Why the Auto Industry Is Broken (And How to Fix It)
Chris Collins and Christian from Service Drive Revolution say the auto industry's service departments are broken because manufacturers, dealers, and trade groups like NADA skip real training. They run boot camps for GM dealer managers and argue that without mandatory frontline training, shops lose money, lose staff, and lose customers after warranty ends.
Chapters
Welcome to the big show. On this one, I lose my stuff.
Off the reservation a little. It's okay though.
Off the reservation. That's a good way to put it. I'm very upset about a few things and I have to get them off my chest. Do you feel better and that? No, because nothing's changed.
It's been four minutes.
That and much, much more. Coming up on this edition of Service Drive Revol.
Okay, what is my system for deciding if I want to go to a speaking engagement or not?
Very easy. It is.
The formula is known across at least you and other people in the company.
Which means two of us know this. Besides.
No, we talked about it before.
Besides, me and Chris, two other people.
What's my formula for deciding if I want to go on a. Somebody calls and they're like. Like we want Chris to come talk to the. The association of Zookeepers in Ontario, Canada. What, what, what would, what would I do? How would I figure out if I want to go or not?
Yeah. The speaker fee and time would have to be greater than the desire or what you would pay to not do said engagement.
Correct. Good. So let's. Let's take the zookeeper convention, the Zookeeper 20 group in Ontario, Canada, which I'm in. What would I want to pay to not do that? So would there be a direct flight.
To Ontario to Toronto?
And what do you think zookeepers are like? Like what? How much fun would that be?
I think they smell like pee.
Oh, man. Yeah. So yeah, the numbers. The number is going to be high. That would be the point. The number that I would pay not to go.
Right. So I need to just to convert this. You probably would pay 25 grand not to go. US dollars, which is 275,000 Canadian if you do the conversion. Yeah.
Which is so funny.
It's rough up there. Right.
So we're recording this before the Thanksgiving holiday. And I gotta go to the Northwest.
Not to talk to zookeepers, though. Well.
You'Re going to Portland, so who the heck knows? I don't know. I feel like you have a beautiful.
What would I pay not to go? That's the question.
Well, see, the great equalizer on that to me is your mom's strawberry rhubarb pie.
And okay, that's payment. But then lax, it's 5:30 in the morning.
You can't fly Burbank to Portland. Huh? Cause I sure would do that.
You know what it was. So it's. Nobody listening to this, cares about this, but Alaska is the one that flies. They were twice as much as Delta.
Oh, the fees are insane, aren't they?
So I, I wasn't going to pay it. It's too much. It didn't make sense. And Delta's better. Like just Burbank in and of itself isn't worth paying twice as much.
I agree. That's fair.
So that's why.
Yeah, I had to. I had to cancel my Thanksgiving plans.
To go to Florida.
It was just too much.
Yeah, it's crazy.
It's just too much. And I was like, go there for a day and a half. And so instead we just video call more like during this time of year.
So.
But it's really cheap to video call, but the prices are insane right now.
So we, we had a boot camp here last week, and we do this thing internally where, where some of us call it a boot camp and some of us call it a masterclass, trying to fix that. But what it is.
In a nutshell is new.
New coaching member orientation. So somebody joins our coaching group, the GM dealer, service, parts manager, come out here for a couple days and we kind of lay out the architecture. And there's a lot of aha's. If, if ever you watch a testimonial video from that, people are pretty excited. Like they usually are. Like, wow, nobody explained this to me before. I've been in the industry for 20 years and I never knew what I learned in a day and a half hanging out with Hoagie, Christian and me.
Right. Have you heard how I'm describing it to people? I don't know if it's landing or not yet.
How do you describe it?
I describe it like the movie Pleasantville, which is the one where everybody was in black and white to start the movie. And then as they, like, kind of got creative, they started to see things in color. It's like you come in here and you see fixed ops as black and white, and you leave. And that thing's in 4K HD.
