What Your Shop is Secretly Saying About You | SDR #276
Chris Collins and Christian break down what a messy service department reveals about your shop's leadership and systems. High turnover, long wait times, employee theft, and inconsistent customer experience are red flags that point to hiring problems, weak accountability, and poor pay plans. The fix: hire more technicians, build systems, and set clear expectations.
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Chris Collins and Christian
8333 Ask SDR
offers.chriscollinsInc.com
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Welcome, everybody, to the big show. We got an exciting topic today for you. What's your service department say about you? We have a long list of different characteristics and what they mean. Also, Christian is going to reveal a new, very unhealthy hobby of his.
And the news and much, much more coming up on this edition of Service Driver Revol.
So here's what I need to understand. If I take creatine in massive amounts, I will grow chest hair.
I know this is a sample size of one, but. Yes.
What if I want to get rid of back hair? What do I do?
Wax?
But is there, like, an antidote to the creatine that I can drink?
Maybe.
Let's go through all the supplements that you're taking for the. For the audience out there, because if they want to be buff like you. Yeah. And you, you are signing up for a bodybuilding contest, correct?
I'm thinking by the end of the.
Year, by 2025, you'll be on stage with a fake tan, in a speedo, posing. Oh, my God. This would be the greatest day of my life.
You have to come get the cameras ready.
We're gonna. We're gonna make a movie.
I'm gonna hire a pose coach.
Oh, yeah, you have to. And a nutri. Yeah, no, you know, I was. I had a front row seat to all of Etter's competitions. And you're gonna be in a bad mood.
Can't wait.
You starve yourself to death and dehydrate yourself. It's really. Does it seem healthy?
No, but it's a high level of commitment, which I like.
Yeah.
Okay, let's see. But yeah, so. So I'm growing chest hair, which is great.
From the creatine.
I believe it's from the mouth.
What other supplements are we taking?
Let's see. I mean, a bunch of multivitamins and then a vasodilator.
Oh, you're gonna have to get on testosterone and all kinds of stuff if you're going to compete.
Yeah.
Things that you shoot in your shoulder called zips.
There's no rules with that.
Should we take an hgh?
I'm going to grow another nose if I'm not careful.
You know how you take hgh?
Shoot it through your butt, I think.
Right through your butt. Like a sport?
No, a shot. A jab in your butt.
In your stomach. Okay.
It's in your stomach. I've never shot myself before.
Oh, well, can we film that, too?
Yeah. I'm an open book.
When you're. When you're interviewing opposing coach. What, what sort of things are you looking for?
Somebody who's taking a common mortal. That's it, let's call it. Yeah, most people are starting to do this when they're like 15.
Yeah, 15. Let's just say my years might be.
Late to the game.
That's okay.
I think there's a 15 older cat.
Like I think just like the audience. I, I can't tell if you're serious or not cuz it doesn't make sense.
That's what I like. I was not serious about the drinking thing last year. Yeah, okay, well I'm way more serious.
About probably not bodybuilding.
Okay, well stay tuned.
What's that? Before we get to our subject.
I like that this is just a.
What's in the news?
All right, so good news or bad news? Bad news.
I feel like, I feel like we should focus more on good news. There's a lot of bad news. That's easy. Okay, next time, layoffs, closing strikes.
Did you look at the news for the day recall? All right, so we got two, two slices of news related to General Motors today. So the first one, do you want the, the bad news or the that makes sense news?
Let's start with the that makes sense news.
Okay, so.
GM has announced that it is buying out half of its Buick dealers. So they had 2,000 dealers, they're now going down to 1,000 dealers.
So there's probably no chance they bring back Oldsmobile.
I was just going to say this probably looks a little bit like the Oldsmobile thing that they did right before they kicked the bucket. And Pontiac, I think they did the same thing. Constrict and kill. So I believe that's what they called it.
Constrict and kill.
Oh no, that's my, that's my term for, for what GM does when it's trying to off its thing.
