Episode Description
This week, we are tackling the adoption of processes in the shop. We’ll hone in on Digital Vehicle Inspections (DVI), and the strategies they, and other shop owners, have used to turn antiquated methods into healthy shop habits.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Save time in the shop by making time for growth and improvement
- How to maintain ARO increase after implementation
- 9 Takeaways you can implement in your shop for immediate results
Special guests:
Marc Arnold and Greg Masewic (owners of four Meineke locations in the Concord, NH area)
The 9 Takeaways straight from Marc and Greg:
- “There’s a million good reasons to send it (DVI), and 0 to not”
- “It’s just about staying the course” – be as consistent as you can
- Send it out as soon as you edit it, don’t wait on the estimate. The more they look at it before a cost is attached, the better. They sold themselves
- Guys half-committed are worse than uncommitted at all
- You can’t properly inspect a car in 6 minutes, paper or not, so commit to the better process
- Speech-to-text was the most rapidly adopted feature – start there.
- SAs are most pushed outside of their comfort zone, but time and consistency take care of hesitancies
- DVI changes the selling procedure – you’re educating, they’re buying
- It’s so much nicer to schedule the work out – bigger chunks of work, easier to plan their day, etc
Episode Transcript
*This transcript was generated using Artificial Intelligence. Errors may occur. If you notice an error, please contact [email protected].
Tom Dorsey (00:00:04):
Good morning and good afternoon. Welcome to this week’s edition of The Digital Shop Talk Radio. I’m Tom Dorsey, and today we got a great show for you. We’re going to be talking about problem. My shop just isn’t doing enough inspections and we’ve been talking about kind of changing the format a little bit on the show. And each week we’re going to take another, a specific problem and we’re going to talk about the solutions that you can take away and implement immediately in your shop to solve those challenges. And one of the biggest problems I guess, that we probably run into, at least initially when shops are just getting started is we’ve got to make some process changes. I’ve got to, gosh, this new digital inspection is just taking too long. My service advisor, he’s been kind of in the habit of running back and forth in the shop to get updates and as soon as I get the inspection, I call him up on the phone and start explaining it to him.
(00:01:11):
And the digital process is a little different and it takes some getting used to and we tend to be inconsistent in our results. And so today what we want to talk about is how do you overcome those? How do you implement those best practices into your operation? And not just kind of tell you an overview, but exactly what you need to do and how to do it. And we’ve brought on a couple of awesome shop operators to reinforce how they did it, how did they actually implement it into their shop. So long story short, let’s get cracking. First I want to introduce our expert panel of experts. As always, Uwe Kleinschmidt and Bill Connor. Welcome gentlemen.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:02:01):
Good day there everybody. Good morning. Welcome.
Tom Dorsey (00:02:05):
If I could, guys, what would you say, if you could say in a nutshell, what’s the takeaway that you want folks to get from today’s episode?
Bill Connor (00:02:17):
Uwe, why don’t you go ahead and take that one first so we’re not talking over each other. Of course.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:02:21):
Yeah, thank you. So the simplest way I would like to put it is I just because you have done inspections before, that doesn’t mean digital inspection is just the same thing. Just like when you switched from a landline phone to a smartphone, they were both phones, right? But you changed the process completely to take advantage of the smartphone the same. No, I got to
Tom Dorsey (00:02:48):
Tell you, I didn’t switch though until I ran out of the longest cord that I could find. I think I was up to a hundred foot cord with the stretch and then I went, okay, I’ll get a cell phone.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:03:03):
And now you’re just using the phone portion of it and the rest you don’t, right? Is that what you do, Tom? Exactly. You just need a flip phone. They sell those flip phones with those big buttons. Is that what you have?
Tom Dorsey (00:03:18):
Teeter bug.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:03:19):
Hey,
Tom Dorsey (00:03:22):
Don’t knock it. It’s cheap.
Bill Connor (00:03:23):
So paper inspection is where we started out years ago, then we went to digital inspections and we kind of said, okay, these have got to go ahead and be the equivalent or replacement for that. But a real true digital inspection, which we’re going to be talking about today, is what’s really required in today’s marketplace to really excite the customer, get them to open their wallet and let you start pushing money out. So we’re not talking about the average digital inspection, we’re talking about in a digital inspection that has all the elements on it for customer education. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today, is how to go ahead and actually turn the adversity of, I don’t do digital inspections into money. And as we go through here, that’s the takeaways we want people to have.
