Treat Detail Like a Business

So my first is that you have to treat it like a business, not like a necessary evil.

Whereas you have to understand how much it costs you to detail a car.

So walk me through that math. How do you figure that math?

So when you think about it, at the end of the day, there are certain costs to doing. Let's say it's a full detail on a customer car. So the easy stuff is the human part of it. Right. How much you pay somebody actually to clean it. But then also, what are other expenses you would incur during doing a detail?

Water would be. So the cost of the car wash portion, then all the materials and the chemicals supplies, electricity supplies, everything like that. So when mistakes. Yeah, so when I set this up in my store, I had it down to pretty accurately how much it cost me to do a detail. So I knew how much it would cost me with.

With materials. I knew how much it would cost me in water, I knew how much it would cost me in human labor. All that stuff was to where I had a cost figured out.

Okay, so can. Can we make a distinction between a used car detail.

And a customer detail?

So that is my number two, is that not all details are created equally. Because I think in a lot of. A lot of cases, if you're not looking at this like it's a business, a detail is a details. A detail. And I could think of. I just started listing them out and I came up with like five or six different types of details. I think that a used car detail is different than a new car prep. I think a customer pay detail is different than a used car detail. I think a truck is different than a car.

So can we just take the used car detail and talk through how you'd cost it out?

Sure. So essentially with a used car detail.

So how long on. Just in the scenario in the last time you did this, what. What was the time allotted for somebody to do a detail?

Yeah, so the used car detail, what I did is I timed somebody doing. I think that we did four. We did four average cars just randomly pulled. And what we ended up doing is we found that realistically, start to finish, if I took out any kind of breaks or anything like that, a used car detail on a moderately dirty car was taking us roughly two and a half hours to get it done. Now, so the backside of this is that I also, I paid those texts flat rate. So I costed that out at three and a half hours.

Okay.

So I billed myself for three and a half hours when I was figuring out my cost.

Okay. So that's a good way to do it in the sense that I do think, like. Cause when people ask us like, what should a detail pay? I do think that the market you're in, the climate conditions and the type of system your used car department is running, like if your used car department's selling 79.95 cars versus $40,000 average used cars, the amount of work that it takes.

There'S different styles, there's different approaches. You could. I've been in stores where the, where the fair number is five hours.

Yeah. So. So I've, I had it.

So I've gone all the way from two and a half to five.

Yeah. So within that I had four details. So I had. There's a retail used car detail and I forgot about that. The wholesale used car detail. Well, what you're doing is you're trying to make it look good so it goes through the auction at a higher price. Yeah, but I'm just talking about just.

The normal used car detail. The bulk of what we're going to be doing for used car, which is just a used car detail. So three and a half, four hours is usually where I find that. Now the thing that Christian saying there, that I think is really important, I don't want to be missed is the, the detailers know that the average was two and a half when they did the test on four. And then he's saying, okay, it's going to pay three and a half. So a couple things are happening there. One is we're saying like, hey, you can make more money than just the time that you're here. Right. You can increase your efficiencies, like a flat rate tech could do. The other thing is you're, you're also kind of building a little bit of a buffer in the quality conversation because it isn't like, you know, they get one that's a little dirtier. And the reason why they didn't do as good of a detail on it was because a paid two and a half. You're, you're kind of in a sense building a little insulation to the quality conversation on top of that. So there's a, there's a couple reasons to do that. Also don't lose sight of the fact that the used car department or ultimately the customer is paying for that detail.

Just the cost of it has to be balanced out with the quality of it. If it's just everything as cheap as we can do, as quick as we can do, and you'll end up spending a lot of time on the comebacks. It also does affect your service department in a, you know, abstract way where if the customer gets into the car and they don't feel like it's clean and they buy, you know, they buy a used car, they're not as likely to think that they want to come to you for service. They are attributing that to the service department. In a lot of cases, it's a.

Representation of how the work we do.

So if you want to get those cars back into your service, drive, drive. The quality and the, you know, how they feel when they take delivery has an effect on your retention of those customers later on. And so just focusing on the fastest and the cheapest.

Usually a lot of used car managers have that narrative, but it's not long term, the best strategy. And at the end of the day, like, at the end of the day, these conversations sometimes driving me crazy. Because we're talking about 50 bucks, right? If you're gonna lose a used car deal over 50 or 100 bucks, you.

Need new salespeople or.

Yeah, like, there's a right way and there's a wrong. Right? And so we're not talking about thousands of dollars. We're talking about, you know, doing it right. Customers perception. Customers, you know.

Satisfaction in it. And the retention coming back is. Is more important than just shaving it to the bone.

Yep, exactly. And when you pay a good amount. And I'm just talking about. I'm not talking about customer pay details right now. I'm just talking about the used car stuff. When you're paying a really fair flat rate, the turnaround time is way faster. I've had, I. Yeah, I'd had a.

Lot of times where culture is.

Get to work.

That's right.

I can make time.

That's right. And the, the thing I think that keeps a car from selling is the condition. So let's say that even if you take pictures, get a car on the Internet, but it hasn't been detailed yet, and somebody comes to look at it, it's not worth whatever you need to get out of it, because it doesn't. It doesn't do the whole, you know, dopamine release in the customer's head and be like, oh, I can imagine that in my driveway.

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 Chris Collins Inc. Dot com. Now that's offers.chriscollinsinc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.