Chris Collins warns against frequently changing service-department pay plans and criticizes pay plans that use variable percentage bonuses because they are hard for advisors to calculate. He explains a common industry flaw: when customer demand rises but technicians are lost and not replaced, remaining techs gain leverage, collaboration breaks down, advisors sell less (focusing on diagnostics/warranty), average per-ticket and throughput drop, and advisors’ earnings fall—prompting managers to consider changing pay plans or blame advisors.
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The thing about the shuttle drivers, you have to have so many open or closed ros by the end of the month. What are other things that I've seen in pay plans that are super interesting? Oh, like that you have to have so much usage of the videos being sent to make your money. And then another weird thing is, I don't know if you noticed this where instead of like a dollar bonus, like it's, it's you, you can get more percents, which makes it really hard to calculate if you're an advisor. Yeah. They have come maybe like yes if come maybe no. It's the, the grid thing and all that. I always thought that was somebody that had too much free time and they were like, hey, how do I create a pay plan that's like tricky and whatever, but.
I never do a pay plan with a percentage is variable. Just don't. It's like you make this percentage, whatever it is. Yeah. We call it the base. Yeah. Okay, the next one. The reason why your pay plan gets changed is there's a. There's an inherent flaw in our industry.
And it is being.
More and more prevalent than ever before in the sense. I had a strategy session with a guy yesterday that this was clearly, clearly going on. So what happens is.
You have a service department that the customer demand goes up a little bit. Meanwhile, at the same time you lose a couple techs and the manager running that department says, I can't hire techs, can't replace those techs. The technicians that then you currently have.
Might, might understand that the department needs them more than they need the department. So then they're a little bit more of a pain in the butt than they should be or whatever. Right. And so now the shop is kind of not. It's not a collaboration. It's kind of like they're kind of holding it hostage a little bit. And now the service advisors can't get the work done, so so they stop selling work and they just try to get diagnostic or warranty work or whatever done. And so their average per ticket goes down. Right. And it's taking longer and longer for them to get a job done. And so now whoever's running the service department says we're losing advisors.
Because they're not making enough.
So then what do they do? They do things like guarantees they'll up percentages. They pay more money for less work, basically. 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. 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.
