Chris Collins presents the "Rule of Five," a practical strategy for achieving goals by executing multiple simultaneous actions (five minimum, ten preferable). He illustrates with an anecdote about leading a top-selling dealership and a worked example applying five specific measures to raise Effective Labor Rate (ELR) in an automotive service department (pricing strategy, customer-sell system, manage discounting, advisor–customer trust, review tech times). Collins argues the approach generalizes to hiring, personal goals, and other business challenges.
Chapters
Hi, this is Chris Collins with your service Drive Tip of the day. I want to teach you something today that can help you accomplish just about anything that you want to accomplish in business or in your personal life at and I call it the rule of five. Now, early on in my career, when I was 29, I ran a dealership that ended up being number one in retail sales in the nation, if not the world. And we sold a lot of cars. And a friend of mine came in after me being there about a year and a half, and he said, kris, what is the difference? What change did you make that took you from where you were to number one? I said, I have to think about that. And I went home and I. And I literally wrote out three pages of all the things that my team and I had done that got us to number one, three pages worth of things. And I kind of came to the realization at that point that it's never one thing. There isn't a magic thing that you do to accomplish something. And I see this a lot when I go into service departments. Managers tell me like, oh, I can't hire techs. I can't get my ELR up. And they have all these things. And I say, well, what have you done to hire tech? And they're like, well, I ran an ad. Well, in today's competitive market, it isn't one thing that's going to get your head. So that's where I came up with the rule of five. You have to do five, 10 is better, but five things to accomplish any goal. So let's take for example, you wanted to increase your elr, your effective labor rate for your customer, pay sales. So what are five things that we could do to increase our elr? The first one is you got to have a pricing strategy, a better pricing strategy, and kind of embrace complexity with that. The second one is you got to have a system with your customers to sell the stuff with a higher effective labor. The third one is you got to get rid of discounting. So you got to manage discounting and, you know, are the advisors discounting a lot? You have to take care of that because that can affect your elr. The fourth one is your advisors have to connect with the customers and build trust so the customers aren't constantly shopping you because there's a value to the relationship with the service advisor. The fifth one is tech times. You got to look at your tech times. A lot of times, managers aren't constantly looking at what they're paying the tax for the job. And sometimes that stuff can creep up and change. A big one is alignments. With the old alignment machines that we had in our industry years ago, it could take hours to do an alignment. With these new ones, it doesn't take very long at all, and you can adjust those times down. So those are five things right there that you could do to increase your ELR. We could come up with 10 things. We could come up with 10 ways to hire good technicians. 10 ways to do just about anything. How you could be a better husband or wife, how you could get your kids into college. It works for everything. The rule of five. So really think about that. And anything you want to accomplish, just start writing down things that you could do to do it and start executing and getting after it. So I'm Chris Collins, and that's your service drive. Tip of the day.