It's not going to be your strategy when you're bodybuilding. Constrict and kill.
Yeah, for sure. Plus there's also a thing that not only is it about muscular build, I've also got to do something with excess skin which is a totally different episode. But yeah, I've got my work rubbish.
Rub lotion on it.
No, I don't know, I never body built before.
You gonna start having plastic surgery?
No.
So you're not that committed?
Well, it's just like a one time thing. So it's not a life change.
I feel like you're gonna go up there and like crack jokes. Like you're not gonna pose like you just want the laughs. I don't think you want to. Really. It's gonna be like a Saturday Night Live skit.
Well, there's a little bit of fear. I had me trying to overcome a fear. Just getting up in front of a bunch of people to speedo is kind of crazy, which.
Let's go do that at the improv.
So. Yeah, that's true. It's a good point. But I wanted to let you know my role model for this is Chris Farley from the Chippendale skit.
Yeah, that's what I thought you were doing. That makes more sense. They probably won't let you on stage.
Stay tuned. I think I can get on stage.
The one thing about those people is.
They take stuff seriously.
They're very crabby, especially when they're competing because they haven't had a. You know, they haven't had a meal in two weeks. Or water.
Oh, yeah. Cause you gotta dehydrate yourself. Basically. It makes your veins pop out, Right?
Yeah. Imagine the mood. And then here. Here comes you with a Popeyes chicken in one hand, a Gatorade in the.
Other.
While I'm posing.
It's a big joke.
What's the worst that could happen?
They would kill you.
Yeah, that's true. I guess that is the worst that could happen. All right, so, okay, so kind of along that. So Oldsmobile, Buick are out. They're headed out. And then GM is laying off 1300 Michigan workers.
Most of it's related to the Chevy bolt that they used to made. They discontinued that bad boy.
Oh, really?
Yeah. So that thing's going by the wayside.
So did the 13 inch that bull bolts.
Yeah. I remember a lot of GM dealers did not like the. That there was a pain in the.
It was a pretty, pretty, pretty good idea. You know, I don't know. It was something.
Yeah.
I'm proud of GM for doing the bolts.
That was a little bit of a step out of their comfort zone, for sure.
Yeah.
But I remember it always as a. Was an issue, but. So 1300 people in Michigan. Just a thought. I don't know if any of you are mechanically inclined or not, but there's a shortage of technicians in the. In the industry. So maybe if there's a kinesthetic thing between working in the factory and maybe working on the cars themselves, might be a career to kind of chase after.
Do you. Do you believe that.
Characteristics. Travel impacts?
Very much so, yeah.
Let me give you an example.
A while ago, we. We had a client who had an advisor that told everybody at Top Dog that he was stealing cable.
So his neighbor let him run a wire over and use his neighbor's cable. Okay, makes sense.
Yes.
So he's not paying for cable.
Now when you hear that, you're like, okay, like, I don't know, it's theft, but it's not.
I don't know. It's not the worst thing in the world.
No. On the surface, there's no victim.
Right? There's no.
On the surface, there's no victim is what I say.
Who's the victim under the surface?
Well, I think what happens is when. When the cable company doesn't have the revenue or enough people to divide everything over, they raise their rates to the people that are paying. So that's my belief, is what happens. So it's not. It's not as victimless as it might seem. The rule followers are the ones that pay for it.
Yeah, good. I agree with that.
But it's really easy to explain that.
Away and not feel bad, so. Yeah. But ends up.
Six months later, a customer comes back and says, you guys fix my car, and it's not working like it. I don't know, had the same issue that it came in for. I forget what the issue was. We go to pull up the history. There's no ro. And we say, well, sir, there's no. We have no record of doing that repair here. And he goes, oh, yeah. The advisor, who also was the same guy stealing cable told me if I brought cash, it would be cheaper. And it ends up this advisor was him and his technicians. He had a team of technicians were doing work.
