Why Service Managers Get Fired (Service Drive Revolution)

Today on the show, we're going to talk about Christian's passive aggressive behavior about cigars, why carrier pigeons are more reliable than him as a delivery system, and why service managers get fired and show you how to get into our private secret Facebook group. All that and more coming up on Service Drive Revolution.

What's going on? Chris Jones.

Not too much. Got to go see the other side of the country. Very recently, just last week, New York, Florida, Washington, D.C. no, didn't come in those cold places. Although Carolina's pretty nice this time of year, so. Yeah, so. So I was in a. Visiting a store and a friend of the program been around for a few years now.

Friend of the program. You make it sound like it's aa.

Totally.

What is the. What is the AA thing? A friend of Dave's or what is it?

I don't know. But this is totally going off subject.

Does anybody know that? What is it when somebody's in a. They say, a friend of John or.

Yeah, so that's exactly what it is. But. But you and I were in a hotel one once and we were on the top floor and like it said, party for friend of John or friend of Dave's or whatever it is. And I go to you, I'm like, man, I wish I was a friend of John's. And you're like, you know what that is, right? And I'm like, no.

Oh, yeah.

Do you remember that?

I do.

You made so much fun of me for that. But so. So I.

But you don't drink anyway, so why would it matter? You'd fit right in, right?

I'd be like, when's the last time you had a drink? I don't remember. I don't have a coin, but I was visiting with Paul Vollrath and he gave me a cigar to give to you, which I would like to tell you that I'm going to give to you, but I don't know where I put it.

What kind of cigar?

Oh, sheez. It starts with a G. A gherkin. A Gurkha.

A Gurkha.

Gurkha.

Where is.

Is either in my apartment or on the roof of my Tesla, which is.

Are you saying you lost it?

Yeah.

Wait a second. Somebody gave you a cigar to give me?

Yeah.

And because you don't drink or smoke, you didn't care and you purposely lost it.

Boy, I feel like you might have read into that a little bit much. But. But either way, the result is the same. I do not have the cigar to give you, but I bet it's awesome. And I'm going to replace it. Paul. Nice work. It smelled great.

You're gonna replace it? What do you mean?

Yeah, you're gonna try the Gurkha.

We have plenty of cigars around here. It's that Paul gave me a cigar.

Right.

Thank you, Paul, for the. Well, thank you for the thought. Your next time you might Want to consider FedEx, UPS, DSL, the United States Post Office, some random hitchhiker on the interstate.

It's got a way.

There's like. There's there's probably 50 better ways to give me a cigar than to give it to Christian, who's anti drinking and anti smoking.

Yeah.

Weird that he lost it. Were you gonna say you left it on the top of your car?

Well, I might have.

It drove off. It's possible. Seriously, what do you think that cigar cost?

I don't know.

You have no context. Have you ever bought a cigar? What do you think cigars cost?

I would say that a really nice Cigar probably costs 20 bucks. No, is it way more than that?

Like the cigars we have over there would sell for like a hundred, 100 something.

Oh, you almost had to bleep a hundred dollars for a cigar.

Bleep.

I almost said a bad word.

Yeah.

Almost had a drink.

So close.

You almost brought me a cigar.

It was. It was close.

So what do you think's wrong with Paul? That he doesn't just put it in an envelope and mail it. His. His problem was he trusted you.

Totally trusted me. And I let him down.

Wow.

I'll make up for it.

So that's. You know, we're good at fixing your. Your business, but you can't trust us couriers.

We are not.

True. It's not. The pony. The Pony Express would be more reliable.

Right.

I've never even heard of a gherkin.

No, it. But it. When we were looking it up, it. It's got like a cool sounding history. I think that's all part of it, right?

Is the history they have the rating like the. You know, my. My problem with cigars is that I smoke those Cuban cigars and they're so hardcore that anything else is like.

Are they hardcore because of the intensity.

Of the flavor and that?

Yeah, it's okay.

They're pretty strong. So I was talking to a manufacturer the other day. They were talking about how their. Their problem is that there's more than a 50% turnover in service managers in the last year. It's literally over 60%.

Yeah, I have no doubt that that's correct.

So six in 10 service managers have been replaced or fired or whatever. So we thought we would talk about why service managers get fired. The. The book, the irreplaceable service manager is going right at this. Like, we feel terrible when a service manager gets fired. And when a dealer calls us and says, hey, I'm going to bring you guys in as soon as I fire my service manager and find a new one, our answer is, always let us work with the guy you have. Yeah, because you haven't trained him, you haven't given him the tools. And, you know, they'll say, oh, well, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. And it's like, it has nothing to do with tricks. Once somebody understands how the numbers work, how the systems work together, and they can actually see a way out in a path to success. It's just human nature that you're going to do better than you were doing before. There's no magic pill.

Right. There's no doubt. And I think the big thing is that when it comes to service managers, they're naturally fixers in their spot. And the only reason that they're getting fired is they don't know that they were supposed to fix something. Like, that's our fault.

