Chris Collins and Christian explain how technicians become irreplaceable and earn top dollar. Build customer relationships through personal cards and photos so they request you specifically. Mentor junior techs with structured pay overrides, which scales your skills, increases your earnings, and improves the business.
Happy Friday everybody, and welcome to service Drive Revolution and your Friday drive by. I'm Chris Collins, this is Christian.
Hello, everyone.
Christian sometimes likes to sneak in with a joke, so pay attention because he might randomly just be like, hey, you know when I was in the desert the other day or something like that. He had one that started with, what was it? Oh, I was hanging out with my accountant friends or what was it? Financial planner.
Financial planner friend.
I was like, is this a joke? Has to be. What a fun group. These financial planners love. Like. But anyways, we are here to answer your questions. That's what the Friday drive by is all about. The phone number. Get something to write with or open notes on your phone and put this number in. It's 8333-ASK SDR. That's 8333-ASK-SDR. That's the hotline call with your questions. We're here to help. If we do play your question on the big show, we're going to send you a swag bag. A bag of swag.
Only the good stuff.
Only the good stuff, which is like a T shirt, a mug, a hat. Stuff you frankly can't buy.
And people love it once they get it.
The way you get it is by calling in a question. Okay, I am a fairly high performance performing technician.
How can I be an irreplaceable million dollar technician? How can I become an irreplaceable technician and millionaire technician?
Like, he took both books and blended them together. That was great, man.
The real answer for this question I don't really want to talk about.
There's another level to that. Yeah, I feel like we can give him. We can give him little nuggets.
Yeah, that's a great question.
Okay, well, the first thing that you can do is think beyond just hours of labor and think about collecting customers and the customers coming back. So anytime you can say hi to a customer, like maybe even write a note, a little card to every customer, like, hey, thank you so much for letting me work on your car. It was a pleasure. And customers are going to come back and ask for you. And if you think about customers come back and ask for you. Over time, more and more customers are asking for you that are out of warranty, that need bigger repairs, that sort of thing. So.
Doing something like that where you're leaving like a little card in the car and then offering to meet the customers if they have any questions, that sort of thing.
I had a technician that had little pre printed cards that had a picture of himself too, because. And I and I remember asking him about it.
He said, well, I have to see if he's good looking or not because if you don't want.
Oh yeah, this tech was decent looking too, so maybe that was part of it. But I remember asking him, so you put your picture on there. He's like, yeah, if there's a picture of me, I'm a person. I thought that was really, really ingenious for him. He was also, he was next level tech in terms of his abilities too. But he had pre printed cards, but always hand wrote something underneath. It was like the printed with the handwritten. Thanks so much. I really loved working on your car. So Steve.
Yeah, Something personal too, like I love your, you know, your Tahoe or whatever, whatever, whatever it is. So think beyond labor and think about the customer and you know, these customers have lives and kids and problems and all that. And then the second thing I, I would say is to become an irreplaceable technician. I would offer to mentor other techs and there's a couple ways to do this, but most, my favorite way to set up a mentorship is that for like 90 days, sometimes a little bit longer, you take a younger tech and you get an override on their, their time. So let's say that you make, let's just say $30 an hour and this younger tech is making 15. I know these numbers are unrealistic, but let's say you're making 30 and the other tech is making 15. You either get the balance of the 15 for every hour they flag, or maybe you just get like 10 bucks for every hour you flag. But you turn these younger technicians into flat rate machines like that have a sense of responsibility that understand how to make time, how to QC their own work. And in every shop that, that I've worked in, I usually end up with one or two technicians that I'm constantly giving them mentees with an override and they make more money. But also the impact that that has on the younger kid, but also on you, like there's nothing better. We're doing this right now internally, where we're having our existing coaches coach new coaches. And the thing that will happen, because this happens to me, to Christian, to everybody, is when you coach somebody, you have to analyze how well you are doing in relation to what you're teaching and it makes you better. It's like you have to kind of, you have to live up to what you're teaching and you know, think about it and analyze it and you discover yourself in the sharing of the knowledge and wisdom with somebody else. So I would say being a mentor to somebody else, it would be a really good step also.
Yeah, I think the big part about that, that mentorship doesn't just make you better, it actually makes the business better.
And I gotta say, that's one of my favorite questions in a long time.
Loved it.
It's a great, great question. Thank you so much. Remember, if you have a question, it's 8,333, ask SDR. Call in the hotline and we will, we'll answer your question if it's good. There are some that we, we don't answer because they're a little, a little off. But let's assume you're not off and you have a good question. Call it in. We'd love to hear it. But that's it for me and Christian. Goodbye, and we will see you next time 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 subscrib 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.chris collins, inc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.
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