Drive By Rewind: Unwritten Rules Service Advisors Need to Know!

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Welcome everybody to your Friday drive by where we answer your questions. Do me a favor, get a pen, paper, open your notes on your phone and get ready to write down a number. But first, let me introduce you to Chris, Joan. Hello everyone. And Coach Cliff.

Hello.

8333 Ask SDR. That's the number. Write that down. 8333, ask SDR any questions you have. I also would say that you're welcome to submit questions for parts holds and we will, we will put them that way. Right? So yeah, if you have any parts questions that you want answered, call that number and just say, hey, this is for parts. And we will, we'll serve that up. Also remember, if we play your call on the big show and we don't play them all, we've nicked some lately. We're going to send you a swag bag which might be a T shirt, a hat, coffee mug, notebook, that sort of fun stuff. But most of the time that isn't something you can buy. You only get it by having your question on the show or attending top dog or something like that. But we'll be making parts hold swag too. Oh, I can't wait.

Okay, let's go to our first question.

I'm a service technician. I have been a service technician for just over nine years at this point. I'm now 30 years old and I have a chance to be a shop foreman at a different dealership than I work at now. They're offering me this position of course with the incentives and the pay and all that. It's a smaller shop, maybe would be in charge of like eight guys, maybe 10.

My question is.

What kind of things can I do or look into a research to prepare myself more for that position? This is my first time being a shop for my period and is there any questions I should actually ask my service manager going into this? How should I get paid far as like any kind of bonus on top of my base pay and what tips and tricks can I do to increase productivity?

Okay, great, great question, Gary. And there's a, there's a lot there to, to kind of unpack. So.

The first part of this is understanding that when you go from being responsible for your individual performance to being responsible for others performance and to a varying degree you're going to have newbies, you're going to have vets.

It'S harder.

Just is all of us experience that coming up right one day it's you can create whatever outcome you want because it's just you versus you. And now all Of a sudden, you got a bunch of people that aren't as motivated. And probably one of the reasons why you are being promoted is because you're more motivated or, you know, more driven than everybody else there. So I would encourage you to do one thing. If you're on our on demand or in our coaching group, get. Have your manager give you access to the 17 laws of leadership and go through that, and maybe go through it twice, because there's a lot in there. But go, go through the 17 laws of leadership, and you're going to pick up a couple things in there that are going to be crucial to your. To your trajectory here. The other thing that I would say that I see with Foreman.

That happens when you're a really good tech is you fall into the trap of fixing it for them and not teaching them how to fix it. And so you want to create a new way of looking at things or new way of processing that. When a technician comes to you with an issue, you want to be welcoming, you want to be encouraging, but you also want to ask a lot of questions and not let them take shortcuts. So, for example.

I mean, this will happen to a service manager, right, is you'll be sitting in a service manager's office and an advisor walk in and go, hey, boss, can you call this customer? They're not happy.

Now, if Cliff takes that and calls the customers, every time somebody does that, how much better do the advisors ever get?

Zero.

Yeah. Because he'll do the work for me, and I'm going to take the path of least resistance. So when a technician comes to you with an issue, you want to start off by asking, what have they done? What do they think? Have they. Have they done all of the steps that they need to do to get to the point where they would have, you know, an idea and don't just give them the answer. This happens a lot when technicians become advisors. They just diagnose in the drive and they kill. They kill it because one, they're taking shortcuts to the customer, perceives no value in what's going on, and it creates all kinds of problems. And so as a foreman, you want to see yourself as the creator of good technicians, not the fixer of vehicles anymore. Don't fix it for them. Make them do the work no matter how hard it is. And don't be the kind of shop foreman where there's four cars lined up at your stall and you're fixing all the problem cars. You're not creating better technicians in your shop by Doing that and you will become the problem very quick. In those scenarios, the foremans that just fix everything become the constraint because now all the problem cars are waiting for you and nobody in your shop knows how to fix a car. They only know how to replace a part. So you got a bunch of part replacers and they don't actually know. So go through the painstaking process of making them figure it out while being encouraging, while being fair, and don't, you know, not making them feel inferior because they don't know something. Have the sort of atmosphere where there's no stupid questions, but we're not going to ask the same stupid questions over and over again. Right. But we don't want people to be afraid to ask a question because they feel like they should know it and they don't. So that, that's probably the biggest thing that I see with foreman is they become the constraint because they just fix everything and they don't mentor.

Yeah. If you're working on cars, you're not showing anybody how to do anything. I think that that's, that's a huge thing. Another thing that popped into my head was, is you have to really start to build relationship with your team and them to see you as the teacher, not the enforcer. Almost like if you're there, cracking a whip is a different kind of thing than if you're encouraging people to become the best versions of themselves.

There's a balance for sure. But I think the outcome of you being a good foreman is that that shop is productive.

Bingo.

That we're burning through work and the work is quality.

He asked that about the production, increasing the production. But I think key is what you've already touched on is him not identifying himself as the guy who's fixing everything anymore because sometimes it does bottleneck everything he's thinking about. Because a lot of them identify that, well, I'll take away all the hard jobs and I'll take them on all myself. And that'll thereby increase the production of the shop.

Yeah.

