Turning Dealership Downturns into Service Drive Gold

So what's going on in our world? And re, you know, the opportunity of a lifetime comes once a day. Customers are keeping their cars longer because you can tell by the sales volume they're not buying new cars. They're buried in the ones that they have, which forces them to maintain and repair what they have. So the average car, we talked about this the other day is 14,000 miles. It might hit 15.

No, no, 14 years old.

Oh yeah, 14 years old. It might hit 15. The thing to do in this sort of situation is to start marketing fixed tops, like going after it, get good at finding those customers online marketing fixed stops and grow it. Don't, don't shrink it. I know the tendency is to run scared. I mean, how many, how many dealers furloughed technicians during COVID and then immediately regretted it?

A lot of them for sure.

And don't do that again. You can grow it. Like the opportunity to gain market share. And when sales turns around to have a bigger customer base is right in front of you all. All you have to do is be strategic and execute. That's it. Don't panic and run. If you panic and run, your sales aren't coming back anytime soon. Like it probably won't be until later next year. Depending on how the election goes. It might be longer than that. But people are putting miles on cars and they're not trading them in for tennis shoes. In the words of the late Bob Crevier, people are not trading their cars in for tennis shoes.

That is one of my favorite things.

They're driving more, actually.

That's right. So, so there's the opportunity from the customers coming in. There's also, and I think that this was something that I saw in 2020, is that you have to understand that as much as we can talk about not panicking, people are going to panic, which means that some really talented people are going to come available. So this is the time where you can build an all star team to take the best care of customers. And it's so funny to me that like the strong will just get stronger. And this, these downturns like this are my favorite time for fixed ops. It's like it's once every 15 years that fixed ops gets to be a star. This is that time, like it's here. And the profitability, if you're not making, you know, a really healthy profit and service and parts right now, you are, you're missing the ball and the ability to make your dealership sustainable. So with that, you know, it comes at the value of the product that we sell. So if I've got the best team, the best techs, the best advisors, the best parts department personnel, and then the ability to get customers in and out in a very fast method and communicate with them really well, you will just, it's literally the rich will just get richer. But there's going to come a point where if you don't have your fixed ops set when Everybody else is 30 steps ahead of you, it's going to be tough to keep up.

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.chriscollinsinc.com now that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.