Episode Transcript
*This transcript was generated using Artificial Intelligence. Errors may occur. If you notice an error, please contact [email protected].
Tom Dorsey (00:00:06):
Good morning and good afternoon. Welcome to this week’s edition of Digital Shop Talk Radio. I got a full house. I’m Tom Dorsey and I’m here with an awesome round table of experts. You might recognize some of these folks. These are the guests we’ve had on over the last three weeks talking about best practices to drive higher build, hours per ticket, average build hours per ticket, and revenue in general. And so we thought we would get them all back together so that we could pick their brains, learn from these folks and drill down into some more specific details. So I want to welcome back first, Brittany Schindler. Welcome, Brittany. Hey, thanks from Rod’s Japanese and Rod’s Master Auto Tech in Bellingham, Washington. Awesome. Second location is about two months old now and already, boom to the moon. Bruce Williams is joining us. He was on last week. Awesome insights from Bruce last week.
(00:01:06):
Welcome Bruce. Thank you Tom. Sure. And we got Christoph Schopfer back video working. He’s got a strong internet connection and we are going to learn some more, James, because Christoph really got us inspired by some of the conversation that we had around technician auditing, inspection, auditing, creating custom inspections, really good stuff. And so have your questions ready, folks. Use that chat button, use that q and a button in there to get involved and learn. We really want you to be able to take away an action plan with some of these ideas that we’ve been covering over the last three weeks to be able to implement them tomorrow morning. So don’t miss this opportunity to interact. Don’t be shy and if you don’t agree, challenge us. Right? Challenge us. Do that through the q and a, do that through the chat function. And of course, joining us, our expert panel of experts, Uwe Kleinschmidt, and Bill Connor. Welcome, gentlemen.
Bill Connor (00:02:01):
Good morning here.
Tom Dorsey (00:02:03):
Good morning, good morning. So let’s just jump right into it because I really want to, like I said, we had great conversations I think with each of these shop owners and we’ve talked in some pretty broad terms, but I really want to drill down by workflow step today and give some concrete takeaways for folks and then also give you an opportunity to get some more information. Maybe some of the things that we’ve learned over the last three weeks are still vague or maybe you tried implementation, but you’re having some challenges. And so now this is the opportunity to kind of hash all that stuff out, be ready for the morning. I think before we get started, I’d like to really just kind of go around and give us, because really what attracted me to have the three of you on the show was the consistent application of the best practices and the results, right?
(00:02:53):
I mean, anywhere between four and sometimes six build hours per inspection. Brittany Schindler shop is running something like 18 recommendations per inspection and 80% picture edit rate. I mean, some of these things are incredible. Some of these things you would have folks tell you can’t be done. And so that’s why I really wanted to get this group together because A, they’re doing it. They’re doing it at volume, and they can give you the insights to help you to be able to do the same thing. So great opportunity today. So if we could, Brittany, I think I’d start off with you is just say, and we talked about it when you were on the show, but give us a refresher, especially getting thrown to the wolves like you did, you were young when you came in, started working for Rod, and then all of a sudden you became the implementer for AutoVitals about probably four or five, maybe even six years ago and just had to make this thing work and boy did. So what were the early challenges? How did you overcome ’em? And now what would you say is the critical success factors to keep the success rolling? To keep consistency? What do you do to make sure that all that work you put in is going to continue to pay off in the future?
Brittany Schindler (00:04:04):
Absolutely. I think some of our biggest challenges, and even specifically myself too, coming in, like you said, I didn’t really know anything about cars even though my dad owned automotive shop. So confidence was really lacking. It was like, okay, a fluid exchange, the customer needs, right? And okay, but the car’s still running. It could be fine if it leaves, so we could just let it leave. I just presented to the customer, I was lacking a lot of confidence. I was lacking knowledge of what it took to do that. When we started having team meetings, we started to discuss those things like, Hey, why is it important to do these things on these cars? Why is transmission food important? Why is struts important? Why is maintenance items that aren’t going to make the car run any different when it leaves here? Why is that doing right by the customer?
(00:04:50):
It was just a lot of knowledge. I notice things like now when I’m auditing in work orders, when the customer leaves, I’m like, man, why aren’t we selling this specific service anymore? So what I do is I write that down and then we talk about at our Friday lunch meetings together, I’m like, Hey guys, let’s all, as a team, let’s all talk about why struts are important to your replace by mileage specifically. And we all go around the whole table and everybody kind of puts in their 2 cents. And I didn’t really tell that to the advisors. We just all start chiming in and saying why it’s important, and it kind of builds that confidence back up in the advisors. So confidence was one big thing as well as knowledge. And then we started offering a lifetime warranty that also shot up our ARO too. And just really explaining to customers the benefits of getting these services done. And a lot of it is explained on the inspection, thankfully.
Tom Dorsey (00:05:45):
Yeah, that’s really brilliant point is that it starts a culture and it starts with an open, there is no dumb question because that’s the only way you’re going to help other team members to improve and get to the level that you expect them to be at because you might have that AEC in there, but gosh, if he’s not sharing that knowledge and helping the CECs and the GS and new people at the front counter who may have come from outside the industry, well then it is just a Titanic just waiting to hit the iceberg. You just haven’t hit it yet, but it’s coming. But if you open up and you say, there is no dumb question, I’m here to share my knowledge. I’m here to share these experiences. And I thought that was a really brilliant point is to have that in your weekly meetings.
(00:06:26):
Talk about the basics, right? Football players at the top level, the champs of the won the Super Bowl, still practice blocking, still practice tackling. You still practice the basics, and so it’s really going to be helpful in your operation to do the same. Christophe, if you could tell us a little bit about what challenges you overcame. You are in a similar situation. I think Brittany working with your father, second generation owner coming in, maybe third, I don’t know. We’ve been up there a long time in the mountains. But how is that from just coming into the business and then taking on this digital inspection program implementation? It’s not just a simple kind overnight thing as you all know, and then especially getting into the workflow implementation and really starting to change processes. And that might be difficult to do, especially in an established shop. How did you manage that?
