What To Do When Your Service Manager Isn't Cutting It | SDR #283

Welcome everybody, to the big show today. We're going to talk about what to do when your service manager isn't cutting it. If you're a service manager and you're not cutting it, this is for you. If you're a dealer general manager and you're wondering what you should do, this is definitely for you. And then there's much more coming up I really can't talk about. Also, I don't know, we might have to edit some of that out, but we have a. We have. Have an awkward conversation about something that Christian is doing in his personal life that. Yeah, well, that much, much more. Coming up right now on Service Driver Nation.

Headed to New Orleans for the 2024 TMC annual meeting. The American Trucking Association. I'm giving a keynote there in the Big Easy.

Right. Is that what they call New Orleans?

Oh, I thought they called it the big.

Sweaty drunk mess.

Oh, yeah.

With a little voodoo.

So you're talking about after 6pm New Orleans.

6Pm People are walking around there all day with drinks.

I mean, I remember going there when I was 19 and being just amazed is the first time I'd ever seen like beer vendors on the, on the sidewalks and they weren't really worried about IDs.

It's great, people watching.

Yeah. There was a lot of interesting things that I learned during that time.

Should be fun, though. This is like the nada of trucking. This is a pretty big deal.

Then I, I can't even remember the last time you did a keynote. It's been a minute.

Can you remember the last time I said no to a keynote?

Yeah, a week ago.

I said no to everything.

Yeah, that's.

Yeah. By the way, if you've asked me to speak and I said no, I'm sorry, but it's nothing personal.

Yeah, it's all about finishing.

I've been saying no for a year now. This, this was booked three years ago.

Right. That's the only way. It's probably on the schedule, but it.

Was the last thing on the schedule. And.

It'S great. It's a great association. They do a good job.

You've done a really good job of committing to getting that, the leadership stuff over the finish line. But I, I would have a guess that these wonderful folks in New Orleans are going to pro get the, the benefit of what you've been working on for the last three years kind of to enhance the keynote.

If I had, I wasn't gonna, I wasn't gonna include any of that.

You don't think you'll I think you naturally talk about it like it's part of everyday conversation with you.

Oh, yeah, but this is a keynote. It's. It's.

Designed for an outcome, right? Yeah, for. It's about their event. It's not about me.

I understand. I'm just saying that the things in.

And you know what? You know what people say? We have some prototypes around here of the new leadership Books. Yes, they're books. Do you know what a. A common thing is when people look at them, what they. The question they ask, how do I get one? Well, yeah, but no, something like. Not that. Oh.

What, are people asking questions about the color?

No.

Okay.

Do you like. Do you like this game as much as me? No, they. They go, how long did this take?

Yeah, I've been.

I'm like four years, maybe more.

Okay, so I've switched that up lately. I'm telling people it's kind of like your life's work in a book.

Yeah, I think it's four years.

Way longer than you. You spent four years officially writing it, but I think that you've been collecting this a long time. Hey, I can't help but notice you keep staring at my jaw. Have you noticed something different?

I keep staring at your jaw.

Yeah, like I've caught you a couple of times and this is what I was told would happen.

I'm not staring at your jaw.

Yeah, you are. You are a little bit, but yeah. So I have a new device. It's called Jaws or size.

You're joking, right? Is this a. You know what one of the boys said before we started a couple minutes ago?

What was that?

They said that your jokes are.

Outlawed in 12 countries or something.

It's funny.

What is the punchline?

There's no punchline. It's a real thing. You can look at it. You can look it up. It's called Jaws or size, endorsed by Dr. Andrew Huberman. So he.

Stanford guy. Yeah.

So his belief is that people are more inclined to listen to men that have a strong jawline.

Oh, so what about a beard?

Beards are also a sign of. A sign of wisdom. So same thing. But I can't grow a beard. I can strengthen my jaw. So this thing, it looks a little bit like. I'm trying to find a way to describe it other than, wait a second.

This is a serious thing, that you're dead serious.

I'm only five days into it.

Oh, and you think there's gonna be a difference already?

Well, I mean, it said that people are going to notice your jawline and.

Then so you're gonna work. You're gonna work out your jaw until it's.

Like, sculpted big like a muscle.

Yeah.

So creatine help with this?

So I stopped taking creatine until after my race. That you. That you're not endorsed.

Okay, how's this work? Does it. Please tell me that it's. Something goes in your mouth.

Yeah.

And so. And you have to stick.

It's round.

A rod in your mouth.

No, it's more like a round.

Tell me that you stick a rod in your mouth and you have to bite on it over and over.

Yeah. So you have to bite on it over and over again. Five minutes a day.

Every ex wife's nightmare. Gosh, that's a terrible way to put it. Are you serious?

Yeah.

You do this in front of Claudia.

She is really concerned about. What have I done?

Yeah, yeah. She's not.

She's not into alternative.

Yeah, she. She doesn't.

Are you serious, though?

She doesn't swear a lot, but I opened up the package and she said, what the blank is that? Like she.