On the side during business hours. They were all in on it. And it ended up that it was a pretty. What's funny also is this advisor was one of the top advisors.
In addition to stealing, he also did a good job legitimately.
Yes.
Wow, that's impressive.
Yes. His number. He was always like one or two.
Okay.
But he.
He was like. This was. I mean, think about if you got three technicians in yourself and you're stealing.
You. You're not gonna. It's not worth a hundred bucks. Right. So they're doing thousands of dollars probably. So maybe they're doing. Well, when we went, it looked. It's. It's actually not that hard because you can see what parts they're buying.
Yeah. So they're buying counter tickets, right?
Yes.
Yes. So that'd be super easy to figure out.
And so maybe. Maybe they're doing 35,000amonth or whatever.
Unless you had a parts guy in it. And then he rang him up as cash tickets with.
No, not. We did not find a parts guy.
Okay. But that would have been a. I love how.
I love how co host of the show Parts hold would automatically default to.
You got to have a crooked parts guy. Yeah. If you want to make this thing work. Maybe that was their fatal flaw.
Yes. So anyways, coincidence that the guy stealing cable is also the guy stealing.
No. Right.
It's exactly who that was.
So people are trying to tell us who they are. We just don't want to listen.
Yes.
Would you agree with that?
Yeah. I've painfully had to learn that lesson dozens and dozens of times.
Every chance I get it, I point it out.
Yeah. Thank you. Keep doing that.
Yeah. So it's a thing. It's a hobby of mine. A lot of people whittle or rebuild cars or collect pens.
Yeah.
I just point that out to you. That's my hobby. And so when we talk about. What does your service department say about you? In a sense, we're saying like, oh, yeah, maybe on the surface this thing is like stealing cable. It's not the worst thing. But being in. I don't know. I've been in thousands of service departments in my life. They travel in packs, and you can assume that one equals another. Correct.
Yeah. So that they never. There's never one lone gunman.
Yes. And. And one of the things when we were working on this list that Christian felt odd about was, well, why aren't we pointing out any positive ones? And my point to you right now, I'll just say is every one of these has an opposite that's positive. If you'd like us to point that out, we will. But there's no reason to.
Do both when you can figure out that the positive is the opposite of what we're saying.
Yeah, I do appreciate that. You know what else is interesting is that Elon wasn't in the news today. And it got me to thinking that I really, really hope that Elon Musk is never involved in, like, a huge political conspiracy because elongate sounds really drawn out.
That took a minute, but you got it in you.
So what does your service department say about you? And we're going to talk about different characteristics.
Of.
Service departments that say, hey, you're stealing cable. And also you might be stealing labor and parts. Like.
Right. It's terrible that that happened.
You know what's funny is we fired that guy instantly. Got hired somewhere else. Yeah.
Back to the system of people don't check references so well.
You're not even allowed to say Anything?
Yeah. You can just say whether you'd rehire him or not.
Yeah. That's it? You can't say no. The guy's a thief.
Yeah. Good. So do you want me to go down the list of the things and you kind of tell me what it says about someone?
No, I'm gonna do the. I'm gonna do it, and then you're gonna say it, and then I'll comment on it because you're. This is. This gives you an opportunity to.
To let people know I'm deeper than just chest hair and jokes.
Oh, I was thinking you would tell jokes.
Oh, shoot.
Okay. What does it say about a service department that's booked out three weeks?
You need texts?
Well, that they aren't good at hiring techs or they're not paying attention.
Yes. Okay.
Like, so many times people are booked out, and they just. They just accept that as a normal course of action. So either you don't know how to hire techs or you're just. You're just numb to your business.
Yeah.
Right.
I think it also means.
What? How much labor do you have pent up. If you're booked out a month, two.
Months worth of labor.
No.
I think that if you're booked out for a month, half of the people that called decided not to make appointments.
No, I know, but if they all came in. Let's just say you're booked out a month and they all came in for a month, Wouldn't it be a month?
