Secrets of The Irreplaceable Service Manager | SDR #263
Chris Collins discusses his book Irreplaceable Service Manager, covering why he wrote it, design choices like larger font for readability, and favorite chapters including one about an authentic manager called Mr. X. A proposed NHTSA airbag recall affecting 52 million airbags, 20 million in GM vehicles, also comes up.
Chapters
Welcome everybody, to the big show. We are going to start your week off with a bang. Today we're going to talk about the secrets of the irreplaceable service manager. We also dive deep into Christian's.
Trauma. How would you say it?
Oh, it's a light braise.
A light braise. There's more there.
Don't panic, Roger.
And there's some surprises in the news. That and much, much more. Coming up on service Drive Revolution.
What happens today?
We're going to the football game.
Yep. How do you feel about the. So everybody, we're going to the Cowboys Chargers on Monday night.
Right.
With the team. Because our whole team is in town for Top Dog.
It's kind of like our. Our Top Dog kickoff day, right?
Yeah. So we kind of make Top Dog into a whole week internally. So we'll have the coaches come in, we're going to go to the game and then we'll spend.
Couple days having internal meetings.
Like a coach. The coach meetings.
And then we'll have Top Dog, which will be a blast. It always goes by so quick.
Yeah. It is a race in itself for sure.
And if you don't have your tickets to Top Dog, you will not get a ticket.
It is a sold out event is what I would say. We are at capacity.
Exactly.
There's no room at the end.
I was gonna tell you too. There's a. There's been a little bit of like a weird Covid thing happening lately. So I went and got a COVID test over the weekend and I got a 50.
At the same time.
I also had the new Covid.
Yeah, I also, as I got results back from my IQ test, I was positive.
I think we should talk about the news.
So today we have an article out of Car and Driver. And this may shock all of you that have been in the business for a long time, but the NHTSA is proposing that there is a recall of 52 million vehicles due to. If you had to think of the biggest recalls over the last 20 years, Chris, what is it related to?
Let me think. What does every car and truck have? Tires. But they're not all the same tires.
It's gonna be. I'm gonna guess it's airbags.
He would be correct. So 52 million airbags are potentially defective. So the big number to attach to this 52 million is that 20 million of them are GM products. So just under half a.
Yeah. So since 2015, the NHTSA has found nine ruptures and two deaths, which basically means the things exploded on their own and, and shot metal shards in places they shouldn't go. So here's the thing that. No, here's the thing that surprises me about this, though. And I don't know if I'm insensitive, but you're.
Before you finish this, I'm going to tell you you're insensitive.
Okay, great.
This the only person raised in the Midwest that's insensitive.
How does that work? I don't know. It doesn't make any sense at all.
Someday we'll get to the bottom of it.
But the failure rate of the airbags that they want to recall is 1 in 370,000.
And so your thought is that that's not that bad unless you're the one.
369,001.
You think it's terrible.
Just, just let's say that we were going to Vegas, you and I, for the weekend, and there was something that had. The odds of being successful were 369,999 out of 370,000. We're not picking the, we're not picking the dark horse.
All the one needs is a good lawyer. That's all.
Fair, I understand. I'm just saying that, like, we're saying that these airbags are terrible, but like one out of 370,000, you're like, I take those odds. Yeah. There's so many more components on cars that fail at a much higher rate than that. So I think that that's interesting how they're kind of tuned into.
You know, the airbag thing. However, I think about, like, you know, let's say a manufacturer, Korean manufacturers, having problems with like, oil consumption in their engines and they, they have tons and tons.
A Korean manufacturing. Could you be more specific?
But to me, like, those things, like, they consume oil and then the.
Which of the two Korean manufacturers that are actually the same.
And you can't answer this question wrong, by the way, so they're both correct. Okay.
But let's say, hypothetically, the two Korean auto manufacturers that are the same, they're really the same, have an oil consumption problem.
Just. Just say it.
Okay.
Hypothetical.
I follow you. Yeah.
I think that's 10 times more dangerous than a 1 in 370,000 chance of an airbag failure.
I think nobody's dying from oil consumption.
No, but it. I do think that what happens if they, if the car gets low enough on oil? I would assume that it probably could stall out. And if it stalls out on the freeway, maybe we just haven't attributed it to the engine yet.
Maybe not. But the airbag thing is a. It's not a.
All right. I'm just saying I would play the odds.
It's a surprise when those things go off. It's like a.
It's a shotgun blast.
What's the. What's the biggest firecracker we could buy? When we were kids, I lived in Mexico. No, we could buy M1000s. They were like. They were a quarter stick of dynamite.
I thought that was M80s, maybe M1000.
Maybe there's a whole stick for Mexico.
I don't know. You know, people are listening to this and I'm like, what did they drink before they started filming?
Nothing.
Yeah.
Yeah. That's what it's like when an airbag goes on.
Yeah. I've hit a couple airbags. They're not very fun. You've hit them, isn't. They've hit my face.
Yeah. Surprise. With your driving.
You know how many airbags I've had to go off?
No.
Zero.
Not one. A couple, he says, which means 12 dozen. You've had a dozen airbags go off?
