Tate, a new service manager at a family-owned Texas shop, gets advice from Chris Collins on his first 90 days: spend 30 days listening and observing, then implement all changes at once instead of gradually to avoid resistance. Key moves include one-on-one meetings with staff, identifying informal leaders, and framing questions to shape how people think about problems.
Questions this video answers
90 days (with the first 30 days dedicated to listening and research).
8333 ASK SDR (spoken as '8333, ask SDR').
offers.chriscollinc.com
Chapters
Good morning, gentlemen. My name is Tate. I just wanted to say I'm a huge fan of the show. Great content. Got some really some advice I'm seeking from you gentlemen. I've got, just took a job as a service manager at a new store that our company is acquiring. It's been a family owned store for the last several years in a really small town in Texas.
Just kind of want to pick your brains on some, maybe some tips or tricks on coming into a store as a, as an outsider. I'm going to be significantly younger than everyone else there and.
Be kind of thrown into a culture that's already like a tight knit family. So what are some tips and tricks that you guys would have or try to use to kind of ease the tension of being thrown into this family type environment.
As a brand new service manager?
Thanks in advance.
That's a great question, Tate. So one thing that I would do going in is I would understand that it's gonna take you 90 days to fix it. So I would spend the first 30 days just researching and figuring out what is what and who is who. And I wouldn't make a lot of moves. I wouldn't talk about changes, I wouldn't. One thing that hurt me early on when I would go into to fix service departments is I would talk about how the pay plan is going to change and then it paralyzes everybody. I would talk about what things that we were going to do and all it was was death by a thousand paper cuts. Because they would take one little thing that I had said and then they would make that the mantra of why everybody was going to leave or everybody was unhappy. So keep your lips sealed and just ask a lot of questions. Research, watch, pay attention.
Go through repair orders and you can learn a lot by going through repair orders. Watch the process, ask a lot of questions. The second thing I would do is I would schedule an hour with everybody in parts and service and every manager in the whole dealership. And I would sit down with them and I would get to know them. So the first 15 minutes of that interview would be, you know, are you married, kids, what do you like to do? Your hobbies and just make friends with them, learn, learn about them. The rest of the interview would be about the business and how we can make the business better. Understand that when you ask questions, you can create intention. So if I ask Christian a question.
Like about customers, like, so let's say I said so, what do you think about customers.
That can go either way, right? Because you could be like, well, Customers are crazy, or the customers here are nuts, or this is Texas, and, you know, whatever. They'll shoot you, whatever they say. Actually, I've heard that before, been told that before.
Ask the questions, creating the intention you want. So, Christian, how could we better serve customers? See, there's a big difference. I'm implanting the intention into Christian, and I'm framing how he's going to respond. So I'm not leaving him a lot of room to wiggle. So if I'm talking to a technician, I would say something like, so what's your process for inspecting cars for additional work? In my experience, most of the techs are going to say, I inspect every car. Truth is, they're not inspecting any cars most of the time, but that's what they're going to say. That's okay. All we're doing is just creating a relationship and a dialogue. Now, when I come back 60 days later and I put in an organized system to inspect, and the technicians say, oh, well, I want to get paid to inspect cars. You told me in an interview you were inspecting every car. Right? So just, you know, what you're asking and what you're framing comes into play later on, Right? So then I would. I would ask them, you know, about how can we improve the efficiency in the shop. Now they're going to blame parts, so just, you know, get ready to write that. A bunch of times they're going to blame the service advisors. But at the end of the day, what's important is you're listening to them. You're going to. By the end of interviewing everybody, and it's going to take you probably a week. I don't know how many employees you have going in. It's going to take you a week. You're going to know who's sleeping with who, who's doing what. You know, you're. It's going to be really hard by day three to even listen to what they're saying because everybody's going to kind of say the same thing. But it's. It's really important to them, sitting with you and getting to know you and feeling like they have a say that they got time with you instead of, you know, when you're new coming in, you're in the office all the time. They know change is coming. They know that you're going to change stuff because you wouldn't be there if you weren't going to change stuff. Break that ice and just sit down with them right away, one on one, and put it all at ease. Like Hey, I don't know what you know. They'll say, are you going to change my pay plan? Are you going to. They know what's messed up, so they'll suggest different things and just say, oh, I don't know, I'm just asking questions. Even if you know what you're going to change, don't tell them that you're going to change it. You'll find that the shuttle driver, the cashiers, anybody answering the phone or lot attendants, they know more about what's going on than anybody else. They know which advisors suck. They know who doesn't call who back. They know why customers complain because they're on the front lines and they see it. Right. So the shuttle driver that's taking customers home all the time knows everything.
They hear it all.
And so just spend the first 30 days watching, listening, going through paperwork. And then the next thing I would say is create your plan of what you're going to do and do it all at once. Don't do death by a thousand paper cuts. You roll out a new pay plan. Then they're all upset about that and then you try to get them to, you know, inspect or sell more work and they're sideways about their pay plan. I start gamification pay plans, new processes. You know, if I'm bulldozing the service drive and changing the way customers come in, it all happens at once so they have no chance to undo any of it. So that's what I would do going in. I think another thing too is enlist some of the more influential people. Once you've done your research and you kind of know who's influential and who the natural leaders are, pull them aside, take them to lunch, maybe invite them out to dinner with their spouse and really get to know them and enlist their help and become their friend. Don't just make it a, you know, boss, employee type thing and you know, say, hey, we should be different, we should take better care of customers. We could really, you know, do something special here and enlist them and tell them how important they are to the process and how they're the future leaders.
You'll get a lot of buy in by investing energy and time in the people that are natural leaders there.
Yeah. And getting them to buy in, the other people just follow and then you don't have to put as much energy into it. Yeah, it's actually just a more efficient shop. Yep. It's just a more efficient way to do it.
And they're usually good people, they just are misguided or they've been misled.
And don't assume that the shop foreman's the leader.
Yeah.
And a lot of times you'll find out that there's someone else that's actually the leader of the shop. And it's not always the dedicated shop foreman type either.
It's always really interesting to meet their spouses. Like, that's a secret weapon in a lot of cases.
Yeah. Cause then you got a trump card over them.
Not only a trump card, but you just kind of know, like, what's going on. You know, somebody's different in front of their spouse. Good question, though. Thanks so much, Tate. Thanks for listening.
Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driver Revolution. 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 that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you.