Tom Dorsey (00:04:05):
That’s a great point. That is a great point. How to put in the work and actually make it pay off for you. And so we’ve got welcoming back to the show. I’ve got a couple of great, great guests. I dunno how many shops you guys own? Four or five of them. Meineke Operators, Greg Masewic and Marc Arnold.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:04:27):
Alright guys,
Tom Dorsey (00:04:28):
Welcome gentlemen, it’s great to see you. It’s been a few months and I really appreciate you guys taking the time. I know you’re right in the middle of Hurricane ISAs and you got a lot of the other stuff on your plate. And if I could just give your perspective on you heard what Bill and Uwe are saying and kind of what the challenges are you guys really? So for folks that don’t know, Greg’s really active in MDA, the Meineke Dealers Association. It was instrumental in the very beginning when we were piloting the program and every single day this guy gets out there and helps shops understand the value. Not only did he blaze the trail with all the other guys that got started in the very beginning, but now you’re taking the time to actually help folks out and give them at least try to open their eyes to what that possibility is.
(00:05:26):
And so I can’t thank you guys enough really for what you do and what you’re got a big heart trying to help folks get those same results that you got instead of just stacking the money and saying, I got the secret sauce. You’re actually out there paying it forward. And so really appreciate. So what do you guys think? Same question to you. What would be your big takeaway that you would want to tell shops that are, I got the inspection, it’s just not paying off, my guys aren’t really doing it as much as they should and I’m kind of letting that slide because it’s just not working for me. What would you want ’em to take away today?
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:06:09):
Yeah, it’s just about staying the course, right? I think a lot of guys fear that their guys are going to completely reject this when they first introduce it. And there’s always a little bit of that, right? There’s always resistance to change. I think the bigger danger is when it’s adopted but only half adopted and we get some or no reason, everybody thinks they’re using it or says they’re using it. And again, it’s a tool to manage your business and it doesn’t replace managing your business. You still have to manage it. And just staying the course and watching those KPIs and looking at the BCP and just staying with everybody until it becomes muscle memory. If you do that consistently enough in the beginning, it gets a lot easier down the road.
Tom Dorsey (00:07:08):
And if that doesn’t work, you always got rope, right? You can just tie ’em down and wait, maybe you did that and we’ll talk about that a little bit because Greg did some. I wish we could have got Paul on too, but Greg, he’s an outside of the box thinker. I’ll just leave it at that. But let’s just jump right in kind of with the first thing I want to get started on is probably the thing that we hear the most and you guys, I’d love to get your perspective on that when you’re talking to folks about why they’re struggling or why they’re not going to continue or even not even try and it takes too long on the tablet, right? I mean you guys, have you ever heard that before? Anybody?
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:07:52):
Oh yeah. Yeah. We would argue it takes the right amount of time, right?
Tom Dorsey (00:07:57):
It takes the right amount of time. That’s great. And I’ll never forget, I was out, actually, I was at the Meineke conference one year and I was doing a breakout with honey and I’m not going to say the guy’s name. He stands up and he just starts calling us out. Oh, it takes my guys way too long. They won’t do it. This is ridiculous. Basically, and before I can get a word out of my mouth, it was Kevin Ledger gets up and he says, Hey, if it’s taking ’em too long, then they were never doing inspections the right way to begin with.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:08:23):
Exactly. That’s it. Exactly. Yeah. No, you can’t properly inspect and shake down a car in six minutes, right? It’s not possible. Right.
Tom Dorsey (00:08:36):
That’s how you get those growing breaks. They fix themselves. Oh kidding. Hurricane Ec house came and got ’em, but we’ll get ’em right back on. No worries about it. And actually U if you want to kind start us off and set up the problem and solution discussion that we’re going to be having around this just takes too long and I can’t get my guys to do it
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:09:08):
Right.
Tom Dorsey (00:09:09):
Justin, if you want to maybe bring up that infographic while we’re waiting on Greg and Marc to get back. Thank you sir.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:09:26):
So we were sitting here and laughing, right? And say, yeah, then it wasn’t the right time initially. I really think we have to go to the level of detail and say how can we help shops who really go through this right now and have the challenge that on the one end as an oh no, you want the tech to do the inspection as fast as possible because that has been the mindset for years and on the other hand it should pay off. So we really have to go in helping shop owners what are the steps to help themselves and the tech to get the right results because just making it take longer, we can check that box. We just make the inspection time longer. That’s not going to automatically turn into results. And so we have been doing this now for so long that we really think what is possible to do is setting up the inspection in a way that the tech only needs to tap a condition and take a picture if required.
(00:10:54):
That’s it. Everything else should be set up, thought out before configured and everything goes really down a consistent path. So like Marc and Greg said, it’s muscle memory and the less I deviate from the process, skip topics have a freedom to do this or that. Especially if it’s different technicians inspecting the same CO over the course of a year for example. The less problems I’m going to have, the more consistent I am and the easier it is to turn into muscle memory. We won’t be talking about this anymore in three months. It’s just part of I don’t know how to eat with fork and dive and how to tie your shoe laces if you still have shoes with laces and it just do it. And so I really want to recommend and highly encourage to build an inspection sheet, spend the time in setting it up so that everything is configured from the number of conditions which are possible per topic to the recommended canned jobs, which are going to show up on the work order for each condition with the notes the motorist is going to see.