Yeah, that's a good analogy.
That's how I kind of describe that.
And then the, the outcome of that feeling is you feel powerful because you feel like, oh, now I understand. Now I can. Now I can do things that have a direct outcome instead of kind of guessing or doubling down on the thing that didn't work, but is the only thing I know. Right. Does that make sense?
For sure? Yeah. Throwing wet toilet paper against the wall to see if it sticks.
And just, just think about.
This kind of.
Directly in that how much could somebody running a service department make an additional sales or gross. But let's just say sales in additional labor. Sales parts will come along. Whatever the, the labor to parts ratio is would come along accordingly. How much could they make more in a month? Like being super conservative. Don't, don't like, talk about the high end of this. Like, just. Could somebody make another.
30, $50,000 a month just by understanding how to use a pricing strategy?
Yeah, I was going to say 20 to 30 on average, but there's some that would go way beyond that. Okay.
Could somebody easily make another $50,000 a month by understanding how to set up the shop?
Which.
By setting up the shop, we're talking about the way that the work is handed out, the way that the technicians are organized and then how you hire and, and you know, so now you've done.
Now we've priced things better and we're getting more of set hours done. So you've done.
Doctor, the question is, could they do another $50,000 a month? Just doing that for. We already forgot about the menu thing. It's a one off.
I'm sorry. Yes.
Could they.
That would be great.
Could they make another 50,000 in sales by doing that?
It's a lot, but yeah.
Okay.
Service, drive, judo, our system in the drive. Could that make them another. I would, I would contend that that makes people more money than anything.
Well, I don't.
Because of what it does to the customer psychologically.
Right. So I think that judo to me is more money and better CSI.
Yeah, but we're just measured right now, Dr. Christian. We're measuring it by money. That's the conversation we're having is his money.
You don't want me to talk about any other. There's tons of benefits.
Well, there's tons of ancillary benefits.
Okay.
Just directly, like how many more of those sort of things that you could easily make another $50,000 a month if you, if you knew it, understood it and applied it.
Seven maybe, maybe more.
Yeah.
And then you start to. I don't know if I'm, as a doctor supposed to say this like, but if you did seven $50,000 things, that's a lot.
It's okay. You're like a chiropractor. You're not really a doctor.
You got your thing on your degree online.
Could you imagine the prescriptions I'd write people? It'd be awesome. Oh, that reminds me. Hold on. Before you talk seriously, what do you call someone that studies beef in outer space?
What do you call somebody who studies beef in outer space?
I give up.
A meteorologist.
Oh, man. Yeah, it's pretty good.
Oh, I've got a better one. It's coming later.
Would you agree with the concept that I see things differently than most people.
Than anyone I've ever met in my.
Life, and people can disagree with me, but they can't say that I'm wrong.
They'll say you're wrong and come back and say you were right.
Yeah, they can disagree with me, but they can't say I'm wrong.
Yes.
And the reason why they often disagree with me is just because it's not expected or it's not what they're used to. And it takes them a minute to get over that. Correct.
100%.
But it. In the long run, it works out for them. There's just. There's sometimes a moment of processing and getting through that. The way that they were looking at the thing before was not the way that was going to get them where they wanted to go for sure. But it requires a little.
A little, you know, I don't know, disruption in the process.
Yeah, I'd agree.
Yeah. So you can disagree with me, but you. You can't say I'm wrong. And the thing that I was thinking about when we were doing the boot camp last week.
Was that I don't understand how our industry is where it's at in the sense that there are.
Really talented people out there running service and parts departments or even dealerships for, you know, that matter.
That our industry has not trained on the. Like, nobody has decided that it's a priority for the people doing the thing to know how to do the thing.
And we're talking in the most basic, lowest level of training.
Yes. Like, just understanding where a dollar goes and what happens to, like, just the basic. Why you would price something the way you do.
