The Secret to Keeping Your Top Technicians

The next one is having, uh, bonuses and perks that aren't always about money in a sense, right? Like sometimes you can bonus technicians by just having a parking spot and getting free car washes. Sometimes it's like, you know, a lot of times a dealer has a house up at a ski resort or a house in a condo in Vegas and giving your top performers access to that for a week, or, you know, being able to take their family for a 4-day weekend, the condo's sitting there either way. Like, maybe it costs the cleaner or whatever, but it's a low-cost thing for a huge perk. So concert tickets— it's funny how much in a dealership the executives and the salespeople on the front end get invited to baseball games and football games. And concerts, and the technicians don't. And I would just, you know, encourage everybody to really think about, you know, your top 5 techs or 10 techs in the shop should— they should get invited to some stuff like that. You should be giving them tickets to different stuff and making them feel like they're important and they get, you know, they get to share in the rewards as well. So 3-day weekends at the, you know, at the ski house, concert tickets, getting access to the box if you have a box somewhere. But it's, it's so funny to me how much technicians get overlooked for that sort of stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

Baseball games are awesome for that because there's a lot of cheap seats for that, especially if you're a White Sox fan.

So far— well, don't they pay you to go to a White Sox game?

I think they've gotten it down to like $12 a seat, like on the first level.

They're just hoping you buy that technically. It is $30 beer, pretty much.

Well, actually, I think they're giving away 2 Miller Lattes for that.

And then the last one that I have on the list is the Christmas bonus matching program, which is a, it's a great retention tool. But let's say for every hour a technician flags, You contribute 25 cents, 50 cents to a Christmas bonus, and then they can match it, you know, come the end of November. They got a pretty good, pretty good chunk in there saved over 12 months. And, um, it's a great retention tool because if they have a lot of money in there, they're not going to quit and leave and go somewhere else during that time. but it, you know, it just gives them something to look forward to and it, you know, the customer's paying for that bonus. So it's just included in whatever your cost of sale is. I would cost it out as you were going and accrue for it, but it's, you know, it's a big, it's a big one. It's, I've done the same thing successfully with salespeople too, where for every sale they, you know, you put $50 in a pot or something and then they match it. But having some sort of Christmas bonus like that really adds up and ends up being a really good retention tool.

Yeah.

And it also gets them thinking about hours, you know, how many hours they flag.

And if you kind of put all that together, I guess I get that question a lot, Chris, on like the structure of a technician's pay. So you mentioned a couple of different things there. And I think just putting them together in a bullet point might be worthwhile. Cause I feel like I'm having this conversation a lot right now where, so a tech's pay The hourly pay part he talked about, like aim for the hourly pay, 'cause if so much of it's bonuses, they don't realize it. That's one. Two is their bonuses. I can't tell you how often I've taken a big screen TV, a grill, something like that, and put it under the leaderboard and whoever wins it for the month wins it. Like those little things go a long way. And, you know, and then the last part is the Christmas bonus. Those three things as a foundation of your technician pay package, each provide a little bit, you know, an intentional outcome, but those three things together, like it's a core part of kind of moving a lot of the things in the right direction you want with your techs.

I like the grill.

I'll tell you the best technician bonus I ever