(00:12:26):
You don’t want technicians to spend time writing out what later a service advisor either reword because it’s tech lingo or just passes it on to the motorist, just go into the inspection sheet for each condition. Define what does the first picture has to look like, what’s the caption of that picture, what’s the note? And then let the technician take exactly that picture for this condition and you can configure that throughout the whole inspection sheet. So in the end, the technician goes in, taps the condition, takes a picture, everything else is auto-populate and goes directly to the motorist. Nobody needs to approve it. It has been approved the moment when the inspection sheet has been set up.
Tom Dorsey (00:13:22):
So Bill to Uwe’s point we’re talking about, Hey, I don’t do enough inspections because it’s too much work. And how do you tell somebody that the solution to it’s too much work is to do more work is to get that following Uwe’s lead there is to say, I’m going to go in and I’m going to define now notes and specific topics and I’m going to put in some mandatory topics and I’m going to have to go in and put in some maybe comparison images and things like that. It sounds like a lot of work. How do I tell somebody who’s already thinks it’s too much work, they got to put in more work. What’s that payoff? Why would I do that?
Bill Connor (00:14:11):
So when I talk about that, I kind of like to use kind of simple math. I go ahead and say, would you train one hour today or maybe even eight hours today or 10 hours today to configure an inspection sheet
(00:14:26):
To be able to go ahead and have your technicians save five or 10 minutes to an inspection from now until the cows come home. So that’s some simple math. Will you trade this amount of time today for 10 minutes per each technician on every inspection they do from now on? And then it becomes kind of simple. And then I like to go in and actually pop up a screen there and I like to show ’em what a guided inspection looks like. We’ve been begging people for years to go ahead and do an inspection a certain way, make sure that there’s a picture on it if there’s a need, make sure there’s notes on it and so on. And so if it’s okay, I can actually go ahead and share a screen and show you a guided topic.
Tom Dorsey (00:15:02):
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Bill Connor (00:15:04):
So let’s see if we can go ahead and find a screen here. And I think that we can do this one here. And so let me know if you can see my tablet.
Tom Dorsey (00:15:12):
I sure can.
Bill Connor (00:15:13):
And so I’m going to clock in because I’m lazy and I showed up for late work today and I’m going to go and clear a bunch of this stuff out here. So I’m going to grab this little CRV here and I’m going to go ahead and tap on this topic and I’m going to come down here where it says instrument cluster and horn. I’m going to touch where it says select condition. I’m going to say the check engine lights on I’m going to hit next. You can see that it’s already filled in the notes and stuff that the technician would want to go ahead and have. So if they want to override it or add to it, that’s great, but otherwise just press next. It’s going to say, Hey, that’s what the picture should look like and now you can see what a different office looks like.
(00:15:50):
But anyways, I’m going to drag an arrow over here, press next. Now here’s my notes for my image caption. I press done and press add. Now that topic’s done and I just go right onto the next one. So when it comes to a truly guided inspection sheet, having all the elements that are on it to go ahead and actually inspire the customer and open their wallet, which is what we really want to do, we want to get authorization through education. It just makes it really simple to follow the process, go through, accept the notes, get a reference picture. So here if the technician don’t know left or right, it’s kind of easy. There’s an arrow point right to it. They go ahead and grab their picture, drag the arrow to where they want to go, press next, accept the notes. They might go and put a left or right on it, but although the picture tells a story and they’re done. So that’s really about as simple as it is. So what you’re doing to go and configure your inspection sheet properly, if you’re not using one we provided for you, basically the time you spend to configure it is going to be used over and over. And that’s the first part of it is then we can talk about, I’m going to go and release my screen. We can talk about it here a little bit when we go ahead and get over to the carry forward function.
Tom Dorsey (00:17:05):
Awesome. Yes. And that is it, right? Is that you put in that work and that exactly is what makes the work less from a text perspective and then much more likely for them to be consistent in the application. And then you have that adoption that you’re looking for. Marc and Greg, welcome back gentlemen, appreciate you making it down to the shelter and then tune in right back.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:17:36):
Tom did promise us that if we did this today, you guys would move us way up in the queue on getting that new version into our shop. So not sure where we are now, but
Tom Dorsey (00:17:46):
You’re way up in it. You’re way
(00:17:54):
Just to catch you up real quick. What we were talking about is it takes too long and Uwe kind of went over some of the, I don’t want to call ’em excuses, but some of the challenges that folks experienced and what we were talking about is set it up for success, build in your guidance into the tablet for the technicians, they do the least amount of stuff as possible. They have a really smart process around the vehicle from a workflow perspective and then they can start to get it down. I mean, I got to tell you, we learned a lot of that from you guys, right? Because you were there day one.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:18:34):
Well, and I think the last time we were on, we talked about consistency a lot and that forces consistently, you don’t have four guys putting out four different verbiage and quality levels of inspection. That’s our model. Every time that customer comes in, it’s the same thing every time. Wash, rinse, repeat over and over and over. And this just forces that. This is terrific.
