Your Fixed Ops Questions Answered: Scheduling, Walk-Arounds & Diagnostics

Welcome to the big show today. I'm going to answer your questions. We had some questions in the vault about scheduling, about how to get advisors to do walk arounds, about what do you do when a customer can't afford a repair and you've diagnosed it and then just a couple housekeeping things that we are going to go over. That and much, much more. Coming up right now on Service Driver Evolution. Everyone who sent me tequila or vinyl records or cigars, I really appreciate it. I feel like back in those days when I was an advisor writing service for Cadillac where I would come home with a box of Crown Royal, you know, a box of tons of Crown Royal because for some reason that was the Cadillac customer. They, they would give you a bottle of Crown Royal at Christmas, which was fun. But I feel that way with tequila this year. So thank you everybody who, who sent, you know, gifts for Christmas. We really appreciate that and you're, you know, thinking of us. Very, very sweet. I'm on my own today. I don't have a sidekick, but moreover, we're gonna have some fun. I also have got some feedback on the Taylor Swift docu series on Disney that I suggested on a previous episode when I had watched that there were only two episodes up. And the docu series is about the ERAS tour, kind of the creation and fulfillment of the ERAS tour, the big tour she did. Now there's six episodes up. And if I thought it was a great leadership study and example of something that we can all learn from now, watching all six, it really is her ability to tell a story, her ability to create a culture and get people fired up and involved, her ability to keep everybody on message and on the task at hand, her ability to recruit the most talented people and then get those people to perform in a level that nobody's ever seen before. I know that tour broke all kinds of records is, is something to.

You.

Know, to study and try to understand whether you're a Taylor Swift fan or not. You cannot argue with the results. And I'm, I'm not a huge Taylor Swift consumer. Like I, I could barely name a couple of her songs. But I am always a fan of people that perform at a high level and, and do things that are, you know, special and different. So I would encourage everybody to watch that. I've had some really fun conversations about it since, since I talked about it and I'm hoping that there's more of that. But check it out on Disney plus Taylor Swift Eras tour and binge it. I don't know, but I, I Would kind of keep some notes about the leadership lessons. Like watch it from the context of leadership, not the context of entertainment or music, that sort of thing. Like think about it from Taylor Swift and her leadership ability and when you watch it from that lens, you'll see it in a completely different light but really fun. And I'm pretty excited about 2026 and what's going on. But we're going to do questions today. So we have some questions that were backlogged and if you have a question that you want us to answer on the show, the phone number you can call is 8333 ask SDR. So that's 8333 ask SDR. And we check those periodically and we will play them on the show and try to get you an answer to the thing that is keeping you from performing or you're just bugged about whatever it is. We want to help. But let's do a couple of the questions that we had.

Hey, my question is why do service advisors fight the walk around at the point of write up? I just don't get it. I know very few service advisors that will do a walk around and for that matter they also don't quote direct prices when they walk in. You say hey, I won't go over this much without talking to you. Then finally, why don't service advisors say hey, is there anything else that's been, we've been thinking about on your car? Anyhow, my name is. Thank you.