Christoph Schopfer (00:07:22):
So like you said, it’s not an overnight success thing. And so probably the biggest challenge is you can’t go into it with that mindset, see what Brittany is doing, what I’m doing, what Bruce is doing. It wasn’t overnight for us, it was small steps over time. When we first started, I might’ve had pretty sure a 3% picture edited average, and now we’re up at, I don’t know, it’s close to 80. And same goes for recommendations. It’s just small steps at a time. It’s not an overnight success. And you treat it that way. You treat it just like any other success. You just tackle one thing at a time. And then like you were saying, Tom, we were an established shop and we had our paper system dialed. I mean, we were very efficient, but it’s archaic. So I wanted the digital and just convincing even my young techs and my older tech that it wasn’t going away. That was very difficult. And it was just every day reassuring that and not taking your hands off the wheel and thinking it’s just going to work itself out just every day is constant work.
Tom Dorsey (00:08:44):
So do you feel like you have the digital process dialed? You had the paper process?
Christoph Schopfer (00:08:48):
Yeah. Oh, it’s way more dialed now than, yeah, it’s way more dialed. I can track things. You can’t do that with the paper. You just have an inspection to look at. But with the digital thing, I could see where technicians, we have three techs, I could see, oh, this guy’s good at taking pictures. Why don’t we have him in the meeting next week? Tell the other guys what he’s doing for his success. And maybe this guy over here is really good at selling maintenance. I mean, I have all this data I can track and I could see where everyone’s strength and weaknesses are, and then we can share our ideas to make sure that we all have it just ups our whole process.
Tom Dorsey (00:09:27):
And that’s something teamwork makes the dream work.
Christoph Schopfer (00:09:30):
Yes.
Tom Dorsey (00:09:33):
Bruce, how about you buddy? Kind of I think a different situation really. And with the volume that you produce, had it been a challenge? How did you get it done?
Bruce Williams (00:09:47):
Well, definitely it was a challenge, especially when we expanded our shop, trying to design the front end with three service advisors, possibly four that we can have the customer communication, the customer relationship, building time without also having a ton of noise beside you. And we still deal with that, but we’ve basically redesigned it a couple of times. We’ve brought in some different dividers because really you want to have an uninterrupted conversation with your customer, interesting to really work on the history, the deferred work, what’s expected when they’re at the shop, what kind of maintenance preference did they have, and really dig down into why, like Brittany says, doing product knowledge with your team. And so you can confidently talk to the customer about whys and hows of doing all these services, what the benefits are to them. And again, like Brittany says, because when they drive it in and drive it out, they don’t feel any different. And it might’ve been a $600 bill in maintenance services, but they don’t understand why Having that product knowledge to be able to have a conversation slow down the process a bit has really, really helped a lot.
Tom Dorsey (00:10:58):
What do you have in place now? What’s the important things that you’re looking at to monitor from a monitoring perspective, from a data perspective to say, we’re doing it right. We’re improving daily. We’re going in the direction I want this team to go in.
Bruce Williams (00:11:15):
So we definitely edited pictures and that’s proven. And every time we get a little bit lazy with edited pictures, ARO drops,
Tom Dorsey (00:11:24):
You talked about it when you were on last week. Yep,
Bruce Williams (00:11:26):
Totally. Every time and motorist research time, the more detailed you can get your inspections for them. So when the customer’s looking at that, they understand you’ve drawn attention to fluid samples or worn out parts with arrow circles. It is amazing when you do all that extra editing on the inspection, the research time, I don’t know what, mine is almost 660 in the last 90 days because of the editing. So it sells itself. It tells a complete story to the customer. So when they’re researching it for that long a time, they’re ready for a good conversation with you. When you talk to ’em on the phone and at pickup, they understand the extensive inspection work that you’ve done on their car to give ’em the best results of the health of their vehicle.
Tom Dorsey (00:12:18):
And that is a really amazing metric because it correlates so directly to revenue. I mean, you could almost say 602nd motorist research times $600 ARO. I mean it really 700 motorist research time, $700 ARO, because it really does, you have to almost try to break it. You have to be doing something drastically wrong, insulting the customer or something before you send the text to have that high of a motorist research time that doesn’t translate into approval rate. Maybe it doesn’t happen overnight. Maybe you have a little fine tuning to do maybe because I like to use the analogy of telling a story, right? Publishing a story and taking to market and then people are reading your story. And I mean, look at some of the greatest series of books, Stephen King books or JK rally books. They had a small group in the beginning that kind of got it, but now they’re these phenomenons and so many people, they’re ubiquitous in our culture.
(00:13:21):
And it is because really once you have that set expectation and what’s expected of you, well then it’s easy to follow the story. It’s easy to just do the next step, just approve that next appointment, approve that next job because well, I have that trust developed and it’s almost as if you are going to mock me or what am I a moron? I mean, I could see the pictures now I have to fix it. I’m not fixing it. What’s wrong with me? And there’s almost that kind of own self guilt or pressure you’d put on yourself because it becomes so transparent at that point. Wouldn’t you agree, Bill?
Bill Connor (00:14:04):
Yeah, I would. And they brought up a couple good points already, but what I’d like to understand a little bit more about is the story that you’re talking about is the same story that we used to use show and tell at the side of the car. Maybe they could talk about a few of the things that they’re actually making sure are included in this story that they’re doing
Tom Dorsey (00:14:24):
Such as,
Bill Connor (00:14:27):
Well, I mean at the side of the car, the technician would point to it, they’d say what it is, what needs to be done and the reason why it should be done today. Those are some of the things that we’d expect in that story. How are we leveraging that? Are we using the guided inspection or are we discovering that during our team meetings and then editing into inspection sheet, some things like that. And we’ll probably get into some of this a little bit as we go on.
