Tips To Become A Great Service Manager | SDR #191

Welcome, everybody, to this week's episode of Service Drive Revolution, the big show. I'm Chris Collins. This is Chris John.

Hello, everyone.

And we have a guest, James. Captain Ballmer is here, which we're going to talk about in just a second. Well, you can say hi, James.

Hey, how are you?

Perfect. On today's episode, we're going to talk about what it takes to be an elite service manager. What are the differences between service managers that are struggling, constantly getting fired? And what are the elite service managers thinking doing? What are their habits? That's what's coming up on today's episode of Service Drive Revolution.

Okay, so before we get to today's subject.

Should we talk about the history that we have together? Your dating experiences?

Absolutely not.

He didn't think about that for a second.

Should we talk about your collection of Star Trek memorabilia?

Yeah, I like Star Trek.

So I remember once we went to a Star Trek convention and you bought the bridge. Yeah, tell everybody about that.

So my garage is made up like the bridge of the Enterprise. One whole wall is the bridge of the original enterprise from the 60s.

How long do you think Shatner is going to be around?

He's 90 years old. He's still going strong.

Yeah, I saw that he was on an interview the other day.

He went to space.

Yeah.

He's cool.

Is he your hero? Do you remember when you got your picture taken with him?

Yeah, that was so lame.

So we go to this Star Trek convention and.

I. I think I bought you that as a gift, right?

Yeah, you did. Sorry I called it lame, but.

No, it was lame, but a great business lesson, honestly. Right. So they, before you get there, like, they have this, like, VIP package and, I don't know, comes with a different laminate and whatever it was. And then you got your picture taken.

With Spock, Leonard Nimoy and Kurt.

This was a big deal at this convention because they hadn't been in the same room for like, 10 years or something. Right. And so it was a big deal that they were both coming to this convention in Vegas. Was it the convention center in Vegas?

Right, that's right.

And so you could have your picture taken with one of them or you could have your picture taken with both of them. And so you think it's a big deal, like you're gonna get to meet them, but what happens is all 500 of you that bought this, they put. They put you in this room and they basically, like, threaten you a death if you even make eye contact. So the way that it works, it's like An Alex Van Halen drum solo. In the sense that they line you up and you're in this huge line and the line moves like it moves fast. And all you do is step on this mark next to them. It's the real human, but they're just looking at the camera. They never look at you, acknowledge you. Picture out of the way. Next.

And so they prep you the whole time, even. And when it's your turn, they tell you one more time, you can't say anything. You can't talk to him. You can't ask them a question. Just go up, take your picture, and you exit out. But I still have that picture in my bedroom.

Yeah, it's a great. I think in the picture I had, I look mortified. I.

But looking back, like, I don't know. Stark Trek conventions are such a great business lesson. And how they monetize and how fanatical the fans are. Like, if you could think about having a business where people dressed up, like, to try, you know, I mean, I guess the NFL or sports are like that. But there aren't too many things where people actually will dress up like a character.

Which. Do you remember when you were there? You were doing a video blog and you were interviewing people and asking them questions about. Do you remember the last time you were at a dealership? Do you remember your service advisor?

Yeah, I was asking if they remember their service advisor's name.

Right. And some of them did, some of them didn't. But it was a really good question and always threw them off because they weren't expecting a question like that.

Great stuff. So why don't we do the news? And then we're going to talk about how to be an elite service manager.

We have some results from a survey done by dealerator about tire buyers and that they count price is their top.

Guide for buying tires.

Yeah. So the price is the main reason. And it's funny, like, I was just thinking about tires the other day, and I think I'm gonna stop using tire puns. They're just. They don't have any traction.

Come on.

That's. That's. Who. Who are these people? They're surveying? Because that's interesting. I don't know.

These are.

Do you think that that price is the number one reason why people buy tires? There is no way. There's no way that if they come into a dealership, you measure their tread and you're like, hey, you need tires that for 20 or 40 or $50, people are going to take it to Costco.

So there wasn't 258.

I think that. Well, what's the percentage?