Just simple stuff. And I think about this, and I thought about this a lot over the weekend in a, you know, in a way that, you know, I understand. People are gonna say that I look at things in a. In a different way, but I think the. One of the reasons why I look at things in a different way is because I'm trying to get to the outcome more than anything else. And I don't feel like. I don't feel like that is always the case for most people. So take, for example, my experiences with nada, the National Auto Dealers Association.
Right.
You think. Or I. I thought for a long time.
Growing up in our industry, being an advisor and watching my boss go to NADA every year, and he would go to all these workshops and you would assume. Or one would assume that the reason why they're going there is to get better and that the training that is given there is meant to make them or to inspire them to be really, really good at the job that they're doing.
Yeah, I thought of it as the benchmark for excellence is kind of like what I thought it was.
Meanwhile.
I, I would assume that that guy, that manager that I used to work for still doesn't know what he's doing. Oh, for sure he didn't know what he was doing when I worked for him. It was a disaster. And I would assume he doesn't. I mean, I don't think that dealership that I used to work at really understands what they're doing when it comes to.
Isn't it change hands a month trying to.
No, no, it's still the same, same. But I don't, I don't, you know, I don't think that they really understand what they're doing when it comes to, to fix stops.
So, you know, you, you kind of grow up thinking that going to NADA into their workshops and attending that event is about the industry getting better. And then, you know, I would apply to be a speaker at nada. And they, they say that you are chosen independent on whether you are buying a booth there. But I will tell you that I never got selected to speak until I bought a booth. I applied a bunch of times and never got chosen. And then the one year I bought a booth, I got chosen to be a speaker there in the, the very first time I went and I was a speaker. It was a, it was not a great experience. Like you spend close to $100,000 having a booth there because you have to get a staffing. You got to stop, you got to, you got to pay union guys that don't really care about what they're doing to set your thing up. You, you can't even take your stuff on the floor. They have to carry it on the floor. It's very, it's very stressful and cumbersome. You, you do a workshop and invariably what happens is in order to do a workshop for them, you apply for it. Then they have this like committee of, you know, sometimes it's three, sometimes it's five people that work for an ADA that then give you feedback on the thing you're going to teach.
By feedback, they, you know, they kind of curate it, but it becomes very obvious that they're curating it. Not to have the best content, not to teach somebody something, but to make it as user friendly and as broad as possible without offending anybody. Right. And so the, the second time I went, I got chosen to do two workshops. So I was really, really interested in providing value to the people that came to my workshop in a way that I wanted to inspire them that we could be better. Like, I think of NADA as.
A mechanism that could take a leadership role in our industry and really inspire it to be better, fill some gaps, do. Do some incredible things. None of which has really happened ever.
So you, you know, I got chosen to, to do two workshops. They dumbed down my content. They told me, you know, I couldn't talk about Tesla. And I asked why and they're like, well, it's just not a popular subject with the, you know, the attendees. And I'm like, yeah, but it's a reality. Like, I have, I have a doctor that bought a Tesla and they come to him. He never takes it in for service. It's a new mod, new model is happening of direct to consumer. And the answer would be for us to be better, not to ignore it.
Or am I wrong?
No. And it was at a time where it could have changed the landscape.
It was way before the curve.
Right?
It was way before the curve.
Also, like, interestingly enough, some of the, like, bigger names in training in our industry don't do nada.
Like, they don't. They didn't. And I asked a couple of them why and they were like, it's a waste of time. Like, I. You'll get just as many clients without doing it as you will with. And I, you know, I don't know. I, I was the underdog. Like, I wasn't. I've never. Or we as a company have never been in that inner circle of those people. Like, we're always on the outside looking in. And I was trying to get on the inside because I really wanted to make a difference. I thought that what we had would benefit the, the industry and I thought that that was something that NADA shared as a common goal. Right?
Yeah.
