The Solution to Too Much Work!

Hello, my name is Matthew. I work at a Mercedes Benz dealership and has watched your video on how to take care of overbooking, hire more techs. Well, I'm in a scenario right now to where it's currently June 22, and I'm scheduling out till mid July for services. And for the last three months, person above my service manager has been aware that I need more technicians. My question is, how do I, how do I stay the course in the sense of taking care of my current customers because I'm backlogged like crazy, which were a simple oil change or oil change paper exchange is taking longer and.

Just trying to get people in the shop because getting work has not been an issue. I get phone calls every day. Can I get my car service? I get my car service. I just literally can't get the men for the time being. So until I get more text, how do I, how do I better take care of the customer and I better.

Execute that customer experience you're always talking about.

Did you hear that, Aaron?

Yes, I did.

Don't you just feel for that kid, man?

I, I honestly, I mean, if he ever watches this, man, I feel for you. Yeah, I absolutely do.

I'm, I'm facing the same kind of situation.

I'm probably down, you know, I probably need three more technicians.

Well, five. I'll just say five.

And it's, it's absolutely tough right now. It's not. And it's not just isolated. It's not just Mercedes. You know, I would imagine for Mercedes, it's, it's probably worse. And not because of a car count issue. It's probably more of a customer service issue. But with your domestics, it's definitely going to be a car count issue.

You know, having multiple techs, you know, that, that definitely helps out, but so his issue is, is probably going to end up being scheduling. I mean, you know, you can only schedule so far out, but until you get more techs.

That'S a, that's a tough, that's tough.

Like I said, I'm, I'm, I'm working with the same situation right now.

So, I mean, we have, we have two, two kind of scenarios. Here is one, you are the manager, so you can fix it. He's a victim to bad leadership and there's really nothing he, you know, can do. Right? You can't walk into the manager's office and like, sit your manager down and write him up. Or like, I mean, you can suggest, but I'm sure the manager there wants, you know, would want More text. They just don't understand how to get them.

Yeah, I mean, in this, the industry's gotten tough with that. But if I were, if I were him.

When I worked at a Ford dealership, I had 10 other service writers. I was just a writer. And individually, at different times, each and every one of them would come up to me and say, hey, can you go to the boss and ask him this? Can you tell him this? Can you, can you go like, well, why am I the only one? Why am I being nominated as the speaker to go and talk to my boss?

Mainly because all of the other one, the other service riders were just too scared to walk into the office.

That's not it, Aaron. You know, people perceive.

People with a beard as being the natural leader in times of crisis, in times of war, people look to the guy with the beard because you're more, you're more masculine. You just project leadership. That's why. But. Sorry to interrupt. Keep going.

I think if I were him.

You know, if he's, you know, and this kind of goes back to. There was a question that I asked on the show a long time ago that you answered, and it was about getting technicians to do multi point inspections. And your answer to my question, which I, at the time, I said, well, I can't get my techs to do multi point inspections. And your answer was, well, it sounds like a lack in leadership.

I didn't take it offensive at all. I took it to heart because you're 100% absolutely correct. So in Matthew's case, if he's having an issue with the scheduling with technicians, I would definitely take more of a leadership role and see what I can do personally about it if I can't get the answer from my management.

So I feel like it's one of those, it's one of those situations where we're talking around the answer, but at the end of the day, the answer is hire technicians.

So this whole idea that it's impossible to hire technicians is crazy. Like, I've been in scenarios where we've hired like 40 technicians in a very short period of time. We've never been in a marketplace in the US or Canada, and I'm talking like northern Canada where nobody lives, to parts of your home state of Texas where you can watch your dog run away for four days and there's nothing there and you can hire technicians. But the first thing is, is you gotta stop thinking that it's hard and you gotta figure out, like, what it is. So we have, you know, on our in Our on demand platform, like we have a thing called Technician Tree which is a course on how to hire, you know, the ads, how to recruit, you know, all that. We just last week recorded kind of an update to that of Christian and one of our coaches, Steve and myself, just going through all the stuff that's working, pulling up ads and going through like why the placement of the ads is wrong, the way they're written, the whole thing. And the other thing to understand is if you understand profitability in a service department and you understand pricing strategies and how to sell more, you, you basically control your effective labor rate and your ability to hire technicians is more dependent on your effective labor rate. So if I'm talking to somebody with an $80 effective labor rate and technicians like diesel techs in a, you know, Chevy or Ford or whatever shop are, you know, making $40 an hour, my gross profit percentage on that is 50%. It doesn't even make sense. So you got to be able to have an effective labor rate that doesn't drive customers away. But also you retain enough money to hire the best technicians in the marketplace. But there's, there's a, there's a certain point there where nobody can compete with our clients because we can get the effective labor rate and the, we're selling the work that makes the techs more efficient because we're selling more customer pay work where in most shops they don't have enough techs. So what happens, Aaron, over time if you don't have enough techs as a, as a dealership, not an independent shop, is you start doing more and more warranty work because you don't have the ability to sell customer pay work because your shop, you know, you're full of just warranty work. The advisors are scared to sell more work because they can't get done like this poor Matthew kid can. He can't get done the work that came in three days ago. He's not going to tell somebody they need a seven hour job, right?

