Should Your Service Drive Be Open On Sundays? | SDR #259

Today we talk about the question that has been bugging you for years. Should my department be open on Sundays?

I don't know if that's been bugging people for years.

We talk about the opportunity for Christian to change his ways as a terrible driver.

And there's some fun stuff in the news and much, much more coming up on this edition of Service Drive Revolution.

The world's best driver is going with me to jet Ski. Right.

So Christian's coming with me up to the lake house, and we're going to jet ski. And I was. I was telling him that there's a license you have to get, like a little online thing, money grab for the state of Washington. But it's a $400 fine. I guess if you don't have it, maybe we should keep the jet ski. You're riding on an eco mode where it governs 25 miles an hour.

Right. Like granny mode.

Those things will go just the way they sit right now. They'll go 70 miles an hour.

That's faster than I've ever. I think I've been at 60 on a jet ski, but never 70. That's fast. Yeah. And the pictures you sent me of the. Of the lake, you got some. You got some room to run on that?

Oh, it's a big lake.

Yeah. So it's going to be really exciting. I'm kind of pumped for it.

The only thing when you're going 70 is that the gas gauge. You can just watch it go down.

That's the. That's the hard part, man.

The. All the things that go through my head. Like, I mean, I guess the thing is, if you're on glass, like, if there's no waves. Right. That you're not going to go. If they're early.

Early and late. Yeah.

There's codes all over the place. You're not going to want to go 70.

But nobody gets up early. Like, I've been on that lake. I don't know, there's like a thousand houses on the lake or something. I don't know. It's.

I've. I've had that lake to myself.

Do you think that 830 of the people wake up to the sound of you jet skiing around the lake?

Missy says you can hear the music. Like, I'm sure they think that.

Oh, no, he's that guy.

Yeah. But, hey, I'm having fun. And the eagles. Have you ever seen eagles in person? Like, fish. Like, they will come down and grab fish out of the water and then take them back up to their little Nest. Put a little salt and pepper and lemon on it and eat.

Never seen an eagle outside of a zoo. That was one of the animals. When I went to Yellowstone a couple of years ago, I was really disappointed. I didn't see. But I just have nothing but respect.

Too, though, you know, like when this is kind of a little off color, but when there's a, like, say a deer gets hit in the road, the eagles go and eat. Like they're carnivores, like they're aggressive.

Really?

Yeah, they'll eat. I'll eat meat.

Well, I definitely knew about the fish thing, but I didn't know about the carcasses. Yeah, I mean, heck, that's a lot of protein.

You see it because it's like right on the side of the road and.

They'Re concerned about their diets.

Well, it's going to be. We're going to have fun with that. We'll have our little cup of coffee. We'll get out early.

Speaking of coffee, it's also one of the states that I haven't been to.

You need to make a playlist and download it because there's no wi fi. Oh, there's no cell phone.

I. That's such a good thing.

So make sure you download the playlist you want because, like, Missy, for example, had to listen to one Morgan album over and over for the first one.

Or the second one.

The second one is not even her favorite one.

Oh, gosh.

So you want to download a bunch of stuff because you don't know what kind of mood you're going to be in.

Yeah, I've got. I've got really probably four albums I'm listening to right now, so those will work out. I'm. I'm not very diverse. I keep playing the same stuff over and over once I like it.

Just a little, little reminder, everybody, sir irreplaceable service Manager live the lecture series. Lecture series happens every other Tuesday. If you're not in on it, make sure you get in on it. Go to ChrisCollinsInc.com and sign. Were taking me under the hood of how to be irreplaceable, how to turn around a service department. You could. And many have taken these strategies and these mindsets and ideas and parlayed them into becoming general managers and fixing sales departments. And we've had people fix other businesses.

If you want to be unique and irreplaceable and bring a lot of value to wherever you are, you don't want to miss out on this. And I'm putting a Bow on this. So I feel like this is kind of like me closing this chapter in a sense. And.

I'm putting it all out there, so would love to see there. The other thing is Q A at the end, so you can ask me some questions and we can talk.

And you got quite a body of work to draw from. Right. Like the. That's the coolest thing that you bring.

To this is funny how simple that book is. Like how on point and simple. Like I think I told you when I wrote it, I took three chapters out at the end. Like this Leader. You should see the stuff we're chopping out of the leadership book.

Well, I can only imagine because the.

Thing is, the way I write is I do no editing whatsoever because I feel like it holds back kind of the creative process. But then when you step back for a minute and look at it, you gotta. You gotta chop a bunch of stuff out because people just can't absorb all of it. It's too much.