Yeah.
So you would double your sales?
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
I would just contend that whatever you're booked out could. It could be worse.
So when I look like, let's say, a service department is doing a million dollars and they're booked out a week, how much is that?
250,000.
If they're booked out two weeks, 500,000.
750,000. A million.
Yeah. And so if they have 30 texts and they're booked out two weeks, how many texts do they need?
15.
No.
Yeah.
Yeah. Wow. Oh.
The number's always higher than what everybody thinks. Think about when we go in, how many times we hire five or seven techs right off the bat, and everybody thinks they're fine. Right. Coming into it, when you're doing the strategy session, they're like, oh, maybe we need a tech. You're like, no, you need five techs.
You need way more.
And that's not even enough.
Right. Way more than you think.
So if you're booked out three weeks, it says you're either asleep at the wheel or you Don't. You're having no luck hiring technicians.
Yeah. And it's not that important to you.
Okay. What does it mean if your CSI is low?
Okay, so what I would say is if your CSI is low, there's two things that popped in my head. One is that you don't have a minimum standard of expectation of your people and.
You'Re not focused on the customer experience.
Yes. And another thing I might say about you is you just don't think it's important.
Yeah. It's an afterthought that you think that CSI is a conspiracy and that nobody.
Yes.
Could csi. So you buy into the whole luck fate. Yep.
You're praying to the altar of csi.
Yeah.
Terrible sacrificing. Little white doves.
That's good. Okay.
Okay. What about if I come into a service department and the people seem preoccupied, like nobody says hello to you. They seem like they're. They're busy, they're stressed out.
That you don't have a system for how to receive people. That's what that would tell me. Right.
That's good. What else?
I'm going back to you don't care.
Yeah.
There's a lot of these that are probably.
That probably is the answer to everyone.
Stop saying that for everyone. Let's just.
No, still say it funny.
Maybe your people perceive that they're overworked. Maybe they are and can't take any more.
Would there be a coincidence that somebody would be stealing cable and stealing from the company? Or somebody would be booked out three weeks and they also wouldn't hire more advisors, they wouldn't hire more techs, they wouldn't hire more advisors. And they would just let that pressure cooker just cook.
They would say they can't handle the expense.
And then what do they say? What do they call us and say? Christian. They call and they go, I need training, Advisor training. And it's like. No, you need texts.
Yeah.
And then advisor training, but more text with it. Yeah. Okay. So that's. That's a good list. What, What. What does it say about you if your people aren't friendly like they are one word answers and what brought you in? Or do you have an appointment? Hello?
Yeah, so.
I could be wrong here, but I think that. What. There's definitely a thing. And I think you've told me this before, but the department takes on the personality of the leader. And I think that in departments where I go into. And the people are really short with the customer, and then I'll see the manager interact with the customer and it's identical.
So I would say that if your people are really short with your customers, you probably aren't number one with the customers.
Yeah, it's rare a manager comes out from their office and they're, like, super, super outgoing and friendly.
Yeah.
They're usually just as angry, if not more just as socially inept.
Yes.
They're in a customer business, but they're not customer friendly.
Yeah, I agree with that. Okay.
What would you. What would. What does it say about you if your service department is losing money? You're negative net to gross.
Okay. So two things here. One is, as a leader, you don't see. See the financial statement. And two is you're paid on gross.
Okay. Three, you don't care. You don't care. Okay.
Four would be you don't understand what makes an apartment profitable.
In a lot of situations, you would be better off handing the customer a 20 bill and telling them to go somewhere else than to write them up.
Yes.
Because you don't understand pricing. You don't understand cost of labor. You don't understand loading the shop.
You know, like, you're not convert. You're not converting the right stuff.
There's a lot of things left to chance. You're leaving it to chance.
I like it. Okay.
What does it say about you if your service department is declining in sales?
Oh.
I would say.
