Mending Fences With An Abusive Owner

Foreign.

And your Friday drive by. This is where we answer your questions. What's on your mind? What's keeping you from being the best version of yourself that you can be? That's why we are here. I'm Chris Collins and that is Papi Chulo right there. Say hello, Papa Chulo.

Hello everyone.

Known to some as Christian. But isn't it funny when people see you and they go Christian?

Oh yeah. It's probably the most common greeting I get these days.

You're welcome.

Thank you, sir.

Not that you were going to say thank you, but you're welcome. Let's go to this week's question.

Let's do it to it. Ready?

I work for two partners. We're in a high volume used car dealer. Anyways, one of the owners is very.

He'S very rough with me. It's like he finds everything that he can to find out wrong with what we're doing. My question is, is at what point when the. When we're doing what we're supposed to and the shop's making money and he's staying on my backside. At what point do you just say, hey, you and I got to have a talk and we need to square up or we need to part ways?

So at what point, Christian, do we say, hey, meet me out back, we're going to settle this?

I feel like there's a, there's a conversation before that, but yeah, that's a.

You know what it was in my high school is meet me at the Red Barn. That's where everybody would fight.

Okay. We had, we had a lot. And then the south door.

Meet me at the south door.

Yep.

And you knew what that meant?

Everybody knew what that meant. And amazingly enough, like, it was like, you know, there was only 180 kids in the school, but like the turnout was really good. Like we'd catch 160, 170. Kids like from all grades, they love to see the southdoor fights. I remember some of the best ones. I wish I could have recorded them. Remember one kid did like the hockey move, you know, where you pull the shirt over.

First of all, they better be Seahawks fans if they're from Yakima.

Yakima, the one that smells. What's.

No, it's Tacoma.

Tacoma aroma. Yeah.

Coma aroma. Yeah. Which does. Never disappoints.

And Yakima is the. They have like carriers. Right. There's a company that builds like all the things for bike racks and all that stuff.

Oh, I don't, I don't know that that is based There, but maybe I haven't spent a lot of time in Yakima.

Okay, got it. Might be. Might be a To do for the summer.

No, pretty sure.

I mean. Okay, so maybe. Maybe. John, a way to approach this is. And let's say this partner, his name is Phil, probably wasn't told that he was loved as a kid. Probably has a lot of internal issues. One thing you could try is giving him a hug.

We can do better than that.

Really?

Yeah. I feel like the hug comes after the conversation, but I don't know. I'm kind of.

Yeah, but just think, like, if. If Phil's coming down to me and I'm like, because I've done this, I do this to people who comment online.

Where you give them the love instead of the pushback.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Interesting. I guess I just keep thinking in my head, like, they gave him financials to look at, so they must have some sort of faith in him.

I don't know. I just always feel like there's a. There's a time and place for you to kind of pull and be like. You have to either analyze if you're being too sensitive or if it's worth having the conversation to see if there's a better way to communicate.

I mean, I guess all. All things aside, what I would do in that situation, as I would say, hey, Phil, can. Can, you know, close the door? I would do it alone. Just me and Jeff meeting. Good old Phil thing. Also a great time to give somebody a hug when you're alone. Nothing weird about that, right, Christine?

I can't think of any reason not to do it.

So then I would say, hey, I would just like to get on the same page. How do you think we're doing? I'm really vested in learning what I'm learning from the financials and getting better, but I feel like no matter what I do, I'm not. I'm not meeting your expectation. And I want to. So, you know, it demotivates me when I feel like the guy who I work for is. Has a negative view of what I'm trying to do when we're trying to do the same thing. How can I get on the same page as you? And, you know, at no point am I in that. If you listen to the way I'm wording things, at no point am I saying, you have to change, Phil. I'm saying, what do I do? What kind of. I'm falling on my cross, right? What can I do? And then, you know, that'll start to chip away at it might tell you. And then you might just want to mention like, you know, I get the feeling. Feel that you were never told you were loved as a kid.

Just let that hang for a minute and see what happens.

Yeah. No, I don't know. I don't know. I love.

Yeah. What's the saving Sort of things like hugging and.

Because my.

This area is a great time for us to go into your childhood trauma, Christian. Look how uncomfortable you get.

No hugging.

Hugging in a work environment.

Yeah. So I really, like.

I've hugged you once before.

You did a side hug not too long ago.

