The Hard Truth of Employee Retention (Service Drive Revolution)

Hey, everybody, I'm Chris Collins and this is Christian Lafferty. Today we're going to talk about Christian's weird fetish that involves metal in someone's face. And you're going to ask yourself the question, is he more punk rock that I actually thought. We're going to talk about employee retention and how it's going to get harder in the future. We're going to talk about firing single moms and why you are mad at Christian about that. And we have a question from a new service advisor, Daniel in Texas. All that coming up with on Service Drive Revolution.

You pissed off a lot of people with your.

Would you rather seems that way? It really does seem that way. You can.

The single mom, she's heartless bastard.

Her and her three kids are living in a minivan.

It's a funny, funny bit. Very funny.

It doesn't feel funny when we're going through it. No, it feels like I'm in a vice.

You feel like a lot of pressure?

Super, super amount of pressure. Yeah.

How do you think I'm handling my midlife crisis?

Not bad. I feel like there's hair extensions that are coming in your future of a different color for sure too. Right?

Hair extensions. What do you mean?

Uber frosted tips.

Bon Jovi.

Totally. Now you're starting to see it.

Like living on a prayer. Bon Jovi.

Yeah.

Living on a prayer. Bon Jovi all the way there.

I gotta tell you that that' in the. It's not on the menu.

Now that I've put it in your subconscious, it might be extensions.

Yeah.

Isn't that great?

I think I'd be closer to shaving my head.

No way.

Yeah. I don't know.

I couldn't imagine.

It can look pretty tough with, like a couple hoop earrings and a bald head and a beard.

Yeah.

That's a look for sure.

It is. I feel like it's. It's a little more biker than you are.

Oh, I'm a biker. What do you mean? I grew up in the Northwest.

Talking about motorcycles. Right. Yeah.

Like Hell's Angels.

Yeah.

No. Okay, here's your. Your. Would you rather.

Oh, we're getting right to it. Huh?

So everybody should know if you listen to the show that. That Christian drives a Tesla. One of the things with Teslas is that you got to plug them in and charge them.

Right.

And so should you be in a precarious position of needing to charge your Tesla and, like, trade.

Something to charge your Tesla. Let's say you're stuck somewhere and there's none of the fancy Tesla chargers, and you got to do the old fashioned plug it in.

Yeah.

And when you plug it into the normal outlet, doesn't take like eight hours to charge us.

Yeah. The most you get out of it is 25 miles per hour with an accident. That's actually with like the. The 200amp thing.

Okay, so let's say you're gonna charge it for four hours. So then. Oh, you're gonna get 200 miles in four hours.

404 hours would be 100 miles.

Oh, 100 miles, you're gonna get 100 miles. That's enough to get home or whatever. Right. So would you rather to charge a Tesla in exchange for labor or services?

The bartering system.

Yes, I got it. Would you rather clean the sump in a wash rack that hasn't been cleaned for like 10 years? Have you ever cleaned a sump?

Yeah, it's the. It's the most hideous smell.

Yeah.

Like it's worse than sewage. I don't know.

You're gonna spend four hours cleaning the sump.

Okay.

Just the look on your face. How do you feel about that?

Not. Not so good.

Drive a customer home with COVID So a shuttle. You're gonna drive the shuttle, but the customer clearly has Covid.

He's sneezing, coughing, flaming everywhere, death speed him on the windshield.

You're driving him. Not in like a van. Like, you're just in a lone car. Like a Chevy Malibu.

Like a small one. No, no, forget the Malibu. It's smaller. It's the Aveo. Yeah, the Aveo.

So number one is you got to clean the sump in a wash rack. Number two is you got to drive a customer home with COVID Like, clearly with COVID Or you have to fix the Henno machine that a new parts guy has put all the wrong parts in the wrong parts numbers. So the locators are all wrong, and you got to go through that whole thing and redo every. Have you ever tried to do an inventory on a. On a handle machine?

No, but I can imagine it's a chore.

I've gone in before where the machine is wrong. Like the parts are wrong in there, and it is. You got to. So first of all, you got to shut everything down for like a couple days.

Right. Cuz you could die if you're.

You have to kind of pull everything out and then reload it. And most of the time, that machine doesn't talk to the DMS the way that it should. They're fighting, just trying to paint the picture that.

You Know it has its own software, right?

Yeah.

So if anybody doesn't know what the Heno machine is, it's that parts machine. That's like a parts department vending machine.

Yeah. You type in a number and then the part comes up. It's beautiful. Yeah. And then when it's not needed, it disappears. And all the things are on different layers. It's a conveyor belt. Really?

Really works well when it works well.

And it is an expensive disaster when it's not going well.

It's.

So to fix.

To charge your Tesla, Would you rather clean this up in a wash rack, drive a customer with COVID home, or fix a machine that.

