Pyrrhic Victory (Service Drive Revolution Drive By)

Foreign.

Everybody, and welcome to your Friday drive by. A little something to think about. A little inspiration going into the weekend on Service Drive Revolution. I'm excited to talk about this subject today because I know it's going to impact you and I know we're going to get a lot of comments and feedback on it. And. And what it is we're going to talk about today is the Pyrrhic victory. Pyrrhic victory, even though it's not spelled like it sounds, that's how you pronounce it, is Pyrrhic victory. And it came from king Pyrrhic in 319 BC because the king decided that he really liked Italian shoes, Italian design, and he wanted to conquer Rome. And so he took his army and went to conquer Rome. And there were a couple little battles that he put everything he had into that he wanted to win. And what happened is he won those battles, but he paid a big price to win those battles. And all the Italian soldiers did is replenish and regroup. And then more soldiers came, and he couldn't double down again because he'd exhausted everything on the two little battles. And oftentimes that's what happens to us, is we're trying to win the wrong battles. And when we do that, it makes us very ineffective. It makes us miserable. We feel like we're just kind of on a treadmill going in circles, but we're never getting a ahead, right? So let's talk about how. How we set this up and then how we kind of change our approach and our thinking to avoid having these Pyrrhic victories and have real victories. So the first one is you got to stop trying to be right and try to win. The best example of that is with a customer, right? How many times do we have a customer sitting in front of us and they're not right? What they're saying isn't true. We did call them back or we didn't put that dent in their car.

Whatever it is.

The car's got 300,000 miles on it and it's 20 years old. And just because we replaced the water pump doesn't mean that the rear end of it went out. It was going to go out either way. Right? The customer is wrong. But if we put a lot of energy into being right, we lose the customer in the end. It doesn't pay to be right. It's like that just about with anything. With your friends, with your spouse, with your employees. It doesn't really pay to be right. It pays to win. And so you got to not be so excited and jump so quick and so emotional. And you got to step back and you got to think like, what's motivating this person? What's the story behind this person that's making them act this way? Why do they feel like this? And listen and show some empathy and use some other techniques so then you can come back around and talk about it in a different way. But if you just put pressure against pressure, right? It's that old trick that motivational speakers do when they put up their hand like an open hand, and then you put up your hand and it's almost like you're high fiving, but your hands are together and then they push. And then your automatic reaction is to push back, don't push back, don't catch the plate. There's an analogy that I use a lot of times with people when they find themselves in this situation is I'll just take something random in the room, like a pen or something, and I'll throw it to them. And they automatically catch it. And then I say, well, now you have it, you caught it. The best thing in that scenario when somebody throws the plate at you is don't catch it. It's their problem. If you catch the plate. Now you got to do something with the plate. So if you emotionally let something affect you, then the person on the other end is actually in control. They're in charge. They're leading you. You're not leading them because you reacted to something, right? So you got to be careful. Don't try to be right. Just try to win. That's it. The next one is wasting a lot of energy on things that don't have a return. Low value things that are actions and behaviors you're doing every day that there's zero return on. It's like if they were these actions, if they were in the stock market, you wouldn't do them, right? Let me give you an example. You come back from lunch and you got seven voicemails from upset customers. So you're going to call all those customers back and you're going to fix all those problems. That's a low return. The big return is in going out there and fixing what it is that's causing you to have all those upset customers. The return is actually building a team and a culture where people care about customers and they never get to you. Now that's high leverage, right? So you can spend all your time on those little battles, putting out fires. That's all you're going to be doing. All the time. If you don't go fix the bigger problem, if you don't fix the culture, if you're not honest with yourself, if you don't hold people accountable, then that's what you're going to get, right? You're going to have those little Pyrrhic victories, but you're going to be miserable.

And the other one is in business, one thing that I see, like when somebody will call us and they'll say, hey, we need help, we need advisor training and we need more traffic. And they don't need advisor training and they don't need more traffic. What they need is systems. That's what they need. And then advisor training. But if you can't do it on the traffic you have, you're just going to get worse with more traffic. The more traffic you have, the more effort you're going to exude and the more your systems are going to break down. That's it. You're just going to do a worse job with more people. If you're not profitable and if you don't have great customer satisfaction and retention now and you're not highly profitable, more customers are never the answer. The answer is systems executing on those systems, consistency and accountability and a great customer experience. And then the traffic will take care of itself. Or at that point, then we can market because they'll actually be a return on our marketing. But that's an example of a Pyrrhic victory is we're going to send out mailers with discounts. We're going to get tons of traffic in here. We work really, really hard, we move a lot of money around, but we don't hold on to any of it. Right? We're busy, busy, busy, but we're not successful and we don't have anything scalable. We're always just running in the red, basically on the verge of destruction. But it isn't something that you can scale and consistently improve and get better over time. It's just going to blow up at some point. So those are examples.

Of Pyrrhic victories. So the thing you want to do is you want to think.

Big picture and you don't want to try to be right. That's the biggest thing. Follow the results. Listen, be curious, be a student of the game and don't react emotionally when people do something, try to step back and think, like, what's their story? You know.

This happened to me the other day when I was walking to the gym. I was walking in a crosswalk with somebody and a car pulls up and skids into the crosswalk. And then the window is down in the car. And it was an African American gentleman and he said, he said, kill whitey.

Actually, I think he said, it would be too bad if I killed whitey because he almost slid into us in the crosswalk. Now, there's two ways to react to that. You could want to fight. But if I wanted to fight or I wanted to say something funny back or however I wanted to react, he would be in control. He would be controlling the narrative. Now, if I don't react and I try to understand where he's coming from, what happened in his life that would get him to that point, that he would say that, I know there's all this stuff going around, around us, but I'm not going to catch the plate. I'm not. Nothing good comes from me catching the plate. Now that's an extreme example, but the same thing happens every day. Somebody walks into your office like, hey, this customer is upset and they drop it on your desk. No, that's why I'm paying you, is to take care of that. Right?

You gotta rethink about where you spend your time and where the leverage is. And the leverage is working on the business, not in the business. And not. You don't wanna be right. You just wanna win. That's it. So don't get emotionally attached and emotionally react to anything. Think strategically.

That's the secret fun stuff, right?

It's really, really good.

So I hope that inspires you going into the weekend. Makes you think. And I would love for you to stay tuned and watch a little preview of what's coming up on the big show next week. But we will see you next time on Service Drive Revolution.

Next week on Service Drive Revolution.

Monday.

Monday. Monday. It's the battle of a century. The shock showdown. Our parks department is better. Press four for parts dealerships versus independent shops. Who has the advantage?

This was very fun, but here's the.

Butt that just means everything I said sucked. Who will win the fight for supremacy? If you're unsatisfied, go to hell and don't call us again. Find out the answer only on this special two part Service Drive Revolution event.

That's pretty good. Thanks for watching this episode of Service Drive Revolution's Drive by. I hope it gives you something to think about over the weekend and inspires the some new ideas and hopefully some new results. If you have any questions for the big show, go ahead and post them below in the comments. We'll be looking out for them and we'll answer them on the show, make sure you subscribe and hit the bell icon so you're notified when we post new episodes. I'm Chris Collins and you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Chris Bulldog Collins and I'll see you again on the next episode.

Sat.