Yeah.

It was not. It was nice.

Nothing weird about that.

No, I liked it.

It made it weird. But there was nothing weird until you made it weird.

So funny. But yeah, I do think that there's. There's something to that. And I now I'm kind of trying to put myself in Phil's shoes is that like any time I've ever had somebody working for me and they've come up and they've asked me that stuff, like, my assumption before the conversation is that they didn't care. And it like, immediately flipped when they said stuff like this. And like, like you said, like, it's about, what do I need to change? Not what do you need to change? Because when somebody came in to me and said, hey, I don't like how you do this. You need to do this. You need to do this. But there was nothing on the other end from a deposit. Like, it wasn't a. It was just basically him telling me what I needed to do. But I love that angle of like, what do I need to change? I'm not meeting your expectations. Maybe the fact is that Phil isn't giving John what his expectations are. So the conversation pulls that out of what we're trying to accomplish as a group. But, man, it would be. It. It'd be a. A pity to part ways when you. When you got into the business part of it. Right. Like, so I. I'm stuck on that financial thing is that. That says that I wouldn't give financials to someone. I didn't think I was going to really be a part of the solution of the company. So there's a disconnect for me there. But.

Yeah, I'm also probably more insensitive, like, because I grew up in the business of people being rough.

In the. In the car business. It was just how we. I never take offense to it because it's just how I learned. And in almost every case, when I got my butt chewed, I Earned it.

There is an interesting thing with that. Right. Because when you look back on the people that were maybe your best mentors, they were, for me, they were rougher.

Yeah. I think you learn more from the rougher mentor for sure when you're young, I think.

But I do think the, the other thing that.

That'S happening here to with John is because it's your boss, you sometimes give them.

More. Like you're assuming they're a good leader, which they're not. They're terrible leaders. Very few good leaders out there. So you probably work at best for a guy that's barely getting by. He probably is miserable. He's got three ex wives, he's socially awkward, like all this stuff. But you're assuming because you work for him that he's got some sort of.

Authority. That a lot. When you assume people have authority, then you assume they have more going on, they're smarter, they're more talented. And the truth of the matter is is that is rarely the case. Been rarely the case for me and people I've worked for.

Yeah.

I have to dumb it down a lot of times. I'm not joking, like, I'm not trying to be funny.

You're laughing, but I feel like, I feel like you're talking about me. I think there's so many times you've been you, you've tried to explain stuff. You do it like at the normal Chris level and then you look at me and you go backwards and dumb it down without me even saying, I don't understand.

But that's the story of my life. But what I'm saying is people I've worked for, right? Like I had bosses.

Yeah. And whenever the managing up thing, okay.

The last boss I had, I told myself like, hey, you, you're. You're. You, you gotta, you gotta be an employee. Like, don't, don't take the role of employee and pretend like you're not an employee because it's not gonna work. Right. And so I remember that same boss. I mean, he was, he, he was one of those guys that was really hard. Like, really hard. And I remember he said to me once, he said, and this hit me like a ton of bricks, he goes, you know, sometimes I like a compliment on my tie.

Yeah, there's a whole story with that. I really enjoyed that.

But I had this weird perception, like he was the boss, I was the employee. I was very worried about how he saw things. He would overreact. So I was always trying to keep him from overreacting. I never stopped to think I could keep him from overreacting by feeding his need for acceptance and approval.

Yeah.

Because I didn't think that I was the one doling that out because I was the employee. But everybody's human. I mean, I don't, I live right here. I'm in the middle of Hollywood. And you could throw a rock at, you know, famous people and every one of them, every one of them is insecure, looking for approval. It doesn't matter.

And I've thrown rocks at famous people. They don't like it any more than non famous people, especially when you connect.

I'm gonna like it.

Good stuff, John. Well, I hope this all works out. Like, I love that you're trying to learn more about the business and it sounds like it'd be worth working out, at least on their side for sure. So.

Yeah, but Buffett said it's not the numbers are easy, it's the people that are hard. Right?

Yeah, but, but learning, a man learning this manage up thing, that's a, that's a skill he'll use for later for sure.

Well, thanks, thanks for the question, John. Great stuff. Go Hawks. And we'll see everybody next time on Service Drive Revolution. Thanks for watching this week's Drive By. I hope we gave you something to think about over the weekend. 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. Show. That's 8333 Ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com now that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.