Chris Collins uses Moneyball as a lens for fixing service departments: stop hiring for surface traits, measure what actually drives profit and customer satisfaction, and ignore ego-driven decisions that everyone else makes. The real problem isn't usually what you think it is.
So you.
You had the idea of talking about Moneyball for your service department. I love that clip on YouTube. It always comes up in my algorithm of.
Brad and the. Those old coaches around the table and basically the scouts. Yeah. He's like. They're talking about, oh, you know, he's got an ugly girlfriend and this guy. The way the ball sounds.
Sounds when it comes off the bat.
Yeah.
And that sort of thing.
Yeah.
And has always kind of reminded me of what we do, in a sense of what everybody's talking about.
Is usually different than what the actual problem and fix is. Like, they're. They're talking about the wrong stuff. They're thinking about the wrong stuff. And at the end of the day, nobody wants to acknowledge that it's broken.
Mm.
Like, everybody's trying to justify. There's a lot of egos.
Yeah.
There's a lot of posturing. But it takes a guy like that to come in and go, you know, what is the problem? Nobody can answer.
Yeah.
What the problem is.
Yeah. And he just cuts a straight line to it. Right. So you could apply it to different things, but no, it is just. Just overall, it's a thing where, you know, Jonah Hill's character. Do you remember his name? I forget his name, but Jonah Hill. Yeah, he. He, like, figures out that, you know, he just cuts through a lot of it. If you want a profitable service department and a better customer experience, there's a straight line to those things. But we muddied the waters with it. If you want to win baseball games, he figured out you need runs, and if you need runs, you need to get people on base.
His name was. His name was Pete.
Pete. Yeah, it was. It was Pete. So it was just a basic algorithm, but there was the most important metrics. Like, you got to get people on base, and you got to score runs, and you. That gets you to, you know, World Series or whatever.
But just kind of starting at the end and work backwards. But it's such a funny thing where then you start to apply that to different things, like hiring. Hiring people. Like hiring a service manager or hiring advisors or even texts.
It is the scene from Moneyball.
Yeah.
Witnessed it.
This guy's going to be great. Like, he has the look. I'm like, oh, what's the look? You know, like, what was his performance at the place he was before?
You know, like, I think it kind of. The heart of that, too, is people are mimetic, and so everybody's following what everybody else is doing, even if it isn't working. Like, they're doing the same thing that we've always done, hoping that it'll be okay versus intentionally creating an outcome. You know, like you said, it's more of a direct line.
Yeah, I. I sat in on a tech interview once, and this, this is absolutely 100 accurate. And we sat down there and the guy didn't bring like any numbers with him and no production or anything like that. And kind of just, you know, talks a little bit through a system about. He fixes cars. And the guy walks out. At the interview, service manager come turns to me, he goes, I like him. He's got small hands like that.
And I'm like, come on. And I'm like, what? Yeah, he's got small hands. He'll be able to dig into those little places and fix all those little things. I'm like, you're gonna hire him because he's got small hands? I think he hired him too.
But.
But that was, that was, that's what made me. When you said this Moneyball thing, I thought of that interview. Cause there's nothing more Moneyball than small hand techs.
