Service advisor Chris Collins hated talking about cars, so he studied colleagues like Dawn and Thomas Kemper to build his own style. He filled a yellow legal pad with greeting ideas and steered conversations toward small talk instead of technical knowledge, betting that relationship-building would make him a top advisor.
Maybe the thing to do here is to think about what does Thomas Kemper do and what do I do? Like, what is the gap between me? Because if, like, Dawn, Dawn was really good, but if I modeled, compared what I did to her, it would— there would— there wouldn't be much contrast because she was— a lot of what I did, I learned from her in a sense, and we kind of like she was very passionate about taking care of customers. She worked really hard. She had a huge clientele. And so, um, I, uh, I was like, what does Thomas Kemper do? So I remember the very first thing, and I think maybe that thought and this happened like within seconds of each other, is he walks out to a car and he goes, did you have an appointment? And I'm just like, man, like, ooh, like, you know, you see yourself as a customer and you're like, ah, it's cringy, that's weird. Yeah, like, and then I'm like, well, what do I do? Well, I'm like, hey, how are you today? And so I started keeping this little like yellow legal pad of like how you greet customers. And then the other thing that was interesting for me is I knew nothing about cars. Like when I was general manager, people expected me to like be a car guy because I came from service and then I was overhauling engines like you on my weekend. No, I didn't. My favorite car was the one that was selling. Like I didn't know anything about cars. I'm not— I didn't have posters of cars. I had a poster of Tommy Lee Anthrax on my wall. Like, I was, you know, I was a drummer, so that wasn't, that wasn't my thing. I wanted a car that could get my drums somewhere. I would, you know, I just wasn't a car enthusiast that way. So the worst thing that could happen to me was a customer want to talk about something technical on a car. So when I would go greet a customer, I would try to talk about where do you work, what are you doing, what do you think about the Seahawks, or, you know, the Mariners, whatever it is. But the car was the last thing that I wanted because I didn't, you know, I didn't know.
