The Calendar Problem That’s Costing You 30% More Revenue

We implement all these alerts about delays, right? And so everyone's angry about a delay, but you know what we found out or what they're even angrier about? If we don't give updates, right? So if you're sitting there in the unknown, it's extraordinarily frustrating. So then it's, you're trying to give no surprises, make things known. You gotta take a proactive view about how you're wanting to bring things into the shop, right? And you want to try to truly control it and you gotta control it in a way that matches to your capacity. But aligns with the specialization within that capacity, right? The time for the advisors and the technicians to be able to fully service the vehicle and give the good customer experience.

You're listening to Retention Roadmap, the podcast designed to help you retain dealership customers and solve service department challenges, featuring insights, industry best practices, and real-life success stories from experts and peers. Now here's your host, Bill Springer.

Welcome to Retention Roadmap, navigating service success for new car dealerships. I'm your host, Bill Springer. Today's podcast is sponsored by DriveSure. DriveSure helps new car dealerships remain the go-to provider for maintenance, tires, and repairs. For information on how DriveSure can help your dealership, go to drivesure.com/dealership-solutions. My guest today is David Anderson, CEO of Evenflo. Dave brings a unique background to the automotive industry, having previously worked in capacity optimization and applying those principles to dealership service operations. Evenflo is focused on solving one of the most overlooked problems in fixed operations: how dealerships schedule service appointments relative to actual technician capacity. Today we're going to talk about why traditional scheduling models are broken, how that impacts customer experience and retention, and what dealers should be doing differently. Dave, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you here.

Yeah, thanks, Bill. Excited to be here.

Yeah, excited to have you here. I think this is a great topic. Let's dive right into it. Dave, when we look at the core problem that you help dealerships solve, what do most dealerships get wrong about service scheduling today?

I'll start with kind of like two different layers. One layer is that, more fundamentally, I'd say it's like an unmanaged operation or factory in a way. And before anyone gets offended by it, what I mean is that like In the shop, they run it as operationally efficient, but they don't control what comes in the shop the way they need it, right? Like, it would be like a restaurant taking 42 reservations at 7 PM and none anywhere else, right? Like, you can have the best-run kitchen, but if you have 42 reservations all at once, you're not going to be able to pull it through. And so number one is that ability to, you know, control the flow in so that you can run the operation. I think of the analogy of like a factory or an operation where you're controlling the inputs to maximize the outputs, and there's opportunities to improve how you control those inputs. The second layer is the standard approach of how you load that is, you know, my term is more of like counting cars, right? So I'll take 4 appointments at 9, I'll take another 4 at 9:30, and that approach, it falls down in two fronts. Like, one is it might be applied more from a law of averages perspective. You know, an astute service manager might say, hey, I got 100 hours of production capacity a day. The average RO is 2 hours, so I can take 50 cars, right? And if you zoom out over, say, like a 3-month period, I'm sure that service manager is spot on, you know, to the decimal. And I'm like, what's the right amount, right? but there's too much variability and unpredictability in any given day. But I just want to like roughly say, hey, a third of these are like diag repairs, a third of these are just basic oil changes, and a third of these are a little bit more involved like maintenance or light repair. And that's what gets me, you know, my 100 hours. All it takes is like 5 more diag and 5 less oil changes, or 5 more oil changes and 5 less diag, and then that math all falls apart, right? You're either about run or you're underloaded there. So this law of averages really can't support the day-to-day variation of, you know, with counting cars. And then the second aspect of where, you know, this counting cars often gets applied is it's more focused on like the front of the house scheduling. So you might say, hey, I'll take 4 at 7:00 AM. And why do you do that? Well, I have 4 advisors who started. Well, how many techs do you have? I got 10 techs that start. All right, if you're only taking 4 cars in at 7 AM and you're totally efficient in the check-in, you know, let's just say, you know, the car is back there at 7:05, right? Like, what are the other, you know, 6 techs doing? Well, they're usually waiting for a car, you know, drinking coffee and waiting on a car. And if you start applying that math, like, the average dealership is losing like 5% to 8% of their capacity is wasted just by like how the advisors can take it at the front of the house there. And then if you keep perpetuating that of like, okay, I'm going to take 4 every like 15 minutes or every 30 minutes, or eventually you'll just overrun the 10 technicians. So they start with like not having anything to do, and by 9:30 you've taken in way more cars than what they can handle, and now they're overrun. Those are like 2 examples of where this car counting is like not appropriately kind of like managing the flow in so they can run a great operation. They're trying to, you know, often I hear is like manage the daily chaos. And what they mean by that, you know, when I, you know, I spend time with the service managers, is that it comes in in such an unpredictable or a variable way to them that overwhelms them, or like, uh, dead. They're always just triaging the situation.