I'm still here. That's all I've got to say. So I was part of that 369,999. So kind of related to that. On the heels of the airbag thing and then the UAW strike and all the other fun things that are happening, GM stock the other day hit a three year all time low.
Is it time to buy GM stock? No, no, no.
I don't like that.
You think it's going lower?
I don't like the trajectory where that thing's headed, but.
Really?
Yeah. So what does this mean for service departments, though?
Oh, the recalls. It means that most of the service departments out there will see it as an inconvenience and they won't be ready for it. And the customers will have a terrible time because customers will, in their head, think they're one of the 360. They'll want to get in. They will be booked out. They won't be able to get them in. And then the customers will feel worse about GM than they did before. And there'll be a handful of service departments that gear up for it, inspect every car that comes in that they haven't been seeing, and use it as a chance to gain some retention and to, you know, to sell more work. But that will be so far, and few between. Most of them will just.
Amplify the negative perception the customers have already.
Yes. Ironically, the odds of the GM store being ready for this event is 1 in 3 1, 3 7. But I do think that it's a really great opportunity. So if you're a GM store, start prepping now for the fun that's coming down the road.
That's inspect every car and figure out, like, why aren't they coming in? Why are they going somewhere else. Right.
Yeah. I love Takata time.
I mean, there's two things that give dealers huge advantage when you just talk about direct to the service department like that. They have a lot of advantages, but there's two big ones. One is warranty. Customers got to come back.
And two is recalls.
Huge opportunity. You said it before, and that's probably the thing that the average store looks at recalls as an inconvenience. And there's some really great stores out there that look at those as huge opportunities. Opportunities.
There's no way you're buying GM stock.
No.
I'm. I'm out.
Would you buy crypto first?
I have crypto.
You do?
Yeah.
Let's just say I have a lot of crypto, but not a lot of value to it.
No joke. I didn't know that.
Yeah. It's worth 20% of what I paid.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Almost to the point where it's so worthless. I just keep it.
Really. Just. I bought zero crypto.
I don't blame you. I don't know.
I don't know. I was thinking, I'm clearly not an investor, like somebody that I'm not playing the market. I don't know everything that's going on, so I should only go with sure things, which I've done that, too.
I tend to do very small amounts of trades, but big. Like the Tesla trade that I did, that was great.
Yeah.
More than doubled the money. But I wouldn't. I'm not like.
I also made a bunch of money on Facebook for a minute and then got out.
So you got in, made a bunch of money, and then got out.
Yeah, Same. Same as the Teslas. I just knew it was way undervalued, and it was. Yeah.
Now, if you'd kept it, would you have gotten a lot more money?
You know what? I don't know, because I never.
Well, I mean, once.
It's never done, that's almost.
It's almost torture to go back and look because you don't have the stock, so it's irrelevant. But.
Yeah, but I would buy more Tesla, I think.
Yeah. I have. I have gone back since we made those initial purchases in Baltimore. Tesla. Yeah.
Yeah. No, GM.
Not GM. It's way cheaper to buy GM stock. That's for sure.
What is it?
30 bucks a share versus Tesla was 260 the last time I looked at it.
Anything else in the news, that was it.
Those are the two main things. Three. Seven. One in 300.
Heartless sob.
Yeah. Dirty, dirty bird.
The one in 300 and whatever. 60,000.
I'm pretty excited.
Do you think that those odds are good?
Yeah. Great.
I'm pretty excited about our topic today.
Me too.
So.
So we have been doing a series every other Tuesday. It's kind of like church for service departments where we get together. We're going through the irreplaceable service manager book, a 90 day roadmap to the best fixed ops month ever. Chapter by chapter, and kind of exploring each chapter, adding stories, talking about it, and then doing a Q and A at the end. If you are not in on those conversations, you can go to Chris Collins, Inc. ChrisCollinsInc.com and sign up. It is I. We priced it at 50 bucks a month. So service managers, advisors coming up that want to be service managers someday, everybody can get in on it. It's more about, you know, trying to help than anything else.
And making some friends. So we'd love to see you on there. It's interactive and kind of fun. We have a lot of fun.
Super fun. I think the thing that really amazed me is we were kind of chatting about this today is that there is so much more stuff to go through. Like, you packed a whole lot into that, into that book.
Yeah, maybe. Maybe, like, maybe too much. People said that it was too much.
Yeah, that's actually, that's on my list of the questions that I have for you today is talking about the length of the book. But. But it's super interesting. And one of the things I was gonna say is this might help you with understanding why I'm so insensitive.
But we're gonna get into your childhood.
Yeah. So when I was a kid, Mommy.
Never said she loved you?
No. She's like, I don't even know. She knows she has a son, but.
But raised like Tarzan.
Yeah. By.
By alligators.
No, rabbits.
Oh, nice.
But. But I was once.
There's a lot of whoopee going on.
Oh, yeah, that's right. Rabbits are known for that. I was thinking about how fast they were, but maybe it's the whoop.
But they're not. They're not in conflict with each other. Fast at both. Yeah.
Yeah, good point.
They're faster procreating.
Yeah. But when I was really young, I was. I was kidnapped by mimes. They did unspeakable things to me.
Coming in hot with the dad jokes. Poppy Chulo.