And it's a rod that you bite down.

It's more like a rubber circle.

Like a ball gag.

Yeah, like a.

Yeah. And it even has a string on the end of it. Get. You want to.

Like a horse. What are they called?

A horse bit.

It's like a horse bit.

Yeah, Kind of like a horse. Yeah.

So it's like a combination of a ball gag and a horse bit.

Yeah. There you go.

And what is it called in case anybody listening wants to.

It's called Jaws or size, which is kind of a playoff of Jazzer size, which I think is.

Oh, I get the joke.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I thought you thought that was clever. How much was this contraption for? 300.

Yeah. For three ball gags was 30 bucks.

Oh, so.

So I don't know.

I'm really cheap.

I'm very susceptible to Facebook marketing. Like, when I'm scrolling through my Facebook and I see something come up, I'm. I hop down the rabbit hole pretty regularly, so they're hitting their target pretty good.

I'm not.

You won't be buying the Jawser size anytime soon. No. All right. I also wasn't going to loan it to you because I feel like it's. That's. That's the kind of thing everybody needs their own set.

Secondhand Jaws or size.

Could you imagine trying to sell that on Etsy or something afterwards, After I'm done with it. Oh, go. A used Jaws or size. Yeah. So we'll see what Happens we'll have to do before and after photos like in two months to see what, what my job.

Did you do it before?

No, but I'm only five days in, so I'm basically at the beginning.

That's hilarious.

Yeah.

Can I, can I make a prediction?

Yeah.

You'll give up on it before you see.

Any sort of difference. And the difference will be too subtle maybe.

I don't know, I'm severance.

You know what a lot of people here in, in Hollywood do plastic surgery. They get a chin implant.

Yeah.

Well, I more take like a truck tire.

Yeah. More than the job. More than the jaws.

Stick it in your jaw.

I gotta get rid of this thing.

The double chin.

I think it's quadrupled.

No, it's just two. Yeah, it's not quadruple.

It looks like four.

But see the. If you put the, the chin implant in there, it's.

Would it stick this thing out a little more?

Yeah.

Oh, okay. Maybe I'll get that done.

I know somebody who's had that done.

Okay, I respect that.

Before they had it done, I told them that they shouldn't do it.

And then. Do they regret it now?

No. It looks really good.

Yes. Sometimes that's what you need to do.

Kind of anti plastic surgery.

But Yeah.

I learned in that situation to just keep it to myself.

Yeah.

Because it made, it made a big difference and the person looks dramatically better.

How does he feel? Does it help confidence or anything?

You've read Psycho Cybernetics?

Yeah, I have.

You can't change what's inside.

Yeah. So my favorite thing, I'm super excited for you to go and speak in New Orleans. But I think the coolest thing and I've been getting reports sometimes a couple of times a day and is you have no idea what the impact that you've made. But coach Vicki is really excited to take you to dinner.

Oh, in New Orleans.

Yes.

Oh, yeah. We're gonna have fun.

Yeah. So she researched and found the restaurant that she thought would be the best for you. And I think I. She said I've been there before. Yeah. So. So she sent me some of the stuff. It's definitely your style. I'm gonna guess you've had a pretty good.

What, fancy?

No, you're more than fancy. Like you want something with personality to it. When you go for a restaurant, you're not. You're not just going to like the most expensive restaurant you can go to. You want something that' experience.

It is the most expensive restaurant you can go to.

Okay. But it Also looks like customer service is really important there.

Comes with it.

Yeah, yeah. So.

But I've been there twice already.

Yeah, good.

But she ends up the. I've been to New Orleans quite a few times.

I've only been that once.

Been to Louisiana a bunch.

There's.

Louisiana's a. Interesting state.

Yeah.

There's a lot of really good people there. Sweet.

Yeah.

And voodoo and ghosts.

Right.

Do you believe in ghosts?

No.

Me neither.

Oh, speaking of ghosts, what do you, what do you call a murderer with two butts?

What? An assassin.

So we've talked about this subject before.

We have. But it's worth repeating.

But it keeps coming up. So it keeps coming up in the sense that people call us and they're like, hey, we want to sign up for your coaching.

We.

But we want to get rid of our service manager or our service manager is closed minded or our service manager is not any good, whatever it is. And so. Or just the question, what do I do if my service manager isn't any good?

I would say that's happening more often than I've got to replace my service manager.

Well, there is a focus on fixed ops, is there not?

So that's why I didn't do any news today. And I was going to, I was going to do a little editorial rant on this, but it's really amazing to me. So every time before we film an episode, I go and research, let's say the five or six biggest news outlets for automotive. So a lot of things you've heard of like Motor Trend Road and Track, Wall Street Journal, a couple other things. And the amazing thing is, even though there's clearly a huge focus on fixed ops, what do you think the ratio of sales related items to service related items is in all of those things?

80 to 1?