So even the, the very last time I did nada, one of the workshops that I was doing was selected to be this new way of, of training, which basically meant that I did it in the round. Do you know what that means? You know, when we saw Zach Bryan and he was in the middle of the arena. Yeah, that's in the round. So you're in the middle, you're not on a stage. So one I did, I was on a stage and then one I did, I was in the middle and everybody was at round Tables. And they had those cube microphones that they have at events where you throw them around and people talk.
Oh, yeah.
They wanted me to incorporate that into my workshop.
Because, you know what? What I'm trying to say is none of those party tricks make content better.
I agree with that.
Like, it's putting lipstick on a pig. Like, it doesn't make. Now I'm happy to do things in that environment. It can be fun. But the thing is, is when I showed up to do that workshop, you know, I get there a couple hours early. I want to set up the room. The room wasn't set up. They. We ended up. Because nobody. Nobody really set up the room the way that it was supposed to be set up. And all the rehearsals that we did, all the maps of the room that I had, they had to turn a couple hundred people away. So people were lined up. And I don't. I don't think they understood who I was or, like, I don't think to this day they understand because, like, we. We recently just offered to do SDR from there. And now think about. Think about Nada. And look. Just look at any of their channels and how many views they get and how many subscribers they have, and then look at ours. We're by far and away the number one podcast show in the automotive industry by a mile. Like, it isn't even close. The. The amount of downloads we have on itunes and Spotify and YouTube. If you add all those up, there's nobody even close to what we're doing now.
If.
If you. If you're running Nada or whatever the other one is for heavy truck that goes on at the same time.
Yeah. ATD or something.
Atd, if you're running either one of those. And Chris and Christian show up and have our big SDR neon sign, and we start interviewing people inside of the convention that our vendors or talented dealers, even our clients. If we just have our clients come on and give some information and interview them and talk.
The.
The goodwill that would do for Nada. They couldn't put a price on that.
No. And it would be free, and we.
Would do it in a way that actually, like, made a difference. Like, that was actually good content. Yeah, in a sense. Right. Like, so anyways, there we. I. I wanted to literally kill myself when they were turning people away because they hadn't set up the tables. And I'm just thinking they made. They changed my present, made me present it to these trainers they have that really have probably never worked in a dealership. Like, you know, that That's. There's one thing that will drive you crazy if you actually work in or have worked in a dealership is to take criticism on information from people that have no retail experience.
It's infuriating.
Infuriating because they don't get. They don't understand how hard it is to be on the front lines. They don't understand that it's a nuance.
Wants.
It's not. It's not, you know, idealized and as perfect as everybody wants it to sound in a meeting. Right?
Yeah.
So they've. They've changed my whole thing, and then they don't even deliver on their thing. Right. And we're turning people away for this one in the. The workshop was on gamification. That one was on gamification, a universal subject, if you will, lined up down the hall, and they start turning people away, and I'm like, out of my mind. So I did two of those. I did two of the gamification and two or the other. Right at the end of doing the. The last one, which was the gamification one, I went into their little speaker lounge. By the way, they treat you like you are. They. They treat you like ice. Treats a person here without a green card.
Oh, that's not good.
No. They're so disrespectful and mean, and there's a lot of nice people that work at nada. But overall, like, you understand this, like, what it takes to do a presentation and to do it well, even in the. In the. In a situation where they're messing with it and changing it and, like, whatever the indifference that they have towards you as a speaker is like.
It just does. Is.
Sad is the only way I could say it. So I go into this. This speaker lounge thing, and there was a lady there that was working the room, and I said, hey, I'm just curious, like, how did my workshops do? And she has this sheet that she grabs that has all the workshops and the attendance on it.
Oh, they're not getting feedback.
What?
They're not getting feedback?
No, they get feedback. But she had, like, how they. They have people there that count how many people are in the room.
Oh, okay. Okay.
Where do you think my workshops ranked amongst all the other workshops? And this is. This is on the last day of the event. Like, at the top? Yeah, at the top. At the top. By. By a pretty good clip.
