How Service Managers Get Fired | SDR #322

Welcome to the big show. Today we're going to talk about why service managers get fired in an industry where over 50% are turned over every year in leadership or management positions. Why does that happen? What are we seeing? Christian and I also talk about our most traumatic firings, and they're pretty interesting stories. Christian gets a little choked up, so if you want to see him cry, stay with us for this edition of Service Drive Revolution.

I don't care how long you've been doing something, how old you are, it never becomes normal or gets easy to fire somebody.

Never.

Never.

The pit in your stomach. There's like, a list of things that you go through.

Yeah. So I recently had to do it, and I can't remember the last time I've had to let somebody go because, like, there's never a situation where I have to. Like, everybody that's let go is down the food chain. Right. So I don't ever have to. In fact, I thought about. In this situation, I'm not joking. I haven't told you this, but I thought about.

I know where you're headed.

Where am I headed?

You're gonna have me do it.

I was.

I had it all planned, too, because I was gonna do it, and the person called in sick, and so I had this stuff all done, and I was like, I could just leave it, send you a text, and tell you.

To do it before you go.

Oh, my gosh.

There is a. There is a little bit of that. Like, I am kind of the grim reaper of Chris Collins, because I'm pretty sure that I've had to do that a few times over the years.

The funny thing is, is even if the person is like, there's just no question that it has to happen. Right? Like, there's no way to fix it. There's no way around it, whatever it is. And, you know, for me, that's pretty far down the road. I think I go further down the road than a lot. A lot of people. Even in that situation, it's. I still can't sleep the night before.

Can you sleep the night after?

It depends on the situation. In this situation, I slept really good the night after because it had to be done. And, like, so I wanted to do it on Friday, and they called in six, so then I had to do it on Monday. Right. So the whole weekend. I like thinking about it. I just think about it and think about it. I just want it to be over. So then when it's over, I mean, I don't feel good about it in any way. Shape or form. I feel like, you know, every time somebody doesn't work out, I feel like I failed. I let him in here. Like I let him into the company. I interviewed him. I. It's at one point I thought they were the solution to whatever that was. Right. And so I'm really hard on myself when it comes to that. Like, because I don't like, I don't like that. I feel like it's a waste of my time and their time that I need to be better at that. So it depends on the situation. In answer to your question, in this situation I slept really good because I had gone all weekend with not being able to sleep and also like so Friday I was up all night filming so that didn't help either. Cuz I'd been, oh yeah, you should.

Have slept like a baby on Friday night.

Why didn't I had to get back up at four to be down here for Sunrise to film again. So we filmed after as the sun was going down and then we filmed as the sun was coming up.

This is off topic a little bit, but I do appreciate like our production team and like you really learn when like I get to see it from this side how much goes into all that crap. Like it is crazy how much goes into it.

I agree with you. We're making some good stuff. We have a lot of talent here and we're having fun, diverse and cool, cool stuff. If you haven't seen the books that changed my life, stuff that we're doing over on the library channel, check it out. Like there's some great ones on there. I don't know what I would say. I mean people probably think Kelsey Grammer, like some of the, the more famous like Jenna from Dancing with the Stars are the better ones because they're famous. But man, there's some good ones. Like the stories that people have about books that change their life are pretty incredible.

Yeah, there was easily 10. I thought that like my. I've got a bunch of favorites. Like I. Hanks was one of my favorite.

Like just she's probably my favorite too.

I thought she was pretty amazing. The Easter eggs on that channel though that I think that everybody, even on our car side would get a lot out of are like these little videos and I didn't know you were doing them but like the videos about the way that you carry all your stuff and everything. Like, like they're almost like a. Oh my everyday carry. Yeah, like a really, really cool product review of understanding. Like just the high level of int goes into everything and that the Everyday carry review was. It was so cool. Like the shots, but also the information, like there, there's something for everybody on that channel.

Just for those of you that don't understand what we're talking about, the Everyday Carry is like, how do I carry books around? Because I'm always reading books. I'm. I'm usually carrying like three books at a time. Sometimes it's more like when I go up to the lake to jet ski. I might take five. I took five last time. But how do you take books and keep them from getting damaged? Especially if they're nicer books or collectibles that you're reading and you want to take care of. You can't just throw them in a backpack and they're heavy. And so I have a system for that that I've figured out. And yeah, it's all about books though. It's like book nerd stuff, but stuff that people don't really talk about in a way. The other thing too, like I said it in that video. But we could do. You could. I could. Hoagie could. A lot of us could do a video on how to pack.

