Chris Collins hired an executive coach to fix his dealership's bloated weekly meeting. The heat sheet session had ballooned to four hours on Tuesdays at a 600-car-a-month operation. By shifting responsibility to his finance director and cutting the agenda, he got it down to 10 minutes. He learned the hardest part was changing himself, not the system.
Questions this video answers
$800 an hour.
Over 600 cars a month.
About four hours every Tuesday.
10 minutes.
Chapters
I. I don't know if you know the story, Chris, but I hired a. A coach when I was running a dealership. So I was a general manager, and I literally would have a line outside my office. And I knew I was kind of coming to the end of the year. I was making my goals for the next year, and I knew that I had, you know, I was working six days a week, sometimes seven at the end of the month. Right, because you, you know, in the front end, you're, You're. If the month ends on a weekend or whatever, you're there, like, no matter what, or if it's the last weekend going into the end.
So you're.
You're, you know, you're working crazy hours. You got a line, you feel, you know, you're important because you're making a lot of decisions, but you. You don't have anything else to give. Like, there's. There's nothing else left to. To give. And I literally, I paid. This guy came over to my house, and I believe it was $800 an hour, and I paid for it out of my. My own.
You know, my own money. In fact, I didn't really want my boss to know I was doing it, probably for a couple reasons. One is I didn't know if it would work, and I didn't want him to also manage, you know, that part.
Of it, because I knew that it.
Was going to be hard for me to change.
And I fought the guy.
Like, I remember.
I remember I went. I.
The first meeting, I sat with him, and it was just an hour at my house. And he goes, hey, I want you to keep track of what you do throughout the day.
And he said he wanted me to do it for a week, but I couldn't do it for a week. But I did do it for two days. And so he's looking at my Tuesday the next week when we met, and he goes, what is this heat sheet meeting? So I, I would have a heat sheet meeting with my finance director, and it was about four hours every Tuesday. And I would, you know, I'd call in a fleet guy to be like, hey, we need a driver's license on this deal. We need insurance on this deal. And I was chasing, you know, we were. With used and new. We were selling over 600 cars a month. So there. There were. There were a lot of deals that were missing, you know, something. And so then I'm showing him this and I'm explaining it to him, and he. And I remember pushing back on him, like, with all the conviction in the world. He says to me, goes, so, what is the finance? Because he didn't know a lot about car. He. He was coaching, like, Fortune 500 CEOs. And he goes, so, what is the finance director do? And I go, well, there. Blah, blah, blah. You know, explain the thing. And we have 12 finance managers and whatever. And he goes, no, what do they do if you're doing their job for, like, why would you be chasing a driver's license? Like, I'm. I bought a car before. I know that I left without giving them a driver's. Why aren't they getting it? And I would say, well, sometimes we are. Our fleet salespeople will deal with brokers. And he'd be like, yeah, but what's the finance director's job? Could you explain to me the job of the finance director? And I remember I fought with. He left or whatever. And then the. The next Heat Sheet meeting, I was like.
To. My finance director was like, hey, it occurred to me.
I have you to do all this, and why am I chasing the fleet? What I want to do is I want to move this meeting to Wednesday, and I want you to do all of this. And.
My goal is that this meeting's 10 minutes. And so, you know, we went from three sheets to, you know, five deals at the top of one sheet. And those deals, they, you know, she would just explain. But the hardest person to change was me.
It wasn't. It wasn't my finance director. I was in this. This, you know, loop of thinking I was so important, and it took something. It took me paying somebody a lot of money to come in and then point out something pretty clear. I mean, it happens to us all the time, too, where clients will be like, oh, we thought of that, or, oh, we knew that. And I'm always like, yeah, no, the difference is we're just going to do it. It's not that we invented anything we're just gonna do ends up that the secret to success is in the execution, not in the idea. My favorite line is, oh, yeah, we tried that once. Yeah, well, we're gonna do it again, but it's gonna work. We're gonna follow through. Yeah.
That's awesome. Thanks so much for watching this clip.
Of Service Driver Revolution.
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