Bill Connor (00:19:04):
And so the other thing is when we start talking about I don’t have enough time and things like that, then Uwe, you might want to go ahead and talk about the carry forward a little bit and maybe I can go and pop that up and show an example of that if you’d like to also.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:19:16):
Yeah, but before we go there, I really want to, those are all great features. I’m proud that we have those again. Marc and Greg, how did you change the mind of your service advisor and technicians to do what you want them to do? Was there somebody with a shotgun in the back shop?
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:19:42):
Yeah, I was going to say before or after the two by four application, and it did take a little of that from time to time. So it was every, everybody’s different. So everybody had to be motivated a little bit differently. Some guys needed the two by four. I think with us we just kind of keep picking away until they get tired of listening to us and just do what we want. And then it was really quick before they saw the benefits of doing it that way. And then from there it was easy. So the texts were making more money, the service advisors were making more money, the customers were happy. And it was just, again, it’s just about kind of not letting your foot off the gas. And again, and we in Concord, our first shop, we made a ton of mistakes onboarding and getting it rolling that fortunately we didn’t have to make any other three shops the hard way about being nervous and letting guys off the hook because they were complaining about this or that. And
(00:20:48):
The more consistent we are in the beginning, the faster it makes sense to the guys and the faster it goes. Well, go ahead. I don’t think, I’m sorry. I don’t think that the techs were ever really an issue with the inspections. For example, we had a 17 picture policy to start out with and we got techs that now are doing 34, 37, 38 pictures for inspection. I think it’s more the service advisors staying on top of them all the time and making sure that they’re doing not so much the pictures, but putting the comments in as to why it’s important, why you need this, why you need this, why this is bad. I don’t think that the advisors, I think they feel it’s more of a challenge than the text. I don’t think the text, I think that generally tends to be the case.
Tom Dorsey (00:21:46):
And you really hit the nail on the head there, Marc, is because you had a policy and a procedure in place for the text to follow. They knew what the expectations were and then I can do it. So if I’m getting inconsistent inspections and you just leave it up to me and I do whatever I think I see, in other words, I’m eyeballing it, I’m just doing it digital eyeballing, right? Really is what it is. And then instead now you’re saying, no, you got to give me the 17 or you got to give me the 20. Well now I know what I need to do and I deliver it.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:22:17):
Right?
Tom Dorsey (00:22:19):
And so you set that picture policy. What other kind of guidance did you give to those guys early that now it is that habit to Greg’s point, the muscle memory has already been established for you guys. Yeah.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:22:35):
Yeah. It was that in the tech effectiveness report, right? So again, looking at we always cabin filters, right? Looking at, okay, I’ve got four techs, they all had 25 or 30 cars this week and one of ’em recommended one cabin filter and everybody else recommended 15. So it was pretty easy to zero in on that guy and identify what he was missing. And they can’t hide from it, right? They can’t pretend that No, no, no. I do check them. Mine are just all clean, right? Well, we demand
Tom Dorsey (00:23:08):
They live on the clean side of town.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:23:11):
Oh, even the shelter doesn’t have good internet.
Tom Dorsey (00:23:17):
Well maybe they’ll unstick, but while we’re waiting on them, let’s go ahead and because I really wanted out. It was a great kind of segue into what Marc was talking about and that’s how really it takes the two, right? It’s the technician can do his part, but the service advisor needs to do his part and really be able to hold each other accountable and make sure that everything’s complete
Bill Connor (00:23:45):
Really as the captain of the ship. What they did is they actually started out good. They shared their vision of where they wanted to go with their staff and said that we’ve got no place other to go than here. We are going to go ahead and do this. Then they went ahead and said, we’re going to go ahead and make sure that everybody comes along on the journey by going ahead and measuring and then using the business control panel and some other tools that can actually, they shared a vision, told ’em what good looks like, and then along the journey they kept showing them with some quick wins that they were actually going on the right path.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:24:17):
So Bill, how do you do that? Let’s get really down and to the details. Is that a service advisor every morning briefing the text is at a shop meeting once a week where inspection results are being audited and then we go around the team and use examples and let the team look at them, the KPIs shared in, I mean there’s so many different things and I’m really looking for little nuggets our audience can take away and say, I’m going to implement that today.