I like that one. I'm thinking about getting a new mug.
Oh, wouldn't Claudia be mad?
No, I'd let her pick it.
You want a different font on your puppy?
No, I think it's just something. Something else.
You want it in old English or something?
Helvetica. Yeah.
You know what's funny is I get a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, like people reaching out, trying to sell services to me and stuff like that. And it'll come as like, as lead coach and Papi Chiulo at Chris Collins Inc. Like they, you can tell just it copies whatever your job title is and it goes into that. And I have Poppy Chulo on the. My LinkedIn.
Oh, do you? That's funny.
Yeah, I love that. So it'll be like, as lead coach and Papi Chulo at Chris Collins Inc. You must have a need for coaching. It's so great.
I love it. All right, so I've got a list of questions.
They're not in any particular order. However, I think that they build into each other. So maybe they are in particular order. Scratch that. So my first question for you is in the context behind this is that I meet people all the time that are like, I'm either writing a book or I should write a book. I've done this so long, I know it all. I'm writing a book and it's very rare that I come across someone that actually has written a book. So what is it that got, how did you get started? Like, I wouldn't even know where to go to like get a book published, to be honest with you. So how do you remember like that initial thing that says, oh, I'm going to write a book and it's going to be about this and here's how I'm going to get it done.
Yeah. And I would say the thing that I think of too when we're talking about this is then there's most people start a book and don't finish a book. Of the people that finish a book, which is a low percentage, only a handful of them is the book good. Like think about, of all the books that are gonna come out this week, how many of them aren't very good or they're self serving or, you know, whatever it is. And so, you know, getting a book done and then actually wanting it to have an effect on people is not an easy, an easy task. Right. Like you can see firsthand the Amount of mental anguish I've been going through the last more than a year trying to. Trying to finish this leadership book.
It's been a labor of love, but not an easy labor.
And there's days, like, where I hate it. Like, I hate. It's just the oddest thing. Like, you hate everything about it.
And that's all. It's just a part of the process.
So I'll.
I'll tell you what. What. What happened was I was talking to somebody.
Who was. Was successful in business and coaching and that sort of thing, and they suggested that I write a book. And I was kind of like, you know, no, there's no market for that. And then they made the point to me that if you. They asked the question, do you want to help more people? And I said, yeah, as a matter of fact, like, I'm kind of tapped out. Like, I'm booked. I'm booked out way ahead of time. And. And I'm never home. And, you know, I couldn't. There's nowhere else for me to.
To add time. Like, I'm. I'm pretty. Pretty strapped. And they. They asked the question, like, well, do you want to help more people? And I was like, well, yeah, of course I want to help more people. And they're like, well, that's the start of helping more people is if you write a book. And then they said, it's easy. Just get a ghostwriter. They'll. They'll interview you, and.
You know, they'll write the book, and then you. You just put it out. So I did that, and I paid a ghostwriter. I don't know exactly how much, but I. It was. It was probably close to.
Back then. I'm gonna guess it was like 10,000 bucks.
Oh, yeah. I was gonna guess thousands. So 10 grand makes sense.
And the person interviewed me. We came up with an outline, and then they.
A couple months later, handed in a book. And I opened it up and I started reading it, and I go, oh, nobody. Nobody in the auto industry is gonna think I wrote this book. Like, they don't understand the terminology. They've got all this wrong. And so then I started trying to explain to the person.
How things were wrong and that it's just when somebody isn't in the auto industry to explain to them the inside baseball of what really happens in the dynamics and the characters and, like, the politics and the. You know, we experience that when we bring on, you know, different companies, and we're like, no. Well, you know, there's the people that are making the Decisions. And then there's the management and you know, it's just, it's a whole thing.
So you have to teach every person.
Every time it didn't get better and it wasn't, the book wasn't good enough.
To fix. I didn't think, I thought that.
It wouldn't represent me. And people told me at that point they're like, just put the book out. Most people don't read a book anyways. Just put it out. Like nobody will read it, it doesn't matter. And I was like, what? Like, no, I can't, I can't do that. Right? And they would say like, well, how many service managers or your car dealers actually read a book? And I'd be like, well, dealers read books, but service managers don't usually read a book. Like.
They'Re like, yeah, so who cares? Like you'll be the expert. You're the one that wrote the book. But they won't read it anyways. And there's all these stats, right, that only like 15% of books that get bought are read.
Oh, that doesn't surprise me at all.
Yeah, it's very low. And what's odd is of that percentage, most are female of the book buyers.
That actually read it. So. So the male buyers are less likely to read the book than their female counterparts.
And when you just talk about publishing as an industry, more females buy books. Okay, but you, you would have to like understand that the categories are buying is like thrillers, novels, that sort of thing. But the publishing industry caters more to the female buyer than the male buyer.
Yeah, why not put your money where you.
But they read more. And so most, most guys buy books, but they didn't, they never get to it. Right. Okay, so then I was back. So this maybe took like.
Six months or something and then I was back to zero. And then I probably didn't do anything for another six months. Like that was like a year of an expensive, time consuming failure. So then I tried to fix that book. I went back to it and I tried to fix it and then.
Long.