So, you know, when we think about scheduling based upon car count versus, if I understand you correctly, Dave, we want to schedule based on primarily on technician capacity. Is that correct?

Yeah. Yeah.

How do you manage that? Because that technician capacity can change on a day-to-day basis as well, correct?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I look at it as, you know, again, it's a demand capacity or supply consideration. So there are two sides of the equation. So on the capacity side, it's the technicians and obviously it's pegged to the staffing of like when technicians roll on the clock, when they roll off of it. During the day and then across the week. That, in that way, it's— that one level is pretty basic. But then it gets more nuanced because of specialization, right? Like, if you're the ETI tech at a Ford service center, well, it doesn't matter when I roll on if I'm like the, the Quick Lane tech, right? Like, I'm loading the shop. We really need to know when you're rolling on and off the clock and are available to do jobs for that you know, specialization. And so most shops traditionally run like express versus main shop so you could split it out. But there's a lot of brands where you have, you know, you can think diesel or EV or special, you know, recalls where there's only certain techs with certification. So you really have to think about the capacity based on the resources that are able to do that job, right? It's not just one big pool of—

Yeah. The analogy I, I'm thinking of in my brain is a, is a hospital, you know, in terms of managing operating theaters is when, when is the brain surgeon going to be available, you know, and without him or her, nothing's going to happen.

And yeah, you got a patient that needs brain surgery, but like, it doesn't do you any good if you got 4 orthopedic surgeons who are like, I'm ready to do your knee, but like, I don't need my knee done, right?

That's right, that's right. No, that's great. Let's shift the discussion just a little bit in terms of the, to the customer experience and how this impacts the the customer experience. So how does poor scheduling show up in the customer experience?

I think of it as being able to like set expectations and avoid surprises. So customers hate, in any industry, right? Like I'll put Divergers for a second. You know, I worked in the airline industry for a number of years, right? We implement all these alerts about delays, right? And so everyone's angry about a delay, but you know what we found out or what they're even angrier about? If we don't give updates. Right. So if you're sitting there in the unknown, it's extraordinarily frustrating. So then it's— you're trying to give no surprises, make things known. And so part for the customer readiness is it starts at scheduling, right? Like if you're going to have a recall, let them know that there's a recall. If this recall is an inspection first and then if it fails and you need to like order a part and hold the car, let them know that up ahead of time, right? If this recall is like a half a day job, inform them of that. Or if you're supposed to show up with like a quarter tank of gas, let them know that at the scheduling, right? So set the right expectations, right, on the front end. And then if you're shop loading in the, you know, right way, where you're bringing in the work that matches the technician capacity, then from the front of the house with advisors, they can start setting like promise times that they can live to. You know, I was talking to one service director, I quote him because I love this quote, he's like he's having problems with his Express Shop and he's like, we quote everyone like a promise time of 1 hour to 7 hours and we deliver it 100% of time. Right. But from a customer, you know, it's funny, but if you're a customer, like, how frustrating would that be?

Like, that's so funny if you're a customer.

