How to Become a Service Advisor From 1,000 MILES Away! (Service Drive Revolution)
Chris Collins, Don, and Jeremy answer listener questions about landing dealership jobs from far away, switching from technician to service advisor, and running morning meetings at small dealerships. They recommend short video outreach to hiring managers, learning to talk to customers instead of diagnosing cars, and staggering shift start times with rotating coverage.
Chapters
How's it going, Don?
Oh, it's going swimmingly, Chris, I gotta tell you.
Have you ever had moonshine?
Oh, yes, yes, absolutely. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Monday and Saturday.
You drink a lot of moonshine.
Everything that ends.
Any good, cheapest option.
Any good questions this week from our listeners?
Oh, we have the best questions this week. You want me to read them?
Yeah. Let's remind everybody that if you submit a question on.
LinkedIn, YouTube, you can email info@chris collinsinc.com and your question makes it on the show, we will send you some swag.
Nice.
Which consists of some service drive revolution. T shirt, hat, coffee mug, stickers, that sort of stuff.
No moonshine though.
Okay, what's your first question?
Well, first of all, I can't believe you're not sending the moonshine. I mean, let's be honest. But here, here, let me get to the question.
Hello, Chris, I am 24 years old, single and have no kids. I am looking to move into a dealership on the west coast. Coming from Ohio, what strategies or methods can I use to attack the job search from a thousand miles away?
Can't you on Tinder, Jeremy, move the mileage out? Like, could you go a thousand miles on Tinder? Does anybody know?
I wouldn't. I've been married for 21 years, sir.
Oh. Now, are we trying to get you a job or are you trying not to be single? Oh, you don't.
It's a job search.
A job search.
Job search.
So how do you get a job a thousand miles away? I think that probably the best way is to send a nice cover letter with your results. So whatever your results are now, like, hey, I'm, I work in this service drive. I'm the top in csi, I'm the top in sales, and I'm looking to relocate.
No one's gonna read a letter.
No, no. How would you do it?
Service managers are busy.
So how would you do it?
Technology. Right? Make a video of your skills, talents and ability and get your own YouTube channel going and send it out to all the service managers all across the west coast. Pick the city you want to be in and show them how you can actually help their dealership make more money. Go to the principal as well. Don't just stop at the service manager, but use technology. They'll watch a two minute video. They're not going to read a cover letter. Besides, postage is very expensive. Email's fast.
How do you get their emails? Easy.
The dark Web.
How do you get their emails in the dark Web?
Just Go to the what? Just go to the.
See, this moonshine is affecting you.
The dealership that you want to be at. Pick the car line you want. Go to the dealership that you want. Look at their website, call the dealership, find out who the principal is and the players that be and ask for their email address. You'll get it. And then bug the hell out of them until they hire you. It took me six months to get hired onto my first dealership.
And that's how you did. It was a video?
No, we didn't have video back then, sir.
You did it.
Morse code.
I called every week and showed up once a week, every week for six months. Then the service manager finally got tired and said, the person you need to talk to is this person. And I said, great. What kind of car does he drive? And then I stalked him in the parking lot until he gave me a job.
Yeah? Nothing.
It works.
No, that does work. Okay, so Jeremy's idea is make a video and email it out. Would you call and follow up and say, hey, I sent you a video. Yes. I'm thinking about coming to your area. Watch it.
The hard part about phone calls, those.
You're just.
They never answer the phone.
No. But if you left a voicemail.
Yeah, voicemail for sure. Absolutely.
Cool. Good one. Okay, what other questions do we have?
We have another question From Andrew on YouTube. I am looking to change to an advisor from a technician. I am a customer service provider at hot. What tips do you have for me to be an awesome advisor? Slash rider.