Kind of long story short, that didn't work. And I decided to start completely from scratch all over again.
And.
I came up with a new table of contents.
And I wrote it. And it probably, I mean I was really busy and on the road all the time and so I wrote it in hotel rooms and on airplanes and that sort of thing.
And never, never writing a book. Tons of typos. In the first version of this book, there's a ton of typos. But.
But, yeah. So it was, it was three years in the.
Making.
An expensive mistake and then painful. When you, when you write a book, you feel like you're having a kid. Like you feel like you've given a piece of yourself. If you care about what it is.
Yeah. If you care about what the. If you want it to be something that's going to make a difference, not about you.
And I was very connected to what, what we are as an industry, what, what service managers are thinking, what's in their head, what their objections are, what they're afraid of. I mean, for the most part they're not, they're not that different. And so I very much had them in my mind, like, hey, this thing has to do this, this and this in order for them to.
Have some sort of outcome. My goal wasn't to sell the book. My goal was to have an outcome if somebody bought it.
Okay. Which probably rolls me into this next question. I bet it's the same exact answer. So when you and I met many moons ago and you gave me the book, you had said a phrase to me that I still remember to this day, that it's a two cup of coffee book, which I thought it was interesting because I'd never heard anybody describe a book like that. Is that kind of along the same lines of when you wrote it? You wanted it to be something that could make a difference. Does the length of the book have something to do with it?
Yes. So back to people telling me that most people won't read a book. That really scared me. And then I started thinking about it and most of the time, like you've experienced this being around me, most people haven't read a book until they met me and I suggest a book.
Right.
And so people around us read a lot of books, but we're influencing that. Even with, I mean, I don't know how many of our coaches would read books if we weren't doing book reports and all. Some of them do, but I would say the average, they wouldn't. And so I was really afraid. So then I thought, okay, if I want service managers to read the book and I want to give them value and I want to inspire them and give them some, some things they never thought of or some tools, then I need to get right to the point here. Here's the other thing in designing books that you're kind of told from people that make books is don't give them the answers, only agitate the question. And I was like, no way, not a. Now if I get A book. And I'm on chapter two. And I can tell that they're just agitating the question. They're not really giving you an answer. I'm, I, I toss, I'm not going to finish it. So they're like, no, what you want to do is get them excited, so they hire you. Yeah, that's the goal of a book, is to be the expert, agitate the question. But for them to get the information, they got to hire you. And we've always had the approach, even with this show or our YouTube videos or whatever, is we give away better content than people charge for, which I would say in our industry.
We'Ve surpassed that. I don't know how many people we meet that never have spent a dollar with us and have gained tons of value and say that we've changed their life and made a huge difference just from the free content out there, which is fine. And so I thought, okay, then I gotta design this book in a way that's easy and friendly. And so at the end, and this was like killing the, Killing your babies. They always say I took out three chapters. The one chapter that I took out that I do remember, I don't remember what the other two were, was time management. And it just didn't seem to fit. Like it didn't.
You know, it could be there, it could not be there, but it didn't seem like this is a how to book and time management is more of a philosophical idea or the way I understood time management then was, and then I did something else is I made the font bigger. Understanding that if somebody gets in the rhythm of easily turning pages, they start to feel success and they, if they sit down for a couple minutes and they're all of a sudden, you know, this far in and they, they've learned something. Somebody who's never read a book or isn't in the habit of reading books is like, oh, this is easy. Like, this isn't hard. I was trying to take away all of the friction and create an experience that somebody would feel like, oh, I'm gaining knowledge. And the feeling of flipping the pages.
Like sometimes, you know, you pick up a book and you can read the first page for 10 minutes. Yeah, I didn't want that. I wanted them to be two minute pages where every two minutes you're looking at the other thing and then you're flipping so the font's a tiny bit bigger. It's funny, we're formatting some books right now and I told the designer, I go make the font a Little bigger. And they're like, you can't do. I'm like, can't. What are you talking about? It's the. I'd rather have more pages at the end and have somebody get in the rhythm and feel like they're getting ahead, then stuck on the. There's just something satisfying about flipping pages. So I thought in the design of the book, to consider the unique person reading it in their experience and try to create an experience that would give them value and make them feel like they were. They were, you know, accomplishing something.
Yeah.
And so it's a two cup of coffee book. Like, over a couple cups of coffee, you can finish this book and get tons. Tons of value.
Yeah. The. So as a. As someone who read it, it was the first book that I'd read in a long time. I'm not an idiot, but I'm not an avid reader, or I wasn't an avid reader at that moment in time. The unintended byproduct of that was self esteem. So what I got is I was a person that could read and understand books. And then it just started me down a journey where I haven't stopped since that particular book. Do you know what my second book I read was?
No.
Art of War by Sun Tzu.
Hmm.
Also an easy read.
Yeah. And different. That book, in a sense, is an easy read, but you stop and think. So you read it and you got to stop and think about it.
Yeah. So I didn't rush that, but I don't. I never would have got to that without irsm, without irreplaceable service manager. I never would have got to.
I didn't know that. That's cool. Well, that was the intended result.
Right.