No, thank you. No. Nobody followed up? No. Like, hey, how could we make this better? Hey, you were talking about some really cool stuff. How can we get you to come out and talk to some 20 groups or how could we. How could we build on this? Nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And what I realized is I. I was looking in the wrong.
In the wrong place. Like, we have this saying here that people are trying to tell you who they are, but we just don't want to listen. Ends up that. I thought nada was in the business of making dealers better.
They're in the convention business.
They're just in the business of getting people to attend a convention.
They're a convention company.
They do that pretty well.
The worst. The worst that the industry does arguably could be better for attendance.
Oh, because there's more solutions if they're doing worse.
Well, so there. People are certainly more willing to go to something if they're looking for answers, but giving them the answers.
Like, you don't. Like you. You don't want to fix it. Or get that they're in the convention business. They're in the business of butts and seeds, not in fixing the industry.
But they could, but they never will.
Because that's not the business they're in. They take no, zero responsibility for the condition of the industry.
Yeah. That's interesting.
It's not owned by the dealers. It's owned by a company that runs conventions.
Completely, completely different.
And so when. When we. When we offer to do SDR there or we try to do anything with them, they. They only want to do something if they're getting paid for us to be there. They don't care if it's better for the dealers.
Oh, yeah, that's. That's a good point.
I was. I was. Was looking in the wrong, like, had it backwards in a sense. Right. And the other thing I would say that I think about kind of in that same regard is a little bit of a flip on that is one time. And I don't think we should say the manufacturer.
But.
But I told you the manufacturer today. But I was invited to their headquarters for a meeting they were having with a bunch of dealers. Like, I don't know, say.
Say 700 dealers. I don't remember. It was a big room and a big theater in their corporate headquarters.
A reasonable representation of their entire dealer body, basically.
Yeah. And I wasn't speaking. I was invited there to.
Help them with something. We had a couple meetings and we talked about some stuff, but it was all very, very positive and I learned a lot. But this one guy who had met in one of the meetings was the new head of training for this manufacturer.
Okay.
And he pulls me to the side and he said, hey, can I ask you a question? And I was like, yeah. And he goes.
So he'd come from Apple. Did I mention that he'd come from Apple?
You did mention that, and I think that's a very interesting part of the story.
And.
Kudos to them for trying to recruit somebody, you know.
Yeah, they probably had to open up the pocketbook a little bit.
This is a while ago.
Invest. Yep.
He says, I don't understand something. Could you help me? He goes, the dealers aren't required to do training. And I go, well, sometimes they are. And he goes, but for the most part, even if they are, they only send like two or three salespeople, but they have 12. And then he goes, and I go out and try to meet these dealers and understand. But they're. They're second, third generation, and they're just like super aggressive with me and tell me all the things that we're doing wrong as a manufacturer. But they have no interest in training. And so I'm developing this training that I think would be very effective, but I can't get the dealers to send their people to the training. What do I do? And I said, you gotta mandate it. And he's like, yeah, but if you mandate it, then they're not really. They're only doing it. Like, we've done that with manufacturers.
Right.
Where it's mandated and.
It'S.
I don't know, I guess if all things are equal, I prefer that they mandate it because then if we make the training really good, it's a win. Win. Yeah, but if the training isn't good, right? Yeah, but he was trying to make the training good and he couldn't get the dealers to participate. And he came from an environment where training wasn't an option. Like, it was what they did constantly. They were constantly training people on customer service, on the new products, on everything.
Yeah, I think that that's the big thing. It's so funny, I just had this conversation with the prospect not too long ago, is that sometimes it's really hard to see past that temporary pain of not having someone on the floor or in the drive or in the shop. They can't see past that. In order to see the value of sending someone out and making an investment in them entering. Like they can't see past the day or the few hours that they would be gone.
Yeah.