Bill Connor (00:24:54):
So I actually believe in sharing all the data with the staff. So if you hiding stuff from ’em, it is not doing any good. And so I like to go ahead and have a weekly meeting to go ahead and maybe do an inspection result, audit to look and make sure the quality is there, but more importantly, when you go ahead and define the things that you’re going to work with on ’em, I really like that five minute walkthrough. If you decide with your staff, you want to go ahead and look at the inspection results to make sure you’re doing inspections, maybe the average number of recommendations and maybe that they’re sent, maybe just three things to go and key on and then review every morning, Hey, yesterday, this is what we did. Congratulations, and we still got to get this other number up. Let’s work on it.
(00:25:36):
And then when it gets solid on that, just move on to something else. But everybody in the shop should always be working on something so you can have goals for the whole entire shop. Just keep ’em simple. Whatever’s going to give you your most bang for your buck, go ahead and focus on that first. Get the low hanging fruit, knocked out it away. Build your foundation, do inspections, make sure you got recommended actions. Without that, if the technician doesn’t recommend anything, what good does it do? Make sure they’re edited and sent. Focus on a few things and move forward. But I actually like a combination of weekly meetings where you go and do an inspection audit and randomly pull up just couple inspection results and have your technicians and your service writers together ask them, Hey, tell me what we could have done better here.
(00:26:22):
And you should expect them to say, I think that maybe we could have took a better picture of that. Maybe put an error over here. Let them suggest to you what they could have done better as a group. And that’s a really effective way to conduct a group meeting and then continue on from there. But don’t go ahead and just give them a random, Hey, we need to do better inspections. Pick out a few things to go and work on them, two or three things to focus on. Meet with them five minutes every morning. If you’re an admiral or your fleet like you guys are, you’ve got multiple shops, then what you do is you dictate to your manager of that store, these are three things I want you to focus on. I want you to go ahead and review these with your staff every morning. Takes about five minutes to prepare and conduct that meeting. Tell them where they’re at from the prior day, congratulate them on what they did good and ask them what you can help on the things they didn’t and it just works. And so I’m looking for rapid continuous growth. I’m not looking at going ahead and taking onboarding of a shop or training of the staff and stretching it out three years. I want three or four months, maybe 75 days and done and move on to something else.
Tom Dorsey (00:27:31):
And that’s really, I mean that’s where those quick wins become so important. And for folks that it doesn’t matter if you’re new to digital inspections or you’ve been doing it forever. There’s a lot of stuff in this kind of, we don’t want it to seem like it’s basics. There’s some best practices that, hey, we might not even have realized our best practices when you were first going through training, right? Because as we learn and we share these solutions,
Bill Connor (00:28:01):
And so that’s good that you talked about quick wins because we want to have them wins early and often. And so in the past we actually had a webinar that actually told you, Hey, go ahead and take this exact picture on a break topic. Go ahead and mark it up a certain way and so on. So we did that in the past and we said, Hey, identify one or two topics to focus on exactly how it’s supposed to look, estimate it, send it to the customer and let them approve it. Now what we said is that works so well. Why in the hell don’t we go ahead and build the quick win information right into the guided inspection sheet? And now instead of only having one or two topics defined, every damn topic on the inspection sheet is defined with the referent image, the proper notes, proper caption. So the quick win is really the whole inspection sheet now instead of just that one or two topics.
Tom Dorsey (00:28:51):
That is a great point buddy. Real quick, because I want to move on because while Marc’s back, I only have him for I think a couple of minutes before the next wave. So I don’t want to dig in on what he was talking about from the service writer’s perspective, but I don’t want to skip over because we want to talk about how to help for folks that detects are struggling, we’ve got defining and setting those guidelines a weekly or a daily standup meeting even where you go over those metrics and their performance to goal. But there’s also some other things that you may don’t even know exist. I want to talk about that. So Bill, if you can show us a little bit about the carry forward and talk to us also about speech to text because these are two tools that if you’ve got that are thinking that it takes too long When you get this carry forward tool and they start to become more, build that muscle memory around speech to text, it really cuts down on a lot of their time and it’s going to help ’em out tremendously.
Bill Connor (00:29:57):
So let’s see if I can go ahead and get the technology to work again where we show a tablet.
Tom Dorsey (00:30:03):
I see a tablet,
Bill Connor (00:30:04):
Awesome. So I’m going to go ahead and grab another work order that I’ve been experimenting on because I want to show what the carry forward looks like. So here I’ve went ahead and pulled up an inspection that the vehicle been here before and when you first look at it, it looks like nothing has changed. But then when I go in and tap on a topic, you can see that this was inspected before and if the condition’s the same, I can just press confirm and then proceed and go on to the next topic. Now when the next topic comes up, you can see obviously I’ve got my picture in there, I got my image caption, I got my notes and so on. So if it’s in the same condition, all the technician has to do is press confirm and go on past it. If they update the condition, it is going to go and wipe it out where they can inspect it again or they could come down in here and take another picture and say, okay, I want to show the customer change over time. I’m going to go ahead and snap another picture. I can go ahead and put some notes in there that pertain to this. And this is where you’re talking about the speech to text. So I’m going to go and tap in here.