I'm gonna go ahead and read a couple of those.

What's the percentage that say that price is 29. Oh, so one out of three.

Okay, 22%.

Two out of three. Don't. To my point, the majority of people don't think price is the most important thing. Right.

So there's other factors they chose too. So 22% tread life durability. 17% bought off a brand. I thought that was really interesting. 10% based on the warranty. And then this is where I think that I've missed the boat. Maybe with some training. Is only 5% bought because of free perks like a rotation or lifetime balancing or something like that. I would have thought that would have been way higher. And then the last thing is that made someone choose a specific tire was a retailer recommendation. So if these 18,000 people are indicative of all of our customers looking for tires, the rotation and what we tell them don't have near as much to do with it as I thought.

You know what fascinates me? You know Patricia in the office?

Sure.

She buys all of her maintenance and tires at Firestone. Do you know why?

No.

Like I'm talking about, if you like later today, go up to her office and just ask her what she thinks of Firestone. Make sure you bring a cup of coffee and a snack because it's gonna go on and on. She's the equivalent of a Star Trek fan. And it's alignments for life.

That's it.

They sell her an alignment for $200 or whatever, but it's for the life of the car or the. She has an SUV and she goes there for everything else.

That's awesome.

She's happy and she loves them. She's got her purse in there. Like it's a great. It's a great.

Would you ever thought that.

Alignment for life would be that powerful of a retention tool?

Never would have.

Me neither. But it's working.

It's interesting. Okay, what else is in the news? Chris Tone.

So that was our tire segment and now we go to another interesting development also out of automotive news, Polestar to supply hertz, which with 65,000 battery powered vehicles. So Hertz is going electric. Five year deal represents $3 billion in potential revenue for Polestar. Like, wow, that's pretty impressive.

That's on the back of them buying a bunch of Teslas.

They already bought a bunch of Teslas. But.

Yeah, that's a huge deal.

Polestar's from Polestar.

They're from Sweden.

I didn't know that.

I didn't know that either.

Cause I'm not in the market for a Polestar.

Yeah. So that's a 65,000 vehicle order. Guess how many vehicles Polestar sold last year as a company?

10.

29,000.

29,000 where it was globally? Wasn't here.

No.

Have you ever seen one on the road here?

I haven't even heard it until right now.

Yeah, I've never seen a Polestar.

Yeah, I'm not sure I have either.

I've seen them in the mall or whatever, but that's it.

Yeah. But I thought it was interesting. So they're doubling down on a. On a newer company to the game. The electric game.

Yeah. And.

That Rivian company too. Right. Wasn't it? Amazon ordered a bunch of those.

But Amazon, why did I. I thought for a while there was a deal going with a government review.

The guy that made the video that said they never sell more than a hundred thousand electric trucks. And it was like the biggest lie ever had. Never read anything on. He never googled electric truck sales because Amazon literally ordered 110,000 of them or something.

Pretty funny. Okay, thanks for the. Thanks for the news. So because you're elite, James, because you have this vast experience and wisdom.

Let'S. Let's kind of unpack what it. What's the difference between managers that struggle and managers that are elite? Right.

Understanding too that a lot of managers are worried about their job. There's. In some brands we've seen higher than 50% turnover in managers. So it's a. It's a position that turns over a lot.

Right.

What do you think the, like the biggest differences are between the ones that are going to get fired probably this week and the ones that are highly recruited?

Well, I've met a lot of service managers being in elite group and then going to events with Chris Collins and stuff. And I think that the, the ones that get better and the ones that don't turn over, they're not stuck on the same ideas. They're open to new things and so they take suggestions and they actually go back and implement them. But I can tell within five or ten minutes of talking to a manager at a group or something, if they're going to listen and change. I think the biggest thing is they just get stuck on stuff that's irrelevant. It doesn't matter.

Yeah, I know this is going to resonate with you, but like Christian and I were in Florida and you go to different events where there's managers and the easiest way to tell if somebody is a performer or not is how they ask questions. So a lot of times the commonality between low performers is the way that they ask a question is not a question, it's a statement.