Was. Was to make whoever picked it up to make them feel like they were accomplishing something and not that it was a daunting task. And then if. If I gave them the, you know, whatever information I understood at that point, if I gave them that information and they had value and it wasn't, you know, shielded by, hey, you gotta go buy something to get the answer to this. But actually, like, you know, here. Here's what's working. Like, here's what I know at this point, and they feel the two combined, I think, is what makes it work, is the success of reading a book and then the absorption of new ideas make you feel like, oh, okay, this is an experience that I feel has made me better, which was my intent.
Yeah. I think that you hit it right on. You're the second person in two weeks that's told me about the whole satisfaction of the turning the page thing, too.
Oh, really?
Who else? My son. So he's 11, and he's. When he was a kid, loved writing, reading books, and now he's kind of really started to get back into it. I'm like, what is it that you love? Because he, like, he's a machine now. He'll just keep reading and reading and reading. He's like, dad, every time I turn the page, I've finished and won something.
Every time he turns a page, which I think is so great.
I think it'll be interesting with this leadership book because it's so different the way that it's. It's formatted. And in a sense, this was the. The spark of that, right? Like that.
That.
The way that we format a book and. And turning your back on the industry, because the industry, like, whenever you talk to somebody who writes books or whatever, what. What is the question they ask you about a book?
How long is it?
How many words?
How many words?
So they sit around and they go, oh, well, mine's 120,000 words, and mine's 200. That book on Elon Musk is 900,000. Or, you know, and if you talk to a writer, like a ghost writer to write a book, they'll be like, well, how many words do you want it to be? And it's kind of like, you've experienced this with me before, where people go, well, how long do you want the video to be? Like, an editor will say, well, how long do you want the video to be? I'm always like, I want it to.
Be good as long as it takes to get the message across.
Yeah, but good like, not. Don't waste anybody's time and make it good. Like, I don't. I don't. If it's five minutes, and that's what there. It's five minutes. If it's 20 minutes, that's what. You know, I remember Jerry Seinfeld talking about when he was making Comedians in Cars in the beginning, and all these executives that are his friends would go, well, you got to make them seven minutes for them to play on YouTube and this and that. And he's like, I don't know. We just watch what we got. And some are 12 minutes, summer 19. Like, it's whatever we got from that episode, you know? But I think with the leadership book, the. The rhythm of it and the feel and the size of it and all of that are going to play into the absorption of the content. You can't I don't think. I don't think most authors just are putting words on a piece of paper, but the. How many words, how big.
Pictures.
All of that plays into. You know, you want them to stop and think about something for a minute, or do you want them to blow by, like. Because that's the other thing is you kind of lose your attention span with the way a lot of books are formatted.
Oh, I believe that for sure.
There's just so many words, and they take so long to get to a point.
Yeah. I think that the leadership book, from what I've seen of it so far, is that you're trying to. The reason to stay in is that you're taking people on an adventure. And it's almost like it's what's next when you turn the picture, as opposed to, like, you have to keep continuing the story. It's like, oh, this is a story, but there's something else coming along with it. It's super visually appealing. And this book's kind of the same way. Like, it's really. It's easy the way that you hop from one subject to the next. Which brings me to my next question. Is. This might be hard to answer, but do you have a favorite part of the book? Is there a part that when you look back at it, it's like, oh, yeah, that hit home exactly how I wanted it to.
I mean, I have this. I have this deep love for the time that this book was created, in a sense that there was this tight group of managers we called the Secret Service Society. And I dedicate this to them in the beginning. And the motto at the beginning is like, well, what we used to read before every meeting. But I think that the motto and that feeling of.
I don't know, just. I think that the.
I mean, it's funny how accomplished most of those managers have become, but they were accomplished then, really, in a sense. But how.
Yeah, like, you think like a group, a small group of people can't make such a difference. But, I mean, it's funny. You really can. And how hard and smart they were, how hard they worked and how smart they were. But I think that that is the. When I think of this book, I genuinely attribute a lot of the content in here to what we figured out in feedback loops of trying things and not accepting the status quo. Like, nobody in that room was opposed to trying something if it made sense. And they were all trying to up each other in performance, and everything was based on the customer experience and net profit. So none of the stuff in here is idealized, which I've always, I've always had a disdain for consultants and idealized ideas. When, you know, people say, oh, you got to pay your advisors on gross. Why? Well, and then they don't know why, but because they heard it at a 20 group. But it doesn't make any, any sense. Or, you know, people that sit around and argue about proficiency and efficiency and all that, like, there's none of that. And there was none of that in that room. They would, they were so hardcore like to, to not waste their time with that sort of stuff. And so that's number one. And then a close second is the, the chapter with, with Mr. X. James.
Yeah. That's great. It's. I think my favorite thing about what you just said is that when you think back to the Secret Service Society is the amount of people that were in that room 13, 14, 15 years ago that are still involved in our program today.
Yeah.
In one way or another.
Coaches.
Some of them are coaches, some are still clients. It is.
Isn't it funny when people are like, so tell me about your coaches. What do they know? And you're like, you have no idea how good our coaches are. There's nothing they haven't seen. Right. Like, they're not, they weren't bg.
You know, they weren't selling BG or whatever. They, like, they've, they've been to hell and back a bunch of times.