Tom Dorsey (00:14:49):
Yeah, that’s a really good point because that feedback and improvement, it’s constant improvement. It’s like a living document, that inspection sheet, it should constantly be evolving, not forever because it’s going to get bulletproof. And one of the most important things I think is specialization is you don’t want to put all everything into one inspection and then it becomes this behemoth and then you start to see shortcuts and mistakes. It should be divided up, you drill down, you go deeper on a specific specialized inspection. But we can talk about that like Bill said, when we get into the inspection topic. Uwe, any questions for this panel before we get into the workflow steps?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:15:32):
Of course. I just want to add one more element to it. There is no question whether we should do it or not. This MOTORLESS research time, we actually came up with that when I noticed myself doing so much online research that I thought two hours gone, what did you do? And then realized all facets of our lives where we do make decisions about anything is now triggered by some online lookup. My favorite example is a while ago, probably customers who didn’t understand what the timing belt is would ask the service advisor on the phone what that is. They would, because that was the trusted expert today, they might just hang up and look it up or just
Tom Dorsey (00:16:32):
Google it without even hanging up because it’s that fast or Googling
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:16:35):
While being on the phone, being
Tom Dorsey (00:16:37):
Right on the phone, and then they’re going to test you, then they’re going to test you
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:16:40):
And then finding out it’s a rubber band for hundred and 50 bucks. Why are you charging me 750? So somebody has to connect the dots, right? I
Tom Dorsey (00:16:49):
Can get it on Amazon for 79, 9 9.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:16:53):
I checked it. It’s not that cheap, Tom, unless you buy some, you go to
Tom Dorsey (00:17:00):
Alibaba’s on Amazon.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:17:02):
So anyway, the point I’m trying to make is we are piggybacking on a habit we have developed, which was triggered by probably Amazon as the first super successful online place to buy. And let’s make no mistake, this is not the end for me. Back to your question, what are my questions for the panelists? The one I really know is delicate is service advisors, season service advisors, where the focal point of all knowledge have been for as long as we know this industry. And so how have you created a rethinking of their role where not everything has to be talked about on the phone, but it gets packed into the inspection result. So we place talk on the phone by image editing and writing notes. So how did that process go and how much resistance was there and how did you overcome it, if any?
Bruce Williams (00:18:21):
Well, I can speak to that a little bit, but the only reference I have is myself being a long-term tech service advisor manager wearing all the hats. And then when I transferred to the digital inspection process, it was hard for me to do the transition and get used to doing that. But my service team up front now are quite young and I found great success with somebody that understands general automotive maintenance and repair and then teach them the little bit more depth on the product knowledge and then just teach ’em from green to understand this is our process, this is their system, this is what we do, especially with the guided mode. They learn very easily how to go through it at the right order. And there’s no pushbacks. Now, I don’t know if Brittany and Christophe can say the same thing depending on what they had for service advisors before, but definitely with me it was a hard to change.
(00:19:21):
And it’s hard to change our long-term customers when we did the switch to understand, because they always ask me questions, come out in the parking lot and have a look, come and do this, what do you think I should do? And now transitioning and me, I really had to get out of my own head and step back and let the system and the process work out front that we put in place. And it definitely works great with our young service team. They set it up, they stage it, let the customers know they are going to get an inspection result, either text or email and go through it when they transforms the customer’s thinking in it, they watched
(00:19:58):
This.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:20:00):
What made you drink the Kool-Aid? Was it trying and trying and be successful or just power of will because you knew it’s going to be successful?
Bruce Williams (00:20:15):
I’m always looking at ways to be innovative. And when I first looked at this being in Canada, they come up with a DVI, and I was just seeing you guys come online. I think I’ve been with you guys almost from the beginning. As soon as I seen it, it just lights went off in my head that this is the way of the future. There’s no question about it. Like Bill was saying, talking into what would you do? What do we do different now compared to when we had to bring a customer back in the shop, if you talk to a customer over the counter about their breaks are worn out and they need new ones, they hear that, but they really understand. So you’ve had to bring ’em back in the shop, walk through the shop, bring ’em to the car, point it out, and as soon as they see it, they can’t unsee it and they understand what it is. And now the inspection process does that. When we send it out to them, they actually get to see their parts, their car, and like you said, you could tell ’em a story all day long on the phone. They can easily unhear it, forget it, misconstrue it, but as soon as they see it, you can unsee it and it’s factual and it sinks in.
Bill Connor (00:21:17):
One of the interesting things about that in the past, we used to, part of the sales process was to control the whole conversation, which you could do at the side of the car real easy. But if you think about it now in the digital process, modus research time is a great tool to measure how well you’re controlling that conversation digitally,
Bruce Williams (00:21:35):
Right? Yeah, exactly.
Tom Dorsey (00:21:37):
But that’s kind of a hard connection to make if you’re a service writer because would you agree that this can be threatening, right? Because if you, like Uwe said Uwe’s point, if I was the font of all knowledge and I was really the most important person in the building at this specific workflow step, now all of a sudden I can be replaced by this tablet, by and by somebody who just walks in off the street and just basically puts a circle in an arrow or something like that. That’s got to be a threat. How do we still maintain that value, that self-perception of value added to the service writer who goes fully digital?
Brittany Schindler (00:22:20):
I think you still have to put in play there that people have different buying personalities. Everybody gets the same type of information, but the way that you present it to the customer might be different for different types of people. Therefore, you do need service advisors that can read people that do it properly. And on our inspection specifically, we don’t have just arrows and circles on our photos. Every single photo that gets edited has something written on it that says exactly what’s in that picture. There is no deciphering needed for the customer. It is plain as day right then and there. Another huge goal that we have here at our shop and we do have a really high motorist inspection rating is I want my inspection written so well that the customer doesn’t have to Google anything. And also on there is the exact same things that the advisor’s going to say, the customer read it, they looked at it, they call us, and then we’re going to say the same things over the phone just to reiterate what our inspection says. Yeah, I read that. Okay. Yeah, that made sense to me. And here he is, someone that I trusted that I liked when I dropped off my car telling me the same thing, that he’s really going to be taking care of me.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:23:25):
So if I can channel that differently, what you’re saying, it’s not a threat to the service device, it’s just a different channel to talk to the customer.
Brittany Schindler (00:23:34):
I think it’s a
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:23:35):
Phone goes to digital
Brittany Schindler (00:23:37):
Amazing tool for the service advisor that’s going to really, really help them win and just be successful for sure.
Tom Dorsey (00:23:44):
So they get to show off their knowledge, they get to still be that leader because that’s what it really is, right? It’s leadership. They just do it in a different format and actually it allows ’em to express themselves even more and they save time. They can talk to 20 customers at a time.
Christoph Schopfer (00:24:02):
And it’s
Tom Dorsey (00:24:03):
Do that on the phone. Yeah.
Christoph Schopfer (00:24:06):
Yeah.
