Your best employees quit because of broken systems, not because they're unmotivated. A coach who builds repeatable processes beats one who relies on charisma. At a car dealership, advisors were drowning in busywork while managers blamed traffic instead of fixing how work actually flowed.
You'd be able to talk about a process. And so then if I'm interviewing somebody to be a coach and they, they aren't addicted to fixing stuff, they're, they're, uh, they're not going to be very good at what we do. They're not going to want to learn because we're going to teach them a lot of stuff and we need somebody who wants to learn and get better and improve, but they also don't think of things in a recipe. They're more emotional about it. And most of the time, the people that aren't good at fixing stuff want to— are more worried about appearing a certain way, appearing successful, versus actually having a track record of turning stuff around. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, that when they get to me, that's the thing that I'm, I'm looking for. Is they, they can break down a recipe how to fix something. And then there's certain things inside of that recipe that tell me they know what they're doing. And I'll, I'll tell you the number one thing that isn't the answer when I say, what's the recipe to fixing a department? The people. If they say the people, they're usually not fixers.
It's kind of funny, our, uh, in reviewing with some of our clients, that's the first thing that they'll go to too. Or any other sort of business, it's about the people.
Oh, I used to, so when I first started doing this, like I was 24, right? So I was really trying really hard to be good at what I was doing. And I just came to this realization by the time I was like 26 and I'd read a lot of books and I was learning and I had gone out and like,, you know, spent time with people that turn businesses around and not in automotive, like in other industries, like turnaround types. And one of the things that, that I figured out pretty early that it was the system that it holds all of the leverage. And I would tell people that because I was so excited, right? I'm 26 and dealers would ask me like, how do you do what you do? How are you getting these incredible results?, and I would be like, oh, it's the system. And they'd go, no, it's the people. And I would be like, no, no, I'm telling you, it's not the people, it's the system. And they would be like, you cold-hearted SOB, how could it not be the people? We're people. We want it to be us. We're like, the most biased thing for people is people because you're people, right? It's like, I get it. I get that you're biased for people. But if, if you really want to know the truth, It's not the people. The people are the second ingredient. And honestly, if you have really good systems, you can survive with mediocre people. You don't want to, but you can. It's the— you know, and just the flip side of that is if you have really good people and bad systems, you'll run them out. Like, good people don't want to be in bad systems. They don't want to do things 3 times. They don't want to get caught in a trap. They don't want to, you know, like, just, just think about the departments we've gone in where the advisor's not at their desk, they're washing a car. They're like, they're looking for lost keys or whatever it is. And then the phone's just ringing off the hook and they're like, oh no, Chris, what we need is more traffic.