7 hours, right? Like, so that's like setting the right expectations and communicating like, hey, if I say it's going to be an hour and a half, like, you deliver upon it, right? And then that's the experience that then customers can trust. And then that also helps with like the retention of knowing I'm going to get a good experience, I'm going to be able to trust what they're going to say, and I can plan my day around that.

I'm glad you brought up your experience with airline capacity, Dave, because I want to ask you about that. You know, I think your insight in terms of, you know, customers don't mind the delays as much as they mind not knowing what's going on is a great insight that dealerships can use in the same vein. What else can dealerships learn that parallels some of your learnings in the airline industry? Yeah, what's the— for example, what's the equivalent of an empty seat on an airline for, for a dealership?

Yeah, so the term I always use is like spoiled capacity, right? If a technician is sitting on the clock at 3 PM and there's no work in front of him or her, right, at 3:30 you can't go rewind the the clock and flag the time, right? In the same way that like an airline, you can't sell an empty seat when you're 30,000 feet in the air, right? You lost that opportunity. It's a spoiled, you know, capacity that shows up in lots of industries, right? Like a golf course, if there's no one teeing off at like 2:45, like you can't rewind the clock and get a foursome on 2:45, right? So it's the wasted capacity there. And so that's what really a part of like the core capacity management is, trying to anchor the demand to the the capacity. The big thing with the airlines too is, and we're just on the cusp of this, a lot of more of this, like business optimization, really. Like, when do you want to bring work in? When does it make sense? Obviously you're going to be concerned about the customer experience, providing them a lot of choice, but there's certain times in the operation where it makes sense that you would want this job in based on where your staffing is or what optimizes your business. And maybe the Example is, is like recalls. There's certain recalls where it makes sense to push that to maybe off-peak times or not have it even on like a Saturday because you don't have a staffing, right? So it's that business optimization of really how do you maximize every single hour of the day, you know, avoiding spoil time, but really getting the most you can out of every single hour of your capacity.

I'm glad you brought up recalls. I want to get to that in a moment, but before I wanted to make sure I asked you about, you know, what, what you see in terms of, you know, a dealership that does fix their, their scheduling problems and really drives optimization of their technician hours. What do you see in terms of improvements, in terms of, you know, however you want to describe it— revenue, hours booked, whatever the case may be? What's kind of a, you know, a typical before and after for an average dealership?

Yeah, so I'll give a quantification and then I'll try to clarify like how to maybe think about it in the real world of like what this is, right? So from a quantification, like we can see many case studies of like 10-12% increase in flag hours and then 20, you know, up to 30% incremental revenue associated with it. So that sounds dramatic, and in a lot of cases we may not even be increasing ROs, right? Really just bringing the flow of the shop in to where it can they can maximize sort of the production of it. And what happens, if you think of like the work, ideally you'd almost want the right pace of a conveyor belt or work in when the team has the capacity to do it so they can fully service the car. And so what we see in the data, and you see in the real world, I even tell a story myself, is like when there's overloaded, you just try to move cars through. And so I, I was in my car for maintenance like a month ago, as for my wife and son who are doing like a 4-hour road trip. So I wasn't like necessarily price sensitive. I was like, I want to make sure the car's safe, right? The dealership was backed up and they were like 90 minutes past the promised time. So the advisor didn't even tell me about 2 things that failed inspection because he said, Dave, you're good to go, but there's a couple things we should probably look at when you're back in here in 6 months. And so what that translates to is less dollars per hour, less hours per hour, because they're trying to do— move more cars through in the same time. And ultimately, like, this is a bad experience for me. Right?

Yeah, exactly.