Tom Dorsey (00:24:06):
Christoph,
Christoph Schopfer (00:24:08):
I was going to say just what Brittany was saying, it’s a sales tool. It’s kind of like back in the nineties when OD two started rolling out and a lot of technicians thought that was a threat. Oh, this computers going to replace me. Yeah, it’s kind of the same thing that we’re rolling into with the technology that our advisors have at their fingertips. And another big thing that really gets pushed to the leeway that we haven’t mentioned yet is the fact that you can, or a service advisor can pull up past inspections. And that’s a huge tool. We use that a lot to see what condition the car was, and then has the oil leak gotten worse? Is it the same? It really helps build customer trust even more when a customer comes back and you tell ’em, this is what we found last time, it really hasn’t progressed. You don’t need to waste money on it. However, your tires have worn way, way faster than they should compared to last time you’ve only gone 5,000 miles. Hey, let’s throw out an alignment on there. It’s a huge tool if utilized properly
Tom Dorsey (00:25:23):
Use it, right?
Christoph Schopfer (00:25:24):
Yeah,
Tom Dorsey (00:25:26):
That was a brilliant point. And real quick, we’ve got a question for Brittany from the audience. Elgin’s asking if you could, and this was back a little bit from when the intro, but he was asking, what does Brittany mean when she says lifetime warranty? Three question marks.
Brittany Schindler (00:25:43):
I mean, yeah, we do a lifetime on our parts and labor and that’s against defect. If a rubber’s going to wear down over time, that’s not a defect. That’s just something that happens. Same with every other part. It just wears down over time. I’m going to cover anything that is just effective. And another thing with our warranty is we require you to come in two times a year or every 5,000 miles, whichever comes first for a free inspection, make sure that the work is staying intact. So
Tom Dorsey (00:26:11):
Exactly. So I would highly encourage you, Eldon to go back and watch the episode when Brittany was on by herself because she talks a lot about and how they leverage that lifetime warranty into their CRM and to getting that follow-up visit. I thought it was brilliant, and you can get a lot of insight there. So don’t miss that episode as well, and we’ll talk a little bit about it when we get into pickup and things like that here in this show. We’ll get some more insights from Brittany. Thank you, Brittany. Yep. So if we could, let’s get into it, because last week we had Bruce on and when we were talking about staging, and we kind of had a pretty interesting conversation around that, and there’s two sides of the coin and some shops that might be something that they can adapt well to others, not so much. And for various reasons, I heard a lot of different kind of excuses. I would call them excuses, but it was really interesting because what he’s talking about is staging the customer interaction during the appointment setting to manage kind of a deeper intake interview. And so I think right away what I’d like to ask is from Brittany and Christophe, how are you making sure in your shop that you get that full intake interview, that deep conversation, whether they’re a return customer or brand new to your business before the drop?
Brittany Schindler (00:27:39):
We do a lot of vetting on the phone, first of all to kind of figure out how this customer is. Most people call in and they ask a price of something, and then you get into a little bit deeper, did you just do some research or did you already get looked at? Are you looking for the cheapest price? You already learn who they are when they first come in. And then they do come in and they’re starting to fill out the intake paperwork. And then we’re just having small talk with them and really getting to know them. But we have very specific questions that need to be asked to every customer, whether that just be coming in for an oil change or for diagnostics. These questions need to be answered and we built it into a casual conversation that we have with the customer. I think just being very prepared and knowing the questions that you need answers for at dropoff is going to make it go by really fast, but also really thorough for you guys.
Tom Dorsey (00:28:25):
So that’s interesting. So do you profile those folks off of that intake interview? You say, this person is resistive, they only want what they came in for, they only want the basics, or Hey, this person is a lot more open to suggestions and more of a long-term customer prospect. And then do you put goals in place to try to flip those profile? Well, I guess flip the resistive profile into a more receptive profile?
Brittany Schindler (00:28:54):
Yeah, it depends if someone’s going to come in and be like, oh, I’m getting rid of this car next month. It totally depends on what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do the inspection too. But I think we still do the full inspection anyways and then that still wows them and then they’re amazed and they’re like, man, maybe I should keep this car. But no, it’s a lot of explaining and I think a lot of our speeches need to get down and listen to what you say, record yourselves when you’re presenting even at that intake interview, and then listen to it and see how you sound to yourself. You might sound a little bit different when you actually hear yourself from a recording.
Tom Dorsey (00:29:30):
That’s great. How about you, Christoph? How do you guys find the time to do that full intake
Christoph Schopfer (00:29:36):
Before? Yeah, so we kind of do the same thing. We spend a lot of time on the phone initially, sometimes get as much info as we can address, email, all that stuff, so we don’t have to deal with that when they’re there. So we can mainly talk about the process in which their car’s going to be looked at. We do stagger our appointments, but I’m sure the other two can attest to the fact that you get there at eight and everyone’s there at the same time waiting to drop their car off. So it’s difficult. You can’t control that. That pretty much happens every day. But we do try and then we just take time. We’re fortunate enough, I mean a busy week for us is 30 cars.
(00:30:26):
We’re talking on a Monday. Yeah, we’re taking in six, seven cars, and then it tapers off as the week goes by. So you’re spending 10, 15 minutes with the customer. Sometimes not even that much. I mean, a lot can be done in 10 minutes. A lot can be said, and it is part of the process and it helps and it builds that trust, especially with a new customer. An existing customer might only be less than five minutes, but a new customer is going to be 15 minutes sometimes, sometimes more. And most of the time we’re just talking with them. And you need, one of the things you guys were talking about is a lot of people think that they don’t have that time, but that time is so important. I mean, if you think that you want to get a high average RO and a high picture or a high motorist research time and all these numbers, I mean Brittany and Bruce probably the same thing. I mean, as I said earlier, it doesn’t happen overnight. And it starts with the little things like spend an extra two minutes with the customer every week, try to spend on average, I don’t know, one more minute with each customer, and at the end of the year, you’re going to be spending 15, 20 minutes with them and you’re going to find that time.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:31:46):
If I may, what I loved about Bruce’s example is he’s injecting role plays with the team. So how to approach the customer. How do you do that? Do you do the same? Is there a script or an outline of a script or how do you get consistent, Brittany? Yep.