There's no doubt we pack better than we. We are 97.

And only out of necessity. Not. This isn't a hey, we're smarter. No, it's just we've traveled so much and like the idea that when you travel so much that you have to check a bag, one is dangerous because if you check a bag and you're connecting somewhere and your connection doesn't work. Your bags Mia.

Yeah. And inevitably it's when you're doing the, the presentation and like you have this beautifully pre picked outfit. It is always in the checked bag and that screws everything up. Yeah, it's always that.

So you gotta know how to pack for a carry on. So I mean, I rarely ever check a bag. Yep. Ever. The only time I check a bag is like I go somewhere and I buy a bunch of books.

Well, I will buy a suitcase. You don't check going to. You check.

Yeah.

I have this vision of your garage having 347 suitcases actually.

They're easy to give away.

Okay.

So like. Yeah, you give them away a lot. Like somebody asked to borrow one and then you just tell them they can keep it or whatever. But yeah. So fun stuff on that channel. And it's, it's good. Back to the, the firing thing. It's. It's never fun, it's never easy. And there's. There's always this thing like that even if the person has done wrong by you, anybody who has a family that's gonna go home and tell their family that they no longer are employed is a terrible thing. Like, it's. It's not something that I take lightly. I don't know. I'm very empathetic when it comes to that sort of thing. I'm a little bit of an empath. And so I. I replay that stuff in my head more than people would think. And it's. Yeah, it's just not easy. It's terrible.

We have a. We have a mutual friend that I used to work for that, that. That he gave me two pieces of advice that are great.

Is his last name Camp and his first name Steve.

Yeah, Steve Camp. Love you, Steve. But he told me two things. One is when it's time to do the deed and let him go, that it should be super fast. There's no dragging it out. There's no world where, like, if you get to a point where you've made a decision, you're terming somebody, they can't talk their way back into the job. Like, it's gone.

And there's no reason to get a piece of skin going out the door the other way.

There's no need for anybody to. To get a piece of skin or let them try to get a piece of skin. Like, they're not going to feel better about it later on down the road. And then the second thing he told me, and that's what that just reminded me, what you just said is he said, before you start feeling sorry for yourself on how hard it was for you to fire somebody, remember what it's like for the person on the other side. It's way worse. And I've never forgot. That was well over a decade. It was probably 15 years ago that he told me that. And I still remember that every time I have to let somebody go. Yeah, it's terrible for the person on the other side.

So I remember the very first time I had to fire somebody. And, you know, just one of those situations where I was the porter and then the person that was in charge of the porters, they called us the Lot lizards. We were the lot lizards. You can't say that anymore. It's not politically correct. But we were lot lizards.

Like salamanders. Can you say that?

No. We were lot lizards. That's what we called ourselves. That's just what we were. But I don't know. There was a group of like seven of us, and we washed every car and it didn't matter. Rain, cold, whatever it was. We were washing cars, and my boss, the person who hired me. So I'd started off part time, and then I was full time. They quit. And so then they put me in charge of the lot lizards. I was what you call the. The head lot lizard.

Were you still a teenager when this happened?

I think. I think I was. Oh, my gosh. I think I was 18. This story might be better if I was 17.

It doesn't sound like an exaggeration.

No.

So 18 and you're in charge of people?

Oh, you know. You know what's funny? You know that. Not. We're gonna jump all over the place, but the. You know that thing that I have during the leadership workshop where my mom put together this thing of me through the years.

Yeah, the collage thing.

Yeah, we were filming the other day with that and on. On. I think it's third grade. The synopsis was that I was a natural leader. Like, my mom used to always say that if you want to find Chris, he's the one organizing a game of kickball or something. But that was in my thing, which I thought was kind of funny, but, yeah, so I was in charge, naturally. And. And I think my first hire was my first fire because there was this advisor there, and she was my mentor. Like, she was the one that let me write her internals to learn opcodes. She was the one that when somebody would call in sick, she would call me up and have me write some customers. She. She literally like. Like, you know, took genuine interest in me. Now, it benefited her, too, because I'm riding and closing internals in her number.

