Chris Collins describes lessons from turning service departments around, drawn from commission-based consulting where failure meant personal financial loss. He emphasizes rapid, execution-focused interventions (aiming for 90-day turnarounds), doing deep assessments, listening to staff, and using subtle implementation tactics so teams 'think it was their idea.' The core claim: successful turnarounds depend more on systems and psychology than on individual people; transitioning a business from losing to breaking even is especially painful, while improving already-profitable businesses scales more easily. Closing includes promotional call-to-action.
Chapters
What have you learned from turning businesses around?
This could be an episode all in itself, but.
Well.
There'S a lot of parts to that. So I. I would say that, like, the. The way that my progression with that went, especially when I was younger, is I was lucky, in a sense. The thing that made it the hardest for me, actually, is what kind of gave me this unique skill set, and that was that I was doing it on commission, and if I didn't fix the business, I didn't get paid. So, like, we see a lot of guys out there, consultants or whatever, they get paid for their advice, but it's like a weatherman. If your advice doesn't work.
You'Re not giving a refund. Right? Right. But if you're. If your stuff doesn't work and you're on commission, you are giving a refund in the sense that I left home, I flew to Dallas. I've been there for weeks on end. I've spent months doing this turnaround, and then it doesn't turn around. I am losing money. Like, you know, your skins in the game. Yeah. And so you have this. This thing that happens in that scenario that you. You are very.
Aware of what the idealized version of things are and what is effective. And you also become very aware of the hardest thing is executing not ideas. Like, you know, when we go into a store, a lot of times people say, oh, we thought of that, or we tried that or whatever. And I was like, okay, well, we're actually gonna do it. It's a huge difference. And, you know, maybe you tried it and didn't work, but, you know, it's gonna work this time in that sense. And so I remember, like, early, because I was really young. I remember not making money a couple times and being devastated. And then. Then I started, you know, batting 100, where I wasn't, you know, that there wasn't any real errors to that degree. Even if they started slow, I still was. Was making money. But then the. The thing that I kind of, like, started playing. Playing a game in my head is like, how can I fix something in 90 days? Like, how can I turn this around quicker? And.
What happens, right, is is you go in and you do this assessment.
And you. You just listen, and.
You just let everybody kind of dump all of. All of their negativity, trauma, whatever, on you. Then you devise a plan. You got to trick the people into the plan. So you got to do a little bit of a sleight of hand, because if you. If you come in and you're like, hey, we're gonna change your pay plan and we're gonna do this and whatever. People tend to leave. Or it just creates chaos. When you're trying to create order, you, if you do it wrong, you create more chaos, so you have more turnover, more volatility or whatever in that sense. And so.
Then, so then you do a sleight of hand, you get it going and you fix it. And then what happens is that the same people.
Then end up believing that it was their idea in a weird way. And there's very little. Like, the results will be incredible, right? Like, you take something from losing money to making a ton of money in a really short period of time, which oftentimes, like, we deal with this, we don't tell people our results because they don't believe it. They think it's impossible, right? So you can't tell people, like, hey, these are, these are the numbers. Because in their head they're like, that isn't possible. And I think to some degree, they think, like, if that is possible, I'm so lost that I don't even want to. I don't even want to open that gate. They have no choice but to not believe that it's possible. Yeah, I get it. It's way easier because whatever that if, if I can't imagine it, then I must be so off. I don't even want to touch it. Right. It's just, it's too big of a. Of a suspension of belief for them. So then what happens, though, is when it does happen and the results are huge, they, if you do it right, they believe it was their idea. You're trying in the process to make the manager look good and, you know, gain confidence. And there's a lot of things that we're doing there to build self esteem, there's team building all, you know, there's a lot of things going on that people don't perceive but create that outcome in that recipe. But if you just came out and told them, they would want to fight it or they, you know, they wouldn't understand. It would, it would confuse them. And so at the, at the end of the day, the thing I think that I learned from all that is that it is psychology more than anything. So, you know, when I'll interview people for potential coaches, like, I'll ask them, like, what's the recipe to turn something around? Because we'll get managers that, you know, the ideal candidate for us is somebody that goes somewhere for five years, fixes it, gets bored, goes and fixes another one or some of these public companies have guys that go in and fix and I will ask them, so if you're baking a cake and you're fixing something, what is, what is the most important ingredient in there? And.
Most of the time people say it's the people, but it's not the people, it's the systems and the psychology. And most of what we do is psychology.
It's not, it's not the, you know, the people are going to have the psychology imposed on them, but it's not the people. If we do it right, they don't really have a choice. They're just coming along in their own self interest because.
We made it worth their while in a way, you know. So I would say that it's psychology. The other thing I think that I, that I have learned is that if something, if a business is losing a lot of money.
Most of the people there are not going to make it. If a business is breaking even, a very small amount of people, if a business is making money, that's where you can have the biggest impact. Because they have systems, they have people, and we can come in and just fine tune that to the degree where it scales really fast. But to go from losing to breaking even is like giving childbirth. I've never given childbirth, but the analogy of it's very painful, you're giving a piece of your soul basically away to do it. And so.
You know, whenever we're looking in stores like that, like we always, we always.
Assume that it's worse than it is in that scenario because we don't want to get caught flat footed. And if it's losing money, there's a good chance that there's bodies buried somewhere, there's people stealing. The culture is bad. All of that by accident is people misunderstand culture. They think culture is making everybody happy. 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 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 that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video. Sam.
