Negotiating Salary, Appt. Scheduling, Updating Customers

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I would personally like to welcome you to Friday Drive By. Your Friday Drive By. I'm Chris Collins and this is Chris Joan.

Hello everyone.

Lafferty for the laughs.

Host of Lafferty's Laughing House.

The man with the jokes. This is where we answer your questions.

Mostly pertaining to service drives. We don't get too many parts questions. Not yet or relationship questions.

We did just, we did just plug it on parts hold the last time we filmed to call and get parts swag.

The number is 8333 Ask SDR if you have a question. 8333 Ask SDR. Let's go to today's question.

I have been offered a job as a shop foreman for a high end European dealership that I have 14 years of experience with. The question that I have is negotiating for salary. The.

Company that I work for is a good company. They take care of their employees. But I don't know where to start. As far as I know a dollar amount that I'd like to be paid but how the management crew wants to break that down. Is that a percentage of gross, percentage of parts of labor, CSI kick? I'm not certain how that really boils down and I'd like to I need to start negotiating that this quarter and so is there any tips, any kind of info you could provide like that? I would appreciate that a lot. Thanks.

Do you have a preferred shop foreman pay plan? Like I usually just do a base plus hours.

So like so much per hour flagged and then a CSI bonus. So I was just three.

Yep. I've done the CSI kicker hours and.

Flat salary then I do in some of the stores if you're doing instant inspection there is a percentage of sales off of that usually. Okay.

That's definitely a thing I've done before. I've also negotiated in adding staff and adding texts to the shop and in.

The shop form and pay it's if they're paid on hours. When they add text they get more hours.

Yeah. Either way. Trying to think of other things that I've done in the past but is.

I prefer hours over gross but I don't know that gross is a bad measurement. It's just hours kind of have the feeling of you're just stacking them up like the more hours the better. Gross is a little.

Less tied to the performance because it's kind of true.

However, wouldn't you say that if they did pay off a gross then it would be a great excuse for the shop foreman to start to learn the business side yeah. So it could be a gateway.

So grosser hours, CSI, little. I. I would say 25%.

Of your pay is probably CSI.

And then just as a side note, later on down the road, what I would also do is I would track the. The change in hours from before you started to after you started. Like, you should definitely be paying attention to that number and what you're adding to the business.

So if I broke it down, I would say 25% CSI. 25%. Either a bonus on hours or gross, and then 50% is a salary.

That's how I would do it.

I like it. It's easy.

Awesome. Well, that was an easy question.

We should have another one just like that.

Good morning, service Drive Revolution. This is Ryan, and I am out of Central Texas, and I have kind of a loaded question to kind of deal pick and choose as you please. First question is, at a dealership, how do you guys like to say loaners are handled? Does it go to anybody? Is there a priority? How long do you say people can stay in them in case it's just a noise complaint? Second question, you have multiple service advisors and your first or last. At the end of the day, how do you handle someone else's tickets? I mean, you're based off of commission. So do you say you're just doing your part as a team, or do you put it off and wait till that service driver is available? Also, too, how do you guys see about.

Appointments? How many appointments should you schedule in a day? Whenever you all know you only have a certain amount of technicians. Is there a considerable amount of time to tell customers your wait time is, or is there something that's just not acceptable and you just need to go with the flow and hope for the best? Second off, how often should you.

Update customers? Once every couple days. And I'm talking about, if you have no information at all to tell them, do you call them after two days?

That's a lot.

That was more than two questions, Ryan.

I counted four.

I like the little revolution at the beginning, but I. Okay, so should we go backwards or forward?

Any way you want to do it. I can go from.

From the beginning. So what was this first question?

How long do you let customers stay in loaners?

Okay, so the amount of loaners you have would determine what you use the loaners for. So, like, you know, when I ran a BMW dealership, we had 300 loaners, and we gave them to everybody because we wanted to eat up the market. If you have 10 loaners, I would only use them for bigger Jobs and, you know, stuff that is covered under warranty that you can get reimbursed. So it completely depends on the brand, the loaner program they have and how you are financing them. Are they offset by warranty or, you know, are you just eating them? And it's. That's a financial decision. But hands down, the more loaners you have and the more available they are to anybody, the more ros. You will write. What's the next one?

Well, I was also going to say too, he'd asked a really good question about how long do you let the customers keep them afterwards? I would say that you want to get the loaner back as fast as humanly possible because a lot of times customers will stay in the car as long as we let them. And I think that one of the things that really makes a service department kind of stand out amongst others is, is length of blown. And I think that the. One of the areas where you can just chop a day right off is if you have a really good program for, you know, getting the customers to come back and pick up their cars either same day or next day at the latest. But you have to have that conversation when you're giving out the car and.

It'S communication from the advisor calling them and giving them notice, like, hey, you know, it's in the morning, your car's going to be done by the end of the day. So I need that loaner back kind of a thing.

Okay. Are you ready for the next question?

Yeah.

So Ryan wants to know what should we do in a situation when I'm here after hours and one of my coworkers cars, that customer comes in to either pick up their car, drop off of the car, has a question about it, what do we do with that thing? And handling the communication with someone else's ticket.

Tell the customer to come back tomorrow.

That is not true. Do you want to try again?

I like to partner up the advisors. So, you know, knowing the schedule, look.

What I wrote buddy system.