I think there's two answers to that question. The first answer is when did it become negotiable for them not to do walk arounds? Like I mean I, I worked in one of the number one dealerships in the country for the brand and I've worked with a lot of the dealerships that are number one for their brand. And you know, oftentimes that's, you know, it's the same Mercedes dealer, it's the same Ford dealer, it's the same Honda dealer that are number one most years and there's a culture there and one thing that they usually have in common is that any sort of customer complaint is addressed very, very aggressively to the point that if like you're a service advisor and you have a cus, a couple customer complaints, you will be let go. And it's not even negotiable. Like there's just a standard of what is acceptable versus what is not acceptable. And there's certain things as a, as a leader that if you allow them to be negotiable you allow them to freelance and do things however they want to do them. And by they in this situation, I'm talking about the advisors, then that's what you're going to get. You're going to get a lot of inconsistency. So the second part of my answer to this would be the system. So developing a system that kind of forces the behaviors that you want. So, you know, we have this drive process that we've called service drive judo. And the thought behind calling it service drive judo is like the art of judo often is using the opponent's momentum to your advantage. And what we're doing with this process is we're using the customer's wants and needs and momentum to our advantage, but we're organizing it and we're creating structure in chaos. So in most service departments, customers pull in, they don't quite know where to go. Maybe there's a greeter there with a clipboard that directs them. But then they go into the advisor. The advisor then goes out to the car for them to do a walk around with the customer. The customer would have to follow them back out, which usually doesn't happen. And, you know, so service drive judo is a process where the customer is teed up. The time between appointments, how many waiters, we do an hour. Everything is, you know, a part of that. We call that the people math, but it's very thought out. And then the customers are directed to stay with their car because they're greeted up on the curb, they stay with their car, the advisor comes out to them, and then the walk around is just a part of the process that we've designed. It's not negotiable. Like you, you can't get to the next step without doing it. So I would say that it's two things. One, it's failure in leadership, that those sort of things are negotiable. And then we allow freelancing, we allow it to be negotiable. And then the second one is then the system is failing. And I'm always preaching that it's systems first, people second. And that doesn't mean that people aren't important, but it does mean that bad systems will ruin good people, and good systems will help average performers perform above average. So designing a system that kind of forces the behaviors that you want with feedback and accountability and then not letting it be negotiable is the secret there. So, and then it's the same thing with the quoting, the callbacks, the communication, everything, it all falls into that same category. But great Question. Thank you.

Yeah, so one of my questions is that I have a service team that refuses to schedule in the last hour to half hour of the day simply because they don't want to risk upselling a customer and not being able to complete the job. Just getting your opinion on this. I personally think we should fill the hour, maybe not at the very end, but then reschedule things like that. But that's a consistent issue I'm seeing at my service drive, regardless of the manager I have in place. Yeah. Your thoughts would be much appreciated. My numbers. Thank you. Bye.

So I've seen this done successfully both ways. I'm going to tell you my preference, but I, I have tons of people that I respect that do it the other way though, kind of the way you're describing them. We'll take appointments up until the very end. The way I like to load the shop is I kind of know how many customers each advisor can handle depending on how many texts they have. Right. So let's just say that an Advisor can take 12 appointments. Then the way that I would book them is I would start them off. So I would start the, the advisors a half an hour or an hour before the tech start because I want the techs to have work when they come in. If the techs come in and they don't have work, they go get breakfast burritos and they never really quite get the momentum in the day that they, that we want them to have. So I think it's kind of important when you're, when you're doing the schedule to have a gap between when the advisors start and when the tech starts. So let's say just for example, we open at seven. I, I'm booking advisors appointments every 20 minutes, right. So they would have three appointments. I'm limiting how many waiters they can do every hour. That goes hand in hand with how many lube techs per lateral support group that we have. But I'm usually limiting them to one an hour. So I'm controlling the waiters, but I am book, I am booking them strategically to load the shop early, get in as much work as I can. And most of the time I'm, I'm cutting the advisors off by like 11, 11, 40 in there somewhere depending on the advisor and how many arrows I want them to write on a daily basis. And this, you know, this can change depending on holdovers, etc. So if I'm setting up an appointment system and most of the time that's at the BDC, I'm stopping the appointments at 11:30. I would allow any customer that, that doesn't work for. So let's say we have a customer and they're like the only time I can come in is 2 o'. Clock. We will make that exception for them. In my experience, that happens way less than we think it happens. But either way we will put a customer where they want to be if that's the only way that it can work for them or they, you know, highly vocal, you know, verbalize that. But for the most part, 95% of our customers are coming in in the morning. We're getting all the work in and then we're trying to touch those cars, diagnose them, see what they need, get the okay from the customer and then in the afternoon we're doing all that, that work in a sense. So I, I'm not a huge fan except for oil changes, of taking appointments in until the very, very end. There, there are a couple, you know, side notes to this is you could start quick l text earlier because if you're, if you're booking your first oil change at 7, you got to have a, you got to have text there for that. So you can do that. But I'm trying, I'm as much as I can, I'm trying to get it all in early and then diagnose it, figure it out, call, update the customer, get the work approved and then finish it. I'm not trying to take appointments until 5 or 6 in, in the way that I would design it. Also I want the advisors to have time to do estimates to follow up, to call, that sort of thing. And if they're, if they're writing customers all day, that's really hard for them to do. They never really, you know, same thing with, if we have an appointment for the advisors every 10 minutes or, or we'll do just as many waiters as customers, you know, or, you know, we just allow waiters to be every appointment in the morning. It's really hard for the advisors to, to call and update other customers. It, it gets a little difficult for them. So I'm trying to set the advisors up for success that they can write a customer and then they still have time to call a customer in between the next customer coming in or going and touching them in the waiting room, but giving them enough time strategically in order for them to do that. And so the, you know, the way that we would book the work in in a drive, oftentimes you would start off with like, let's say a high volume Toyota store where customers don't make appointments and they just drive in. We can usually within a four to six month period of time get their, you know, RO count to be somewhere around 70% appointments and 30% walk in from all walk in basically. But there's a bunch of things going on psychologically to create that in, you know, without ever forcing a customer to have an appointment. It's, it's just kind of guided discovery and very, very soft. But my preference is the opposite of what you're saying. But you can, you can schedule them to the end too if that's how you want to do it. I've seen it work. It's just not my preference. My preference is to get it in early. I hope that answered your question.