I'll say that a couple. I'll say that every once in a while when I get on with the prospect, I'm like, I'm never trying to fix your department with the BG rep. And then I immediately qualify by saying, not that there's anything wrong with the BG rep. It's just a different skill set.
Yeah, no, it's a completely different skill set.
It's just a very different skill set. Which, which these.
But you can't. Unless you've ran stuff and had to sit in the chair, you. You don't have the empathy for the person sitting in the chair that our system relates requires.
That's right.
Because there, there is a degree of empathy that's needed in order to get the result.
Nice. All right, so this is a little bit more of a personal, not necessarily a book related question, but I'll ask first and then I'm going to give my observations of what it's been like. But.
How do you usually respond when someone comes up to you? Let's say that, like this, this Top Dog event this week, it's going to happen. You already know you're prepared for it. When someone comes up to you and, like, maybe they're holding the book or asking you to sign the book, and they're like, chris, thank you so much. You've changed my life. How do you respond to that?
I mean, first of all, a lot of times when people do that, they feel like they're inconveniencing me, which I never want anybody to feel that way. Like, if.
You know me signing a book makes them happy, I want to do it, but I'm more curious about them and the connection and who they are as a person.
It is.
Interesting or hard. You and I, we talked about this when we were up at the lake. Is like, even this show is designed to feel like we're having a conversation.
Sure.
And there's no. At no point, I think, do we ever think that we're celebrities or that we're more important or even that we're smarter. We want to be in on the conversation, and we want to keep the focus on the things that matter.
But, yeah, I guess I always just hope I can make people feel comfortable. And then the. The other side of this is if you put this much work into something with the intention of it having an effect on people, you can't be surprised when it works.
Yeah.
Which I would say it's intentional. Like, I intentionally created that outcome, and I worked very hard to do it, so I'm never surprised.
Yeah. I don't know. There's deep answers to this sort of stuff that I don't really understand. But, you know, a lot of times when I go somewhere, people think I'm a celebrity.
Yeah.
But I'm not. Like, unless you're in the car industry or you listen to business outlaws or whatever, you know, I'm not a celebrity. Like. Right. And what kind of celebrity do they think I am?
Like, people will say it to me all the time. They'll be like, you're famous and you're a famous what?
Action star. Artist. Oh, that's great.
They'll always say you're a famous artist. And I'll be like, actually, no, I'm kind of in the. I mean, I do art and all that, but I'm in the car business or whatever. And they're always like, what? So the. The way people perceive things, and.
I think the presence that you bring your. If you're authentic about what you're doing and confident people perceive you to be something, either way, does that make sense?
Yeah.
And so it's very Interesting. But I don't. I don't like people feeling that because I want them to feel comfortable.
That's right.
It's not about me.
Yeah. So I think that that's a thing that I've seen over the last 10 years that's been a little bit of a shift. I remember observing you when people came up to you. And then I'll tell you the story about when I did the thing with you two is that.
Did you ask me to sign a book?
No. But we had a conversation that will probably make you laugh. And.
First off, you're always super gracious. And then the thing that. And you. You even told me this a couple of years ago, probably before I started coming on the podcast, because I think that you had an idea that there would be some sort of, like, I had to be mentally prepared if someone came up and talked to me. But you always said, get ready because.
People are going to ask you to sign. Sign stuff. Yeah.
So.
And how long after that did that happen?
Not long. It was pretty fast. But you always were, like, really gracious. You always sign. And then there was a lot of, like, thank you, and, like, you kind of shook your head and everything like that. And now when I watch you and someone comes up to you and it's thank you and, oh, did you have a favorite part or, you know, you're trying to get. Where are you at? Like, you actually do what I call petting the dog with the person that asked you, which probably they leave being like, oh, my gosh, he actually was interested in me. And it's all about them when someone comes up and they interact with you. Whereas I think that most people, it's not about the person that's asking them, it's the other way around. So the. My favorite. It's one of my favorite things is way back, it was like we just kind of had that crazy turnaround. Right. I was losing a bunch of money, and then we ended up making a bunch of money in that, which is pretty fast turnaround. And I came up to you like, we're at an event or something like that. Oh, we're in Las Vegas.
But I'd been in your store a.
Couple times when we'd known each other, and we communicated by text and everything like that. And so it went up to you, and I'm like, hey, I just want to let you know, like, you've changed my life. And you're like, oh, thanks. But, you know, your unapplied labor wasn't really good last month. What Are you doing to fix it? Did I really? Yeah.
What did you do to fix it?
I went back and fixed it. Like, it was so funny. We're in Vegas. And I went with.
Must have been looking at your financial.
So I went. I went, no, we're. We're. Caesar's past.
That isn't what I thought you were. That isn't what I thought you would. Were going to say. I thought you were going to say that. I said, well, you did all the work.
No, no, you said. He said, thanks. Your unapplied labor wasn't very good last month. What do you do to fix it? No, you're not.
It was fixed by that Tuesday, so it was okay. But I. But that was also the relationship that we had. Right. That you knew that I was all about the results and.