The things that failed, I use things I needed to maintain the car and keep the car operationally safe, which was my primary concern. And maybe I'm price sensitive, I don't know. But still, like the advisor, you know, that's the opportunity. If you create time, the advisor can at least present the case to the customer for them to make the choice and just say, you know, it's just tax season. I got hit. I have to wait. Right? Like, you know, I don't have the free cash for that. Or no, wait, I'm really— the safety is really important to me. Let's do the service there. So it's about the time for the advisors and the technicians to be able to fully service the vehicle and give the good customer experience. To me, you know, especially since you're focused on retention, like, I think this is where the role is, like the dealership being a trusted advisor for the, you know, the dealership. And you give them the time to be the trusted advisor. Because, yeah, as an outsider, upsell is always a weird term for me because what are they telling you is like, here's maintenance or repairs that are, you know, you need for the safe operation of your vehicle. It's either to manage the lifetime repair costs, like pay $200 now or $1,000 12 months from now. What do you want to do, right? Or extend the longevity of your vehicle, you know, safe operation. All those things are in my interest as a vehicle owner, right? There's nothing there that's like, oh, why are you telling me about that? Like, those are good things, right? So give the team the time to be that trusted advisor and you can, you know, set the right expectations. Then you engender trust, experience, and then that's retention, right? Like, why would you go somewhere else if you have that relationship there? But it's like, me, a big part of it is time, right? It, it's comes down to time. Like, if I'm jammed up, I don't— like, in my example, I don't think the service advisor was a bad service advisor. He just had 8 customers behind me that were getting kind of upset, and it helped his cause to get me out of the way because he was trying to get to the guy who was giving him death eyes behind.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's a, that's a fantastic example of, you know, a capacity management issue that results in lower parts and service revenue for the dealership, a less than optimal customer experience. You get a customer who is actually willing to pay the money and have the work done, but it couldn't get done because of— because they were just trying to take care of as many customers as possible. Yeah, that's a great example. So let's talk about recalls for a moment. How does scheduling impact recall completion, or vice versa? However you want to answer that, Dave, in terms of how does you know, the execution of recalls impact how you schedule your shop?

Yeah, I break it down into kind of like 3 important components to do it really well, right? The first, you touched upon a little bit with customer readiness, is like, is the customer aware that they actually have a recall, right? So if you schedule an oil change, rotate, and then they hit you up on the drive like, there's a recall that you should really get done and it's a safety concern, it's serious, but it takes 3 hours, now you're caught off guard, you know, and you might not have planned that for the day. So when you're setting the appointment, let them know so the customer can be prepared for it, right, of what to expect. And, and people can be flexible, they can plan their day around it, they know it, right? And then it's also like some of these other instructions, like, well, this is an inspect first, and then if it fails, we have to order the part. Like, kind of again, setting the expectations for the customer, I think that's really critical. The second part of it is operational readiness. So if the customer's ready, you better make sure the shop's ready. So do we have the part on hand, right? Or do I need 3 days lead time, you know, to get the part? So I better not offer up an appointment tomorrow for him because all I'm going to do is hold your car for 2 more days, right? So that's kind of match to make sure that the, the operation is ready, not only on the parts but also there's the right technician capacity. And this gets into skill level where like maybe we have technicians available, but they're not certified to do this, like, uh, hybrid cable recall. So like we can't offer up the time, right? And then the third part is, I alluded to a little bit of the business optimization standpoint. So when is the right time that you want to bring in certain pieces of work? And some are more attractive than others. And maybe these are recalls that are, you know, less attractive, and instead of it being like a nuisance RO that pays you really well, or you're always looking at it as like, well, this is squeezing out my 60,000-mile maintenance customer, that a CP, that's like my, you know, my prime target, like it is my favorite customer, right? So you look at the recall as like a nuisance, right? Well, let's start pushing them to where there's off-peak time and you have more time. Then what we found in those cases is like then those nuisance become like opportunities. And then you start talking like, well, Bill, while you're here, did you know that you actually need— you're due for an oil change and your filters are actually, you know, they're past due, and you're just ready for to get your brake pads, you know, changed. So it's a customer pay opportunity. And is it— from the customer experience, they feel it, right? Like, you feel if you're a nuisance or if they're happy to see you, they're working with you on it, right? So it's, um, that business optimization I think is, is, is another key aspect there for sure.