So they'll say something like, so what do you do when your market is impossible to hire technicians?

That's not a question, that's a statement like, how do I, how do I answer? Impossible. Like you're saying it's impossible. I don't have, I don't have like magic. Like if it's impossible, you know. Or they'll say, well what do you do when it doesn't work?

You're like, I don't, I don't. I've never thought that way. It's hard for me to think that way.

How many times have we had that conversation with a group of guys, group of managers about how hard it is to hire techs? It is not that hard to hire techs. It's really not that hard. And sometimes you're just on a roll and you just get texts because other techs that work at your store love it there and they, they go out and search for you. But it's not that hard. Every time someone says that, I just, I get quiet and they're not trying.

Well yeah, but you know what we say, like make, make everybody think it's hard. Like I would, I would personally say to my competition, I'd be like, oh my God, it's impossible to hire texts. Because then it'll be a self professing prophecy for them. And they'll tell their boss like, oh no, I was over there talking to James and he's having a hard time too. It's impossible. We should give up.

Right?

Well these aren't competitors I'm talking with. I'm trying to help, you know, but.

But it's funny how as long as you confirm the negativity, they take it as law. And you know, that's right. It's easier for it to be hard than it is to figure out other ways to do it. And you know, some, some creativity. Okay, so I think that, that that's a good one.

What do you think the overall like let, let's just, let's do this in a kind of an abstract, fun way.

So low performing service manager wakes up in the morning and.

Makes themself he or she some coffee, has a little breakfast, gets in the car and drives into work. High performing elite service manager makes some coffee, drives into work. When they get to the Dealership. What is the difference in mindset and their approach to the day? Does that make. Does the question make sense, the context, the approach, what it is they're going to do in the first hour?

Well, I think you want to plan for your morning meeting, have an agenda to talk about, have a game that's ready to go and be prepared.

You do that the day before?

Oh, sometimes, Sometimes the morning of early on.

You did.

Yeah, but you're thinking about it all the time. So I might have an idea for a meeting this morning, but I already know what I'm going to be talking about two days from now or whatever. I always have ideas that I'm going to talk about.

So if you're not in our system. He's referencing having a shift meeting before. Before everything opens up. Okay, so you're thinking about how am I going to motivate the advisors, how am I going to get everybody on the same page and how am I going to create momentum for the day? Right. Because if you get momentum that first hour, the energy is contagious the rest of the day.

Yep.

If you start off slow, you kind of end how you start.

Everyone needs to be there early, everyone needs to be ready to go. Everyone needs to be prepared. Prepared.

Right. So now let's take the. The low performer. The first thing that you would notice that this happens and you're going to notice this now as a coach is you're going to get there at 6:45. I don't know, you probably get there at 6:30 and the meeting starts at 6:45. How many people do you think will be late?

Half.

It's maddening. And so that's an indicator of the leader, the respect they have for the business, how serious they're taking their job, all of that. But it's accepted as just part of doing business. Right. So one different differentiator would be people showing up on time, ready to work. Like just their overall approach and respect.

For the job after a while, it's a habit. I don't remember. It's been years and years since an advisor has been late to one of our meetings ever. Just doesn't happen anymore.

Everyone listened to that. You just said it's been years since an advisor has been late. That's very different than what happens in a normal dealership. It's been years since an advisor's been late.

So now.

We'Ve had the shift meeting, everybody's on time, or we haven't had a shift meeting and everybody's kind of rolling in when they, when they feel like it or they're late, whatever, and then we open the drive and now we're taking customers. And so in the system where we have the high performing elite manager, the advisors would be approaching the customers. They would building, be building rapport doing walkarounds. It would feel systematic and organized. In the low performing service driver be chaos. It would be. Well the question from that manager, which you've heard many times at coaching meetings would be well, how do I get my advisors to do walk arounds.

Or which could be the same as how do I get my advisors to show up on time.