So I'd partner up and then you partner them by the schedule. Right. So if one's late, one's early, then you, you can partner them. Same thing with days, days off.

So as an advisor, I did that and we took really good care of each other's cars. Oh yeah, it was.

And you don't have to tie pay to it.

Never once wanted anything extra from it because I knew that if I took care of his cars, he was going to do the same thing to mine. There was no, no thought of commission came into that the next question, you ready for this one?

Yeah.

Is how, how many tickets essentially should you write? Based on capacity and scheduling, how many cars do you take in?

Okay, so let's, let's go by the premise of three technicians to every advisor which is where you should start. So if you have three technicians for every advisor depending on your appointment.

Percentage. Right. So if you write 100 cars in a day but 50 of them are appointments, that's going to kind of skew this number of. You know oftentimes when we go into a Toyota store they don't have an easy appointment system. You can get them to 80% appointment but it takes a minute. So that's a factor here. But I would say just in an ideal situation with three technicians per one advisor, I would make 10 to 11 appointments knowing that two or three drive ins are going to happen. So I want the advisors writing somewhere around 12. If it's Mercedes or BMW or you know, kind of Highline, I might make eight appointments depending on the advisor what I'm trying to do. But the, you know, the more you control that, the higher sales you'll have per repair order and the better CSI and communication and retention you will have.

That's pretty good too. I had, I had written down here 70% rule where whatever my capacity is in my shop I want it scheduled for 70%. But it all depends on what your walk in traffic is for. Sure. But when you're saying you might have three walk ins outta 10 appointments, it's right around 70%.

Yeah. And in some markets like let's say you have a Honda store, you want them to be able to just drive in and get an oil change. And so yeah you're 30% are going to be driving oil changes. And since we don't, we don't believe in a quick loop that's spread out amongst all the advisors and so you want to leave. You know, I guess the other thing is we do appointments every 20 minutes, not 15 for advisors. So if they're doing three appointments you can strategically give them holes in their, in their day to write non appointments. So you want to take that into consideration.

Yeah, it's super easy to write 12.

Never ever, ever, ever, ever. No matter how many times people have told me that it works. Have I ever seen booking by hours work?

It always ends up short.

Yeah.

No matter what.

And it's one of those things that in theory it should work. I've never seen it work.

Yeah.

Although people swear it does. And then when you dig in it's not it's not working.

That's great. I love it. All right, ready for the next one? I actually think this is the last one. Ryan from Central Texas is the house. How often do you update customers?

How often do you update customers? So when the car's going to be there? While.

Yeah, when the car's going to be there.

Yeah. So that. That's a. That's a.

That's easy to me, like, so let's say I got a customer and there's a part that they got to pull off the. The factory line, and we know that that part's shipping from Korea or Germany or whatever, and it isn't going to be here for at least two weeks. I tell the customer, hey, let's pretend you're the customer.

Okay.

You want to role play with me?

Yes.

Christian, how are you doing? Okay, good. Your car. Did you just question your car? Is unfixable, Christian. And so bad that they have to pull apart off the assembly line in Germany, and they're saying the soonest it'll be here is two weeks. So let's look at a calendar together. I'll call you in two weeks.

Okay.

I mean, it just depends. I guess my answer is it depends on the situation. But if you tell the. There's no reason to update the customer every day if it's not going to be there for a week. Tell the customer the truth. Like, hey, I'll check with you in a week. But the way that it looks right now, it's going to be a week before I have anything else to tell you.

Okay.

All the customer needs to know is the truth and what's going on in a plan. Right. I never had a customer feel uncomfortable with the fact that I didn't call them for a week if that was the appropriate time to check in with them. It's when you tell them you're going to call them in a week, and you don't call them in a week, and it's been two weeks and they got to call you is where the problems start. So I think that's dependent on the situation and telling the customer the truth. But I don't think you have to call them every day if there isn't something to tell them about. That's ridiculous. Yeah.

So I think that setting. Setting expectations is the. Is the punchline to that thing, right?

Yeah. It's common sense.

Yeah. And I think that that's. That's exactly where I'd go. I've had times where, as an advisor, it was going to be two Weeks. And I'd said, hey, the parts due in, in two weeks. And, and normally what I'll do is I'll check in with my clients and let them know after a week, even if I don't have anything new to tell them, I want you to hear from me. So I know you didn't forgot. But if you want more communication that I'm happy to do it. I just need to know what your expectations are. So I'll do that too. Where if someone just likes to be called every day just because they want to make friends with you, I don't care. I'll make it. I'll make a status call every day. But usually what happens even if they say I want to be called every day and it's two weeks, by the third day they're like, okay, you don't have to call me anymore.

Yeah, no overkill.

And they're just happy that you followed the instructions.

I'm not as a customer, I'm not answering that call. I'm too busy.

Yeah.

Maybe a text.

Yeah. But they, but by three days they're.

Like, don't make me feel any better if I know it's going to be two weeks that you touch me every three days. Yeah. It seems ridiculous.

Yeah.

To me.

But they have a vote and setting expectations is the key to making customers okay with communication.

Great questions. Thanks for that.

How much swag should we send him?

Just regular swag.

Okay.

We want extra swag because he asked too many questions. Yes, he should give us swag.

What kind of swag do you think we can get from Central Texas football swag?

Tacos.

No, I thought tacos LA is the hub of the taco.

Thank you, everybody. Remember, 8333 Ask STR and we'll see you 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. 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.