Short Drive By episode (hosts Chris Collins and Christian) responding to a caller "Max" about taking over a family-owned car shop. Key advice: prioritize marketing and pricing strategies; ensure clear, ironclad goals and defined roles among family partners; create an exit/turnover plan tied to revenue and performance; tie responsibilities to measurable targets to reduce family conflict. Episode includes CTA with phone number and offers link.
Questions this video answers
833-3-ASK SDR (spoken as "8333 Ask SDR").
June 23, 2023.
About seven years ago.
About six months.
Chapters
Foreign.
Welcome to your Friday drive by. This is where we answer your questions. The things that you're dying to have. An outside opinion, perspective, fresh view on things. I'm Chris Collins and this is Christian.
Hello, everyone.
Better known as Papi Chulo. Get something to write with or open notes on your phone, but the number to call is 833-3-ASK STR. That's 8333-ASK S D R. Let's go to today's question.
My dad and cousin invested into a shop about seven years ago. We. Well, I have been working here for six months, learning. I want to know what it takes to run a shop and I wanted to know what you advise a son with a cousin involved. So it's a partnership. Want to know what advice you give me if I should even take the shop, I should even run half of it or run it all.
I think that the things to be good at, if I can rephrase kind of the perspective or the question, the most important thing in a shop like that is to be good at marketing and then good at pricing strategies and, you know, understanding your pricing compared to your overhead. And then I think the second question about whether you should take over or not has more to do with you sitting down with your dad and your uncle and having clear goals. You know, we did an episode about relationships, and I think it's the same sort of thing when family is involved. Most of the time what I see is everybody isn't on the same page to what the goal is. So if you sit down and you're like, okay, how much do we want to do in revenue? What does everybody want to get paid? What, what do we want to look? What do we want it to look like? And okay, now what sacrifices and collaboration have to happen in order for us to hit these goals? So whenever things are getting weird, you can just reference, hey, this was the goal we all committed to this year. Maybe next year we do it this way, but we've committed that we're going to, you know, work a little harder, do things this way. I'm going to be in charge of this, you're going to be in charge of that. Everybody has a clear role in the outcome that we're trying to achieve.
Yeah, I think that that's probably the best piece of advice when it comes to dealings with family members, is the agreements should be more ironclad than what you would do with an agreement with a complete stranger.
Yeah. Because family can get weird and feelings get in. Everybody has a quirk. There's Always, you know. Yeah.
If you don't do that, it never ends well.
So having clear outcomes that are desired and then sticking to them, you know, making a pact that, hey, we're going to stick to this because it gets hard when we're constantly moving the flag. Yep.
And then I think that that was a really good thing that you said too, about clear and defined roles. Because I think too often in, I mean, and this is just my experience from coaching independence is that too often when the family type business, what I saw was like, if there was multiple owners and there were family members, they were doing the same thing as opposed to like that divide and conquer and like utilize the fact that there's two of them.
Yeah. And it's really hard for a kid like Max because to some degree his uncle or his dad is. They're always going to feel their. They're better at what he's doing because he's new to it.
Yeah.
And so when you have clear, defined roles, it's accepted that he's going to make some mistakes. Right, Right.
I would also have like a, an exit for Max. I would have an exit strategy plan, like at what point the business gets turned over to him and what does that look like? And like all already knowing what he has to do to own the.
Yeah. Tie it to some revenue.
Tie it to revenue, performance, everything like that. Yep.
Good stuff, Max. Thanks for the. For the question, we will send you a swag bag. Remember the numbers 8,000, 333 ask SDR. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution.
Thanks for watching this week's Drive By. I hope we gave you something to think about over the weekend. 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.