Christoph Schopfer (00:32:13):
So that’s one thing I really wanted to do is role play. And I keep telling myself, oh, we’re going to do role play, but we’ve done it in the past, but I haven’t found consistency in doing it. That’s awesome. You’re doing that, Bruce, that we kind, in the beginning I would talk to the customers and then my service advisors would watch, but now they fully have it. And just the fact that we need to spend that time with the customers, or if a customer, I guess we kind of do a little bit of role play, but not so much as I pretend I’m the customer, but if a customer wants this or if they want that, or how are we going to handle this guy when he comes in, he only doesn’t want to do the inspection. It doesn’t really happen, but it does happen every now and then. How are we going to handle that guy? And it helps make it smoother and quicker and we just talk about it. I should say, me and my service advisors, we just talk a lot about handling
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:33:12):
Of objections in this case,
Christoph Schopfer (00:33:14):
Right? That’s a huge deal. Huge. Yep. Yeah.
Bill Connor (00:33:19):
So do you expectation today is regardless of whether the customer is going to be at the counter or on the phone, you’re obligated, the service provider is obligated to spend that quality time with ’em regardless. Is that correct?
Christoph Schopfer (00:33:33):
Yes. Yeah. I mean, in ours they know the benefit of spending that time with the customer.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:33:43):
How difficult was that in the beginning because everybody is running around and has something else to do, and now you say, Hey, Elba, we spend more time. How did that go
Christoph Schopfer (00:33:56):
Down? Well, I’ll just answer really quick. For us, honestly, we were spending the time with the customer before AutoVitals that time. When we did implement AutoVitals, that time kind of went down. Now we were doing more work, we we’re trying to figure out the software, but now that once we have it figured out, then we just got that back in. But that’s just part of who, that’s just how our shop is. We care about our customers, we like to talk to them. So
Bruce Williams (00:34:28):
That’s where I’ve also, which is like Chris, I found the most success when you actually spend the time to just have a conversation with a customer, you can just see their body language completely change right in front of you. They’re not standoffish. They feel comfortable now with you. And that’s all in the check-in process of how you communicate with them, setting up expectations. We went as far as designing a brochure at drop off. If it’s your first time customer, what to expect if it is your first time in the shop, if you’re a repeat customer, what do you expect from our shop? And there’s two check marks and a signature part. One check mark is that they understand we will be doing an inspection on their vehicle period of some kind. And the second checkbox is that we’ve discussed their maintenance preferences on their vehicle. What do they understand about maintenance? Do they want some education? Do they need to be educated? And what we actually do as a shop, as a maintenance shop. And when you have those conversations, now they’re expecting a really good inspection and they understand we may see some stuff that is overdue maintenance, and we are going to bring it to their attention. We’re going to advise them what our job is. We’re professional advisors.
Tom Dorsey (00:35:47):
That is brilliant. So real quick, we got a question from Carlos Torres. How many service advisors do you guys have on average? On the desk is the manager on the desk too.
Bruce Williams (00:35:58):
Okay. For me, in my shop, I have six techs and we have two service advisors and a service manager. And in our busiest months, that’s nowhere near enough. I need at least one more service advisor.
Tom Dorsey (00:36:12):
Are you moving into a production manager role?
Bruce Williams (00:36:16):
Yeah, that’s where my service manager, I guess slash production manager, that’s where he would, it’d be nice to be able to have him full time doing that and not service advising.
Tom Dorsey (00:36:26):
Yeah.
Christoph Schopfer (00:36:29):
Brittany?
Brittany Schindler (00:36:32):
Oh yeah. We have two advisors at the counter. And the cool thing with AutoVitals is I can see what’s going on the whole day. So I can see it from anyone. We’re
Tom Dorsey (00:36:39):
Always at the desk. She’s at the desk right now.
Brittany Schindler (00:36:41):
Oh. But yeah, I’ve been at the desk lately because I recently hired another advisor, but she didn’t work out then. So I’ve been at the front counter, but actually I’ve been having a lot of fun. I miss being an advisor sometimes, and then me and my she, when
Tom Dorsey (00:36:54):
You’re really good at it, like Brittany.
Brittany Schindler (00:36:56):
Yeah, it’s fun doing a little competition here with my advisor here. Oh yeah, we’ve been having tons of fun
Tom Dorsey (00:37:03):
Smoking them. Yeah. Christophe, how about you, buddy?
Christoph Schopfer (00:37:07):
We normally run two advisors, however, I lost one. So I have one right now, and she’s been with us almost 10 years. So as a manager, I’m helping her out, but I’m probably only doing 10% of the help. I’ll probably end up doing three to four Ros this week for her, but normally two too.
Tom Dorsey (00:37:33):
Yeah,
Christoph Schopfer (00:37:33):
Hoping
Tom Dorsey (00:37:34):
And advice. So Bruce, I got a question for you. So one of the things that was coming up was to say that a lot of people don’t want, so when we’re talking about staging a conversation, actually, if you could give us kind of a play by play on how you set up the staging and what does that entail for folks? So they kind of understand what we mean by staging that interaction?
Bruce Williams (00:38:02):
Staging ultimately starts after the first visit. Now you set up expectations, what you’re going to do for your customer, and then it’s at the pickup of that appointment, booking the next appointment, explaining to them how we’re going to do it, fit it into their time schedule, not ours. So what we do, I don’t know what many people do, but we book everybody for three months out on a Sunday period. So then the week prior, the service advisors were getting all our regular appointment phone calls, and they look at the Sunday a week ahead, start calling those customers and finding out what works for their time schedule, what they’re comfortable with, because nobody really knows what they’re doing three, four months out. We can all presume. And then this way, it just, again, they’re not a hundred percent committed to a time. We found great successes, backing it off to the Sunday where we’re going to call ’em and see what their week looks like so they can fit it in to their schedule.
(00:39:00):
And they already know that when they show up, we’re going to talk about all the deferred work that we already talked about at the last and whatever’s upcoming from mileage intervals, maintenance, and we’re going to talk about that. So that’s part of the staging, what I call staging anyway, setting up that conversation with them three months out. It is no surprise, no shock therapy for our customers. We like to be upfront and transparent with it so they do understand, and maybe they actually budgeted for it and saved it, or maybe they didn’t, but at least they know we talked about it. And now we’re not the bad guys by saying, you got $1,500 in overdue maintenance. What are we going to do about it? They know, and whether they save for it or not, that’s now on them. And then of course then that whole process starts over again.
