Why Tire Maintenance is a Vital Service

Then the southern.

Dealers or shops. Right.

Yeah. I think the thing to recognize with our southern dealers is that what to your point earlier is that tire maintenance is actually due more often than oil maintenance. Like, it's crazy that that's the case. So I'd be using that as my retention tool to customer that way.

Yeah. And the change of season, Right? Yep. So using the change of season as a reason to get them back in for a pit stop or let us check it out, check your tire pressure, top off your fluids and inspect it and do a pit stop. But I find that the. Probably the best retention tool there is. Lifetime alignments. Yeah. And so it's funny, your. Your sister bought a new key. Is it a Kia?

Hyundai.

Is it a Hyundai or a Kia?

Hyundai. And a Honda.

Well, Hyundai and Kia and Hyundai. She's never gone to the dealer. Never gone to the dealer because she bought a lifetime alignment at Firestone. Is it Firestone?

I think it was Firestone. Yeah.

One of those chains. And so even though it has nothing to do with an oil change or maintenance, she goes there because.

That'S where she hangs her hat. Yeah. Right. And so selling an alignment yearly that you know is a. Is a lifetime or three year or however you want to do it, the lifetime one's kind of pencil. But they come back and then you remind them to come back and you can charge more for it. Right. So if you charge 129 for a regular one, you can charge 299 for the lifetime, but you're hooking them in and then you're going to get the tires, you're going to get everything else.

Yeah. You can use nitrogen like that, too.

Yeah. So using that and the changing seasons to get. To get them back in. Understand too like you're supposed to check your tire pressure every time you fill it for gas.

Yeah.

Oh, come on. That's what the TPMS is for. The dash tells me where my tires are at.

Yeah, right.

It does.

I think it's still a good idea to get out and look at them, though. Especially if you drive like me. You never know what's going to jump out in you front of. Of you.

I don't know how many times I've gone out. I had a bubble in the sidewall.

Me too. That's what I'm saying, is that you got to be. You got to be checking that stuff.

Yeah.

Oh, you know what? That makes me think of something. What can't be used until it's broken.

What can't be used until it's broken.

What you got him thinking on this one?

It's broken.

I give up.

What an egg.

Huh? Clever. I like it.

Thank you. I ran that by the joke person before I said that.

Who's the joke person?

Not Jeremy.

Oh, my gosh. You were bashing me today. Wow.

Usually I'm really nice.

Interesting.

What's wrong?

This takes me back to, like, lifetime oil changes instead of alignments. So we used to, you know, sell a lifetime oil change on the car, and that was very successful in the, you know, late 90s, early 2000s. And then that kind of has gone away. I'm just like, lifetime cabin air filter coming and get your cabin air filter changed.

Yeah, I would say to that too. We, we have a.

Dealer group as clients that have a lifetime oil change as part of buying the car there. And when we, when we started coaching them, I remember you would hear a lot from, from the managers, like, oh, these things are bringing down my averages. Right. And they, they're not saying that anymore. And they're, they're doing way better and selling more. And a lot of it was, they, they don't look at that as an opportunity and a retention tool. But from a dealer's side, that's one of the best ways to retain customers, is to have that. And it can pencil like, that's the thing with these sort of things that always blow me away is you can do the math. So it pencils, you can pack it into the new car. You, you know, you can write it off to advertising, whatever it is. But I would rather have the traffic than not have the traffic. I'd rather have the retention and the opportunity and keep them coming back than losing them forever.

Yep. Yeah, we did that at my, at my Infinity store. And I remember when you came in and I thought one of the first things you're going to say is do away with the free oil change program.

I think people think that a lot.

And then you came in, you're like, that's a great idea. I can't believe that more people don't do it. And it was really, really fair and equitable. So we wrote off the cost of the oil change. It was split between parts, service and sales. And it was really, really equitable. And our retention was in the 80s. It was crazy how retained our customers were because they always came in and, and it had so much to do with the mindset. And we were just really grateful to have the people.

Yeah, it's because, you know, it's crazy, but dealers usually retain 20, 25% and you can retain 80 if you want.

So.

Yeah.

I'm curious because I wonder why more dealerships and even independent shops don't kind of use the Costco membership mindset and create an exclusive club or membership that customers have to. It's limited.

It's interesting you're saying that. I was thinking about that the other day because, you know, the Ferrari store here in Calabasas used to be 50 grand to join the club to then to be able to buy a car from them.

Wow. Just to be able to buy a car.

Yeah. Well, because it's here. Right. And they were kind of like they were serving Beverly Hills and all that, and.

Yeah. I just wonder if there isn't a model there for that.

Well, there is. I mean, we're moving our shop, so we're gonna start moving more towards that direction with the VIP program. And so is.

Is it almost like you're doing an extended warranty, extended maintenance program where more is.

I'm going to package the annual maintenance that your car needs into the membership cost. So when you pay the membership, you're not going to be out of pocket for.

You have a different price for, say, like a Honda than you would for a Ford.

Yeah. And. Well, of course, the Ford would be like $29,000. We can get started on that right away. But.

And then there's a different cost.

Yeah, different tiers. The other things. Like, I look at Fletcher Jones Mercedes in Newport beach, the largest Mercedes Benz dealership, you know, in the world, and their car wash is crazy busy. Like, when you pull in a service drive, you can't tell which line is for service and which line is for the car wash. And I, I don't. I don't know their program, but I imagine that if you buy a car from them, you can get a free car wash at any time. And I think that's great. But I would limit that to a certain number per year and make that an exclusive member benefit for a certain percentage of customers and kind of create that club where it can be more profitable for you than just giving it to everybody.

