Chris Collins and Christian break down why service managers fail: running unprofitable departments, getting promoted for showing up rather than managing people, resisting change, following instead of leading, and lacking real training. Most get hired without the skills the job actually needs.
So what would you say the. The top reason service managers get fired, in your mind and in your experience?
Because the department's not profitable.
So profit.
Yeah.
Okay. Most of the time, service managers don't get the financial statement, don't understand how to read it.
And then most dealers have a financial statement sitting within a foot or two of where they work every day. They're always looking at it, and so they look. This is what happens. I'm going to interpret for you. Dealer looks at the financial statement and sees that the service department's losing money. He goes out and says, christian, how much gross are we going to do this month? And let's say you say 400. And he goes, we need to do 450.
I can do that.
And so you discount. You try to drive traffic. You do everything you can to get 450. Meanwhile, you spent 55,000 to get the 50 extra, and now we lost more money. And the guy, the dealer sitting there with his financial statement the next month, and he's like, hey, Christian, do you think we could do 450 again? Like, just thinking that, oh, it was a fluke. We lost money. And it's. It's the. The most incestuous relationship ever that the dealer doesn't say, hey, look, we're losing money, you know, or you have. In some scenarios, you have it the other way, where all the dealer does is focus on expenses, and they don't understand that you got to sell. I don't think. I don't think. I. I can't think of. And I always hate saying something that's absolute, but I can't think of a time when we fix the service department by just cutting the expenses.
No, it's a. There's a multiple pronged approach.
You get expenses in line, you fix pay plans, you structure things. But you have to be able to sell. You have to have a pricing strategy. You have to be able to convert, like, all of that. So service managers are in a trick bag with that. Is that you're not seeing the financial statement, but by not seeing the financial statement, you literally are driving a car at 100 miles an hour, and you can't see out the windshield.
Yeah.
Like, it's a trick bag. Okay, my list here. The next one I had is, most of the time, service managers think, like, text.
Well, half of them were.
Yeah, but they were just reliable. They had leadership skills, and so they were promoted. But they were never taught how to manage people. They were never taught pricing, marketing, all that. Right. And especially in a dealership you have the ability to just sit there and wait for the cars to come in. And whether you convert on them or not, if you're not looking at the financial, you can go 10 years sometimes just by being reliable, opening up on time, and maybe not pissing off a lot of customers.
Yeah. Well, I think that the lesson that, that teaches the service managers, which is not the right lesson to be teaching, but they determine their worth by how hard they work.
Yeah. And then the next one I had that I thought of is they. Most managers are very scared of change.
Yeah.
And so any sort of change rattles them and they spend most of their energy trying to avoid change. Right. So change is a. Is a big one. Systems like, they don't understand how to create scalable systems. Most of the systems that service managers have in place that, you know, frankly, or half of a system were given to them by the manufacturer and it's mandatory. So they're using a certain digital inspection because the factory said they had to. They're using tablets or whatever. They're doing a quick lube that the factory had some consultants come out and set up. And they're doing it not because it makes sense, not because it's good for business or the customer, but because they. They had to. Right. And then I think the next one is that service managers often are followers, not leaders. They do what they're told the factory tells them to do. So they're doing all these things, but they really have very little context or confidence to stand up and say, that's wrong, or that's, you know, they just become passive aggressive. But they never just stop and restart and say, no, that doesn't make sense.
Yeah. I think they underestimate their power in a lot of cases just like that.
And you know, and I know you've heard this, but it always confused me when I would go in to a department, I would say, okay, we're going to do this, this and this and this. And then the service manager would say, oh, we talked about doing all that.
Before, or we used to do that. You hear that a lot.
Well, but in this context, I'm saying, like when they say we talked about doing that, we used to do it is another problem. Yeah, right. But we talked about doing that, but they never did. Means that it made sense to them logically, but they didn't have the confidence in stepping up and saying, hey, we're launching this and this is the new path. Oh, okay, I see where they were followers, not leaders. They had ideas, but they, they weren't Confident enough to step up and say, hey, I'm. I'm gonna be in charge here. We're gonna do this. I. There's a better way. And even if we fail a little bit, we'll be better off going this direction than staying on this one. Right.
Yeah.
Does that make sense now? The. The flip of that, I think, is another. Another thing. Like not trying to. Trying something and not sticking to it is a different situation, but just as dangerous.
Yeah. They abandoned ship at the first sign of a wave.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then no training. Most of the training that service managers get comes from nada or the factory, but none of it really is helping them run the business. Like they. I mean, it's amazing to me that a manager can do all that work for nada, come back and not really know much more than shopify efficiency and a couple other things. They throw so many numbers and so many figures at them, and it's just not practical. They don't understand.
Yeah. They just need to learn how to. How to lead and manage people and understand, like, just in general, a department, like, what makes it work Right. And to be healthy. And there's so many. Like you said, there's just so many numbers that there's formulas that the factory comes up. They just don't have the dealers or even the department's best interests at heart.
It's a tragedy for sure.
So, yeah, training. That's the big one. So that's kind of our list of why service managers get fired. And to Christian's point, the most common one is that you're not putting, you know, you're not putting a profit up.
Yeah. Even if you don't know it.
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 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 sa.