And then the. A couple other things that, that I think is, one is like if you looked at your day as 50% of it is mentoring and teaching. The other 50% is focused on the systems and the process. So you should be focused on as a foreman. You should care about how the vehicles are staged, how the keys are stored, how readily available the cars are, how the advisors are calling customers and the work is conveyed, how long it takes to get an estimate. You, you should be concerned about the quality of the inspection. So the more successful Foreman out there re racking and double checking the quality of the inspections and in a, you know, and in a fun way. And making it a learning exercise, not a condemnation. But everybody in their head has the thought that their car could randomly get chosen for reinspection. And understand one thing, that the guys that take the most shortcuts when they're inspecting are the vets, not the young kids. The vets. Pencil whip, they know it all. They put the stuff they want to do, but they'll never put tires or a battery corrosion or whatever because they don't want to do it. So don't, don't just re rack the young kids because the vets are probably worse than the young kids in, in my experience. And then get to know the advisers, get to know the parts managers.

Go.

A really good par shop foreman would be at the advisor meeting in the morning, would be involved in the parts department.

You know, don't just create a silo in the back. You, your job now is to be walking around and moving around and being available to the advisors and coaching the advisors on how to get better descriptions, how to do an estimate.

Creating consistent ways that estimates are created through a SPG or whatever it is. But as a foreman, those things make your tax more productive and really understand that good advisors are going to sell more customer pay and customer pay is going to create more hours that are, those hours are more efficient in the shop for your tax. Right. So like we're seeing this more and more with manufacturers where what's happening is the.

Shop is booked out three weeks and so the customers that are CP go to the independents and it's just warranty. So now technicians aren't efficient because they're doing nothing but warranty. And the last part, I would say, and I don't know if you guys have anything else, is you're a recruiter. To be a good foreman, you, you have to be the one out there recruiting. And you know, people want to come work in a shop where the shop foreman's got their back. There's a fun environment, it's positive. We're learning, we're getting better. You play a big role in that. So you got to see yourself also as a, as a recruiter and out there networking, you know, making friends with the tool guys, all, you know, all that. But filling your shop with talent, you don't want to just leave that to the service manager because, you know, a lot of times service managers or advisors, they don't know what you know about good technicians. And.

The worst Thing to be. What was that old parcels. Thing is you asked me to cook the dinner but you don't let me pick the ingredients. Was that his quote or whatever. You don't want to be in that situation like you want to, you know, you want to be involved in the recruiting also. So what I'm describing is, is you becoming more, you're going to become a manager very quick if this is your approach.

But you know there's a handful of foremen over the years that I've seen that think like this. But for the most part the foreman's the guy sadly with three cars in their bay waiting and they're fixing everything and they got a line of a couple techs waiting to then go to their stall and fix the other thing. They haven't mentored anybody. They feel important because they're fixing everything but they're actually the constraint. Next question.

Hey Chris, my name is Harry, number one. I want to thank you for giving me an opportunity to work one of the biggest Ford dealership in Southern California. You guys got me recruited in 2015 and.

There was about 18 advisors, what we call it as.

The Yankees or the Lakers of the dealership. It wasn't just another small dealership. Anyways I got the job, you guys trained me properly and I was one of their number one advisors.

I made over way over $200,000 came in from aftermarket. I'm just gonna name it Midas now. I took over a small dealership as a fix up.

But the question I have is I know you guys talk about advisors, pay managers pay.

I want to get into shop foreman pay. I want to be educated. How should I pay my shop foreman percentage wise.

By managers. What percentage do I have to be at?

Okay, so there's a, there's a couple things here.

That we want to keep in mind is there's a point that you need a foreman, right? And that's usually probably for some brands past 12 texts, under 12 text. It doesn't make financial sense. There are brands that require you to have one so you have to do it but it still doesn't make financial sense even for those brands. So how many techs you have.

Matters in that. In that scenario. Most of the time the way that I set up a shop foreman pay plan is I pay them a base and I then pay them so much for hours in the shop and then I'll pay them a CSI bonus. In some of our more advanced shops the foreman is paid on a, you know, instant inspection or where they're inspecting Cars in the drive. And so how are you paying in that scenario for foreman? Were you paying them by the ar?

Yeah. So I paid them a percentage of the AR sales.

Yeah. So then that's advanced shop foreman. But they're getting a pay a percentage of the sales they create.

In the drive through doing inspections. But I would say a base. 50% of their pay is a base. The, the other 35% is going to be hours. So you know, depending on the shop and then 15% is going to be. CSI is usually a pretty good mix there.

As a percentage of gross. I don't have a number for that.

Yeah. On the CSI thing, I'm just asking this question. Do you pay the shop foreman on the entire CSI or just like the fixed rate first visit score?

It would depend on the brand.

Yeah.

But it could go either way. Yeah.

I've also seen where your hours is a really, really good one. And then I've also seen a pay plan I thought was really interesting where it was on efficiency, on how many hours they turn in the expected time that they're open and then a little kicker on recruiting. So like increasing the number of techs, which could be a good thing too. It's like thinking about that as growing and working that into the pay plan.

Yeah. You know. Yeah. You wonder like if a foreman got two grand for every new tech coming in, how motivated they would be?

Extremely motivated to start talking to people going where they're having lunch.

Like that's a great point.

Would be the cheapest way to hire techs, Pay them two grand, everybody they bring in.

Yeah. Well, and also you could assume that the foreman's not going to hire somebody they don't want to manage. So they're.

They wouldn't want to hire somebody that didn't help out the other stuff, Right?

Yeah. You would hope they would be discerning. For the most part they would. There'd be a lot of those guys.

Are talking within the community. I mean they talk to each other, they know each other.

So great stuff. Thanks. Thanks for the call and the kind words. Swag will be sent out. Remember the numbers 8333-ASK SDR and we will see you again real soon on service Drive Revolution. Thanks for watching this week's Drive By. I hope we gave you something to think about over the weekend. 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 Ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chris collinsinc.com. now that's offers.chris collins inc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.