(00:31:06):
This is how you can use the speech to text to increase accuracy and improve your time and then add. So again, it’s quick, it’s efficient and
Tom Dorsey (00:31:23):
It’s intuitive, right? It helps you to understand what it is and why we’re doing these activities.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:31:34):
Yeah, our guys love speech to text. They
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:31:42):
So correct. When you introduced it, was there pushback speech to text or
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:31:48):
No? No, no. That was probably the most rapidly adopted feature of this whole thing was speech to text. They loved it.
Tom Dorsey (00:31:57):
Awesome.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:32:00):
And did you, back to when Marc talked about the service advisor changes, if I, correct me if I’m wrong, but your previous process was basically text grabbed the bag and that’s the vehicle they were working on, and then the service advisor had to figure out which ones are in the work and which ones are not and how long it takes and so on and so forth. How did that captain role of the service advisor change with the introduction of workflow and digital inspection?
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:32:44):
So I think the service advisor’s biggest pushback is that when the techs are doing the good inspections, they’re actually forced to do more work rather than look at a piece of paper and say, you know what? Yeah, let’s do the belts and let’s do the wheel bearing and forget about all this other stuff.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:33:04):
Oh, I see.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:33:06):
Now they’re kind of forced, they have to look at all this because we can see if they are looking at it or not looking at it by just going on the BCP and seeing how their inspection to estimate ratio, how that looks and the image editor, how many images they’re actually editing.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:33:34):
So in other words, the service advisor was afraid that if the tech does a consistent inspection every single time, he’s going to lose productive hours to sell.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:33:47):
Yeah, I don’t know about that. I feel like it just, for them, it feels like it’s more work for them. They have, I see
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:33:56):
More work for the service advisors because they have to go through every single image and
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:34:01):
Correct and they have to estimate all of those things. And everyone who sells anything has things they’re more comfortable selling than others gravitate to those things. And so this pushed them outside their comfort zone a lot of times and they just had to find a new comfort zone, which they eventually do. So again, if you’re newly onboarding all of this and these are some of the obstacles you’re facing, time and consistency, you’ll take care of it. They’ll get better and they’ll adopt it,
Tom Dorsey (00:34:38):
Clear plan, reinforce it, measure it, give feedback, and then it’ll happen. Right? Some are faster than others, and that’s really something that Uwe and Bill and the Turbo shops and everybody over here has been really working on is how do we help that happen? How do we put the guided that Bill showed us kind of things like the carry forward and all those other tools in there that really kind of strip down all the excuses almost and give a really clear path on how this is supposed to be done. Don’t fight. It would be really, my big takeaway is don’t fight it. I know you’ve been a shop owner for 30 years, but you haven’t been a digital shop owner for 30 years, right?
(00:35:26):
All dogs learn new tricks and don’t fight it, right? Because it’s evolved from people having success, guys like Marc and guys like Greg and everybody else telling us this is what I’m doing and this is how it’s paying off for me. And then we put out out there and get a consensus and other people can replicate that and get the same results. Well, guess what? That becomes a best practice. It’s not something we pulled out the sky, we didn’t just dream it up. It’s proven to work, don’t fight it. That would be my biggest takeaway when we’re talking about making those process changes that sometimes it’s extra work.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:36:09):
It’s what your customers want. There’s a reason why we’re not all in two big gas stations with greasy, dirty plastic chairs in a tiny waiting room anymore. That just doesn’t work, right? Your customers don’t want that. And our Concor store, which was again, store number one with Meineke, I think our ARO when we started was like 180 200 and we’re in the high fours right now, so that’s in the country. It’s just, it works. It’s awesome,
Tom Dorsey (00:36:42):
Right? It’s not just occasionally, I mean it’s boom, it’s been there. It’s the new standard, right?
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:36:50):
Yeah, yeah. Yes, it’s, yeah, it’s, yeah, art of the possible, right?
Bill Connor (00:36:57):
So this is kind of what I talk about when I talk about we don’t do just digital inspections. It’s a process and a procedure. And when done properly, you’re actually building a team culture in your shop. And that’s where the meetings come in. So that way everybody understands their piece, how they can help each other out. And if you get all the Vikings on a ship, rowing the boat in the same direction with the same amount of enthusiasm, at least you’re not going in circles anymore.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:37:23):
That’s very accurate.