So what would you say The. The top reason service managers get fired, in your mind and in your experience.

Because the department's not profitable.

So profit.

Yeah.

Okay. Most of the time, service managers don't get the financial statement, don't understand how to read it.

And then most dealers have a financial statement sitting within a foot or two of where they work every day. They're always looking at it. And so they look, this is what happens. I'm going to interpret for you. Dealer looks at the financial statement and sees that the service department's losing money. He goes out and says, christian, how much gross are we going to do this month? And let's say you say 400. And he goes, we need to do 450.

I can do that.

And so you discount. You try to drive traffic. You do everything you can to get 450. Meanwhile, you spent 55,000 to get the 50 extra, and now we lost more money. And the guy, the dealer's sitting there with his financial statement the next month, and he's like, hey, Christian, do you think we could do 450 again? Like, just thinking that, oh, it was a fluke. We lost money. And it's. It's the. The most incestuous relationship ever that the dealer doesn't say, hey, look, we're losing money, you know, or you have. In some scenarios, you have it the other way, where all the dealer does is focus on expenses and they don't understand that you got to sell. I don't think. I don't think. Like, I can't think of. And I always hate saying something that's absolute, but I can't think of a time when we fix the service department by just cutting the expenses.

No, it's a. There's a multiple pronged approach.

You get expenses in line, you fix pay plans, you structure things. But you have to be able to sell, you have to have a pricing strategy. You have to be able to convert. Like all of that. So service managers are in a trick bag with that, is that you're not seeing the financial statement, but by not seeing the financial statement, you literally are driving a car at 100 miles an hour and you can't see out the windshield.

Yeah.

Like it's a trick bag. Okay, my list here. The next one I had is most of the time, service managers think like texts.

Well, half of them were.

Yeah. But they were just reliable. They had leadership skills, and so they were promoted. But they were never taught how to manage people. They were never taught pricing, marketing, all that. Right. And especially in a dealership, you have the ability to just sit there and wait for the cars to come in and whether you convert on them or not. And if you're not looking at the financial, you can go 10 years sometimes just by being reliable, opening up on time, and maybe not pissing off a lot of customers.

Yeah. Well, I think that the lesson that. That teaches the service managers, which is not the right lesson to be teaching, but they determine their worth by how hard they work.

Yeah. And then the next one I had that I thought of is they. Most managers are very scared of change.

Yeah.

And so any sort of change rattles them and they spend most of their energy trying to avoid change. Right. So change is a. Is a big one. Systems, like, they don't understand how to create scalable systems. Most of the systems that service managers have in place that, you know, frankly, or half of a system were given to them by the manufacturer, and it's mandatory. So they're using a certain digital inspection because the factory said they had to. They're using tablets or whatever. They're doing a quick lube that the factory had some consultants come out and set up. And they're doing it not because it makes sense, not because it's good for business or the customer, but because they had to. Right. And then I think the next One is that service managers often are followers, not leaders. They do what they're told the factory tells them to do. So they're doing all these things, but they really have very little context or confidence to stand up and say, that's wrong, or that's, you know, they just become passive aggressive, but they never just stop and restart and say, no, that doesn't make sense.

Yeah, I think they underestimate their power in a lot of cases, just like that.

And you know, and I know you've heard this, but it always confused me when I would go in to a department, I would say, okay, we're going to do this, this, and this and this. And then the service manager would say, oh, we talked about doing all that.

Before, or we used to do that. You hear that a lot.

Well, but in this context, I'm saying, like when they say we talked about doing that we used to do it is another problem. Yeah, right. But we talked about doing that, but they never did. Means that it made sense to them logically. But they didn't have the confidence in stepping up and saying, hey, we're launching this, and this is the new path. Oh, okay, I see where they were followers, not leaders. They had ideas, but they, they weren't confident enough to step up and say, hey, I'm. I'm gonna be in charge here. We're gonna do this. I. There's a better way. And even if we fail a little bit, we'll be better off going this direction than staying on this one.

Right. Yeah.

Does that make sense now? The, the flip of that, I think, is another, another thing like not trying something and not sticking to it is a different situation, but just as dangerous.

Yeah. They abandoned ship at the first sign of a wave.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then no training. Most of the training that service managers get comes from nada or the factory, but none of it really is helping them run the business. Like, they, I mean, it's amazing to me that a manager can do all that work for nada, come back and not really know much more than shopify efficiency and a couple other things. They throw so many numbers and so many figures at them, and it's just not practical. It's that they don't understand.

Yeah, they just need to learn how to, how to lead and manage people and understand, like just in general a department, like, what makes it work right. And to be healthy. And there's so many, like you said, there's just so many numbers that there's formulas at the factory comes up. They just don't have the dealers or even the department's best interests at heart.

It's a tragedy for sure.

So, yeah, training, that's the big one. So that's kind of our list of why service managers get fired. And to Christian's point, the most common one is that you're not putting, you know, you're not putting a profit up.

Yeah. Even if you don't know it, it's crazy.