Is completely out of whack?

Holy cow. Okay, a couple of quick questions. Do we. Is it a wash and wax or just a wash?

Why does that make a difference?

These are my questions. I'm allotted a couple of questions for clarification.

But why does the wax matter?

Because the wax smells even worse.

Oh, then just wax.

Okay, great. Okay.

The wax smells even worse.

Yeah. Like, the more stuff you put in there, the worse it smells.

I can't imagine how it could smell worse. It's horrible. Every time I've ever had to do that, it.

Honestly, my stomach's turning thinking about it.

Oh, it's the worst.

So bad. And I'm good at this. Aren't the way the stuff get into the rails and. Oh, my good Lord. Okay, then.

Do you see how I'm. I'm saving your reputation by leaving the single mom?

Yeah, because clearly it could have been.

Some Drive a customer with COVID home or fire a single mom. Fire a single mom. Should probably be the third one on.

Every one of these. Sorry, Janet, it's time to go. No, I wouldn't do that. Oh, Janet.

So you've actually.

Yeah, I've named her. Yeah.

Or clearly fired a single mom named Janet before.

Never know. Okay, so goodness gracious. And we're in a Nova. How far is the drive with the COVID The COVID customer?

10 minus.

Okay, cool.

Does that matter?

Yeah, a little bit. Is the COVID customer chatty on top of it?

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Son of a biscuit.

Is the parts department with the handle machine profitable?

Clearly not.

Okay, good. Good. So.

And you're gonna have to do that all yourself. Like, nobody in there is gonna help you because they don't know anything. It's not their fault.

This is awful.

Can you imagine if you worked for Hunnall? Like.

Like the calls that they must get? It's a lot of fun. All Right.

That's what I do is I. I put myself under shock therapy and I recall. I force myself to recall the worst experiences I've ever had, and then I create them into a game called. Would you rather.

Yeah. This is great. I love this segment.

Except I've never driven a customer home.

With COVID Me neither.

In fact, I haven't since COVID started. I haven't even been in an Uber.

Okay. I think I've been in three. Not many just in traveling, but. Yeah, you're right. But always with the hand sanitizer in my hands and I try not to touch anything. But.

I think that I've made my decision.

I'm going to.

I'm gonna take the COVID You're gonna take the COVID Yeah. I have a lot of faith in my immune system. Wow. And I hate the car wash thing. It's so disgusting.

Yeah.

Wow.

Okay. Well, there you have it.

Would you rather super curious if anyone else would take the COVID or if I'm crazy? Yeah.

In the comments, what you think about Christian's pick there?

Yeah. Speaking of cleaning, it's interesting. I was going to tell you this. I sold my vacuum cleaner the other day.

You sold your vacuum cleaner?

It was just collecting dust.

That's funny.

Let's talk about our subject today.

I'm ready.

Employee retention. Now, I think this is a topical subject for a couple reasons. One is that clearly with the change in population and the. The current marketplace that we're in, and also the fact that a lot of.

People are making more staying at home than they are working.

Yep.

That people aren't looking for jobs. There isn't a huge.

Influx of people looking for jobs because if they're making money on unemployment, they don't have to pay rent. Why would they?

There's not a whole downside of staying home and doing nothing.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's. It's definitely. You're competing against doing nothing to get and keep people. I also think the one thing I wanted to say about this topic, too, is I'm actually kind of proud of a lot of our. A lot of our clients is kind of where this subject came from is that we're already having this discussion about the quality of employee retention. And I think that this is one of the first times that I can think of in recent history where we're actually starting to get ahead of the curve. Because in the coming years, I think that employees are going to be harder to get, and making them happy is probably a pretty important thing. If we're Going to have a healthy environment to work in, so. But man, I tell you what, it's a good topic.

Yeah. On the technician side also, like the biggest part of our population, the baby boomers are retiring and there aren't enough kids born, let alone born that want to be techs to come into the industry to replace them. So it's getting harder and harder to recruit and retain techs and. And that's only going to get worse. So what would you do to retain.

Employees? Or what do we see with our clients that have the best employee retention? And I think employee retention also goes along with recruiting because that's a part of it too, right?

Yeah. So I think that there's a couple of really nice tricks that people are doing. One is I think employee gratitude, like the public gratitude and saying that we're happy that we have our people. I think that that's one of the things that's working really well. And then clarity, I think is another part of it. Like what's the team doing?

Okay, so what do you. Back up.

You just roll your eyes at me. Did you throw me in the ocean?

No. What do you mean by gratitude though?

Like how do you show gratitude with employee recognition?

What does that mean?

So I think that you can have, you know, contest of recognition when someone's been there for a long time and maybe there's a plaque or like from it. Like to me, if I'm employing a shop full of technicians, I want them to feel like their area is home. So I want to personalize it. I want to just short of putting a service Drive revolution sign above their.