Well, I would imagine too, when you do it that way, you probably find little sections of what you might have written that would fit somewhere else later on down the road after you do edits. And you're probably glad you had more information than. Not enough.

Yeah.

Because I wonder if some people write books where they're struggling to find the finish to it or whatever. But you're actually.

There's no book like this leadership book. Most leadership books are small talk. This is a real. This is how to be effective.

That's right.

I'm excited.

Me too.

What's in the news?

Our friends at Nissan, who I think that they've. They've had a rough run, so they're due to try to have something different happen. And this says that they've got a new retail model that's really going to support both internal combustion and electric vehicles, which I really like because I think that at the end of the day, both can exist. But they're trying to create an ecosystem where customers love Nissan and buy Nissan for the brand value and not just for. Not just price shoppers or people that can get approved for financing or anything like that. They're like. They really want to build up their brand equity. So they're putting a ton of money into both EV and internal combustion, which if you know a little bit about Nissan, I think that the. Their engines are the bread and butter of the company at the end of the day. And then I think that back in like the turn of the. The turn of the millennium, if you will, they had a really Good. They started with some really good design. I think they're due for something like that. But essentially they're just, they're making a commitment that they want to be, they want to be good and fast. Um, and I like that. This is so, this is interesting. So this is separate from the uaw. GM battery joint venture agrees to hike Ohio workers wages. So they're, they're paying increasing pay by as much as 25% in the state of Ohio in a EV battery plant, which is really cool. So. But they were underpaying before 16 bucks an hour. Now everybody's making 20. This is another in the long line of manufacturers. Accurate. Honda EVs are going to adopt the Tesla charging port. Didn't you say something about what you heard with the.

Yeah, I've been seeing a lot of people complaining that they're, that Tesla owners are complaining that other brands are using the Tesla chargers so they have to wait behind other cars.

Now there was a couple when I had the, when I had my Tesla where I would have to wait in line, specifically in Burbank, there was always a five or six car wait. So I can only imagine what that is now. But it was all Teslas at that time. So if you throw Fords and.

Polestars in there, who knows how long you.

Have to wait to charge up, then it can, can be a while.

I do think that the Tesla superchargers are, those are some bad boys. They can charge a car.

He can also expand. He can add more.

Yeah, and he gladly will, I'm sure.

Yeah. I mean I think the one charges in like 20 minutes, right?

The fastest one that I. Yeah, that's like the 3.0 version. It's a 20 minute charge.

So our topic today, should your service department be open on Sunday? Is. Is a great topic and we've heard it come up more and more. We had somebody at the last coaching meeting talking about how they're open on Sundays.

That's right.

One of our elite members opened on Sundays in downtown in a, you know, top five city in the U.S.

It.

Was successful and it's gonna, it's going to grow for sure. Because he'll make it grow.

That's right.

Because he's talented like that. So we wanted to kind of talk about each side of this because I think a lot of times the mistake is in the mindset, not in whether you want to open on Sundays or not. And we see it all the time that a dealership will be open on Saturday and they're doing everything they can unconsciously to make Saturdays not successful. Well, let me kind of explain that. They have.

Very little talent there. So they'll have one advisor and a couple texts, and none of them are really very good tech.

Yeah, I call those the skeleton crew.

They'll be open for half the day or it'll be a. They'll close at 2 or 3.

Right.

8 to 2. And they will only make appointments for maintenance items or things that are easy. They'll turn everybody else away.

And.

You really wonder at the end of the day, like, why they're putting themselves through that. Like.

And the feeling is, oh, well, Saturdays aren't that great. And it's like, well, you're doing it with the intention of it not being great.

Yeah. And they, they do it so poorly that then that affects their CSI and their retention, everything like that. Because whether they're open Monday through Friday or just on Saturdays, when a customer comes in, they only come in on a Saturday. They assume that that's just how business is there. Yeah.

In this library here, we probably have, I don't know, 200 books on human behavior, maybe more. You don't have to read any of those to understand that the, the actions really tell the true intentions.

Exactly. Right.

So.

Why did they open on Saturday if that's what they're doing? Like, what was the thing? Well, a dealer came back from a 20 group and said, we got to be open on Saturdays. And so to prove that it was a bad idea. Right. And so you. So let, let's just say we're.

We're.

We're looking at the numbers of that, that hypothetical store. And we'. We're kind of generalizing here, but the generalizations are pretty close to accurate. So that store is probably booked out three weeks on appointments. Usually if you drive around that town and you go by Les Schwab, the tire stores, the independents. What. What is their Saturday and Sunday look like?