And the systems part too comes down to the customer experience. And when customers are complaining a lot or customer satisfaction is low, that's a direct outcome of your systems. Your systems are a feedback loop and we just double down on the same systems that don't work over and over again.

Yeah. Because we don't know what else to do.

Yeah. Like, I don't know how many times, you know, you're looking at somebody's numbers, they're losing money, they're. They're upsetting customers left and right. And then you ask them about the, you know, the way the quick lube set up or whatever it is, and they're like, well, you know, Toyota says we have to do it. And it's like, I mean, there's a way to please Toyota, but really Toyota wants you to take care of the customers and run a good business. And so there's a way to do both.

I think so too.

But you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Agreed.

If that makes sense. Have you been in our Facebook group?

Oh, yeah.

So we started Facebook group. The link to it will be in the description here if you're not in there. But some great conversations going on in there that are, that are really fun. And oftentimes now, like I see a question go up and then before I can even answer it, four people have had a better answer than me.

Yeah, I love it.

Like I love being a part of that community. So if you're not in there, go go check that out. Click on the link. But a couple that I that I thought were good is. Corey Klotz posted a question in there about what. What are your guys experience with BDCs and how much of a role should they play in helping to generate business? So there is a point. And so BDC for, for those who don't understand, is a business development center. That's what it stands for. And it is basically to make appointments. Now the purpose of a BDC in our system is to load the shop and load the shop early. And so we have a very specific script, a very specific system. Now I know a lot of managers out there and BDC traders try to get the BDC to sell.

We just try to get them to load the shop and we get the advisors to sell. I mean, I've never seen it where the BDC sells that it's really that successful. And oftentimes the customer already feels like they're being sold and that they're. They're kind of put off.

Yeah. And then they get. They get sold on the phone and then they come in and the advisor tries to sell them again. And then it's really starting to feel like an infomercial.

So the BDC's purpose is to make the appointment process really, really easy and to endear the customer to us while we control the situation is basically load the shop early. I want to load the shop as early as I can. Another one in here by Greg McKenzie. Customer complimentary car washes with maintenance appointments. Yes or no?

Yes.

Yeah, I mean, it's a huge advantage to do that. It doesn't cost that much. It's easy to execute, and it's the difference between you and the Jiffy Lubes, honestly. And if you think that it takes too much time, you can break it out and give the customer an option. So say, hey, your. Your oil change is going to take 30 minutes or 40 minutes, but if you, you know, would you like the car washed and vacuumed? Yes. Okay, well, then it's gonna, you know, then it's gonna take six hours, maybe an hour, whatever. But the customer knows that it's gonna take a little bit longer and it's their choice that they made. So it's just all in the frame and the way that you word it. But I think that that's an easy thing to. To execute. We have, in some situations where it hasn't been easy to execute, will go to a car wash that's, you know, within a mile and buy tokens and give the customers the tokens, but you're losing the customer. And if that car wash is backed up or they scratch the car or whatever can create a problem. And.

But it's better. It's better than nothing, though. It's a nice. It's a nice bridge. You know, when you need to have your car washed when you come back from Vegas.

Why?

A lot of weird things happen in Vegas. As a matter of fact, last weekend, two antennas got married in Vegas. The wedding was horrible, but the reception was great.

Oh, I love it. You know Vicky, our beloved Vicky.

Oh, yes.

One of our favorite people in the world. Or my favorite people.

Me too.

Who do you think likes Vicky more? Me or. No, I'm joking. She used to have this car wash.

The dealership she ran, they literally ate antennas like the Cookie Monster.

That's great.

Like, you can sit in her office and like once an hour, somebody walk in with a broken antenna.

One of the first things I did is cut that. We just went to hand wash. Yeah. It was way more efficient, too. Those car washes, after a while, slow everything down. But I remember, like, I don't know, whatever those springs were on that car wash, it was snapping antennas right off.

Right.

Like crazy. The policy was in the policy, we had a.

We had a lot where it was a guarantee. So back in my day, right, we had the antennas that were the power antennas that went up and down. It was a guarantee. Anytime we had a new porter, like I'm walking through, I'd be like, now, here's what's going to happen in the car wash. You're going to break one of these antennas. You're not going to realize that it's an electron electric antenna. It. You're going to forget to turn the radio off. You have to turn the radio off, off every time. Less than two hours later, every time. I have that speech.

Hey, I. I broke it.

I broke an antenna. Really? That's so weird. I would. I didn't expect that.

Whatever happened to those antennas that would go up and down on their own just got phased out?

Yeah, I think so.

Well, those. Those were cool.

Those motors were nice repairs too, right? Yeah, decent. Was that like 5, 600 bucks to put a new motor in? So it was fun.

Would customers just opt to have the antenna up all the time?

Well, you got to see people being creative, right. And they put weird crap coming out their car depending on how industrious they were.

Well, good. Good stuff. That was a fun show.

Yeah.

Thanks, everybody, and we'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution.

Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Drive Revolution. We're uploading new stuff every day, so. 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 that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com hi, I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.