So the shop, the shop should look like a man cave a little bit.

I want them to feel like it's home.

Like draft beer football.

I didn't think about the draft beer, but that's not a bad idea.

Just have it. Have a beer and work on a, work on a vehicle.

That's it. That's why we have two hands. One for the wrench, one for the beer.

That's funny. What? I was a service advisor for Audi. The they were launching some new Audi models and literally technicians from Germany came over and they were taking the Audis up to like Mount Rainier somewhere for car and driver to drive them through the hills or whatever. And those guys literally were drinking beer while they were prepping the cars. Yeah, it was funny.

That's pretty amazing.

And they're making fun of us cuz we wanted cup holders and they're just chugging beer. But they pretty much drank beer all day.

The Germans are like, you only need a cup holder if you put the beer down. Right, right.

So funny. We, we want, we wanted it for our coffee, but. Okay. So I, I think that the.

Thing that will differentiate you from other employers in the marketplace is to stand for something and have a vision.

Yeah.

Because especially younger kids, they want to be a part of something that actually is making a difference in the world. So if you're just trying to get by, if you're just maintaining and you're not actually trying to be the best in the industry, trying to push the industry forward and really have a passion for customers and making a difference with what you do, you're going to attract a lower class employee.

Yeah.

If at all.

Right.

So having vision, I think is one of the most important ones standing for something. And I think the, the other thing with that is when you stand for something, it's important to cut the bottom.

Like, you know, performers don't want to be around non performers.

Right.

And so if you want to attract the best people, you need to protect that by quickly firing the people that aren't good.

Yeah.

By quickly eliminating people that don't care or don't follow the vision or aren't in line with whatever you've decided. And I think that oftentimes, even as we sit here today, most of the time we let people underperform and just get by and that affects the other performers and it lowers the bar for everybody.

Yeah. So I think that that's a big part of it. And what you're saying is you have to eliminate employee entitlement. Right. Like, I think that there's employee retention is great, it's good to talk about, but I do think that there are some people that slide so far the wrong way that they're keeping the wrong people. And I think that there's just a little bit of a healthy mix to like, we want people to stay warm and stay forever, but if they know that it's still a performance based position, then there's a little bit more to the swing of you're having the right people on the team that want to perform and if you don't perform, there's a murder line. Right. And if you are getting rid of the bottom 20 or whatever it is, you know, there's, there's different theories on how many people you should get rid of, but I think that the top 80 are way more important than the bottom 20.

Yeah.

And I'd be happy with having healthy turnover, not 100% employee retention. As far as that Goes, was it.

Somebody on the elite call the other day talking about how they eliminated a few people because of performance and that the rest of the employees came to them and were like, man, what took so long?

Right. So glad you did that. And that particular person is one of our best performers. Yeah, he is one of our best performing stores in the country.

I remember one year at Top Dog and we had some of the top advisors at the meeting and we asked them like, hey, how can we motivate the Chihuahuas, the bottom performers? And it surprised me, but they were like, fire em. Like, there was no, like, you can't motivate them. They're not motivatable.

Right. And there's those people that have that figured out. And then we as managers, like, we spend so much time and energy trying to fix people, people that are telling us who they are.

I think everybody needs to embrace the fact that it's going to get harder and harder to recruit and retain employees in the future. And so you need to create a place that's special. You need to stand for something. You need to be cutting edge. You need to be progressive in your thoughts and your approach to customers. And I think less and less people are going to want to work for a business that doesn't put the customers first and doesn't care about the value you're providing in the marketplace, because they're going to, they're going to sense that it reflects on them. On social media, just in general, they don't, they don't want to share the business that they work at because they feel like it's unethical or they don't care about customers or there's so many issues. And so, you know, more and more I hear from people that we interview, oh, I looked at their reviews on Google, I did a background check on the company. So they're looking at you as an employer, wondering what you stand for, what people are saying. And believe it or not, you might disagree with me in the moment when I say this, but you'll agree with me in time that how you treat customers is how you treat employees. It's exactly the same. And they know that and they understand that. And so the idea that people are reviewing you online and having a terrible experience is directly in line with people that work for you have a terrible experience because how you do anything is how you do everything. So the two are connected. If you don't stand for a great customer experience, if you're not constantly improving, if you're not offering training and in a career Path and a way for somebody to improve their lifestyle, their circle of friends, just how they feel about life in general. Being inspired versus being depressed. People aren't going to want to work for you in the future. The game is going to be much harder and you need to take it serious and you need to start thinking about it now.

Wow.

Well said. I don't think I ever really made the connection between customer experience and employee experience.

Isn't it the same?

It's totally the same. But I never made the connection.

When we go into a service department that's. That's screwing customers over or has a bad reputation, or let's say a client buys a dealership that's ran into the ground or whatever, the employees are usually.