My question is how am I supposed to sell repair found in our diagnostics when our customers are usually unable to afford the repairs. We do partner with the sema. And now that's my question.

Well, I don't know that you can sell a repair if the customer doesn't have the money. But I would say if you've diagnosed it and you don't have a general understanding of whether the customer can afford it or not, you are, you're not doing a great job. And you know, in, in my opinion because the thing that, that I found to work and we teach is to do a repair authorization up front. So let's say a customer comes with, in with a car and they have, you know, let's just say they have a check engine light on, right? So I know on this Subaru, let's say I'm an advisor at a Subaru store. On this Subaru the check engine light is usually this O2 sensor or whatever it is and that runs 425 bucks to, to repair. When I'm writing the customer up, I'm going to get a repair authorization. So I'm going to tell the customer like your check engine light is on. I'm going to give myself $425 to work with. If it's more, I'll give you a call. If it's less, it'll be less. But oftentimes this is the O2 sensor and if you know we're in there, we, we want to do it but we've got to diagnose it first and check it out. So I'm giving myself $425 to work with. If the customer at that point says I don't have $425, why would I then put the car in the shop and do diagnosis Unless the customer wanted just diagnosis. But I really want to know before the car goes in the shop that the customer can afford to fix it. So, you know, let's say it's a coolant issue. And I know that coolant issue could be a couple grand. I'm telling them up front, like, hey, I'm giving myself a couple thousand dollars to work with. If it's more, I'll give you a call. If it's less, it's less. But, you know, a lot of times this is a heater core, you know, whatever it is, then. You kind of know what you're working with. Like, I don't, I don't want to take the customer's money if they can't fix the car. I also don't necessarily want to be diagnosing it for somebody else. And I really just want to know what, you know, what the customer can afford at a sense. So I'm, I'm, I'm telling the truth up front of what that repair usually is. And we call that a repair authorization. I know people get confused about it. It seems like it's the gift that keeps on giving because this will cause a bunch of other questions. But to me, getting to the point where I've diagnosed it and then the customer tells me they can't afford it, I mean, the only option then is to make some sort of plan where they can do it in the future or talk to them about trading it in. I don't know. I, I wouldn't want to get to that point. To me, that's a no win situation. And if I, I just have a hard time, like talking to advisors about overcoming objections with somebody who can't afford something. Like, you got to be human in the process and treat people how you would want to be treated. And if you can't afford something, overcoming objections doesn't really make sense right there. Like, you've already lost to me. So I would, I would do a repair authorization up front and not get in that situation. If somebody can't afford something, I'd rather know that before I spend a couple hundred dollars in diagnosis that they probably can't afford that either, you know. So repair authorization up front is my technique for that. Good question. So once again, numbers 8, 3, 3, 3. Ask SDR if you have any questions. I hope everybody is off to a great start for this year for 2026, and I will see everybody again real soon. Next time on Service Driver 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 SD. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.