Chris Collins and Christian break down how elite service managers cut staff by 20-25% while boosting profits above pre-COVID levels. The move: remove underperforming advisors, close Saturday hours, and hire only roles that improve customer experience or the bottom line.
So now let's talk about what we learned on the elite call. Actually, you weren't on that call, were you Christian? It was just, it was myself and Steve. But so we, we have a coaching group and managers go through different stages but once they've achieved top of the industry profitability, they have the best CSI around.
And they win our, our comp which is our service advisor managers competition that then they become elite, which is really hard to do actually oddly, the hardest one is to win the comp. That's usually the hardest one. That's where managers get stuck because they usually go through this process where they think oh my market's different, it's not fair. And then they start to figure out that they can win if they decide to win. And then they usually do, but that usually is, is the, the biggest hang up. So we, you know, we have a call every month with everybod Covid. We've, we've, you know, been checking on everybody and seeing what the elite managers are doing because they're usually the best of the best. And the thing that blew me away as we were going through everybody's numbers and their dashboards and talking about it is how many managers have cut their staff by 20, 25% and they're all doing bigger numbers than they were pre Covid.
They've cut like they've gotten rid of a couple texts that weren't performing. They've gotten rid of an advisor that wasn't performing and with less people they're doing more. It's incredible.
Yeah, they, they worked out during the, during the pandemic. They got, they got stronger, they got leaner and now they're in business.
Yeah. And they're not, they're not going to bring them back. Some of them too, this was interesting. Some of them have been closed on Saturdays and they don't think they're going to bring Saturdays back until towards the end of the year because customers haven't expected it. I thought that was pretty interesting that customers kind of understand and because I think a lot of customers aren't consistently working or also a lot of the elite members really embrace the idea of going and picking up customers cars that Saturdays become less of an issue. So their expenses have gone down dramatically just their overhead by just covering five days instead of six. Nobody thought that that would be a trend that would continue past the end of the year. But everybody thought that it was good for now. It was helping with expenses now. But some of the, the net to grosses during this have been tremendous and they're actually making more than they were. Some are making more than they were. It just kind of depends on the brand in the market, in the state, because states have kind of dictated a lot of things. But that was the thing that blew me away is they don't plan on bringing back that, that other 20%. They see it as a chance to get lean. And then it makes me wonder like, how long we carry people that aren't performing. Like we, we just kind of get in this daily routine, routine and we allow it and then something like this happens in. We end up figuring out that, you know, it's that old Tim Smith joke where people would ask him, hey, Tim, how many people work for you? And he'd say, oh, about half of them.
That's a good one.
Like there's, there's people that just aren't productive. They're, they're not adding gross, they're not adding anything to the equation. But we're allowing them to still be there because we don't want to make the hard decisions. And these sort of things come up and they make the hard decisions for us. And just, you know, think about what is the lesson in that? How long are you going to carry dead weight? Because, you know, things will come back and next year we'll, we'll forget about this. But maybe that's something that we don't forget about is let's, let's run leaner.
Yeah, I think that, I think that one of the things that I've caught, I got asked this pre Covid, but definitely a lot over the last couple of months is that how do I decide if I need someone? And really it comes out to two things is what I always tell them is that they need to either enhance the customer experience or they need to enhance the bottom line. And if you can't say that the person that is on your payroll does one of those two things, you really have to ask if they're valuable.
Member Well, I would go as far too on that, Christian, and say if you're wondering that you don't have a system, because in the system that we have and we teach everybody, it's very clear when you need to add a tech or an advisor.
Yeah.
Because you have a scalable system. And so if you're thinking that you don't have a very good system, because it's very obvious if you have.
A system for how many advisors to how many techs, how many ros per advisor, if all of that math is worked out and it's working then it's really clear that if you're booked out three days or four days, you need to add, you need to add more, and you find the soft spot. And that depends on, on your market, because some markets are seasonal and it slows down in the winter a little bit. But for the most part, it, it works, you know, pretty seamlessly. Thank you so much for watching this clip of Service Drive Revolution. Now you can catch the full episode of on YouTube, iTunes or Spotify or wherever you consume your podcast. If you have any questions, go ahead and post them in the comments below. 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.