Good, Good one, Good one. So the. The hardest part of a technician going from the shop to being a rider is that as a technician, you kind of know what's wrong with the. With the car or the truck. And so you diagnose it and you end up killing the whole process. And so the thing that you have to do is not diagnose, but pretend like you don't know anything about anything and just get the information down without saying too much and talking too much. Because you're going to cost yourself diagnosis. You're going to take shortcuts, and you're going to end up sabotaging the text when they get the ro because. Cause you've half diagnosed it on the fly, but you've never really hooked it up to anything. You haven't really done it. And you lose that chance for the customers to pay or to claim warranty or whatever it is by diagnosing it in the drive, which is gonna cost.
You hours per ro, effective labor rate and all that. As well. Right.
So that's the hardest part, I think that I see is that you have to unlearn how to fix a car or truck and learn how to communicate with customers, make friends. And so the conversation needs to be more about them, their kids, their work. You know, really petting the dog, watch the pet the dog video on YouTube, really connecting with them on a deeper level. And not the car, the commodity, you know, that sort of thing.
Yeah. And I would say, I mean, if you're serious about it, make the leap. Just take the leap and go do it. I hate to see us losing a technician because there's a huge, huge technician shortage right now in our field. However, if you do want to be a service advisor, go make the leap, make it happen, Get a coach. We have some of the best coaches on the planet and that will accelerate your career path and getting into the service advisor position that much faster.
Good, good one. Okay, next one. Don, what do you got?
We have another question from Lisa. Lisa writes, I listen to your podcast and have the on demand platform. I really love your training. We just love hearing that, don't we, Chris?
We do, absolutely.
I have a question, though. I know you answer questions sometimes on the podcast, so here goes. If you have a small dealership like me where there are separate ships for advisors, how do you do the meetings? I have three advisors. One comes in at 7, one at 7:30, and one at 8. They also leave in staggered shifts. I want to see what you think the best way to handle the morning shift meetings is. Do I wait for everyone to get there? I don't want to change everyone's schedules. Thanks, Lisa.
That's a good one. So in our on demand training in service Manager University, we, we, you know, teach to have shift meetings or certain things that happen at those shift meetings, but it kind of sets the pace for the day, gets everything going. And, you know, we usually have games and those sort of fun things going on then that we announce and talk about. So my advice, Lisa, would be that I would change their schedule. I would have them all show up at 6:45, and then I would have one of them stay late and cover every third day. So on Monday, one of them stays until 6 o'. Clock. On Tuesday, another one, on Wednesday another one, and they just rotate. But you're going to work a little bit longer. You're going to work an hour longer, once every third day. But the leverage that you'll have and the momentum by having them all in a room all at one time, starting at one Time will be way better. And the other thing that I would really pay attention to is are you then staggering the text in the shop? Because if your advisors are coming in at different times, but the shop is all starting at 7:30 or 8, I want those advisors there writing and loading the shop. So what I like to do is start the text an hour after the advisors so they've had a chance to write enough ros. Then when every tech gets there, they have work because technicians, if they start and they're looking for work for the first 30 minutes of their day, they never really get in a groove and they never really get momentum. They go get a breakfast burrito, they're drinking coffee, they're talking about this thing, and then that's kind of the pace of the day. So another benefit of having all the advisors start early at one time is that we're going to load the shop when the, when the tech start. They got plenty of work and we have momentum. So that's how, that's how I would do it is I would start them all early and then have them just rotate who stays late, have one of them stay late every third day. Great, great question.
Great question.
Good job, Don. Thank you so much. We're enjoying this with you. I not sure that it is okay with your parole officer for you to be drinking moonshine, but if you would like to partake on the side, you are free to join in.
Absolutely. Bring it on.
Well, I do appreciate, I do appreciate the invitation there, Chris. I, I, I do have a problem, as you know, and thank you for exacerbating it.
You're welcome.
Anything we can do to help further your career.
Yes.
Thank you so much for watching this clip of Service Drive Revolution. Now you can catch the full episode on on YouTube, iTunes or Spotify or wherever you consume your podcast. If you have any questions, go ahead and post them in the comments below. Make sure you subscribe and hit the bell icon so you're notified when we post new episodes. I'm Chris Collins and you can find me on Facebook and Instagram @chrisbulldog Collins and I'll see you again on the next episode.