(00:39:48):
From then we talk about, I had to check in a customer this morning because our front end, like Christoph said, everybody just jumped through the door at 8 0 5 and we’re like, oh, cow. So I checked in a brand new customer, explained to ’em, we’re doing a diagnostic, but had the time to explain to ’em, we’re also, we’re really a true maintenance shop and we have a maintenance system built into our point of sale, and as a new customer, would he like to be on our maintenance plan? And he said, absolutely, yes. So I explained to him what it is so that we can keep the health of his vehicle up to date, and everything’s interval from shocks, batteries, fluid services, just one click of a button, it applies it to him. So now he knows that this stuff’s going to come up in the future at the intervals.
Tom Dorsey (00:40:35):
That’s a great point. And Carlos is asking, who sets all that up? How much time do you set aside for the process?
Bruce Williams (00:40:46):
We try to get, like Christophe was saying, about 10 minutes. Once you’re knowledgeable with this process, it actually doesn’t take that long. I think my conversation with customer really only took probably three minutes to do that whole thing, write the work, order, talk to ’em while I’m writing it, just grabbing service packages, putting it on. And that’s again, the staging what’s coming in. So you’re already preset with the work order. You just have to maybe add a few other things with the initial conversation. So it really doesn’t take that long. And ultimately, even if it did take 10, 15 minutes, you can’t afford not to do it. Back in the old days activity base where we’re getting $150 an RO and pumping through 300 vehicles is just not much fun.
Tom Dorsey (00:41:32):
Exactly. Right. And that’s exactly the point is that it gives you the time to be more thorough and more engaging and more personable, and then that pays off right back. And so it’s almost like a wheel of success if you don’t do it. You’re just kind of always grinding. But if you do this thing and then you come out of your comfort zone a little bit and you train the customer, because that’s really what we’re talking about, that’s what Bruce is doing. He is training the customer. You’re taking the time to train them effectively. And then you know what? They can make up their mind if they don’t want to be in that type of shop and they just want to go into some, I’m not going to say a name because I don’t want to disparage anybody who might be in the audience, but some more of a quick serve, lower budget type of Well, that’s what the service they want.
(00:42:21):
Well, at least they know they can go there. And you’ve saved yourself a lot of heartache. Really. You dodged a bullet to be honest with you. And so when you do that, it pays for itself, I think, in multiples because now you have somebody who’s engaged with you asking questions, maybe even. And we’ve had folks on the show and we’ve had plenty of stories like this where somebody says, Hey, wait a second, what about that water pump that you were talking to me about last time I was in here? Why did you forget to tell me about that? I want to get that done. Oops. And talk about some embarrassment for a service writer when he had this thing served us up on a plate, all he had to do was mention it, but he skipped a couple spaces on his own inspection and then the customer held him into check. And I think once you get that type of interaction, you know that you are in the right space, right? You’re doing it right. But Bruce, what would you say to folks that say, you know what? I just either we’re way too swamped at the counter. I don’t have the manpower to get it done, even though, yeah, I understand. I can’t afford not to do it. I just physically I feel like I can’t do it. What advice would you give them to at least get started in some fashion with being able to stage that interaction?
Bruce Williams (00:43:38):
Well, definitely first off, partner with AutoVitals. That’s going to help you out a lot. And honestly, you have to slow down. You really got to slow down, get away from being activity based and be quality based. Give lots of value. Spend time with the customers. You put yourself in any situation, you go to a dentist, a doctor, if somebody you’re talking to doesn’t have time to discuss something with you, you’re not happy. It doesn’t matter where you’re at. We want to be in interactive with, so we understand. And really, you truly just have to slow down and build relationships because ultimately the profit margin on the other end is well worth it.
Tom Dorsey (00:44:18):
Hey Bill. Hey Bill. From a trainer’s perspective, how do you get that message across? Because that’s a scary thing. You’re asking me to slow my business down. I’m barely making my bills right now. I’ve got all these families to feed. All these people are dependent on me, but you’re asking me to really put the brakes on my revenue generation. Are you crazy?
Bill Connor (00:44:38):
So the quickest way to do it is what we call a quick win. And that is to go in and show them a huge success right off the bat by doing it, their own inspection, estimating and presenting everything. And then when they find out that they don’t have to go ahead and have the technician touch eight or 10 cars a day to make money, then all of a sudden the little light bulbs go on and they’re like, Hey, this is cool. I’m not wearing out shoes on a weekly basis. I’m saving all these steps. I’m not having to bend over rack and ReRack. So the quick win process is really the thing. And like I said, if they’ll go ahead and if they’re not bought in the first time, they go ahead and have a inspection that they recommend 8, 10, 12 things on it. The service writer estimates everything. They send it to the customer and the customer calls and they said, I looked this over. When can you have it done? Then Everybody’s a believer, right Quick.
Tom Dorsey (00:45:29):
Yeah, talk.
Bruce Williams (00:45:32):
Another thing I found great success with, instead of booking the next oil service, we’re booking next maintenance service, what’s due for maintenance. And we’ve had lots of customers that are a thousand kilometers away from their oil service, but their vehicle’s here. And it’s a really simple conversation. Why don’t we get that done early? I know you’re still a thousand kilometers or miles away, but it saves you a complete interrupted day and another trip into our shop. We can get it done now, get it early. You won’t have to worry about it now for three, four months. Because finding, like we talked about last time, the customer without their vehicle is stressful for them. No matter what the case is, we rely on our vehicles, whether it’s parked in the parking lot at work all day long, knowing it’s there makes you comfortable when it’s not there, you’re uncomfortable. So why would you not have it there two different times in a month for different services? Why don’t you just leave for the day? It’s there exactly what’s happening, and we’re actually adding oil services to other jobs now instead of the other way around.
Bill Connor (00:46:39):
So two important things he mentioned there is that no vehicle leaves without exit scheduling because every vehicle has a next service due, including if it needs to go to a crusher. That’s one thing. And the number two things is never scheduled for the next oil change scheduled for the next vehicle health inspection.