It's so weird that they can't do that. But then they come to us, ironically. What do they say they want? They say want. They come in saying they want Training. And then I was just trying to explain that, and it's like, well, you know, if I was setting this up and you know what happens? We go out to the dealerships and like, ideally, like, let's just take a position of a service advisor, for instance, like, if I'm going in to work with a store, like, a couple, three weeks before, I really want the advisors to take, like, the online training. So that way, when I come in and I use certain terms, it's not the first time they've heard it. And then I was asked, I was like, well, how much time is that? And I said, you know what? If I was trying to set it up, I'd be like, I take each advisor and I'd schedule a little bit of time with them every single day. And that way they're not watching, like, you know, three hours of videos all at once. They do it a couple at a time, they absorb it, they think about it, and then they come back and then I come in and then they're exposed to the information. And he's like, man, I just couldn't imagine taking people off. What if we get busy?
And I said, it's worth it to. You can break it out, you can schedule it. But I think the bigger question is, if you're not willing to do that, how would you possibly expect different results? Yeah.
And the world that we're living in right now is a world where people are so divided and so affected that they forget that in order for the world to be a better place and for progress to happen and things to get done, somebody somewhere has to take responsibility.
Just one person, for the most part, like, just somebody.
Well, I mean, what we need in the automotive industry is we need shared responsibility. We need. We need associations like NADA to want the industry to survive and be better, be an asset. You know, when you hear our president talk about the automotive industry, he talks about it like it should be talked about, like it's a great industry. It's something that America. America should be proud of. But that isn't. That isn't. The, you know, the attendance at Nada goes down every year. It's like that. There's nobody there taking responsibility for the. This, the status and the health of the industry. Yeah, it's. You know, it's an event. That's it. It's an event. The. Oftentimes the dealers aren't taking responsibility because they don't want to send people to training. They don't want to invest in the industry. They want, you know, they Want profits at all costs. But they, they don't want to play the long game, the healthy game, the game that's better for the customer and the consumer, where they open these doors for companies like Tesla to come in and take market share. I mean, that happened on our watch and nobody wants to take responsibility for that. I feel responsible for that. You feel responsible for that. But I mean, in a, in a sense, like, there's no collaboration in that. Right? It has to be a thing where there's shared responsibility and a mutual commitment from everybody that, hey, there shouldn't be a service manager running a department or a parts manager running an apartment or a general manager running an apartment that doesn't understand how to hire, how to train people, how to set up a customer experience, how to set up the shop, how to do a pricing strategy, how to read a financial, how to, how to create profit, not just gross. Like most of the time we're telling them, just get us gross. No, what we mean is just like the dealer that calls and says, hey, I need training. What they mean is my customers aren't getting taken care of and I'm not making a profit. So what you really mean is I need better systems and I want to make a profit. I want to return on this investment so I can have a healthy business that's going to be here for a while. That's an actual asset, a healthy asset. That's what they mean, but that's not what they say. And so, I mean.
In a way, like, we need collaborative problem solving as an industry.
We need to take responsibility.
And just sitting here watching the boot camp and just thinking, like, I can't believe nobody.
Cares that service managers turn over at a like, rate of 50% a year, that the average service department barely breaks even. And we somehow think that that is okay and that, well, the fix for it is advisor training. Or like, I don't.
But.
But what is it?
But they don't mean that because they don't want to dedicate the time that it takes to do it. I've kind of got a phrase for how this is how the industry as a whole, I know there's exception to this, but like, literally, I believe that the strategy is improved performance by osmosis. Just somehow that if a service manager has been doing it for 20 years, that they'll get better. Not that they have more tools or.
Anything like that, because you're telling them the wrong things. You're telling them, get me gross, they get you gross. But they run up expenses more than the gross and you lose more money and then they get fired. And they had no idea why. Because nobody taught them how to read the financial statement. Nobody actually entrusted them to run the department. Like you got to set them up for success, especially with the stakes as high as they are. Yeah. Like in, in, in a situation where car sales are low, used cars are, you know, volatile. Like fixed stops is, is where, where the stability lies, the predictability.