Oh, yeah. We. I mean, we always had chemistry from the very beginning. And you're. I mean, how can you not. Because you're so fun. But I would kind of reiterate the fact that, like, we're going to have Top Dog this weekend.
Yeah.
It's not about us.
No.
And it's always we're irrelevant. It's our job to pay attention to everybody in the room to create an experience that makes them better, and they're.
It. We're exhausted when it's done. It has nothing to do with us.
Yeah. Remember last year, I was ready to go to bed at five in the afternoon.
You left.
Yeah.
You were done.
I was out.
Yeah. But you worked hard. Like, it's. It's almost harder for you because you do that masterclass, which is giving a piece of your soul, and then you're doing Top Dog.
Um. Yeah.
There's no break where you're going to have a little help, because the coaches are helping with that. But still. Yeah, you. You're. You're going pretty hard.
But wouldn't trade it for the.
But it's not about us.
Nope. It's not about.
It's not about the coaches. We're. It's completely about trying to take managers that are underappreciated but are good people and work hard and inspire them to be better versions of themselves.
Yeah. And I think we're getting better at that every year.
Yeah.
And our team is really aware of the people, the attendees, making it all about them.
But it is funny how our team is. They're all kind of. We're all kind of the same with that introvert.
Introverts. Exactly.
We don't have too many people on the team that have to Be the ones talking in the room we got.
I would say the overwhelming majority prefer to be in the back.
Yeah. Which is a characteristic that I have.
Yep. I think that's another thing people would be surprised about with you.
Everything that you do in terms of like speaking, even just doing this podcast and getting up and doing speeches, like, that's not your normal. That's not your normal mo.
Yeah. It's not about me.
Yeah.
Right.
And the only way that it works.
If it was me, I would be jet skiing on a lake.
Somewhere with.
Me ramming into you.
Different story. But yeah, I think that I've got a couple more questions here, but I want to. Some of them kind of overlap. So I think maybe the last one that I'll leave you with is that did you ever go into a store and all the hundreds of stores that you've gone into, did you ever walk into one and say, oh, no, where, where do I start? Was there like a one that kind of sticks out as, like.
You just didn't even. There was stuff that was so messed up that you didn't know where to start to fix it.
Yeah. So when you're coming in to fix stuff that's really broken.
So Mike, Mike Kahn, the car, the car dealer, he was pretty well known here and then during 2009, he lost his dealerships and was in a, you know, kind of a lawsuit. But pretty. Kind of a smart guy. I had a couple conversations with him and.
He, he said this thing to me because he would buy underperforming deals, dealerships. And he said, if you go into a dealership losing money, the broom sweeps clean.
And I argued with him and I said, no, I'm pretty good at fixing them.
Without that. And I would say it's usually 25 to 30% turnover when they're losing a lot of money. Like there's an element. Usually people.
Yeah, you got there for a reason.
Like, you know, if the parts departments missing a bunch of transmissions and there's a bunch of warranty fraud, those people probably have to go away. But if people are well intentioned and you just put better systems in place and give them some structure.
It'S. It's pretty easy. But there have been times that I've gone into dealerships that were broken and there was so much that had to change so quick that literally people were threatening me like.
Oh, like there was a time in Texas where some of the texts were, when we're talking about middle of Texas, like you can watch your dog run away for three days.
Open ros. On trucks that had been there a couple years. Some of the trucks were there, some weren't. Clearly they were running their own. They had a thing out of the.
Back.
Booked out like a month. Effective labor rate of like 79 bucks and burning through money. And they literally were like, hey, you don't listen. You don't understand, but our market's different. No, you don't understand, but people that mess with us end up in a garbage can.
Oh, that kind of. You don't understand.
Yeah.
So you sit in your hotel room.
And you kind of are like, why? Like I've bitten off more than I can chew. Right. You also will have people that are doing a terrible job at their job. They're. They're blaming everything else for everything. And then they will tell you that you're ruining their life, you're ruining their kids. Like, they will say all this stuff and it's very hard.
To not be affected in one way or the other, even though they're wrong and even though the quicker you get past it, the quicker you get progress.
You know, when you're running a department that is losing money, one of the biggest, biggest.
Dis. What the, the biggest disease, I guess you would call it in that is entitlement. Because if people are allowed to, to continue underperforming and they're still getting overpaid for it, they become entitled to that. They don't. They never see the financial. They don't. They're not aware of how bad things are going. The communication from when the financial statement is printed into the people on the front lines is usually zero.
There's nothing they don't know.
And so it's a complete surprise when somebody comes in and says, oh no, you, you're, you're completely messing this up and underperforming. There's no world where an Advisor can sell $5,000 in customer paying a month and be.
And.
But because there's six advisors doing that and that's their little world and nobody ever sees outside of that world. And half of them started there and they've only ever worked there. Those moments are the, the hardest when you're the first one to come in and, and shine a light on the entitlement, the, the complacency, the mismanagement.
And you know, you just pull a string and all this other stuff falls. Right. So, you know.
If you've been in the industry, you know that an advisor writing 5 or $10,000 a month in CP also isn't calling people back and they're not taking care of customers and they don't have fall like it all is connected, right? How we do anything is how we do everything. And so when you have a shop that is complacent, half of the, you know, half of the texts are on guarantees because nobody wants to work there. And the advisors are getting paid way more than what they're producing because they just wanted to. Their idea of stopping turnover was, well, let's just pay more.
