Q & A | No Upsells? How Express Lubes Leave Money on the Table

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Hi, I'm Peter. Thanks ahead of time for the advice. Work for a large German brand store. I'm the foreman. The concern I have is with our express team. It's our quick lube, if you will. They do all the oil changes and tires, things like that. We don't have a dedicated express service rider. All the riders will write to them.

The issue we're having is with the upsells or lack thereof. With our brand you can evacuate the oil out of the dipstick tube. So you don't necessarily have to lift the car off the ground to drain the oil. With that being said, cars most times don't get lifted and fully inspected. And of course that means the dealership is losing a lot of revenue and the customer's not getting the full multi point inspection they should be.

So what is the best route here? Should we be giving the express team some kind of kickback on their upsells that they can't do because anything over two hours will go to the main shop and they will perform the repairs. So the express team will do breaks, tires, normal alignments, but not alignments with calibrations. But half the time once it goes to a mainline technician for let's say the alignment with calibrations, when they get it on the rack, they'll see control arm bushings torn or engine mounts leaking, etc. Then we get that fun phone call to the customer of we just notice these items. So I don't know what's the best route to go or if we should just do the it's your job so you need to do it type of thing.

Thanks for the question, Peter. So I think the, the.

Answer maybe is in a different place than where you're looking for in the sense that there's, there's kind of a rule in.

Life and business really. It's like it's, you know, not any different than gravity. There's just certain laws of nature that, that drive outcomes. And, and that rule is that form drives or form equals function. So say, for example.

You have a set of tools that are all metric tools, and you're going to work on a Ford. What's going to happen, Chris? Joan, you're going to strip a lot of bolts because the form of the.

Tools doesn't fit the function.

Doesn't fit the function. Okay, now let's say you're starting a restaurant, right? And let's say that restaurant is a Mexican restaurant. Now what? There's certain things that become very easy because now the menu is pretty easy to make, right. You don't have to do like the Cheesecake Factory, where you have four, 300 different things, right.

Specialized.

So you, you understand, like, the idea that it's a Mexican restaurant kind of drives what the menu is going to be. It also drives who you're going to hire. It drives the design of the restaurant. As far as color. You know, there's just certain things that make you think Mexican restaurant. Right? And so then when people come in. So if you're advertising a Mexican restaurant and they come in and then the menu is a pizza menu, what happens?

People get very confused.

Yeah. And it doesn't, it doesn't work because they have an expectation. A certain, like the form also drives expectation, human behavior, all of that. One of, one of my favorite kind of examples of this is.

Marcel Duchamp, in the sense that.

He maybe is one of the most influential artists in the last hundred years. As far as artists go. If you, if you ask consumers, they'll say Picasso, but artists will say Duchamp. And really what Duchamp did for artists is he gave them confidence. And one of the things he, he kind of pointed out is that, and this is, you know, something that many artists has done famously, Jeff Koons did this. He went to Sears and bought Hoover vacuum cleaners and put them in an art gallery, displayed in plastic cases. So literally, he, he just went and bought Hoover vacuum cleaners and then put them in an art gallery. Now, what happened to the people that showed up at the art gallery?

Do you want me to say, yeah, they have to see it as art.

Because it's in an art gallery. And he's just pointing out, like, you don't have to overthink it too much because they came to an art gallery. They're going to assume that it means more than it does because they're in an art gallery. Like it. Nobody's going, this belongs at Sears. This doesn't make sense. They all try to like, oh, this is genius. And oh my gosh, and what does it mean? And they put their kind of their interpretation on it, right? And so form equals function. The problem that you're having is the form is not giving you the function that you want and you're trying to change the function in a form. So you're trying to make those metric tools work. You're stripping those bolts and you're trying to make them work. And you're like, well, what if I put a rock in there and, and like then do it, you know, and it's like, no, you're making, you're making more of a mess than not. And so in, in any system that we would design, we would not have quick lube. We do not. Now the customer doesn't need to know this. The customer needs to, you know, feel like it's easy to get an oil change, it's easy to get in and out. But, but as far as the form that you're designing, you don't want to have quick lube text altogether. Just like, I mean, I know you said you don't have quick lube advisors, but having quick lube texts, it's one in the same. What we want to do is we want to create a structure where those technicians are in an environment with other technicians and they are trying to climb a hierarchy. And.

And so, you know, just the, the setup that you're running will not get you the outcome that you want.

And to get the outcome that you would want, you'd have to spend too much. Like.

And in a sense, you're the foreman, so you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to do the inspections and then you're not doing your job really is what's, what's going to happen. So I would suggest get, get, you know, email info at Chris Collins Inc. And get your store on a strategy session and we'll help you and kind of talk through the way we would set it up in a sense, but we would not set it up that way. You're the, and it's too much to go into in a, in a drive by to explain, you know, the downside of dispatching and all that. But you're.

Your, your system is, is designed for something else and that something else doesn't exist.

Yeah, there's definitely.

What do you think about that answer?

Really, really good. I thought that.

Being really open to the fact that there's, there could be an easier way to do it was where I was headed, which is where you ended up anyways.

But I just took a longer.

You did, but the answer there was a couple things like, well, would you do, would you bonus somebody on this or would you do this? But at the end of the day, what you want to do is you want to build a system that rewards the behavior of taking great care of the customer, which is one of the things you open with.

And, and those texts becoming B and C text quicker and going flat rate. So there's bigger problems than just that. Like the whole, the, the whole thing is broken. Because really what we want to do is grow our own text. And that might be the most valuable part of this conversation. And that isn't even what we're talking about.

Yeah, the, the, the getting a car done better, more efficiently and with better quality of an inspection is almost a byproduct of the trying to grow the text. Like, if you do it, there's a.

World where you get all those things and turnover. Right? Because those quick lube techs are more apt to leave our industry and go somewhere else because they don't see a career path. They, they're just around other quick loop.

Techs like, and also surprising, the ones that you grow end up being way more loyal than you ever thought they would be. Because I've heard that before, people will tell me, like, well, if I put all that investment into them, they're just going to leave me anyways. And, and sometimes people leave you. I totally understand that and agree with that. But like, there's a level of high loyalty that a lot of technicians have and the earlier you dig into them and invest in them, the, the faster you get the loyalty back. So all that stuff is exactly right. But I'd love to have a conversation, a deeper conversation, 20 minutes, you change the way you thought.

And I will say, Peter, like a lot of respect that you're a foreman trying to figure this out. That's a great, that's a great quality that you're asking and you're searching for the answer. So we'd love to help you. So thanks for the question. We'll see. See you guys next time on Service Driver 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 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 that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.