Service departments blame low traffic and poor training for problems, but the real issue is too few productive technicians and shop efficiency stuck at 60-70% instead of historic highs. Most automotive shops pay flat-rate, which differs from heavy-truck operations. Hire better techs and add capacity to fix it.
We continually see this pattern where people say we need more traffic. So they want to hire us and they say, hey, we need more traffic and we need advisor training. And 100% of the time, that's never it. The reason why you think you need advisor training is because you don't have enough techs in the shop and your advisors aren't selling anything because they can't get it done. And they won't tell you that. No, they're not going to come tell you that. But you think that your pay plan and whatever is going on, your lack of sales is because of the advisors not selling it. But you, you have to put yourself in the seat of the advisor for a second. And, and, you know, I was this advisor. When you can't get the work done, when you can't get the work diagnosed that you wrote up, you're certainly not going to flood the shop with a bunch of additional work. And so 100% of the time, even though people think they need more traffic and they're running out of work, they're not running out of work. They need more techs. And then the other part of this is the efficiencies in the shop have dropped. It is insane to me how often now we are seeing the efficiency in a shop be 70%, which is completely unheard of for a Toyota, or a Ford dealership. Like, that makes no sense whatsoever that a Ford dealership in Middle America, mostly working on trucks, would be at 60% in the shop. Can you imagine that, Hoogie?
No, no, it's crazy. It's a reality though. It's out there.
Way more common.
I think it's the same though with commercial truck though too, is we, we keep seeing like the 75 to 80%. It should be higher than that. At best.
Yeah, but the, the difference, I think, in, in the, you know, when we compare a, a service department that's, that's servicing cars and trucks versus heavy truck is, for the most part, the techs on the automotive side, like 90-something percent, are flat rate.
Flat rate.
And on the truck side, it's exactly the opposite. It's like, maybe, what would you, what would we, we're guessing, but 30% are flat rate?
Lower? Well, probably, probably lower than that.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, there's one, there's one group out there that, that is doing it that way, but for the most part, they're, they're hourly. And so I think that has a big part to play in this conversation also.
Right.
I agree.
Yeah. That's fair.
So now the thing is, is when we, and I've ran into this my whole career is when we have a Ford dealership running at 60 or 70% efficiency in the shop. The thought process by leadership is, well, we need more traffic or more work. But what has happened over time is they've lost their better techs, right? So you start talking to them, you're like, so what's the situation? Oh, well, we had a couple techs leave and ends up those techs that left were the more productive techs. And what you need is better techs. You need more productive techs in order to increase that efficiency. You're not going to get it by having more traffic. Or by most of the time by doing it with the techs you have. If you have techs that are okay running it, like if, if your shop is running at 60% efficiency and let's just say you have 10 techs, that means you probably have 2 techs that are running around 100, 110, and then you've got a bunch of guys running at 40%. And you're not going to get those techs that are running at 40% to run at 100% because They're— it isn't who they are. They're either not that talented, not that motivated, not whatever it is. That's too big of a gap to close. And you're certainly not going to close it by having more work. Yeah. And we're just seeing this time and time again is that we think that the problem is traffic. We think that the problem is advisor training. And the problem is your shop and techs and the mix of techs that you have and your inability to recruit really good techs.
So I think the, uh, uh, one of the things that, uh, they, they struggle with, that one is tech recruiting, which is a big, a big conversation by itself. And, and, um, um, you know, we could, uh, probably dive into that a little bit deeper. But one other thing you said that is not intuitive to people, uh, but I promise is the case, is the fastest way to increase your efficiency is to hire techs. And, you know, there is a caveat to that with California, Washington State, and a couple other places where the laws are basically that the techs are all hourly and not flat rate anyway. And in those situations, there's minimum requirements and a couple other things that you can do that kind of help with that. But yeah, most of the time, if you have a normal flat rate shop, the fastest way to increase production is to hire, you know, one more tech than you think you need. And another thing that I've seen time and time again, one of the cruxes of our system is we're looking at CP repair orders and looking at how much opportunity we're missing in maintenance. And for whatever reason, we have just like let go of maintenance as an industry. It's an odd thing. It reminds me of like the '80s and '90s, early '90s when they said we weren't in the tire business, you know, and then dealers got back in the tire business because they were losing all the associated work. And now we're in a time where we're not really offering maintenance and these shops you have like oil changes and you have like major league repair, like cylinder head replacement. But a lot of that like B and C work is, you're missing a bunch of it. And the reason I bring that up in regards to efficiency is, you know, we're going in and capturing a bunch of sales. It's not uncommon when we kick off a store for us to sell more maintenance in a day or a week than that store used to in a month. And one thing I see when they capture that maintenance and they're intentional about capturing that maintenance is efficiency takes a huge jump. And so hiring one more tech than you need and then, you know, focusing on the missed opportunities from maintenance, you can watch huge jumps in inefficiency that way. And yeah, it's an interesting thing to sit back and watch.
