A conversational clip from Chris Collins' YouTube show 'Staying Proactive in Your Dealership' diagnosing common failure modes in dealerships: spending most of the day in reactive 'fight/flight/freeze' mode, unproductive staff conversations (the 'coffee clutch mob'), being held hostage by underperforming employees, and stagnant or negative profitability. Speakers recommend decisive action (e.g., 'burn it down' — removing toxic employees) and emphasize shifting conversations toward improving customer experience. The clip ends with a brief anecdote about a truck tipping Vicks Vapor Rub and a closing call-to-action (subscribe, call 8333 Ask SDR, visit offers.chriscollinsinc.com).
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Next one I have is most of the day is spent in reactionary mode. You're reacting to upset customers. You're reacting to things.
Instead of being proactive. You're not planning anything for the future because you're too busy. There's that old analogy came in. You grabbed the cat by the tail. It dragged you around all day, and then you let go at the end of the day, and you have no idea if you won or lost.
Yeah. Oh, it was kind of funny. So I was going to say that it's fight or flight, but I was talking to this with Judy whilst I was getting my iv. She's like, well, there's more than just fight or flight. I'm like, what? What do you mean? There's fight, flight, or freeze?
Have you heard that before? Yeah. And I think that that's what happens is that the managers get to a point where they just freeze and they don't do anything.
So, yeah, that's a good one. I like that.
The next one is most of the conversation. So if you go sit in the lunchroom or you go hang out in a huddle or just pay attention to the conversations going on, most of them are about either the people working there, the news, the drama, who's sleeping with who. And very few conversations or narratives or stories are about making the customer experience of the business better.
That's right.
What you talk about and think about all day is who you are.
Yeah. I call that the. So when I did my list, I called that the coffee clutch mob. Yeah. It's crazy that we basically, we came up with a lot of the same things, just worded differently. This is fun.
The next one is they're held hostage by bad employees. So the good employees have all left. The bad ones are still there. This happens a lot in the shop where you've lost a couple good techs. You're down to the bad techs. The bad techs have a bad attitude. Don't want to work on this. Don't want to do that. And that becomes your new reality. And you never once go, hey, I got to work really hard at getting some new ones.
Yes.
And then you start saying stuff like, I can't hire techs.
Oh. So the lesson to that is burn it down. I think even if you're short, you just. You clean it, and then it forces you into it. Maybe that doesn't work for everybody. It works for me. But if the bad apple's there, you gotta. You gotta cut the cancer off. Like gangrene.
Burn it down.
I called that turnover and not the good kind. So same exact thing.
And then the, the last one I have on my list is the profitability is not there, which also is an indicator of most of the conversations are about who's sleeping with who and not about how to make the business better.
Yeah.
There's no clear narrative to what's going on. And we're either losing money or we're not growing year over year in profit.
That's right. We're either stagnant at best. Stagnant. But it's my number one was losing money because the monkeys don't know how to strategically run a profitable business.
I was going to tell you, too. So last night. So I'm driving home.
I don't know if any of you are familiar with Los Angeles, but there's a little bit of traffic here. I live like eight minutes from home, so I don't complain about it very much. I come up on this huge clog. I don't know if there was an accident up a couple of spots ahead, but I get kind of stuck in traffic for a while. Right. And then all of a sudden I look to my left and there's this truck and then it just tips over. It's crazy. But it was full of Vicks Vapor Rub and there was no congestion for eight hours.
Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driving 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.