Tom Dorsey (00:37:25):
Yeah. No, but hey, it worked for the Patriots. I mean, you have a plan, get
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:37:30):
The team on
Tom Dorsey (00:37:31):
Board. Everybody is pulling for the same
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:37:33):
Goal. We use their system as a comparison all the time. Yeah,
Tom Dorsey (00:37:37):
Exactly, exactly right. System of success. And then it becomes a mindset and then every morning you wake up expecting to win. Well, guess what? You win.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:37:47):
Exactly.
Tom Dorsey (00:37:48):
It works. And so you just have to have that big picture out there and then hold them accountable, hold them accountable. That’s a critical
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:37:57):
Step. And it starts, and again, and when you get that and it’s gone, it’s a great place when you get that in your shop, right? Because everybody starts now, they start holding each other accountable. And if one guy’s kind of fallen off, now the other guys are getting on him, right? It’s great when you can get to that place.
Bill Connor (00:38:19):
There’s nothing for the technician that when they do an inspection, they document it properly that they can be comfortable. The service writer estimates it and presents it to the customer, and if it doesn’t get sold today, it’s going to go out in the next reminder. That’s a beautiful full circle thing. And that again, is building a culture of everybody working together as a team.
Tom Dorsey (00:38:40):
Hey, just real quick, I want to our CEO, John Belmont’s in, and I don’t know if you guys saw what he chatted in there. He said it’s like the Patriot, like the Patriots, but without the cheating, right?
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:38:51):
Everybody’s jumping.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:38:59):
Greg, we have to come to this high point in the webinar when we want you to share the story if you are comfortable with,
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:39:13):
It’s a lot of comfortable sharing.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:39:19):
So yeah, I remember you shared that a while ago when you were in the middle of turning 1332 into a success and how your service advisor became a converted. Are you Oh
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:39:34):
Yeah, yeah.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:39:35):
Comfortable Sherry.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:39:37):
Yeah. And actually we should have had Paul on because, so when we start, so we had a manager who was running a really successful shop, one of the top shops in the country, just really, really good at what he did. And I came in with this, and of course in the beginning we were patient zero. So we were developing and the inspection sheet was changing daily and expectations were changing daily. And he fought us tooth and nail for a year. I’ve got this great thing going. You couldn’t get another car through this shop if you tried. You couldn’t get another dollar out of this shop if you tried. Why are you messing with my successful method here? Hated it. Absolutely hated it.
(00:40:30):
And I don’t really recall what the actual epiphany was, but I think it had something to do with about 600 grand being added to sales here as a result of this product and is now our greatest advocate. He’s actually our general manager now. He goes around to all the other stores and just if those guys are slacking on AutoVitals, he is all over. And I think, I can’t remember the exact day when he came to us and said, I was so wrong. This thing is amazing. I can’t imagine a day without it. I apologize for fighting you so hard. So again, if you’re starting out with this, you may have that guy hang in there. He will most likely be your biggest apostle.
Tom Dorsey (00:41:19):
That’s the way it works, is the toughest ones to crack, become the biggest kind of advocates because they were really entrenched in a position. And then to get ’em to move, they really have to be able to see the payoff to ’em, change that position. So no. Yeah, stay in the saddle, right? And again, if you have a clear goal and a clear path to get there, well then it becomes really simple to know if you’re going this way, just keep doing it. Maybe it’ll happen in a week, probably not. Maybe in a year, maybe more. It all depends on your operation and your folks. But if you’re going this way, you got to reach out, you got to talk to your advisor, you got to get on the Facebook forum. Got to, like I said, don’t fight it. Right? I know it might sound, it’s funny riding, riding a bike backwards or whatever it might be, but there’s a method to the madness. Greg couldn’t have said it any better. My numbers were here now they’re about double, and they’ve stayed that way for so long. He forgot what it was like when they were down here
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:42:29):
And just look, open your TVP and go to academy and click on the S six plus one and watch some of those videos. We still do that, right? Just because just, oh, geez, yeah, you’re right. We were doing that and now we’re not anymore and let’s get back to doing that. And sometimes they’re just good for little inspiration, right? So if you’re new and you’re struggling, get on, just watch a few of those videos and it’ll all feel like, okay, yes, there is a plan to this and it does work, and if I just stick with it, we’ll get there. And I know in our system, in the Meineke system, there are a lot of guys out there that have tablets sitting in their back office just collecting dust. You’re never going to get it off the ground if you do it that way. You got to put ’em out there and just make it the culture. This is what we do. They’re not going to help you in the back room. No, you, like we were saying, I think guys completely refusing to do it is almost not as bad a problem as guys kind of half doing it, right? You got to dive in, the system change and you, you’re changing the way you run your shop when you do this, so got to commit to it.