But she was a really good advisor, right?

Yeah, and just a pro and just like, took care of people and was like. She was just a very hardworking, genuine person. And her husband was awesome, too. He was. He was a tow truck driver. And they were just incredible people. But she comes to me and says, my niece needs a job for the summer. She's back from college, and I needed somebody to drive the shuttle. Can you believe the.

The Synergy line?

Yeah. And so, yeah, so I went through the whole process. I hired her. She was really sweet, really cute, really nice. And.

She got in one wreck, and that wasn't good. We had a year. She was driving the Euro van that was our shuttle. And then not. Not much, you know, down the road from that, she got in another wreck. And then my boss, the service manager, calls me in and he goes, you have to fire her. And I was like, what?

Like, what are you talking About. He's like, you have to do it, like, blah, blah. Which, you know, he kind of like. I would have loved to have delegated it to you. I was just going downhill. There's no way he wanted to, because she was so sweet and nice. I think I borrowed his office, and I called her in, and she started.

Crying, which is its own episode how to handle when people cry. Let's not go too deep into worse.

Because, you know, she just wasn't a good driver. But it wasn't that she wasn't a good person. It was terrible.

Yeah, it's. It's really funny how rare it is that when you term somebody they're a jerk way too often. It's that they're these really sweet, nice people. That's so hard.

Yeah.

Oh, so your first hire was your first fire. That's.

And I know. I know what a lot of people probably are thinking is, like, how is she insured? And all that, but I'm telling you, this was, like, back when insurance was easy.

I don't. I would assume that most those insurance companies at that point in time were asking who was driving the cars here.

Nah. No, it was like a blanket thing. Like, it was. That came later, all that. But. Yeah, so that was my first time firing somebody and hated it. The good news is it wasn't. Like he told me the day before, like, he told me, and I had to do it. There was no waiting. It was, like, immediate.

Okay, I'd prefer that.

Yeah. Because the waiting is the worst. Like, I just. If I'm done, I'm done. I just want to get it over with.

Yeah. Well, I'm trying to remember my first was.

What was your worst?

Okay, let me just go with the worst, because it's way worse than the first. At the time, I was living with. Living with a friend of mine, and his brother was one of my technicians. And they were just, like, the most open. It was a wonderful. Just an amazing family. Like, they welcomed me, and it was like, one of my first experiences, like, with a Latin family. And you immediately recognize, like, when you didn't grow up with, like, a really loving family, like, what that was like.

And they were just, oh, it's family first.

And they were just like, the most loyal, loving people, and they love spending time with each other. And I was just. I sat in awe of it most of the time. And the technician that worked for me, good technician, heart of gold, early to the shop, stayed late. He was my Saturday guy. If I needed an extra guy on the Saturday all these wonderful things, but he. He left a wheel loose, and the customer basically wrecked the car and everything like that. And I had. I had no choice but to do it. My lunch was at my neck when I had to do it. And, like, I'm not a super emotional person, but I do remember, like, I was. I was holding back tears when I was, like. When I had to do, like. Yeah. So how many times you see me cry in the eight years that you know me?

Zero.

Zero. So, like, that was really.

I feel like you're about to cry right now.

Yeah. Like, even kind of redoing it, like it's a thing. But can we see you cry for.

The first time right now?

No. Can you.

Can you go back to that moment and try to pull up the emotion?

Stop yourself.

What did it feel like? What was the room like?

But.

It was one of those things where he just sat down like, hey, I gotta let you go. And he looked at me and he said, I know. And that kind of let the weight go off a little bit, because, like, it wasn't. He. He just probably won. When he said, I know.

Did he say, I know, gringo?

No, surprisingly, because. No.

No Latino would. He wouldn't. They wouldn't fire each other.

Yeah. No. But in this case, he understood, and he left. I wrote him a really good letter, recommendation, got him another job and everything.

You lied to the next place?

No, because I would hire him again if I could.

But he left the. He left the wheel loose. Yeah. Yeah.

The number one job of a technician is not to leave the wheel.

Couldn't work in my shop. He could work in someone else's shop, but it's terrible. Terrible. That stunk. Um, if you can't tell. Yeah, but, yeah, that was a thing.