Bruce Williams (00:46:57):
That’s right, absolutely.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:47:01):
Now we are revolutionizing again, Bill,
Bill Connor (00:47:05):
That’s what we’re best at
Tom Dorsey (00:47:09):
Ways of the future, and it’s not even that hard to implement. It really is just a frame of mind, build a script around it so that you develop the muscle memory and then review, do regular reviews and role play. Introduce that role play because that’s one of the easiest things to do. You just walk through, if somebody’s not on the phone, it’s ring, ring, ring. And they’ll pick up hello, and then just go right into that conversation and just build that muscle memory and just kind of hammer away at the same topic for a week, two weeks paper, whatever it is, until you hear them automatically falling right into that messaging when they’re on the phone in a real situation. And then flip it up and then do role play on another topic and reinforce another best practice or another value proposition discussion technique. And before you know it, you’re going to just have just high caliber salespeople on the phone.
(00:48:06):
And that’s the trick is that they’re selling without selling, right? That’s when you know that you’re doing it right. It is not selling, it’s educating. And you really just taking the orders in the time that your wisdom and your knowledge, that’s what they’re relying on you for is when this stuff should be done and what timeframe, right? And that’s how we’re going to start to just build out that schedule and exit schedule then, and they fall right in line. Yep, I’ll be here. See you in two months. And it’s as simple as that. So at least get it started, right? At least go in tomorrow morning, work on that script, set up those staging intervals, get that customer education. I mean, Bruce gave you a fantastic idea to have a little pamphlet about, Hey, this type of shop, and you don’t have to just give it to the brand new people, give it to everybody. Give it to your customers you’ve had for 20 years. At least give it to them on their next pickup or drop off because they’re going to learn something. And it helps to educate that customer so that they follow into your process. And as they follow in, they follow almost like lemmings and they just nod their head at a yes a lot. Okay, let’s do that. Okay, sure. Yeah, I’ll come back that day. Oh, yeah, approved, right? And you’re in a really good spot last week, or
Christoph Schopfer (00:49:22):
Actually, yeah, one minute. Oh, sorry.
Tom Dorsey (00:49:26):
When we had Christophe on, I want to talk a little bit about the inspection process. When we had Christophe on, it was really hammering home the importance of auditing the inspections and customizing the inspection to your operation. And I can tell, matter of fact, I’ve been having some recent conversation with folks that are like, Hey, we’re doing 40 minute inspections. We think it’s broken. No, you probably need to watch christophe’s episode. That’s literally what I told him. I sent ’em the link to Christophe’s show. Why? Because it’s a brilliant point is that you need to customize that inspection with the input from your team to make it as efficient as possible and as thorough and effective as possible. Christophe, if you could give us a little rundown on what that process looked like for you as you were adopting digital inspections.
Christoph Schopfer (00:50:09):
So the first thing I did was obviously if you’re new to doing digital inspections, you obviously have a paper inspection. So what I did is I just took our paper inspection and typed in the exact steps that we had on the paper one. So it looked almost identical. And then the next thing I did is I got with the team and we tweaked it to, you obviously have your test drive. We broke it down to four things. Every shop’s different. I highly, highly do not recommend using someone else’s inspection because every shop’s different. You’ve got to make your own or you will not be as successful.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:50:53):
Can I interrupt you? I’m sorry. Sure. Why is that? Is that because the team buys into it way more quickly?
Christoph Schopfer (00:51:03):
Yeah, I would say, well, it makes it easier for the team to do it the same thing they were doing, but just on a tablet now it’s not different. They’re not doing the test drive and being like, oh, I need to check the horn. Why is it six pages back? The way we do it here is we do that first. So I went with the exact same process that we were doing it before, and then we still tweak it, don’t as much anymore. But for example, a couple weeks ago, technician was like, why do we have the wind? We have a step windshield chips. You probably all have that. He’s like, why do we have at the very end? He’s like, usually I can do that during the test drive. And I asked the other technicians and they’re like, yeah, we look at this. So we have to go back and then go back into it.
(00:51:56):
So for us, we have basically four steps, all the stuff they check on the test drive, then all the stuff we check under the hood before we lift the car, because then you have the other thing, some of the inspections in there, you’re lifting the car up and down if you want to go step by step. Whereas I tried to make it where you sweep the hood under the hood and then you lift the car halfway up. Now you check the brakes. It’s easier to check the brakes when the car’s halfway up and take the pictures, and then you lift it all the way up and then you do the underside. So it’s like this whole streamlined process that I built. And it took me, and I’ve said this on the past, AutoVitals shows that I’ve been on the digital shop talk. It’s not something that takes a day to build. It took me a week. So just initially, and then I’ve tweaked it since then. But as the implementer, and I’m sure Bruce and Brittany will agree with me, I mean, you got to sit down and make your own inspection. It’s going to take time.
(00:53:05):
It’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to make your life a lot easier. You’re going to get buy-in and your inspections are going to be quicker. And it’s just benefits are huge. So
Tom Dorsey (00:53:19):
Yeah, no, I was in a shop, well, it’s been about three months ago, but I watched this guy and he walked around the car six times before they lifted it six times I thought. So I asked him, I said, why wouldn’t you just walk around at once and then do this, this, this, and this at the front left and then the rear driver’s side, and then go here and do these things? Why wouldn’t you do it like that? And when you get to the front, you’re done. Then you could lift the vehicle. And it was like you never even thought of that because they were just going by the paper and it was causing him to walk around the car six times.
Bill Connor (00:53:54):
From a trainer’s perspective, I’m going to go ahead and recommend something a little bit different. We know that every shop is kind of an anarchist and they want things their own way, but I’m going to say, take the guided inspection that’s already done. Work with your shop to go ahead and get some feedback from them, arrange it in the order that they want it done in, and then you maybe only have to add a topic or two and things like that afterwards. So go ahead and leverage that hard work that’s already been done, rearranged the order, and then ask them, what other topics do you need added to this? Or is there something that we shouldn’t be doing in our shop and save that time and kind of exploit the hard work that’s already been done.
Brittany Schindler (00:54:34):
Yeah, we started seven years ago, so I’m not sure exactly how it was built then, but I can tell you we’ve edited over a hundred times and we still do every Friday lunch meeting. Is there anything that we need to change? Oh, yeah, add sway bar links to struts because those get replaced during strut replacement or whatever it is. We’re constantly making changes and making it better and making it faster and like, Hey, take off all this extra stuff. Just say steering, suspension’s loose. Don’t diagnose it and click, click whatever makes them faster. And they’re all about 15 minutes or less on the inspection now with an average of 18 recommendations and an average of, I don’t even know, 20 pictures or something like that.