I can't even remember a time when they weren't doing walkarounds. My guys were just so thorough. It's just a habit. It's part of the culture. I don't think anyone even would imagine not doing it that way. So it's hard to remember that far back. But you have to have a line in the sand with being late or doing the walkarounds. You either do it or you can't be part of our program.

Right?

Yeah.

Well I always say when they say like how do I get my advisors do walk arounds? I'm like when was it negotiable? Yeah, Explain to me when it became an option. Like there's no way that we're going to be able to run a business if there isn't an element of predictability.

Right.

If we don't have some sort of consistency in the system, we don't know what's broken in the system.

I've noticed at stores that are also not doing well, it's not so much chaos. Sometimes it's a matter of they just ignore the customers when they come in. And the customers pick up on that so easy. I mean we've all felt that you go in, you can just feel the vibe where they're trying to ignore you or they put their head down and they don't look up. I hate that kind of culture. When you go into a dealership or.

They pick up the phone right when somebody pulls in.

Yeah. Okay, so then let me give you. Let's. So let's kind of come off of the day a little bit and let's just talk about the different priorities for the low performing manager and an elite manager. So a low performing manager would mostly probably focus on RO count. They'd be like, we need more customers, we need more customers, we need more customers. And they would be focused on maybe gross and hours per ro. High performing manager would be focused on net to gross effective labor rate and how many techs they have in the shop, probably production hours per ro.

Do you agree with that, Christian? Those two.

Yeah. So I think that they would equate.

RO count to profitability. Even though they don't understand profitability. They feel like if we're busy, we're successful.

Yeah.

Busy, busy, busy means we're doing something. We're successful when we know that you can be slow and be very successful. Slow is better.

Some of our best days, a lot of times our best days, we didn't have a huge RO account.

Yeah.

And you see that time and time again. The lower the RO count, the higher the RO value. When it's. When it's working right, it's great.

Should be.

It should be. Yeah. When it's working right. Is exactly how it is. I think the other thing, too, is that there's a couple of things I've just. From watch. Watching and listening to James over the years is that it's so great to listen to him talk about. Really, like, it's so easy. That's another thing between elite managers and, like, your regular manager. The regular manager thinks that they've got the hardest job in the world. The elite manager is like, what else can we do to make this thing a little bit better? Like, of course, we don't worry about walkarounds. Like, I don't think James is unclogging talk. Unclogging toilets.

Well, we should end on that story because do you know how the elite group came?

I've probably been told that story a couple of times, but it's a good one.

When we were doing the meetings here, actually, and we all. We were doing them almost monthly, right?

Monthly, yeah.

And so we had our coaching meetings monthly, and we had a. You know, there were guys in the room that were just in coaching that would fly in, and then there were guys where I would actually go to the store. It was a mix. And you had, like, the vets, like yourself and Vicki, Natalie, Carl. There was a. There was a group of vets. And then I kept bringing in new people. Right. And so. And I was using and abusing you guys because I would take the new people to your stores. And one time we had. We had a meeting. And I don't. I'm not even sure how it happened. I just remember it happened is there was a guy that had flown in all the way from Boston. Remember he's flying in monthly from Boston. Do you remember that?

I remember the guy, yeah.

So he's there in the meeting, and what Is he talking about cones?

Cones. It was definitely cones.

So we have a process. If you're not familiar with our system that we call service drive judo, that involves, you know, a cabana and cones, and. And he's asking something about cones. And that one of the. One of the, you know, veterans in the. His name was Carl, flipped out, like, went nuts, and I don't want to talk about cones. And started screaming. And at that moment, I realized, I'm like, this doesn't. This won't work. To bring in these guppies with the wily veterans, I have to have two different groups because they don't want to talk about cones or effective labor aid or walk arounds like, you don't want. You don't want to talk about how to get your people to show up on time because it's not an. You might help somebody, but you don't want to sit around for two days and talk about that. So then. Then we've created experiences for the elite group where we go into other businesses and look at those. Of all the elite meetings, what is your favorite business that we've. That we've gone into?

Oh, there's so many. The rage room was awesome.

That's my favorite. The fact that they were claiming that under.

Insurance as therapy.