It's the busiest days of the week.

Now, in, in a industry where market share and retention are the key to success.

What'S more important? That we're losing them to the, to others? Because let's face it, in, in this world that we live in today is how many times do you run into a family where mom stays home and dad works?

It's very rare these days.

Okay, so mom and dad both are working. If there is a mom and dad, might just be Mom.

Yep.

And dad's who knows where, or dad and mom soon who knows where. Some sort of Brady Bunch type situation where, you know, the kids Are coming and going and this sort of thing. But how much time do families today. How much time does the average person have? Do they have more time or less time than they had 20 years ago?

Way less.

Way less. Right. And so then when do. When are they available to get repairs done, maintenance on their car, that sort of thing? When. When are they available to do that?

On the weekends.

Yeah. And so we want to be open when they're available, or do you want to be open when you want to be open when they're available?

And.

I was. I have this story in my head because, you know, I'm. I'm kind of old school in my. In my thinking. But I had. When I took over as general manager, I had a sales manager come to me.

Maybe I should set this up. I had sales teams in each sales manager. Like, I did it just like I did the shop. So funny.

So each sales manager had a team of salespeople that were their salespeople.

That makes sense.

And then they were paid. The majority of their pay was on the performance of their salespeople. So we sat down with those salespeople every month and did goals, just like we do with advisors. The exact same thing. Right. And I had this younger manager that was more what I was trying to do. He was my. He was kind of my first one through the glass in how to backstop, how to hold people accountable, how to have a shift meeting, how to have a work plan for your salespeople, like, really helping me make the system kind of stick. Right. And he comes to me one day and he says, my team and I want to work Thanksgiving. And I was like, what?

I don't know.

That seems like. And I always kind of thought, like, we'll sell the cars one way or the other. And he goes, I've been watching the security cameras. Have you seen what people do on holidays around here? And I was like, no, show me.

And it was a crazy madhouse.

There were a lot of people that would come and just window shop and walk around, and, like, the lot was busy, even though we weren't there, in a sense. Right. And the other thing was, we had the ability to check our phones. People were calling.

That's great.

So.

He made his case, right? Like, how can you know when somebody comes to you and they have proof and they're that excited about it, you know? And so he'd showed me the video. We looked up the phone thing, which I think was my idea. And I said to him, okay. And I. If you can find somebody to Work the phones. Like if you can find somebody to do the dash, you know, the, the board, the phones, the switching, you can do it. Because he already had a porter, like he had it all figured out. Right. So we did it. It was easy. Like they did it. We sold a ton of cars. And you know what, you know what it was like? Literally, people on Thanksgiving morning just started calling just to see if somebody was open. And we were the only one open, one.

So that's great.

And they came in and they were people that would have probably bought from their dealership closer to them. They came all the way from la, they came from San Diego, they came from everywhere.

Nice little day. And I would say half of those cars we wouldn't have sold if we weren't open. And there was just a little lesson in there to me about availability. Now, on the flip side, we've had clients, we have one in Boston that they're open until nine every night. And from five o' clock until nine you could, you could have a party in there and you wouldn't be. Wouldn't affect too many customers. Like customers aren't coming in after 5 or 6 to get service, but they're committed to it and they have it. And so it's not really some really working in that sense. Right.

And let's say you want it to be open on Saturday or Sunday and you don't have the tires or the thing, you know, you don't have the right tag, that sort of thing.

So do you want to add anything to the, to the bad side before we talk about the good side?

Oh, I feel like we've talked about.

The good side a little bit.

So the, the bad side is that being open seven days a week or Sundays to can create a little bit of a scheduling issue with how many people you have for coverage. And one thing like that, most of.

The manager would say nobody wants to work those days.

Right.

Which is Spanish for I don't want to work those days.

Yeah, they always think it's them.

Yeah.

And what I would say is I don't know if I can talk about the good or not. But it's one of the things that I thought of immediately is when you're talking about families and maybe, you know, it's a split family or Brady Bunch family or something like that, where when it comes to workers, that might be the only couple of days a week that they could work. Let's say they want to work on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, it might be where that's the only time that they can actually come and work and make money and not have to pay for daycare where they're, they might be splitting something with a family member or something like that so they get to keep more of their paycheck if they work through the weekend. So they're happy to do it. So just like sometimes it's easier for the customers to come to work during those times, there's people out there that it's easier for them to come to work during those times instead of the traditional Monday through Friday.

But overwhelmingly, when we talk about four tens or weekends or Sundays, there is a group of technicians and advisors that want to work those days that see it as a great opportunity, that love having the other days off. And it really is in your presentation and you not poisoning the water by saying you don't want to do it. So you're going to make it not work.