If some of these sound like the repeats, I'm sorry, but declining in sales probably means I need more text. Two is it's very possible that I'm writing more repair orders than I should and I'm just hurting cats.
And three is you have not set yourself up with a system for growth. There's no scalability. So in theory, sales departments sell cars, which should be like, you should have a perpetually increasing RO account. When you kind of think about it. Right. Because we're always selling more cars. So your RO account should be growing, which means you should be able to receive more work. So you haven't done that. So I would say that you haven't thought about the future.
Yeah. And either you're not selling cars or your retention's terrible.
Yeah.
What about if your gross is declining.
You have too many lube techs, and you have two people working per car.
That's good.
What if there's an inconsistent, consistent experience for customers? Like some customers get taken care of, other ones don't, depending on the day.
Yeah. What I would say there is a distinct lack in consistent accountability, which would tell me that it. Probably what I would do is I would Walk into the department and I would notice that maybe they're not doing walk arounds, they're not doing a proper write up. And then the manager goes out and has a reaction and right away is like, hey, we gotta do walkarounds, we gotta do write ups, we gotta do, you know, preventative maintenance presentations. And then for four days they do a good job. And then on the fifth day, like some of the people forget and nobody says anything until there's the reaction again. So the only way that people perform is by the reaction of the manager as opposed to we consistently just do the same thing every time. That's what I would think.
Yeah. Also, nobody's inspecting. They're leaving him to chance. There's no system.
Yeah, it's reactionary. So they're only doing it after someone else says something.
What does it say about you if your service department has a big whip?
Whip is work in process that you have.
You have no attention to detail. The other thing I would say is if you've got a lot of whip, you are probably destined to write off a bunch of stuff because those things age like milk, not wine. And.
Yeah, just. I'm really stuck at the whole. You just, you either don't care or think that it's just gonna work itself out. It's magically gonna work.
What does it say about you if you have high turnover?
So I've got a couple of things here. One is you're not really a good leader to work for because a lot of people leave their job because of their boss. The second thing is you are terrible at hiring. So a lot of people say that you just have bad people working at your place. But I would say that you hire, you're attracting who you are in a lot of cases. And the third thing I would say is you don't set clear expectations of your people.
All those would lead to lots of turnover.
That's good. What does it say if your people are late and inconsistent?
That you are late and inconsistent.
What does it say about you if yours. Everybody's gone at noon.
That you have no foresight. Like not only is everybody gone at noon, but that's when a bunch of customers can come to the dealership.
What does it say about you if your people are.
Non incentivized to perform? There's no minimum standards, there's no, there's no incentives, there's no commissions. Or that you're on a communism pay plan where everybody is dividing the pie equally. What does it say about you if you.
Well, I propagate A socialist, communist mindset.
Yeah. So there's a couple of things there. One is, I feel like communism pay plans are the easy way out because it's really easy to calculate everybody's pay. It's like, you're like, I have 10 people. I divide this pot by 10, and that's what everybody gets. Which there's no. There's nothing into that. And then you also kind of go into this assuming a social contract that everyone's just going to perform to the best of their abilities because that's what good people do. Right.
There's a naive. Yeah.
Which kind of reminds me a little bit of why. Why is it. Why is it so hard for a communist to tell a good joke? Why he has to wait for everybody to laugh or to be funny?
That's pretty good.
I haven't told a communism joke for a minute. But, but I would say that you're really assuming that people just, they come to work to perform at the top of their. Their possibilities just because that's what. What people do. It's a terrible assumption.
So just to kind of summarize how we do anything is how we do everything. And the little things are signs for the bigger things.
Yeah.
And if you're struggling in one area, it might mean that you're sitting at your desk on Facebook and you should get to work, hire some techs, build some systems, become a better leader, get in front of it, not, you know, just reacting to it.
And if you are in Facebook, could you please like my bodybuilding photos?
Thanks, everybody for hanging out with us. We'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution. Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Job 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.