Yeah.

And then it was mostly females. Like, I don't know. I just did. I don't see most of the females. I know. I don't see them breaking TVs and whatever. But a rage room is where they. They have these. They actually have employees that just scour Craigslist. They go buy old printers, televisions, electronics, and then you can kind of pick from a menu. They set you up in this room that has hammers and bats and all this stuff, and they. They set them around, and you can just go in and break them. And you're in full, like, protective gear.

Yeah. Goggles and the white jumps.

And then you just go nuts, breaking glass and whatever it is you want to break. So the rage room was a good one. And when we do these elite meetings, most of the time it's arranged that they show us their numbers, they talk about their business and their averages per customer, their marketing, all of that. So we got to see intimately how their business worked.

There was the other place we went to with the VR. Oh, yeah, that was interesting. The VR stuff was awesome. But listening to the business owner talk about all the different revenue streams that he created. So it was. The VR thing was part of it. But there are all kinds of other aspects of that business, which.

So three Bit Circus is the. Is the arcade here in la. Son of the founder of Atari, who also founded Chuck E. Cheese.

So he comes from a family, understanding those different streams of revenue. And fascinating how many different streams of revenue, even to the point, wasn't one of the streams of revenue where they do programming for other companies?

Right.

They were. They were outsourcing programming for other video games and other, you know, companies that need touch pads and stuff like that.

We've been to so many things like that that were so interesting. It was fun to do it. But listening to the business owner talk about it was always the best part. When you did the restaurant tour a few years ago.

Oh, yeah.

We went to each restaurant and the owner would talk to us about running the business and stuff.

The most fascinating part of that was to me was that they ended up buying their own. What are those games where you throw the ball and it lands? Well, you like, you roll the ball up the thing and then there's like a people. They bought their own machines and that. They were doing 40 grand a month in that. Remember that? And then the other thing is, is that that brewery that we were in was providing that canned beer for their other 27 restaurants. So they were kind of wholesaling to themselves in a sense. Right. And the margins were crazy.

We've had so many great experiences with the elite group. Seeing all those businesses. I can't even remember them all, but.

Can'T wait for that to come back because Covid kind of hampered that. But it's coming back. But great stuff. Okay, well, I think that's a relevant conversation for anybody out there that's struggling, worried about getting fired.

Just understanding kind of the two different things. And you know, when he's talking about. I don't remember when people didn't do walk arounds. That's about you as a leader more than anything. But before we go, you were saying when we were walking on the set that the 17 laws of leadership, that there was one missing, and then you had 18. By the way, whenever I do a list like that, you have to give me two because I really need it to be an odd number.

This is OCD that you're feeding.

Well, if you ever look at stuff.

Is it like a superstition or something that you need?

I just like odd numbers. I don't like even numbers that make me uncomfortable. Okay, so.

Well, I'm still working number 18.

It's 17.

Yeah.

So when you're done with 18, you're gonna have to come up with 19 or somebody is okay. But I, I think that you're 100% right in what you said. So what was your idea for of the 17 laws of leadership inside of our on demand.

What is the one that you think is missing? That would be 18.

I think it has to do with confidence and humility.

Yeah, I think that's great humility. It's a powerful one.

It's a mixture between those two, and you have to find that spot that's comfortable for you.

Well, I think when you're saying confidence too is when somebody isn't confident, they're talking too much, they're trying to impose their will. They're just, you know, they're uncomfortable. And so humility is listening, understanding and caring about the, you know, the other person. And, you know, leadership is a selfless endeavor.

There's managers out there that have great ideas, and I love listening to them and taking them back and working with that, owning them for myself and taking credit for them sometimes. But there's a lot of really good stuff out there. And part of the elite group is what is part of that.

There's also managers out there with terrible ideas.

There's friends I made in the elite group. For 20 years I've been in contact with that will still pick up the phone. If I call them right now, they'll pick up on the first ring. It's really great group.

Great. Well, we hope we you enjoyed this episode and thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution. 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 collins inc.com that's offers.com chriscollinsinc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.