No, it's terrible.

And that was one where. Because it happened really fast.

Right.

Like, I let him go that day. I feel like I probably didn't sleep for three or four nights afterwards.

Because you were afraid your roommate was.

Gonna stab you in the middle of the night? Like, fair.

What. What happened with the roommate?

I moved out a couple of months later.

But not because of that or because of that.

No, just because it was time. Time to move on and everything like that. But he. He understood. And he's like, I bet that sucked.

Like, he's like, it's terrible.

I wouldn't like to do that either. But he understood that there was no world where, like, there's no sweeping a wheel falling off and a customer getting in an accident under a rug. Like, you couldn't make that go away.

Yeah. And so, you know, the, the thing about this too, that I, that I think about all the time and we talk about internally is the, the amount of turnover at the service manager, parts manager position and at the service manager position. For most manufacturers, it hovers around 50%. Some are higher, some are a little below, but it's around 50%. And in the fact that we don't look at that as an industry, as a huge failure, always surprises me like it's a flip of a coin whether somebody makes it.

Yeah.

Like, I can't think of any situation in my life where I want the outcome to be a flip of a coin. Like at a 1 out of 2 chance that half of the time I'm gonna fail at something awful. Terrible.

Yeah.

And so nothing, you know, really, really changes now. Like I said, we take it very seriously and we think about it and talk about it a lot. And we were trying to do the math on what our turnover is for service parts managers in our program. And to the best of our ability, the number that we could come up with is less than 5%, and I think that's even a little high. But we were trying to be conservative in our number. But it's pretty rare that a manager in our program gets let go.

And if it does, it happens early.

I would say, like there, there probably are years where we have more managers become general managers than we've had fired.

I can think of at least two of the last three years that would be like that.

Yeah. And so, like, that's a drastic difference from the industry as a whole. You have all these manufacturers, you have all these dealers, all these dealer groups, and the training and the mentorship in the environment that they put people into ends up being a flip of a coin, which is nuts for the amount of customers the, you know, service and parts departments touch and how important it is the amount of profitability, employees, all of that, that the managers aren't given the, you know, the right tools and aren't really told the truth about what it is. And so Christian and I came up with a list of, you know, the, the main reasons we see that managers get fired. And each one of them is kind of a conversation. But we. It sucks. Like it. There's no way that, that 50% of the managers out there aren't talented, that go to work trying to mess it up. They go to work indifferent. No, these are people that for the most part work really hard, care, want to do good, but it's just not set up that way. It's a churn and burn.

Yep. They were recognized and promoted from a different position.

Yeah.

Usually somewhere in the dealership, like there's a, there's a lot of that going on. I think we probably could, could have done more than this list. This is just a good starting point.

But it's a good list. Yeah. Okay, so the first one is maybe the most important one. And it's a trick bag in the sense that most of the time when, when we go into a service department, the general manager, dealer is telling the fixed ops managers to chase gross. They don't see the financial statements, they don't understand it, they don't know how to read a financial statement. And so they're chasing gross, but they have no concept of profit. Now what the dealer, general manager mean when they say, get me more gross is more profit. And what the, the dealer and general manager usually don't understand fixed stops enough to understand that you can increase your expenses and get more gross. Like a lot of times what we see is the, the expenses will be up 15 and the profit will be up 5. Like most of the time the expenses are up more than the profitability. In a scenario where the manager doesn't see the financial, doesn't know how to read it, doesn't understand what's going on. And I say this all the time because I was a dealer. There isn't a dealer that I know or respect that doesn't have the financial statement within 2ft of their desk. Constantly. They're looking at it. It's a, you know, they're referencing it and the first thing they do is go to the bottom and look at the, look at the profit, every one of them. And so, you know, it's a trick bag. The industry doesn't teach managers how to read financials. We see it time and time again when we do our masterclasses here in the library. We do them every month. And invariably there will be, you know, really good people that have been in this industry for 20, 25 years that have no idea how to read the financial statement. And, you know, I mean, there's two parts to that, I think. One is like, I knew very early on, in my early 20s, that the financial statement was the key to everything. So I bribed somebody to teach me how to read it.

But I don't know, I'm a little more pushy and crafty than most people.