For sure, for sure. Let's talk about the quote unquote the true demand problem. You talk about true demand. What, what does that mean in a dealership context?

Yeah, so this is a little bit more like healthcare where I worked than airlines, because airlines, it's simpler in the sense that, hey, I, I bought a seat in economy, right? Like, it is what is. I know what widget you bought, right? Here in automotive, the challenge is, is like what people schedule for isn't what they leave on their repair order. It's kind of like healthcare. You might like show up and say, hey, I have a, you know, my stomach's bothering me. But like it could be something else entirely until they like, they diagnose you, right? So if I schedule an oil change rotate for 100,000 miles on my Odyssey, I'm probably gonna leave with something more than on my repair order, right? Or even if I have a vehicle concern, I only allocate 1 hour for the diagnosis time. If the average repair time is, you know, like 2.2 hours, I'm still underloading it. So What's critical is to be able to account for something that's more than what, you know, what people schedule for. And but it is variable because like if you're a 10,000-mile Toyota Camry, right, that's 1 year old, then probably what you schedule for is what you're going to leave with, you know, right? But if you have 90,000 miles on that Toyota Camry, you're probably not going to leave with that oil change rotate. So it's, it's Understanding sort of that situational context and understanding is there more demand that we need to allocate for? And it doesn't— the way shop loading, you know, needs to work, it doesn't matter whether it's going to be an extra coolant service, a brake service, or alignment, right? Like all that you got to kind of get right is like, is it another hour that you think it's going to be? That's the, you know, one of the real challenges with the car counting methodology is like the law of averages might work, but on any given variable, you know, just put it— bring it back to that example. Like, if I think on the law of averages I'll have 33 oil change rotate appointments, that's great. But if they're all 10,000-mile Toyota Cares or they're 60,000-mile Camrys, those will be two very different days, right?

Yeah. I'm wondering why this hasn't been solved earlier. I suspect it's due to some technical innovations that have come about and some and that type of thing. But help us understand what's changed over the X number of last years that's enabled you and Evenflow to get your hands around this problem that didn't exist some years back.

I would say that this problem is prevalent in so many contexts if you start thinking about it, right? Like a movie theater has got their version of it.

Yeah.

A financial advisor has their version of it. I was working with a biotech company that was making cancer drugs. They have their version of it. So it's pervasive, but actually mathematically it's like not well understood. What I call is like a real-time optimization problem. So like from, um, actually Henry Ford in, you know, automotive, he pioneered operations research of how to maximize a factory. But there you're controlling the inputs to maximize the outputs. That's a well-worn path. But in these contexts, it's like you don't know what the inputs are. So how are you optimizing? And so there's this technique about basically kind of predicting the inputs to then be able to like optimize sort of the, you know, quote unquote factory here. And it's just not a well-understood problem, honestly. Like, and honestly, when I didn't know anything about auto and I first started studying this, my first question was like, well, maybe someone's tackled it. Maybe someone figured it out. And let me just make sure. And only after a year, then I like, I eliminated it. I said, all right, no one's doing anything like this. So there's an opportunity there. It's not like a mathematics course that people take. It's just not an understood problem well, but yet it's pervasive. It's an oddity. It's an oddity.

Yeah, that's right. I find it fascinating. You get so many, you get certain fixed variables and you have so many other variables that can, that are differing from due to lots of different circumstances.

Yeah.

And as you say, they all average out in the end, but what does that mean for me today and for managing my dealership today?

Yeah, and I think fundamentally what I would say, it's a hard problem, right? Yeah, for sure. Because you then, we didn't even talk about things, well, there's walk-ins, there's no-shows, people are late, people are early, like you get those dimensions in here too. So, you know, fundamentally it's just a hard problem. Yeah, that's probably why it just hasn't, you know, been fully, you know, solved before. I think we've, we've got a good take on it, but we can definitely ratchet up the capabilities here. Like, we're, we're on, uh, a dial of 1 to 10. I think we're operating on 2. Like, I, I think there's a lot more we can, we can do, and more features we're kind of just even sitting on that we haven't rolled out because I don't think the market's ready for it yet.