Tom Dorsey (00:55:14):
Oh, it’s incredible.
Bill Connor (00:55:15):
That’s incredible.
Tom Dorsey (00:55:16):
Yeah, it’s incredible. Your numbers are incredible, Brittany.
Brittany Schindler (00:55:19):
Yeah, we have 100% buy-in from the technicians. That really helps too. And I think that’s what shops should focus on a lot is getting that a hundred percent buy-in from both your technicians and your advisors. And how you can really help do that too, is show them the numbers, show them the correlating numbers, more pictures, higher ARO. Those numbers go hand in hand. Show them that
Tom Dorsey (00:55:41):
In the paycheck, right? And once they realize that, they’ll go for it. It’s not like they’re resistive if you wouldn’t have ’em on your staff if they were right, they want to do the right thing, want to do the best job possible. A lot of times you just don’t have the information they just didn’t know. And if you could show it to ’em, like Brittany’s saying is go show ’em the numbers and see those correlations. They go, oh, I could do that all day. Let me get right after it. And then they’re chasing each other to the top. And then you really, you’re in the sweet spot you can just lean back, not for a long time but momentarily. Enjoy the moment.
Bill Connor (00:56:14):
And really when you think about it, until the OEM stops innovating, until the consumer stop demanding more systems and stuff on a car, the inspection sheet is going to be at a point where it’s going to be a completed dialed in tool. So that’s where I kind of disagree with Tom from earlier, but he said challenge him. So
Tom Dorsey (00:56:34):
Yeah, you’re right. I guess it never will, but what I am specifically what I was talking about there is too is that once you start to feel like it’s getting too heavy, break it into smaller segments, right? Break it into specializations because you don’t have to drill down all the way, just like what Brittany was saying, you don’t need to diagnose the steering to know that needs to be looked at, that we need to go deeper. There it is loose, there’s an issue and then you can have a specific suspension inspection where you go into all the different components that could be faulty to create that sloppy steering. And I think you’re going to be quicker and more efficient when it comes to that. And what that leads to, at least in my experience, is higher adoption rate. The technicians are much more likely to be thorough and to buy into the process.
(00:57:21):
If it’s not, they’re just rolling their eyes going, oh my gosh, we got to inspect this. This isn’t even a four wheel drive. What’s transfer case on here for? This is so stupid. I’m getting into that kind of a of mentality. Poking holes in the thing. You want it the opposite. They’re adding value. And to what Brittany’s point was is they’re bringing up very succinct improvements. And once they do that, it’s their idea they’re going to use it, right? They ask for it, now they’re using it. See, and the more that you can get ’em to do that well, the quicker that they’re going to adopt.
Bill Connor (00:57:54):
And of course from a shop owner standpoint, we want to point out that these other inspections should be pinpoint paid inspections.
Tom Dorsey (00:58:03):
Oh yeah, sure, sure. Thank you. Yes. That’s brilliant also, right? That’s another revenue stream and or you’d leverage it because I didn’t get to get in. I mean we’re already at the top of the hour and it’s staying. I want to kick myself. That’s what I’m doing right now under the table. But we didn’t get to get into, I wanted to really get into Brittany’s use of that warranty and also if you remember, if you’re a regular listener to the show, we’ve had Bruce Nation on and Bruce Nation does something very similar to where he puts this a value of course on the inspection and then says, Hey, it’s complimentary to you if you’re following this kind of plan with me, but as soon as you deviate from that plan, well then I’m going to have to charge you. And it goes right back to Bruce’s staging is setting that expectation up front because you know why?
(00:58:49):
Oh my gosh, I remember he said something about it’s going to cost me more money if I don’t do something, so I’m just better say yes to that next appointment. Simple enough, right? It’s planting that seed and putting that information in there that says, Hey, I have follow up and I’m engaged with this shop. It’s not a one and done and I have more work to do. There’s an expectation I have more work to do. And then that way every communication that comes in from you is read, responded to interpreted. You get feedback and questions, you get that opportunity to drill down and profile and get that information. And then of course you get a much higher adherence to your follow-up appointments, right? You get a lot less. No-shows.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:59:34):
I think we have to do another show just maybe in two weeks because I think we already
Tom Dorsey (00:59:41):
Had these guys on two weeks.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:59:43):
We made it fairly, we have to
Tom Dorsey (00:59:44):
Send ’em a paycheck. Uwe, you got to send ’em a paycheck. They might come back.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:59:48):
Okay, we’ll find a way.
Tom Dorsey (00:59:52):
I know we didn’t even get, man, we just scratched the surface. I got to tell you, that was a fast hour. That was one of the fastest. I thought it was brilliant. I thought there was a lot of really good salient points in there and I hope that folks in the audience tell your friends, point ’em to this. Share the link when the video comes out because this is going to help a lot of people. There was some things that we covered in here that are really the fundamentals, the cornerstones to success. And you’ve probably been fighting a self-induced headwind a lot of times and I think we had some information here that will help you to make those winds disappear and really put you on a track to like Bill says, quick wins. And that’s the key. Thank you folks enough for coming in and sharing that information and really giving us some insights. I mean, you are some brilliant operators and it’s really a great opportunity, folks to learn from you.
Brittany Schindler (01:00:44):
Thank you.
Tom Dorsey (01:00:45):
Thank you very much. Thank you, Phyllis. Thank you. Lots of good information. You’re very welcome, Phyllis. Thanks for being in the audience. We’re going to do it again next Wednesday. What do you got? Dan Garlock on from Silver Lake coming on and joining us next Wednesday. He’s a multi shop, three location owner out of the upper Midwest, out of the lakes and known him for a long time. Four locations. Yeah. Thanks we for correcting me. Known him for a long time. A great A TI shop as well. Great operator. Really looking forward. First time he’s been on the show and I kind of kicking myself for that one too, for not having Dan on earlier. I said the same thing about Brittany. Thanks a lot folks. Thank you Bill. Thank you Uwe.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:01:31):
Thank you.
Tom Dorsey (01:01:32):
We’ll see you soon. I will be bugging you about coming back on I think because we got another half to cover. Love to come back anytime. Appreciate you all. Great show. Thank you very much. Okay.