How To Manage a Slow Month | SDR #245

Welcome, everybody, to the big show. Today we're going to talk about how to manage a slow month. Also, Christian is going to share a little organizational system he has for his jokes.

Yep.

And much, much more. Coming up on this edition of Service Drive Revolution.

Welcome, everybody. How you doing, Chris? Joan.

Better than ever. Oh, I was gonna tell you something. So I was walking to work today.

It's my favorite. I thought it would be okay for a joke to start.

And I get stopped by a policeman while I'm walking to work, and he says.

He says, hey, I need your help. I'm like, of course, Officer. What? Can I do anything for you? And he's like, I'm looking at this guy with one arm named Luke. And I'm like, how can I possibly help you with that? What's the guy's other arm named?

Kind of combative there with the police officer, Right?

Little bit. That's what I do. That's how I roll.

Couldn't he be nicer to the cops?

I helped him.

You know, morale is low here in LA for the police.

It really is.

They're outnumbered.

That's probably why they were asking me for help.

Nothing, nothing made them realize they were outnumbered more than the riots during COVID.

The tables have turned.

Yeah. They had to pick their battles for sure.

What do you do when the cops are outnumbered?

Cut their funding.

Defund them.

Defund them? Yeah.

They're already. They're already in dire straits.

Lower them around, tell them they're dumb and they don't know what they're doing. What are you writing down?

Nothing.

What was that?

Do you really want to know?

Yeah.

I have my jokes queued on the cards, and if I don't cross them out, I run the risk of telling the same joke over again at a later time. And when I told that one, I.

Did a little inside.

Little inside base, so I didn't cross that off.

I've never seen you do that before. It was very dramatically.

So there's a chance that you would just go into, hey, I was walking to work.

It's so early Alzheimer's.

Yeah. I don't know if I've ever told you about this before, but I do have, like, a little fun thing I like to do when I'm walking. So it's a chase.

You crossed this joke out already.

Yeah, but a chase Hughes thing is, is where when you're walking up to people, if you raise your eyebrows, that it actually is kind of like a compliance caveman sign of compliance. Right. And it is so fun. Everyone I walk I. It's almost two miles to get home. And every single person I passed, I said eyebrow raising, good morning. And it's like you pull them out of a trance. It's the coolest thing.

Yeah.

So that was my yesterday project, but it was pretty neat. Yeah. You're spreading a little joy that no one expects.

Yeah.

So and, and want nothing in return.

Especially in this part of town. People try not to make eye contact.

They don't. But I, I, but I do the thing where I look at them until they, they're like forced to look over because they know that I'm staring at them. I like. Good morning.

What do we, what do we have in the news?

Looks like May is going to be a big, big month for auto sales. 20% increase versus May 2022. So we've got a nice little thing going on now where before there was an inventory issue. Right. And there were no cars. Now we actually have inventory and still the high demand. So there's a big increase that the interest rates aren't stopping anything which is really impressive. But they're going to sell about 1.3 million cars in May 48 increase. 48% increase in the supply of new vehicles. Which means that internals for our service department should be getting better, which is great. And then with more new cars then we take more trade inside. So now we've got little spikes. So it could be a really good summer for the automotive business. So I'm kind of excited about that. Whereas everyone was talking at the beginning of the year that the entries doom and gloom. The interest rates were going to kill everything. And then this one is going to be a really decent conversation. I think five key trends that will define the car industry in 2023 and beyond from automotive world. And it's talking about essentially that the number of young people holding a driver's license is going down.

So people are not getting a driver's license.

Yeah.

More than ever.

More than ever. That it literally like I couldn't wait to turn 16 for, for kids. It just doesn't matter to them. No. Then rising cost of owner car and cost of living are going up. But these are the things that they, they kind of pointed out. The first subscriptions will become commonplace. Uh, and it's talking about not only that subscriptions from the car sharing where it's like Zipcar is the example that they use here, but also that subscriptions for the, for the specific brands autonomous driving software is going to change the industry.

There's. They're going to you know.

Yeah, we know somebody who does Zipcar a lot.

We do, yeah.

Oh, does he lift weights? Yeah, he uses Zipcar. It's very economical for a couple reasons. But, you know, the main reason the insurance is included.

Turo was like that too. But you actually, you selected what insurance you wanted. You could bump yourself on insurance type. But it was part of the rental. But Zipcar is just included. Huh. Interesting.

Doesn't have to worry about parking, nothing.

Yeah, that's pretty smart.

So.

And he probably doesn't need a car that often. He says local. Does he drive to you?

Yeah.

Okay.

Most of the time he drives to me when he has a client after me that he has to go somewhere.

Yeah.

Which I think is like half the time.

He looks great. He really looks like he's in good shape.

He doesn't eat anything but gunpowder and protein powder.

Gunpowder. I like that. There's also a expectation that new vehicle development is going to be on the rise in the coming years. They're going to come up with some new cool stuff and then there's going to be more reliance on fleets. So people will become part of fleet services. Even like the subscriptions. Yeah. So even regular, regular customers will be part of that. Yep.

Whoever wrote this is doubling down on their.

They had three, but they listed it as five.

Yeah, but good stuff.

That's it for the news.

You want to talk about how to manage a slow month. Yeah.