Yeah, he's, what it's going to end up doing is it's going to, you know, like you said, it's going to make him scared to try to be able to sell anything. And at that point.

It'S going to end up driving him out of the business because warranty doesn't pay anything anyways. And I don't know how his, his pay structure is, but I'm sure it's going to be largely know, customer pay oriented. And then if it includes any type of csi, well, I mean you got my Warranty stuff. Done. But you couldn't get my. You couldn't get my. The stuff I wanted to pay out of pocket for. Done.

Well.

It'S a catch 22, right?

Yeah. I mean, you're playing a, you're playing backwards on a numbers game. You, you're not going to be able to, you know, you've got, you got to have the text, bottom line. I mean, like I said, I understand the situation because I'm just about right there.

Well, we have the solution for you.

We've yet to run into a scenario where we can't hire techs, but you just got to think different. I think the way that service managers come up, unfortunately, is through tribal knowledge. And so your approach to hiring techs is what worked for 20 years, 10 years ago, but the markets change, the way social media works, the way ads work, all of it has changed. But what happens if you, if you follow the way that you were taught through tribal knowledge, you're mostly going to be trading technicians in your marketplace that are the ones that will leave for $2 more. And they're the wrong ones, they're the wrong techs. And so you have to get really good at hiring technicians and you have to have a vast toolbox of.

Things to throw at it because if you only have a screwdriver and you need a crescent wrench and a drill, it's gonna be hard in this market because more techs are leaving our industry than are coming in. But the future is having the techs.

That'S going to drive your RO account and everything, because if you have the quality and the production.

You'Ll be able to name your, you know, your price, basically, because the better technicians know that you could leave for $2 more an hour, but flag less time. And so the better techs also want to know how much work you have. They want to know about the parts department. They're asking a different type of question. So how you recruit them is going to be completely different than the normal way of recruiting. But if you want help with that, you know, it's on you, it's on our, on demand. And you would learn some stuff pretty quick. To Matthew, I would say, I feel for you, bro. I'm really sorry. The probably the best thing in that situation is to make sure you tell customers the truth up front. So tell them we're overbooked, tell them we're shorthanded on technicians and plan. Just tell them like, I've been in that situation as an advisor where we were calling all our customers at 2 o' clock to tell them that it wasn't even gonna make it in the shop. And the best thing is to tell them at write up and tell them the truth. And then, you know, if you want, we'll reach out to your manager, Matthew, and we'll try to get him into our program. Cause if you're booked out until July, you basically probably could double the sales of that department. Which means, I don't know, in my experience, most of the time in a high line dealership, if you're booked out that far, the service department probably isn't making that much money. You're barely surviving. And so there's a huge upside for the dealership too. So if you want us to offer our services, we will. But the best advice I could give you is just tell the truth. As painful as it is, people appreciate knowing I'd rather have somebody blow up at me at write up, then, you know, a day and a half later while I'm making excuses because it doesn't. The situation doesn't get better.

That's what I was gonna say. Like, managing expectations is, like, always number one. Like, it may feel like it's scary to tell a customer from the very beginning. Like, hey, just so you know, we're pretty booked out. It might, you know, it might take longer than normal. Like, it might be scary to say it up front, but from my experience, nine times out of 10, they're actually really grateful for that because then they can, like, prepare ahead of time in their personal life. Be like, okay, so if this is going to take longer, then maybe I'll get somebody else to take Joey to soccer. Or, you know, instead of them calling it to like, hey, I got to take my kid to soccer. And, you know, we're like, oh, sorry, we haven't even pulled your car in yet.

Totally.

So don't be scared of that. Don't be scared to prep them ahead of time. I'm sure that they'll actually be really grateful more than they'll be upset about it.

Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driver 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 dot. Chriscollinsinc.com now that's offers dot chriscollinsinc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.