Well, I mean, we did that at Krebby. Right. And we were right down the street from. From Fletcher. And the thing was, is our grosses on the front end were 5 to $600 more than the market. Right. And in the western region.

And so telling customers how often they could come in for it. Never really. It's a really easy thing to. To pay for. Right. It's. It's cheaper than free oil changes.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And, but, you know, so we did focus groups on that and that was an interesting thing. And we did Fletcher Jones customers in the focus group.

Oh, wow.

And the thing that we learned from it was that most of it wasn't about the car wash. You know what it was about?

What was it about?

The networking.

Interesting.

So people would go to Fletcher and hang out in their coffee shop and they're, you know, none of them cared about the putting green, all of that, but it was about the networking. And we realized and kind of changed ours to, to kind of create that environment where people could hang out socially. But in Orange county, that's kind of what it is. It's more of a social thing.

Yeah, I never would have guessed that. That's really impressive.

Yeah. The focus groups ended up. So we did 12 Fletcher Jones customers, we did 12 aspirational, like Audi Infinity.

Lexus customers. And then we did our customers. And the thing we learned from our customers is that it took too long.

So that makes me think of something as what if. So I would give the car wash to everybody, but offer some sort of a fast pass option.

Oh, it's all about speed of service and get to the.

I wouldn't.

Line.

No, no, it's a good idea. But I wouldn't know because I feel.

Like there might be that exclusivity that.

You just got to understand that, that. So I don't know how many luxury car markets you have in the country as good as Orange County.

It's probably not.

So probably Dallas, Miami.

I'm not, I'm not gonna say Manhattan because Manhattan's a different kind of thing. And a lot of the people with money in Manhattan have drivers.

And so it's not the same kind of luxury market. But Dallas is a. Is a great luxury car market. San Francisco, Miami, no, same thing. I think a lot of people in San Francisco, it's good, but it's not like Orange county or, or Dallas where.

People have the space to park your car and it doesn't cost.

So the thing, the thing kind of about that is that San Francisco, New York are old money. There's a way that people act in Orange County. In Dallas, it's new money. It's kind of like you see a lot of chrome wheels and a lot of. It's a lot of image and who I am. Where people in Frisco, New York that have money know who they are. They're not. They're not so show offy.

Interesting.

Like even in Long island, like, people have, you know, they're Very affluent there. But they're not as. They're. They're not as show offy and caught up in that like they are. They're very affected in Orange county, in Dallas. Like people want to know how much you make, where you work. It's this whole, like keeping up with the Joneses on another level. And so.

I don't remember. I don't know where I was going with that, but I would say that.

I wouldn't do the tears because it's more about the social thing. And if you can get them in, like we.

We.

I think we were the number one. Was it Jimmy? Jimmy. What are the sunglasses?

Maui Jim.

Maui Jim. We sold more Maui Jim's than anybody. We sold more of other sunglasses. We sold Tommy Bahama. Like, our gift shop was selling a lot of stuff. Our coffee shop was profitable right out of the gate, you know. And so getting them. The whole thing is to get them to think about the dealership in a different way.

Yeah.

And so if you have. If you have like art shows there and wine tasting and trying to break the pattern of how people feel about a dealership because you're gonna make it up in the gross on their next car. If they feel like it's more of a club and more like you're a part of their tribe. Yeah, they're less to be about price and what can you do for me Kind of a thing. Which is more of a status symbol. Right. Like I remember. So those stickers that we would put. So in finance, when you bought a car, we'd put a VIP sticker on the inside of your windshield. So when you pulled up it are like, you know, cabana. You could see if they were a crevier customer or not. Those were selling on ebay.

That's smart.

Like, I don't know if a port or something ripped off a bunch and. But yeah, like in just the idea that they don't know that we can pull it up in the computer. It's funny.

Also, that was a thing in service. Like if we really messed up something or whatever, we would give a customer even if they hadn't bought it there. The VIP sticker. So the free car washes, there was a value to that.

I love the windshield part too. Is because not only are we identifying the customer by that the customer's looking and reminding themselves every day that they're a crevy. A VIP customer. That's pretty cool too.

And I'm a huge fan of adding new streams of income. But I'm just telling you in that scenario. If I was running that store again, the the money we were making, you youu didn't need to play with the model.

Yeah. The focus group told you everything that you needed to know. You don't have to tear it. But originally I was thinking that might be a good idea. But if it's not about the model.

We were promising it on the front when they bought the car. And what the customers are telling us is you don't tell us it's going to take an hour and a half. And heaven forbid you come at noon on a Saturday. It's two hours. We had to fix that because their perception was 20 minutes. So we worked really hard on that, but we got it down to 20 minutes.

That's great.

But yeah, it's more clicky.

It is.

It's a status thing. The thing is, is it's so easy to please those customers when it's all about status because it's, it's fluff, it's ego. Like, the easiest thing to do is feed somebody's ego. You just tell them how smart and good looking they are.

Right?

Like, don't fight with them. Let them always be right.

And they're loyal. Like, it's pretty easy. It's different than a customer that's buying on price. Right? Like, you take a Toyota customer that's about reliability and price, that's a little harder because you can't just tell them they're good looking and smart. You can and it works, but it doesn't work to the same degree. Thank you so much for watching this clip of Service Drive Revolution. Now you can catch the full episode on YouTube, iTunes or Spotify or wherever you consume your podcast. If you have any questions, go ahead and post them in the comments below. Make sure you subscribe and hit the bell icon so you're notified when we post new episodes. I'm Chris Collins and you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Chris Bulldog Collins and I'll see you again on the next episode.