How To Prepare For The Summer Rush

So the subject that we're going to talk about today is post Covid pain and I've been saying this for a long time on coaching calls that there is a pent up demand because traffic has been down and people haven't been driving as much. People have been working from home, traffic is down, but the lid's coming off of that dude and traffic is up. And now what we're seeing on our coaching calls and in the conversations we're having is we've cut back our support staff, we've cut back our advisors and techs and now we're going from a situation where we were running out of work to we're booked out weeks and we can't handle in like a little. Were you saying a little less than half of our clients are tracking to have best months ever.

Yeah, and not by a little bit. Like they're blowing old records out of the water right now. It's so much fun to watch. Like it's, it's definitely something. I think that in general that the group would agree that they weren't as ready for it as they should have been. Even though we've all been kind of talking about it for a really long time. But there is a lot of demand right now and it's just, it's kind of a feasting time. So it's pretty cool.

Now the thing that I would say and you guys jump in here, but the thing I would say here is you gotta remember a couple things. You gotta remember that the person interacting with the customers is the advisor. And you still have to approach this like we control the faucet. And if we think that advisors can go from writing 10 a day to 20 a day and we can maintain consistency, you're crazy. You have to either grow your systems and add more advisors and techs or you have to control the amount that's coming in. Now if you're controlling the amount of traffic coming in in this situation, you're gonna get booked out. And once you get booked out past a couple weeks, your no show rate is gonna go up quite a bit. So I don't believe that, that from now until the end of the year things are going to slow down. They're only going to pick up because, and this is, this is being reported everywhere. Even though gas prices are high, people want to get the hell out and they are going to drive this summer, they are going to take road trips this summer. They are going to be moving around because people feel pent up and they want to get out and About So more people are going to be driving somewhere on weekends, they're going to be going to parks, national forest, all kinds of things. Traffic is going to be way up. So you want to scale now, get ready now, add advisors and techs now, because the traffic is not going to slow down whatsoever. It's only going to grow through the summer. This will possibly be one of the busiest summers across the board that we've ever seen. But you will miss out on that opportunity if you don't build the capacity to serve those customers. And what happens is, if you don't get ready for this sort of thing is you're going to piss them off and they're never coming back. So you're going to have all this opportunity served up. It's going to be there and all you have to do is reach down and pick it up. But if you, if you're complacent and you think that with, you know, the same amount of advisors and the same amount of text, you're going to be able to over deliver and that your advisors can go from riding 12 a day to 25 a day and maintain a customer experience that's just acceptable. You're crazy. And we're not even talking about over delivering. What we really want to do is over deliver and be a hero to those customers.

We won't be even delivering an average experience if we don't get ahead of it. So now's the time to hire and build. You can take a little bit of a leap of faith right now, I think, and hire more techs and advisors than you think you need. Although I would say in our experience, everybody needs more techs.

It's still the number one discussion. And I think the big thing is knowing that there's so much work coming in this summer. Like you can get really creative with what the value is going to be of that technician this summer. So even things that maybe you might have done before in terms of offering incentives for people to come in, come on board your team, I would probably move that up even more. It's just really, really important for us to get the team in place before it gets crazy.

Just trying to train during that kind of rush is not helping anybody. And it's not productive at all because everybody's gonna be too busy to train. And then training falls to the wayside.

I have a couple friends that have just been driving. Like they'll just drive to Arizona. They'll just drive because they're just sick of being in the house. They just want to get out and they, they don't really even know where they're going. They just want to get out. And I think that this summer we're gonna experience that. Families are gonna go on trips camping. All of that is gonna. It'll be the busiest it's ever been, I think.

Well, even last summer was like that too. Right. So weren't RV shops having like some record years and stuff like that? With sales of RVs and the RV rentals were going crazy. I expect that same thing to be. Be actually worse this year. I think it's gonna be amazing winter opportunities. But yeah, a lot of people are taking the road to nowhere, aren't they? I mean, they're just getting in and they're. They're going. It's pretty cool. Time for a road trip.

That's what I did all last summer.

Wait, so I thought that was going to be a joke, but was that a joke? Was that a Christian joke?

No.

Didn't that feel like a setup? Like a lot of people are taking the road to nowhere? I would be something about, you know. But what would be the punchline to that?

You let us down.

Yeah, totally. It's okay, though.

You caught me off guard. Yeah. I was like, oh, here he goes.

Right? So now I'm trying to disguise my segues.

Be really careful, you guys. Seriously, like, don't burn through customers by taking them for granted. This is the time where you can build your retention and your RO account because you're gonna have opportunity. But the things you need to focus on is answering the phone, being available when customers, they're gonna wait until Thursday to get their car serviced to go on a road trip on Friday. You need to build the capacity in order to get them in. You need to make it easy for them to get in. You need to make it easy for them to call on the phone. So think about all the little things. Like those things matter. Answering the phone when somebody calls, being available for them to come in, spending time with them, actually calling them back or over calling them. You know, that stuff matters. So don't take it for granted. You. Everybody has a tremendous opportunity sitting in front of you. And it's how you plan and execute on that that's going to determine what happens next year. Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driving 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 8-333-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 that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.