Lose Your Techs, Lose The Game

Hey, Chris. Awesome show. Just wanted to say glad I found you guys. I listened to the podcast on the way to work every day. It's great. I got a vet. We've lost four techs since March. Competitor dealership offered to pay them 40% more hour on a flat rate. So now we only have five. Tax.

And we've been busy. And I can't find certified techs with experience. The shop is still producing the same amount of hours a month after those techs left. And the advisors are going crazy buying time or putting customers in rentals for days because of it. Upper management doesn't want to pay to get experienced techs. And when they do hire techs, they are entry level techs. And after a couple months, they leave for more money. So how can I convince them not to do that? I feel like we're losing customers because we can't get to them faster. We're booked a week in advance. I've been with the same brand for 20 years. It's been 16 years with this dealership. But I'm thinking it's time to jump ship, you know, maybe for a better organization that's willing to spend money to make money. And our parts department also sucks, but mostly just because of the parts manager. He and the fixed ops manager like to keep the inventory thin and thinks it's better to order everything once the job is sold with next day delivery.

Good news is that Covid hasn't affected our sales. We're up every month from the previous year by about 8 to 12%, depending on the month. But any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

Why is he picking on the parts manager, do you think?

I don't know.

I mean, what did the parts manager do? He's not in charge of hiring technicians.

Well, typically nothing.

Typically the parts manager does nothing.

Yeah.

Now, is that one of your weird jokes? Like what's a mad walnut or whatever?

Yeah, it was an homage to joke.

It's an angry nut.

Yeah, the pistachio.

The pistachio. So the. Usually the parts managers do nothing.

Yeah.

So if you do nothing, why would you. Oh, you'd be mad at them. Because they do nothing.

They do nothing.

Right.

That's why he's upset.

I mean, this is a lot of a question.

That was a.

And it kind of contra. Well, kind of contradicts itself.

I counted at least three times that I was catching the contradictions.

We lost text, but we're doing the same hours.

Yep.

Business is the best it's ever been. But it sucks.

But it sucks. Yep.

Yeah, listen, the industry is, is losing tons and tons of technicians. I, I was talking to somebody from Toyota corporate.

A couple days ago and he, he gave me the stats. And so there's like 78, 000 technicians quit or retire a year and only 33, 000 are coming in, graduating.

Right.

In vocational school. So we hear it everywhere we go. You can't hire technicians. We've never not been able to hire technicians. But I will tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that the way that we hire technicians isn't one thing. There isn't one magic pill. The first thing is you have to have an effective labor rate to afford the technicians that are good. The good technicians are worth money and they don't want to leave where they're at.

The good ones aren't out looking and the people that have them know what they have. So if you're just running an ad, most of the people you're going to get are the people nobody else wants. It's rare unless somebody's relocating, that a technician is out looking for a job that's really good, that that technician is somebody that they're lacking. Nobody's letting good technicians go.

Right. They'd almost rather be miserable where they're working than move their toolbox. Yeah, like it's, it's not so easy to get them to move. And I think that that's a good thing that comes, is when we actually do get technicians to move, they'll tell you how hard it was. And it's like they, they worry about the security and trying a new place and everything like that. It's not easy. So I think that that's the big thing, is that we have to recognize a, the value of the technician and that we all play a part in keeping techs and making sure that we retain them.

It's a big part of the future. If you don't have good techs, you're going to have a rough time in the next five to 10 years for sure, because the focus of our industry is going to become fixed ops, and he or she with the best technicians is going to win. So you got to have an effective labor rate to afford the best technicians. Then you got to have a culture and a system where they want to stay, which is something we're kind of going to talk about here coming up. And then you got to be good at recruiting them. And so, I don't know, we work really hard at all of that stuff, but it's not easy. And a lot of service managers think that it's like it was 20 years ago. It's so odd to me that we would rather sit around and talk about how we can't do something instead of figuring out how to do it. And also like it's such a self fulfilling prophecy to say I can't find technicians.

Okay, good. We will.

Right.

I want my competition saying that.

Right.

Don't we want anybody who's not in our family or in our coaching group saying that we'll take him? Yeah. Oh, I say that sometimes to people. I'm like, oh yeah, it's really hard, it's impossible. I just want to feed the negativity. Like Chris Collins said it was impossible. Yeah, sure, whatever.

Because if they can't find him, they probably can't keep them either.

Don't be. Yeah, we will steal your technicians. Trust me, they'll come.

Yeah, we'll make the.

But it's not one reason. It's the culture, it's what we'll pay them, the environment, all of it, it's all gonna matter. So.

Yeah. And then the. I think the question in there is should he leave?

Right.

Yeah, I don't, that's, that's always an odd question. How do we decide that for somebody?

I don't think that we can. The thing that I would want to say is if, and I think, I don't remember if they said they've been there 15 or 20 years or something like that.

16 years.

I think it's 16 years of being advisor. You should be uneasy street. Like think how many collected customers you should have to listen.

I work, I worked as an advisor for a dealership where, you know, just to be frank, the ownership and managers were morons and the dispatcher was a moron and the technicians weren't managed. There was no, there was no pride for the service department. They would, they would just as soon let it underperform. And if you're somebody who really cares about customers, it does get to the point where you can't take care of customers anymore if all your fading is comebacks. And you know, I literally used to have to start calling at 2 o' clock to tell everybody who'd made an appointment two weeks ago that their car wouldn't get in the shop.

Yeah.

So if it, you know, the funny thing with that job was I left and I made almost twice as much money somewhere else with, with way less headache. So if you're a good advisor and you got a clientele. Yeah, go take, take them. That's why, you know, that's why it's important to collect customers. 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 now it's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.