Yeah. And when you say you and then you automatically go to nobody. Now one person on the planet, just.

Like you can make Saturday not work by being 8 to 2 and having Larry, who couldn't ride his way out of a wet paper bag and two lube techs there. And you go, well, Saturdays aren't very profitable. Wow, you're, you're holding everything over until Monday is what you're doing.

And then you're not even trying during those times.

But we did have somebody at the last coaching meeting that one of the things they pointed out when they were talking about going to four tens is how many people wanted the split shift, the ship that they think nobody wants. They wanted it.

Yeah.

Because they wanted days off during the week.

Well, that. And then you never worked more than two days in a row on that shift, which I think is really smart. So like you're, you're working 10 hour days, but you only work, you work 20 on and then you're off for a day and then 20 more and then you're off for a couple days.

So I would contend if you're booked out three weeks, I would step back and I would look at what you're. Are you maximizing the capacity you have? So I personally, I probably wouldn't be open unless I was in a, you know, big city like this on Sundays before that I would maximize my capacity. What I could do Monday through Saturday. But there would be a point where I'd flip that. That, yeah, if I'm booked out three weeks and those stalls are sitting there even, you know, you can get a lot of internals, PDF, there's a lot of stuff you can flip internal. You can do a lot of stuff.

Yeah. If you got 20 stalls and you. You book eight hours per stall, that's 160 hours in a day. That's a bunch of money. I think the other thing that you really hit the nail on the head, and I just. It just occurred to me, too, is yesterday I went to. I live in downtown LA, and I went to a place that's 40 miles away from here, so it was down in Costa Mesa, which doesn't sound like a lot for people that don't live in Los Angeles, but 40 miles on a Tuesday afternoon is two and a half hours, two hours worth of work. And on a Sunday, I was able to go in 42 minutes.

Oh, yeah.

So your. Your theory about how you could actually get people that normally would stay close, it's because, at least in the metro areas, they stay close because they don't want to sit in a car for two hours. Well, they would go to where the best service was if they didn't have to sit in a car for two hours. And maybe this is a day that you. It's like your one day of the week that you can increase your pma. Like, you make it to where you got a bigger thing to pull from. And then, like I said, what happens the rest of the week doesn't matter. It's because that's just your Sunday customer.

Whenever I've had this sort of conversation, I always take the, you know, the leadership or whatever on a Sunday and drive around town and look at how busy Pep Boys and everything else is and the conversations.

It tells you everything because it's even better.

It's happened to me a couple times where they see their cars at the Les Schwab.

That's a. That's.

It's the best.

I love that they're gone.

Like, you're booked out three weeks and they'll. They can drive in. They're not talking about appointments.

That's right.

Yeah.

Want you there.

So I think the lesson here, if we were to recap, is it's about building the business to serve the customer in the best way possible and not, you know, not presuming your feelings or imposing your feelings on the outcome, but really being open about it. Doesn't mean you have to work Sundays, although when you kick it off, you're probably gonna have to be there a couple times. But also, there's been many times where I open something Saturday, Sunday, and have to add an assistant manager to cover. And so it actually gets easier for.

The manager and you also, then you have an, you know, you have an assistant manager who then in theory can move up when you move up. So it's actually, it's planning your ascension. So there's a lot of.

You get more done.

You can come up with a lot of reasons. But I think the biggest thing is you learn when, if, if you're a service manager, never been open on Sundays before, and you go and you just work that Sunday. You learn a lot. You learn a lot about your people, about the customers.

All that I can not reiterate enough that service is the future of our industry and we have to put the customers first. We have to create systems and, you know, marketing and a narrative that makes people endear to us, not have to follow our rules. Like, for a long time we've had it where, hey, it's black and if you want another color, it's black. Like, right. If you got to make an appointment, we control warrant like, we. That's going to go away if we keep making people do things that is really inconvenient for them but convenient for us. There's an expiration date to that type of a business. What we want to do is have a monopoly on it and make it so they don't want to go anywhere else.

Yep. Don't. Don't even give them the chance.

Were you just flexing your chest? Christian just did a little thing where his chest went. Even hitting the, hitting the bench press.

It was probably a muscle.

What was that?

I don't know. I didn't know that it happened.

So good stuff. That's our thoughts on Sunday. Keep an open mind. Just think about it.

But, and most importantly, we're not telling people they have to work seven days a week.

No, we're talking about mindset in your approach more than anything.

Mindset. Mindset.

See you next time on Service Driver 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.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see.

You in the next video.