80 to 1. And the only time that one out of the 80 is only if there's a recall notice. So it's not really even to. In my opinion, it's not really news. And you could probably make a case that they're, they're even skewing that towards sales. And I just would say that as an industry we have got to be having more conversations about how to make fixed ops is the best it's ever been. And I would implore the media outlets to start to research, you know, phenomenal customer experiences and you know, tech hire.

This is your, this is your plea to the Wall Street Journal?

Yeah. So I'm sure they're going to listen to this. And I would just say that if you're Trying to give your readers bang for the buck? Talk a little more about fix than sales.

Okay, so if I, if I ask you, like, we randomly meet on the street.

Mm.

And you're like, what do you do? And I'm like, oh, I own a car dealership.

And.

Then you, you ask like. Or I ask you, I own a car dealership. And I ask you, like, what do I do if my service manager isn't any good? What is your answer to that?

Well, the, the first thing that.

Big sigh.

The first thing that comes to mind is that, like, more often than not is, well, why don't we try to fix them first?

But I've kind of got like a list of things that really. Does your service manager really suck or we just never really give them a chance to win? Because more often than not, we'll have people come into our program that just didn't know what they didn't know. And guess what happens when you start to teach them things.

Okay, so you're.

Did I answer that wrong?

Well, you're getting into whatever your list is already. But I'm saying, like, how do you answer that question?

Yeah, it's tough. Service manager turnover is 50% in the industry. Might be how I would answer that question to start.

So then that's saying that 50% of the managers are bad.

Not necessarily. Which is then where I lead into. It's a. They don't know what they don't know.

Or I might even ask, I think I need to replace my service. If you said that to me, I might say, what makes you say that?

Because what do they think? What do you think makes them think that.

Most. I think maybe your experience is different when you ask them, like, why. Most of the time it's processes like the CSI is inconsistent, the profitability or they're just getting a lot of complaints. Like, most of the time, dealers or general managers will judge the service manager's performance more on complaints. And it could be complaints from employees. So like, well, we just lost three techs.

Yep.

Or it can be customer complaints. One of the two. Okay, so let's give this context and then we'll, we'll go through your list first. But I think it's important to kind of describe where we are as an industry in relation to service managers. So our answer always is give them to us, don't fire them, give them to us. And they'll say, well, he's closed minded. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Whatever it is, the thing that, that we find consistently over and over again, which is sad.

And disappointing, is that there are plenty of managers out there functioning with all of the confidence in the world. They're, you know, they believe that they are effective and good managers and they really have no clue what they're doing in the sense they don't see the financial statement. So they're running a business and they're judged on feelings, not on actual outcomes. And so whenever you're judged on feelings and not actual outcomes, there's this huge gap left for interpretation that you can never really find your path because somebody's mood can change in a second. Right? And so it's not tied to, hey, if I accomplish this, I'm safe, or I'm, you know, I'm doing a good job. Correct? No, it's, well that, that ball is constantly moving. So most managers don't see the financials. They're not aiming their, you know, their.

Intentions towards creating profit. They're aiming their intentions towards gross. So they think more gross has to automatically equal more profit. Which there could not be anything further from the truth. You'll spend your way into gross and you'll lose more money than you were before. And I. How many times have we seen somebody go from 300,000amonth in gross to 500,000amonth in gross and not be making any more money? Right?

So they, they, they don't really have something to aim at that is a clear outcome. That, that clear outcome gets them in and out of trouble. Like you're either, you know, on the favorable side of your employer or the, you know, the bad side. So it's, that's always left up to the weather. It's not, it's not a real thing. We as an industry do nothing to teach them that. So there's zero training for service managers in this area. Most of the training out there, like, nada. And that sort of stuff leaves them more confused about it than they were before.

It just gets super complicated and they just come back going, well, I, I kind of understand what a debit and a credit is, and that really is. But we're not trying to make service managers accountants.

Yeah, they dive too far into that part of it.

Yeah, it's, it's, you know, there's just a simpler way to look at all this and understand all this. So we have somebody who is.

Been living their whole life under the, under the assumption that they're doing a good job or they're good at what they do, especially us dudes, right? Like, we take our career as something that that we make a part of our identity. Right. It's like, what do you do? I'm a fireman. It's your identity to be a fireman. Right. And so in our industry, our identity is the thing that we're doing, our job is our identity. And so.

We tend to justify and close ourselves off to.

New ideas, new ways of doing things. The way that service departments are set up is they're a closed loop system. You're doing the same thing every day, all the time, no variables to it. What happens or an outcome of a closed loop system, and we talk about this all the time, is you end up being closed minded because it is the same thing all the time. Right. So we have managers that don't understand financials, don't know how to affect financials or the profitability of the department in a, in an effective, easy way. We have their identity, which is to be a manager. And so they're closed off to the idea that there might be a better way to do something. Then the last part, which is the most dangerous part, is most of what they've learned that they've attached to their identity comes through tribal knowledge of watching other people that don't know what they're doing do what they do.

Yeah.

And so it's, it's this, it's this disaster. It's a.