manufacturer about four years ago that called me out to their headquarters and done me. I thought, oh, wow. You know, they want. They want me to help them with their stores. And so I get out to their headquarters, and I said hi to a couple people that I knew there. And then they pull me in this conference room, and I'm sitting on one side of the conference table, and two of the factory guys are sitting on the other side of the conference table. And then the door closes, and they got really, really mean. All of a sudden. They said, Mr. Collins, we have a big problem with you. And I'm like, oh, what is that? And they said, you're stopping our digital inspection system from going into eight stores. And every time we call those dealers, they say, we'll talk to Chris Collins. And I said, oh, well, okay, hold on one second. Let's talk about this for a second. Now, what do dealers hire me for? And they gave me a blank look, and I said, they hire me for profitability. Now, I understand the factory isn't always concerned about the profitability of a dealership, but that's why dealers hire me, is for profitability. And I said, just out of curiosity, what's the average profitability in the western region of the United States? And one of the two gentlemen said, 1%. And he just answered like that. And I said, okay, well, then my average client for your brand is 30 times more profitable than your average client. And the other gentleman said, I don't know that it's 1%. And he actually emailed me after I left the meeting and said it was 9%, I believe at the time. So their average client was 9% in the Western region. My average client was a little over 30% for that. And I didn't ask them about retention numbers. And they. They've never discussed retention, but my retention in my dealerships, a lot higher than their national average also for that brand. So I said, I have a really hard time asking my clients to buy software that's 2,500, $3,000 a month when they don't need it. And I said, we don't need that software. And they said, well, how do you know we don't need it? I said, well, they've come in and audited my stores, and there's no benefit to having that software. I said, but I'll tell you what I'll do, because I want to be friendly and I want to be a part of the solution here. I said, pick any two of my stores and come in and do an audit of their ros. And so they picked two of the stores and they came in and they did an audit. And what they found was 98% of my ROS had inspections on them. Their best benchmark for the software, I think, was around 68%. And the average upsell was almost twice as much as their average upsell with this software. And so the problem kind of got gone away. And nobody from the factory ever called me and said, wow, your results are amazing. Because it wasn't the trendy software that they were pushing at the time. Interestingly enough, a year later, they no longer were endorsing the software, and the software kind of went away, and it was the flavor of the month. But what didn't go away is the results in my stores that stick inspecting cars every time they come in. 98% inspection on the ROS that they audited. That's a very strong number. And it's something that's hard to achieve, and it takes very disciplined execution of the systems. And so the key to a system for you, and I'm going to use inspecting cars as an example of a system, the key to that system is three things. And I've come up with this over the years, the three things. The number one thing is there has to be fun Involved. If you want a system to stick and you don't want it to have this bell curve where, oh, yeah, we did that for 90 days, but it went away. There has to be fun involved. You have to play games with the advisor, and there has to be some sort of fun game with the advisors and the techs. Then there has to be accountability built into the system. And let me give you an example of accountability in an inspection program is you got to go through the ROs and make sure that inspection sheets are on the ROs. If there aren't inspection sheets on the RO, there's a problem. I would inspect every car that came through. The second key to success with that is when work is recommended by a technician, only one of two things can happen. Either the work is added onto the RO or it's added to a decline line. If it's not added to the RO or not on a decline line, it means the advisor didn't present the work to the customer. You got to go through the ros and you got to make sure that those things happen. On the flip side with the technician, you can re rack cars. You can go to your cashier booth right now and pick out two cars that are waiting to be picked up. You can put them back in the air. The air have somebody completely different than the original tech inspect those cars and then compare the inspection sheets. And we find over time that technicians get used to picking out the same things on cars they want to fix. There'll be certain technicians that always want to do ball joints on every car. But we find that when we re rack cars, they miss simple things like tires because they don't want to do tires or just simple battery corrosion that is easy to clean off, but that's too boring and not exciting enough to put on the ro. And I'm not saying that in every case, and I don't. I don't want to generalize that all technicians do that, but for the most part, that's what I see in dealerships, is that technicians, over time, gravitate towards the work they want to do more than the work that's best for the customer. So you want to have a system in place that you're reracking cars. And you could add fun to that and play games with the technicians where send three technicians into the waiting room, put a car up in the air and have them come out one by one and inspect the car. And whoever does the best inspection sheet, give them a $25 gift card to Starbucks, and make it fun. And have all the other technicians around watching and learning. So you can turn that into a lesson and into fun if you want. But the key is that you have to have accountability built in. So the system is three parts. The first part is fun. You have to have fun to make it stick. The second part is accountability. Now the third part is constant improvement. If you have a really good system, it has to constantly improve. And constant improvement involves you having feedback from your employees how to constantly improve it. And if you're having fun, it's automatically going to get better because the advisors and the technicians are vested in it. And if you re racked cars and had the technicians compete on who did the best inspection sheets, then constant improvement is just going to naturally happen in that system. So when people ask me, how do you get these systems to stick? That's the key, those three things, it's fun, it's accountability, and it's constant improvement. And that's how you can get amazing results that are scalable and that are automated so they're running and you're not running them.