So this was a. This was a really good topic that was brought up is how do we get through those months? And we had an episode a few weeks ago talking about how to kind of avoid the slow months in general is that you have to prepare for it a few months in advance. But when it does happen to you, I think that the. The natural tendency is to say, oh, my gosh, we're having a terrible month, or we're having a bad month. But there's a couple of different ways to look at it where I think that you can drastically improve during those specific times. So I've got a couple of things written down here. I know you've got a few too, but the first thing that I have written down here. Slow times equals high RO value.

Yeah.

So that was one of the most.

People don't focus on that.

They.

They just want more traffic.

Yeah.

But you really should be doing more with less than your average per ticket. Should go way up.

Yes. And this is where leadership really comes into play because especially so with. With advisors and technicians. I see this happen a lot during slow times is. Believe it or not. They rush when it's slower. I don't know why that is completely. But I'll notice a technician will go really fast through a job because they're worried if they don't get to the back, back to the next ticket that they're not going to get another one. So they might, they might blow off a car, not do as good an inspection, really go fast through a diagnosis, hoping to get to the next car, which they would perceive as a home run. Same thing with advisors. They might do like a five minute write up because they want to be ready for whatever the next thing is. And what happens is that they're just, they're letting $100 bills just roll out the door for everybody.

So it's a good time then to practice the fundamentals. Focus on the fundamentals of petting the dog, checking history, inspecting all of the important, you know.

Kind of difference makers that actually increase your average purse. So dotting the I's and crossing the t's.

Well, I also think too, it's a really good opportunity to, to prove the customer that we can over communicate with them. Yeah. So every time we say I'm going to contact you at 10, we should be able to get to him a couple of minutes early. We contact them more than we've ever contacted them before, make them feel really, really special. Also really good time, pick up and delivery is great. Even when people don't ask for it, say, hey, I've got somebody available, I could drive the car back to you, save you the trip to the dealership. Like, it's just a really good opportunity to go above and above and beyond.

Yeah, that's good. So in that spirit of practicing the fundamentals, you would want as a, as a manager to get people to come in 15 minutes early, talk about the fundamentals, do some sort of training, role play, and then watch them execute. Reinforce behavior or organized training and an organized kind of approach to it. Right?

Yeah. That's great. I love that. I love that idea. I have practice, practice, practice on my sheet. Or you have practice fundamentals. It's pretty good. I like when we make the list and they match.

You're not telling everybody that I handed you my list.

Oh, I didn't look at the list, I just looked at the topic.

Okay. Do you have another one?

I have one more.

What is it?

It's a really good opportunity to, you know, when you think about a service department, for the most part we have more customers coming in than we can handle. But during those slow times, it's a really good opportunity for us to practice the skill which if we don't need it today, we'll need it in the near future is prospecting and marketing.

So if we have customers that were here six months ago and the service intervals every six months, we could contact those customers. We could say hi to them.

That's not illegal.

How are you doing? I noticed illegal. Yeah.

Totally illegal.

Only in California.

And they hang up on you and they say, I don't know why you're calling me. Yeah, but so it's a really good opportunity because I think that that's something as advisors specifically is that they're. They're always used to it coming in. But I think that there's something about this, and maybe this is from my sales days where I feel like. But when I was responsible for my own paycheck, I was way more effective. But if I didn't have any ups coming in on the sales side, I went and created my own ups because I knew that there was someone that I talked to a year ago that either maybe they bought a car and are ready for a new one or maybe they decided not to buy a car and now's the time and they just somebody. Or maybe they just know somebody. That's right.

Yeah.

So you know anybody in the market? I do. And let me give you their number. Like how even just calling and asking. Kind of the universal reward you. But I think advisors don't have to learn that skill. But it's definitely something they should have. And then I think marketing in terms of the thing that kind of popped into my head was some sort of an event. I think it's fun to have during a slow month.

Yeah. But so that would go back to not getting caught flat footed. And what we talked about before.

Yeah.

Where you're planning this two or three months ahead. You know the peaks and the valleys in the year.

That's right.

Know the seasonality. If you're feeling that you're managing a slow month, it's because you didn't plan ahead and you're flat footed.

Yeah. Okay.

Then the other one I have is control the narrative. So a lot of times who's the most negative person in the department when things are slow?

The manager.

Yeah. Speed of the leader. Speed of the team. You have to control the narrative. You have to understand that the opportunity of a lifetime comes once a day. If you're willing to just give up and talk about the negativity, then everybody else is going to accept that as being okay. So you got to be the one talking about average perfect, maximizing every opportunity, getting on the phones, calling people that you know are due. But you got, you gotta, you gotta control the narrative, you gotta control the, the momentum, the thoughts, the beliefs, all that.

Yep. It's good.

And then another good one is to double the games. If you're playing games.

Especially at the first part of the month, to get off to good start is double whatever they pay, double the dice rolls with the text. Do something to encourage the fundamentals beyond just role play. Like there's got to be a reward.

Yeah.

And what you shine a light on or what you put energy to is going to grow. So shine a light on those fundamentals. With games.

It masks the fact that maybe a tech didn't have as many cars to work on if they get to play games after having a really good multi multi point that stuff got sold on.

So it's good.

Yep.

So how to manage a slow month? I think the most important one is your perspective and your attitude and what.

You'Re leaking onto your team. That's probably it more than anything is, is that the slow month doesn't become a month until the, the manager blesses it. Blesses it as the slow month.

It's never coming back after that.

Yeah, cool.

Thanks you guys. It was fun hanging out with you and we'll see you next time on Service Driver Volusion.

Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Job Revolution. 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-SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chris collins inc.com now that's offers.chriscollinsinc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.