Like you can, you can set a clock to it.
Fixed, fixed ops, it's fixed. Like that's the stability, that's the foundation of, of what we have going on. But we don't, we don't take it seriously. And the upside is too big. There's, there's, I mean, if you take the amount of money that is left on the table, the amount of customers that are lost.
Yeah.
If you just think about what is it, 80% of customers after warranty leave.
It's a crazy stat.
Like nobody at NADA is taking responsibility for that stat.
The manufacturers haven't figured it out yet. And I mean, it's not, I mean, unless we have some sort of collaborative acceptance of responsibility and we decide, hey look, how do we, how do we do this together? How do we figure this out and collaborate and like.
It'S not that, I don't know, it's not that hard. But once again, I go back to, you might not agree with me, but you can't say I'm wrong. Yeah.
And the, it's broken. And this is just a little snapshot. Like the thing that we can do for people in a day and a half compared to what the industry collaboration could do. It's, it's super exponential. Because the one thing I think that people are missing and they don't see it because they don't come to this thing. But like they walk out with a game plan, they walk out with more self esteem. We're building better leaders and better humans. Like that's the part that's my favorite is just watching people become a better version of themselves. That's a byproduct of actually the business getting better. So we win twice.
Yeah. And when that person feels better, then they treat their people better. Their people feel that feeling is contagious and believe it or not.
The customers feel that too. And like, you know, there's a lot of stupid things that people write books and say. And it's like, oh, well, the first thing I do is I care about my employees.
I've never seen somebody say that and admired how well they run the Business. I just haven't. The. The best leaders and the best dealers out there that I've ever worked with challenge their employees to be the best version of themselves and then invest in them and are constantly improving and getting better, and they're constantly attracting people that want to be in that environment. They're not. They're not trying to make their people happy or, you know, serving their people first because, you know, this whole idea, take care of your employees, they'll take care of the customers, is really not based in any sort of facts or truth that I've ever seen. You take care of the customers, like, really well trained, empowered, talented people do a really good job with customers and people that are kept in the dark and gaslit and have no idea how to do better and except for to copy the people that they worked for before with some sort of tribal knowledge.
It's learned helplessness. And the. The outcome of learned helplessness is they. They externalize control to, oh, it's the market, it's my boss, it's whatever. But I don't know. You get fired three times trying to do a good job as a service manager, you. You. You just start hiding is what you do.
Yeah. All of a sudden you've got history and facts on your side.
Yeah.
So I get it. But I think that learned helplessness or the desire to be at full potential spreads like syphilis.
Why syphilis and not herpes?
I just. I hear more about syphilis.
More contagious.
I hear syphilis outbreaks. But I know herpes is one of your favorites.
Either way.
It's just funny when you're doing a soundtrack and then you say the anchorman thing.
Sorry for that. Gets beeped out.
Collaborative.
Ownership, responsibility. It's not getting better, it's getting worse.
Yeah. The fragmentation, the siloing, all that stuff.
Hey, we're busier than we've ever been. Like. But.
I mean, I think Christian and I. But I think most people in our company would agree with this sentiment is we want to be busy, but we want the industry to be healthier, more.
Well said, sir.
We want it to be here for a while. And the idea that we're allowing these other companies to come in and get market share on our watch, and nobody's talking about it. We're not changing our behavior, we're not changing our approach.
And nobody stepping up to lead is insane. Vote me in as president of NAD and watch how quick that thing changes. It wouldn't even do that. And put me in charge of the school system too.
I will raise patriotic, self responsible, high self esteem kids if you give them to me for eight hours a day. I think fixing nada would be a.
Cakewalk compared to the educational system.
I mean, just imagine the speakers we could have at an ADA and the theme and the like. Oh, also the manufacturers are there. If, if you get the manufacturers and the dealers on the same page.
Oh, them playing on the same. Them playing on the same team. Oh, that's pretty cool.
Incredible. And, and how hard is that?
