Turn Your Dealership Into A Destination

Now let me tell you a story about my chick buying a Tesla. So Christian buys a Tesla. He loves it, has nothing bad to say about it. Greatest thing ever, blah, blah, blah. So she, she wanted a Tesla. So we go online, we go to Tesla's website, we order a Tesla, very easy, extremely says, I call Christian. I go, oh, it says what, it was going to be four months.

Yeah.

And you go, it won't be. And I'm like, no, it says it is. And you see that they don't have chips and whatever. It won't be. It wasn't two months in. You get an email, hey, your car's here. Schedule your delivery now. Schedule your delivery. Is this you? Schedule a delivery. And I think I did it for like 8 o' clock on a Saturday morning. The kid shows up in the car, he asks you to open the Tesla app, log in, and then he transfers the car to you in the app, hops in an Uber and leaves.

Your car is yours.

Yeah, he did ask if there were any questions. But the car, I mean, it's pretty intuitive. Like, there aren't a lot of. There aren't a lot of things that would spark questions. Because it's very intuitive.

Or the app will help you to, like, there's, there's resources for you, as.

Much as you need. So now that's the buying experience. Completely different than me trying to buy a Land Rover. Range Rover. That situation was a nightmare. Still, to this day is a nightmare. My WI fi doesn't work in the thing. Like, just nightmare. Now you got to charge that thing. And so in the Tesla, you have this map that tells you where chargers are. And half of the chargers that you click on, it says, coming soon. The other ones that it'll say, this is a fast charger. And it's in a parking structure in a shopping center. So we would get down to like 50 miles. You would go to that shopping center, and guess what would happen?

They wouldn't have any open. They'd all be full.

No, they were broken. So you got to download a separate charger to pay for the charging, because it's not Tesla. Now, the closest Tesla one is, is in Santa Monica, which is, you know, where traffic could be 30 minutes away. So I'm just saying, in my general area, where I live, it was terrible. Now, the charger, it comes with charges. You know, maybe you could fully charge the thing in a week.

Yeah, the, the really slow one for sure.

It's like you get like three miles an hour charging with the one that it comes With. So then I'd seen in forums and on the website that you can have a charger installed in your house. That was kind of always a plan. The guy comes out and he says, oh, no, whatever. We got to run a wire over the top of the house, 50, $500. So then you install a 50, $500 that you're not planning on whatsoever, but you don't really have a choice because you can't charge anywhere.

And it's not even the fast one, it's the middle one. So it'll charge it in like five or six hours, but it doesn't charge it in an hour like the, you know, the faster ones do. So my experience with range anxiety and charging that thing, it. I'm in, you know, I'm in Los Angeles. It's pretty progressive and an early adopter of these sort of things. It was not easy. And so now as a, as a community, how could we make it easy? Like if we. If we went. If somebody in a Tesla or in an electric car went to the map and hit the button and they were looking for a charger and it was you, and you had people coming in. Now you have traffic. And now that traffic can turn into whatever you want them to turn into. But now we're starting to think of ourselves as a solution and stop treating the symptom. So although these comments are fun and it's fun to talk about and it's fun to get caught up in conspiracies.

And there's. Is it haunted in here that that book keeps falling or is it just the stand?

Yeah, so that's my thought, is that what we really need to do is we need to start treating the cause and not the symptom. And we need to change our mindset and our approach to think of this as an opportunity, not as something that we have a saying, because we really don't. It's happening, so get over it.

Yeah. Become the destination. Yeah, for sure. And I think that that's part of what goes into it too, is the one thing that has happened in our industry over the last 10 or 15 years is that dealerships started to build a lot of like those Taj Mahal looking places and imagine that. So then you start to transform your dealership into a destination and people have like a regular stop that they do with you. I mean, think about the relationships that you can build. I love the idea that you'd said, I can't take credit for. It was like, okay, so they're, they're charging. Can we Offer them a complimentary inspection. Can you get the car in the air? Can we make sure that the tires are aired up, that they're, you know, that they have good tread on them, everything like that. Every time somebody comes in, what's the issue with putting them in the shop and taking a look at them, too? And the customer just gets used to that. And then what would be great is they come in, they plug in, then they walk in there like, hey, I got 45 minutes left on the charge. Can you put it in the air after that? And then they start to actually ask for that. And then every time they get service done, you know, granted on electric cars is less, but it would always be there. So then you have to think their retention goes up really, really high because they're always with you. And it always makes me think about this one dealer group that we work with. And if you go into their headquarters, they've got the museum there, and there's a replica of their dealership, their first dealership that they had. And you could see that that was like a social place. And I think that we could use electrification and the charging and everything like that for this to become like a coffee bar or something. A place that they go, that people go and, like, now we start to talk about. Because you have events at the dealership.

