A short conversational transcript (YouTube) featuring Chris Collins and Tim discussing leadership in automotive dealerships. They argue that leadership—coaching people rather than departments—creates high-performing teams, drawing parallels to sports coaches turning average players into winners. The clip contrasts cultures that lift everyone with ones that keep people average and notes common accountability failures.
You're never gonna discover things.
Let me defend all the service managers, sales managers, everybody. Most of them guys are the least trained people in a dealership. Most of them get a lot of training on how to. How to manage the dock, how to manage the inventory, how to manage stuff. But they don't get anything on how to manage people, how to lead people, how to have big vision and. And how to dream big. You know, you see it all the time. You can go. You guys go into stores and you go in there and they have nothing but a team of top producers every. And then they hire a new guy and bring him in, He's a top producer within a short time. The bat. Because that's the culture that great leaders create. They don't have that low lid. That lid is always getting pushed up. But then you go into other dealerships, whether it's sales or service, and it's just a team of average people. So why can you take one guy and put him in a dealership and he sells six cars or he's an average or below average advisor, but then you could take that same guy and put him in another dealership right across town, same environment, same structure, their top producers. What is the difference? Well, it's leadership. I mean, that's all it is. You see it in sports, right? You ever see a sports team where you had a great coach and they go to a team that's average players and that team overachieves? How often does that happen?
All the time.
New England patriots do it. You know, I mean, it's. You go on and on about that.
Oh, yeah, like the. The. Yeah.
This is what Jim Harbaugh did at Michigan. He took a team that was. I don't even know what the record was. 4 and 8 or 2 and 10. Not at all. He took. They were 2 and 10.
That was 4 and 10.
And they looked 10 and 2 or whatever it was after that. So it's. But. But. But you see it the other way around too. Right. You see an average coach go to a talented team, and that team underachieves. And that happens. I live in Dallas. It happens there all the time.
Yeah.
So in reality, it comes down to the coaches. And here's the funniest part, the scariest part in sports, when things go bad and the team fails, who do they get rid of?
The coach.
Yeah. And who do we blame and get rid of when things go bad?
The player.
Good thing we're not in sports, huh?
Yeah. No. And, you know, a really good timism that he says is you got to stop coaching the department and start coaching the people. Is that how you say it or.
Do you see different? Stop trying to manage your department. Start managing the individuals within the department. Yeah, we spend so much time trying to. We try to spend so much time winning the game, but we forget where the game. It's about the process, stupid. Follow the process, focus on the process, clear out all the white noise, do the right things all day, every day. Care about your people, spend time with your people and the victory is going to take care of itself. What other industry worries about the end result in the middle of the game?