They'Re either really shady or they're really.

Not in line with where we want to go.

Yeah.

How you do anything is how you do everything, Christian. I try to say that.

Okay. So true.

Can we go to a question? Let's answer a question from the on it. Remember, the phone number, if you have a question is 8333-Ask-STR. That's 8333-Ask-STR. If we play your question on the big show, we will send you a little love package. Like an sdr. T shirt, mug, hat, notebook. Maybe something else. Maybe we'll throw a bulldog in there. See?

Depends on not a real bulldog. Yeah.

Give Olivia away.

How dare you. I'm not comfortable with you.

You have your favorites.

I do? Totally.

Hey, Chris, this is Daniel out of Plano, Texas. I just became a service advisor and I've been in the parts industry for over eight years and I just started doing service. Now I work at a mom and pop shop. So I'm not exactly sure what to expect as far as service advising goes. What's the best way to maximize my time? By collecting customers and also.

Gaining profit from being at a mom and pop shop that is making over a million dollars a year. I just started watching your show. Your advice is so great. I listen to it regularly. Thank you again for taking this call. Hope to hear you soon.

Daniel from Texas.

Like it. So let me start. Part of being. Making that transition from parts to service. Daniel, that's all about scripts. So I know the script that you've got in your head already. Parts hold.

Parts hold. You've got to get. It's got to get out of your vocabulary. What you need to learn to say. I was just going to call you.

So.

The difference between working in parts and being a service advisor is just your excuse. That's it parts hold versus when a customer calls you, you go, oh, I was just going to call you. All day long you're like, I was just gonna call you.

Daniel's on his way to being a legend. My training is complete.

Are you gonna send Daniel that T shirt?

I think send him. Daniel. Let me know if you want it. It's all yours, buddy.

That's funny. I think Daniel, the best thing probably to think about is connecting with customers about the things that matter. Collecting customers is all about becoming their trusted friend. So remember, the car is a commodity or the truck is a commodity. What separates you from everybody else is the relationship you have with the customer. So when a customer pulls in, instead of saying, what brings you in today? Or what's going on with the car? Talk about, oh, hey, where are you headed today? Where do you work? Well, oh, you have three kids. What are their names? What do they do? What do they like? Are they into video games? You know, if you ask three to four questions about any given path, the customer will lead you to what's important and then talk about that. Talk about what's important to them. And the vehicle and the service side of it is the secondary dialogue. It's the co star, it's not the star of the show. Make the customer and your, you know, your friendship with them and treating them like family the star of the show and make the costar the maintenance and the repair of the vehicle because let's face it, there's a, I don't know, 180,000.

Service centers in this country. What really, really matters is is your relationship with those customers more than anything else.

Yeah, that's perfect. The 180,000 service centers. But you're only at one of them, so make that the differentiator. You got to be the reason people are seeking you out.

Thanks for that question, Daniel from Texas. And make sure you tune in next time to hear about my midlife crisis. See, if I shave my head, who knows?

It's going to be great.

What about like a 19 year old girlfriend in a Corvette convertible?

H19.

I don't know, just try. What?

I don't care about the convert.

What if I start wearing like Ed Hardy clothes all the time? Or affliction. Remember Affliction?

Affliction for sure. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Oh, a nose ring.

Oh, I can't do that.

Okay.

I always think it's funny when adults have nose rings.

I always think, I always wonder what's getting stuck up there.

The whole thing is interesting to me also like neck tattoos and all that?

Yeah. Now I like piercings for some reason. Like, I like nose rings and eyebrow rings.

And would you get a nose ring?

No, I like it on women.

What?

But not on men.

Does your girlfriend have a nose ring? No, but have you brought it up?

No, I wouldn't make her get one.

You might say, like, I find it very sexy.

I do find it very sexy. Maybe she would. I don't know.

That's a weird fetish for you to have.

I don't know if it's strong fetish, but I like tattoos and piercings.

But on the face.

Well, not tattoos.

What if she had an eyebrow ring? Would you think that's hot?

No, A totally awesome.

You're dead serious?

Dead serious.

I can't tell if you're joking or not.

I know, it's weird.

Is this a segue to a joke about moths? No.

This is really why, like, we're getting into the psyche of Christian and his female tastes.

So it would really turn you on if your girlfriend had a nose ring or an eyebrow ring?

Yeah.

Like right through the heart of the hot dog.

Yeah. Through the heart of the hot dog. Yeah.

I know.

What about that? What happened in your childhood? Do you think metal in the face is hot?

I don't know, but I do.

It's so weird. I think that even at this point, people are still trying to figure out if we're joking or.

I'm trying to figure out if we're joking. Well, on that note.

We'Ll see you next time on Service Driver Blue Shot.

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.chris collinsinc.com now that's offers.chrisconsinc. i'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.