Yeah, we don't want to lose them.
Yeah, but we don't. We also aren't going to do anything in the shop to create more production so the advisors can write more. And so you come into these situations where everybody's entitled. They, they, they haven't seen change in forever. So they're not conditioned. So change is like a shock to their system and represents everything they're afraid of. And then they attribute that to the new person coming in, which is me. And I'm, you know, I did this, I was just a kid, right. I'm 24, I'm 25, I'm rolling in. And I got to the point where the more broken they were, the quicker I wanted to sign them up because I was just good at it. And I thought.
You know, that was the way. If I had to do it over again, I would do bigger stuff that wasn't broken. You get, you get a way better.
The ROI is better.
Like think about my conversation with Gary in Chicago when, when their group came on and he's like, listen, our store is the top performing store and all. Yeah, you'll fix these ones that are underperforming. But, and I said, Gary, believe it or not. And I like, if I'm wrong, you can hold me to it. But actually you will see the biggest increase because you're already going, yeah, these other stores are gonna take a while because they don't have systems that they don't have the right people. You've already got good people, you've got a good manager. You're gonna double what you're doing very, very quickly. And so if I had to do it over again, I would go after, I could double things that are huge versus.
You know, because getting something to break even and then making a profit is, it's a two step thing. So I would say the tension with the people and coming into.
Welfare type entitlement where you're, you represent everything that people hate about capitalism and whatever and all you're doing is trying to get people to do a good job and run a healthy business.
But they're always grateful for at the end. They just don't know it going in.
Not.
Not.
Not.
Yeah. Not. Not in the beginning, though. I, I, I didn't have a skill set in the beginning to.
I didn't understand the magic trick yet of how you could flip momentum.
Yeah.
And then momentum became the tidal wave. I would, that's, you know, I was a bulldog in the beginning. I would debate people and all that. But that's what you do when you're young. I guess I figured have to just be. Y' all figured that out. Yeah, that's true. Right.
I catch myself all the time.
Did I. Did I answer your question?
That was great.
Yeah.
I think that that's one of my thing, like, areas of pride when it comes to our program and going in and working with people is the managers that had no clue that they were doing terribly. And if they just gave us a chance, they left with just me. We just made help them become better people. And I think that that goes beyond the financials and everything like that, is that the managers that are doing poorly, but give it a shot and they go somewhere they've never gone before at the end of it, they never regret it. They never regret the hard work.
Yeah.
So. And I would say it happens more often than not. Whereas.
Because it's something of substance, like, it actually has value.
Yeah.
It's not, it's not a, it's not a puff of smoke. Yeah.
We want to see people become better citizens. I think. Is probably that one of my favorite things that we say so. But. Yeah, this was, this was good. It's super.
What was your, what was your biggest surprise?
Let's see.
Let me get off my joke note card. Yeah.
Probably, I think my favorite or my biggest surprise is that actually. And maybe it's not now, but I love that your favorite part is the part about James. So your favorite part of the book is the chapter you didn't write. I think that's actually really neat. I didn't know that that was the case.
But it's, it's kind of.
That part of the book made it real.
Yeah.
It wasn't real until it had that. It was just a. How to.
A lot of people say that's the most impactful chapter.
Yeah. Because it's the most authentic. Right. It needed that authenticity. I mean, I, I felt like I had it, but I didn't know writing a book, how you do that like that. That was, that was a late addition.
Yeah. I'm so glad you put it in There. And so early in the book that it really set the tone for the whole thing. Like I remember feeling like.
The it specifically like a little thing about, you know, James had an issue with tech meetings and almost everybody that's read the book has had an issue with tech meetings. But James was me and I think he is a lot of other people that are at that point when they're reading that book.
Yeah. It's funny that, See now if I had to write that chapter, that wouldn't have been, that wouldn't have been the thing that I would have put as the biggest pain point. But man, it sure does connect with people.
Yeah. Tribute to James.
Yeah. The pizza, the whole thing.
See, I would have, I would have thought more about the financial statement.
Yes, you would have.
And unapplied labor.
Right.
That's so funny that I said that.
I love it.
Well, thank you everybody for listening to us talk about. That's been super fun. Remember, if.
You want to be a part of this and you've missed a couple of the weeks when we're doing this irreplaceable service manager live lecture series, they're all in the portal so once you sign up, you get access to the back ones. You can start those right away. And then every other Tuesday we're going through a piece of this and we're just starting to kind of get into the meat. We're through the first quarter, but we're getting into the meat potatoes of it. So don't miss out. We would love to have you there and, you know, want to give you some ideas and inspire you and being, being a service manager can be a lonely place and you're not alone. We're here and we'd love to contribute in any way that we can that will help you see things a little different or get some new ideas or just, you know, be around like minded individuals. So don't hesitate. It's a Chris Collins inc.com and there's a tab there at the top and you'll get a little pop up.
Yeah, the tab says IRSM Live.
Thank you. And we will see you next time on Service Drive Revolution.
Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Job 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 now that's offers.chris collins inc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.