It kind of feels like we had to a long time ago pick a side with that. And we don't outcasts.
We're we. Because we're telling the truth. We don't fit in.
Yeah.
Because we're not in the business of selling tickets to a convention. We actually grade ourselves on our performance that our clients get.
Like, we don't grade ourselves on.
Training. We grade ourselves on profitability and the health and customer. Customer experience for our clients. That's how we grade ourselves. Because that's how I would want it if I was a dealer. Because when I was a dealer, consultants would come in, I would sign their contract for a year or 24 months, write them a check, and then I would have to go hunt for them.
And then they would just spin plates. They would just talk about all the stuff that's wrong. And I'm like, well, when are we going to start fixing stuff? Like I, you know, it, it always seems like a consultant is somebody in between jobs. We don't want to be like, we want to actually, you know, fix the thing. We, we want, we want self esteem and the pride of, of what's going on to happen. And you know, we're not perfect by any means, but.
Geez Louise, we're, we're.
The, we're not perfect, but we're probably the first to admit when we got to do something better.
Put me in charge of nada. That's my new thing. Can I make T shirts? Yeah, put me in charge of nada. Like, there's no. Have you looked at their YouTube channel? No, it's 16 years old.
Oh.
How much great content do you think that's on there?
What is 16 years ago, 2009.
I mean, how many times do we have a client sitting in a manufacturer's training and they play our free videos.
From YouTube and their training?
How many times is that's happened more times than you could count.
I get text messages, they send us.
Pictures, and they're like, look, this manufacturer, I'm in a. I'M in at the factory meeting and they're playing your video from YouTube, which is fine because from the very beginning, our goal was to give away better information than for free, than our. Than our competition charged for y. That's how we were going to make friends and show, you know, help the industry in a sense, like. But do you. Do you think you'd learn anything from the NADA.
YouTube channel?
I don't even know what to expect would be on there.
Oh, well, it's what you would expect.
Okay.
Think about that. In a world where, like, I mean, I don't know, we don't have to have dealers from our industry or people from NAD doing TikToks. I don't. I don't care if they dance to the new Beyonce song on TikTok, but.
It would be impressive.
Isn't there a collective out there of people that are really good at running dealerships that could be highlighted. We won't. You wouldn't do that, though, because they're not the popular ones. Right. Because the ones that are actually really good at what they do are usually, you know, more like us.
Yeah, they're quiet, but, man, if you ask them questions, you just grab onto the knowledge. Like, they spit some knowledge. It's pretty cool. It's like my grandpappy always used to tell me, what's the hardest part of a vegetable to eat?
I don't. I don't know what's funnier, the punchline to this or that. You said grandpappy.
The wheelchair.
Say it again.
Yeah. What's the hardest part of a vegetable to eat?
The wheelchair.
The wheelchair. That's what my grandpappy used to tell me.
That's pretty funny. Okay. Shared responsibility, mutual commitment, collaborative problem solving.
Systematic change. That's what our industry needs. Systematic change.
I love it.
It isn't going to figure itself out on its own.
No osmosis.
We have to accept responsibility for the outcomes. And we're. We're. We're death by a thousand paper cuts, the way it's going right now.
Yeah, I agree.
Well, I know you love it when I get fired up like this, but I'm exhausted.
I don't know you. You. You talk from the heart. It was good.
Oh, it's so frustrating.
I'd be worried if it didn't bother you.
I mean, just think about what clowns we were, that we came up in this industry and could make the kind of living we made based on just hard work, taking care of customers. Like, we got paid a lot of money to do that. There aren't too many industries like that.
There's none that I can think of that are legal.
Like, yeah, when people find out how much service advisors or, you know, fixed ops managers make, they're just like, what? Like, and.
We'Re just letting it, we're letting it wither and you just bring.
A little bit of passion and some hard work and that's your meal ticket.
Okay, everybody, we hope you have a great week and we will 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 make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question, 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.
Sam.