Yeah, yeah. Makes sense, makes sense. So finally, Dave, as we close here today, if you were advising a dealer group today, what's the one thing that they should change about how they schedule service?

I think it just comes back to, you gotta take a proactive view about how you're wanting to bring things into the shop, right? And you wanna try to truly control it, and you gotta control it in a way that matches to your capacity but aligns with the specialization within that capacity. Right. And when you control it, most people think that it's counterintuitive that like, oh, I'm going to push appointments out, but it's actually the opposite. We pull more in with these controls. And maybe like the last analogy I'd use is like a restaurant. Going back to that, generally speaking, it's all about perception. Like you want to go to a restaurant where you're not the only patron, because if you're the only person in there, you're wondering like what? Did I miss the memo? Or like some Facebook post of why there's like, I shouldn't be here, right? So you like going to a busy restaurant, but you don't like going to a busy restaurant where the chef is yelling at the servers and dishes are being broken and swearing's going on in the background, right? Like, and everyone's running around like crazy, right? You want to go in a restaurant that's busy, but it feels like, wow, wow, this is a well-run operation. Like you don't feel rushed. But like, I didn't wait 15 minutes for my appetizer, right? Like, everything kind of just flowed through. And I think I would just encourage the dealerships to say, if you can think of your operation that way and run it like highly efficient, proficient, very, you know, it can be fast moving, extremely busy. You're going to actually, at the end of the day, what I'll feel like is you're going to set records, you'll produce a lot more, but the days will feel easier because it's just more of control, right? Not only does the customer know what to expect, you know what to expect, right?

Yeah, for sure.

You're not caught off guard like, uh-oh, 8 cars just showed up and I can't handle them, you know?

Right. Yeah. And, you know, we haven't, we haven't mentioned this, but I'm sure this has got to lead to a higher level of employee satisfaction and employee retention as well because As you said, if the manager is feeling like the day just went by and went by smoothly, employees are going to feel the same way. And that's going to, that's going to help with employee retention, which in turn is going to help with customer satisfaction, the customer experience.

Yeah, like it all snowballs in a good way, right? Like, so if you're running like the days feel easier but you're producing more, advisors and technicians, you know, are in general with pay structures like they should be earning more. Their days will flow easier. The customers all have better experience, so they'll generally be happier, right? And so then it just builds upon each other, right? And I know this from like, you know, my days at United Airlines working in the customer relations, which basically complaints, right? Like, and working with the team there is like, there's only— every person has only so much tolerance of like, if you're getting yelled at for 7 hours straight, like, Sure. That next call could be the one that sends you over because there's only so much you can handle, right?

Exactly.

The advisor, the most customer-friendly advisor, if they're getting yelled at by like 9 customers in a row, right, like they're not going to go give that 10th customer like an A+ effort, right? It's just not going to. But if you have 9 that are like, man, that was great. Like, I had a great time talking to Bill. Like, I can't wait to see him again. You know, then that 10th customer that comes in, you're going in and like super positive attitude, like, and you're gonna make it happen. And all these things, like, they either snowball in a bad way or snowball in a good way, right? And I think that's where the system is. We're trying to snowball it in the good way, you know.

That's, uh, I think a great place to end today, Dave. You've given us, uh, just a ton of great stuff to think about and just some fascinating, fascinating work that you're doing with dealerships. So Thanks very much for coming on the show. If any of our listeners want to get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to do so?

Uh, you can email me directly at davea@evenflow.ai. E-V-E-N-F-L-O-W dot A-I. I can give you my cell phone number. You can put it in the show notes and I'm happy for anyone to call me or text me anytime.

So sounds good. Sounds good. Dave, thanks very much for being on the show today. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, no, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

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