Well, you could. You can. You could sell car washes, you could sell details, you could measure their tires. There's all kinds of things that you could do on top of coffee and that sort of thing. But we need to think of ourselves as an industry closer to shopping malls than. Than an Apple Store, in the sense that these big dealerships or service departments that we've built, you know, don't have the same leverage in the marketplace that we used to have. But malls, some have adapted and some haven't. Right? Like, so, for example, malls, more and more. You'll see that they have a Whole Foods, there's a. There's a mall here in Los Angeles that spent a lot of money and lobbied really, really hard to get eataly, which is kind of like a Pike Place market of Italian food where they have, like, they make their own cheese. They. They have like a dessert, an espresso, a couple restaurants. But it's a destination. Whenever my mom comes down from Seattle, we take her to Italy, and it's the best babysitter. You know, how you give your son a. A switch or whatever, and that's a babysitter. Taking her to Italy is a babysitter. But it brings so much traffic to that mall. That it, it brings them back to their original business model where the Nordstrom's and the J.C. penneys and the Sears were, were the anchors of the mall and people would come there and then those people would wander into Orange Julius or to the other shops. But if, if you understand the mall, the, the model of how a mall works, a lot of times the Nordstrom's or the businesses that are bringing traffic aren't paying rent. Like there's a, there's a couple interviews with the Nordstrom's kids where they're talking about, they used to just sit on Mondays or Tuesdays and take meetings with developers. It would say, we'll give you 40 million in free rent to come here because they're bringing traffic to that mall. And then the mall is making their money off of charging rent for the other tenants inside of the mall. But when the traffic goes away and Sears goes out of business and J.C. penney's goes out of business, and now people aren't coming in to buy Tool because, you know, a big part of Sears was Die Hard Tools, all of that. You don't have that traffic anymore. And they're going to Home Depot or Lowe's because you remember there was a time where you were going to Sears for that sort of stuff, right? And Sears was in every mall. They have to adapt. And so they're, they're trying to adapt. We have to adapt. But there's a lot of malls that are, that are closed up or you know, are more like cemeteries in the sense that they treated the symptom. They treated the symptom. And just like Blockbuster Video, they're like, well, what we need to do is have the movie experience at home. So we're going to sell popcorn and you know, two literally jugs of coke missing that. The, the whole thing is going to online and you don't have to return something. And it isn't even about late fees. It's just about I can go through an index and, and hit a button and watch a movie at home. I don't have to go anywhere. And they're missing that. Right? And so let's not, let's not do that as an industry. Let's stop treating the symptom and let's try to figure out how can we be the solution, be the solution for our customers and reposition our mindset and put your opinion aside. Like, all these comments are great, but they, they don't fix anything. The closest one is the, the one where we're talking about from Kim in Norway, where, hey, they break, wait till they're out of warranty. And they're expensive. And we can sell a ton of tires because they're heavier. So tires, alignments, there's, there's a lot of money to be made. But how many dealers do we run into that, like, just aren't in the tire business? They're just not interested in it. And so they're trying to dictate to the industry what's going to happen when the train already left the station.

That's right.

So think about that in the sense of let's be the answer. Let's figure out how to, how can we get in front of this and make it easier for consumers? How can we get, how can we help get rid of range anxiety? By being the solution and making sure that our charging stations are reliable? Because that's another thing is a lot of them don't work.

Yeah, they like to break.

Yeah, they break a lot. So that's my thoughts. 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 that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video. Sam.