Tom Dorsey (00:43:43):
Yeah, if you let it get done halfway, then all that does is it proves all the excuses. It does take too long because we’re doing it halfway and we’re not following the best practices. And so it’s kind of that self-fulfilling prophecy. Why waste your time? Right? Again, establish those basics, right? Set those fundamentals in place. I mean, to your point is that pro practice tackling drills, every practice they’ve been tackling since they were Pop Warner, we still practice tackling pro golfers go out and hit buckets of balls all day. BJ saying, I mean, I remember that guy was a monster. I mean, they talk about that guy would put in 10 hours on the range.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:44:23):
I mean,
Tom Dorsey (00:44:24):
That’s dedication. And I’m not saying you got to put in 10 hours of practice every day, why somebody else already did it for you. All you got to do is hit your wagon and take advantage, draft them, draft them. They’re up there pushing it for you. And again, just don’t fight it. Let’s talk. I know we’re kind of coming to the top of the hour. Let’s talk a little bit about another, there’s another kind of common objection that we get and it’s really, it’s a critical success. If you do this part, but you don’t do this part, the whole thing turns into a mess. And that is, I don’t send them, don’t send the inspection a, whatever the excuse, we got a lot of waiters, I don’t need to send it. They’re sitting right there. I’ll just tell ’em what they need. Or I hear this one a lot.
(00:45:19):
I’m in Florida, my customers are, they don’t really like email and text. I’m not implying anything other than some people are less technologically savvy in certain areas, but again, it’s critical to deliver the information and let them, I mean that’s, that’s one of the secrets to the sauce is that you get it out there and they can review the information without pressure on their time and in their way instead of you telling them, nobody likes to be told anymore. How did you guys get that consistency at the front counter? And it starts out at preparing that inspection for publication, doing the work, which to Marc’s point earlier, is extra work and then remembering to follow through and get it to the customer’s phone. What would you guys say? What tips can you give for folks that have a lot of waiters or feel that it’s much better at explaining that stuff than anything else?
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:46:24):
I would say we still struggle with that. There’s times and there’s guys, right? So you spent all this time doing these, all these extra time that you’re taking to do these really good inspections. It’s just a waste of that time if you don’t actually send the inspection out. So it makes sense. Why would we not send it, right? We’ve got it set up in our TVP, right? So that when a vehicle hits the waiting for approval workflow step, it automatically sends it out. That covers half of the issue. Then it’s just about making sure that guys put cars through the right steps in the TVP, but having it go automatically, you’re crazy not to send it, right? The waiters, our waiting rooms are full of people staring at their cell phones, looking at the inspection report we just sent them, and by the time my guys got it estimated up and goes to talk about it, they’ve got it. They know the next question is how much and how long is it going to take? So again, he doesn’t have to sell. And that’s the biggest piece of this is it takes, it changes that selling procedure, right? It is more educating and they’re buying, right? And you, you’re not out there trying to shove stuff down people’s throats. You’re not selling.
(00:47:53):
You’d be amazed at what a shift in dynamic that is in your waiting room. So the more waiters,
Tom Dorsey (00:48:00):
The better.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:48:01):
Nothing like a room full of waiters scrolling through their phones and looking at their reports. It’s awesome.
Bill Connor (00:48:06):
So there’s another advantage to the waiter going through it on their own device right now. That is when they get up in your face, you got less time of them breathing on you. So that can become real important. So a lot of shops don’t want waiters at all anymore, but ’em,
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:48:20):
We don’t want ’em either. We just get ’em,
Bill Connor (00:48:24):
Like I said, if they breathe on their own time and you’ve got limited exposure, you’ve got plexiglass and so on, that just reduces risk for one. The other thing is, is that I don’t care if the customer is a waiter or not, I’m sending it to ’em because if they forget what I say and go out and kill somebody, I’ve got a document with a date and timestamp on saying that they were notified and that can remove you from the litigation that will result, period. Every time.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:48:50):
I’m just say, I’m just not that organized. If I’m having to figure out, sometimes I send it under this condition or maybe I don’t send it under this condition and this guy if I have to just do the same thing all the time, just the way I’m wired. So just send it all the time. That’s simple.
Tom Dorsey (00:49:09):
Hailey,
Bill Connor (00:49:10):
The other thing, if you can verify that their phone receives it, that’s great. Because if you own that spot on their phone, have them go in and add that digital phone number as a contact. I want to own that spot on the phone. I don’t care about the upper left corner of the windshield anymore. I want to own their phone.
Tom Dorsey (00:49:26):
Great point, Bill.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:49:28):
Exactly. There’s a million good reasons to send it. And there’s zero to nine, right?
Tom Dorsey (00:49:37):
Well, and you got to look at it again, put yourself in your tech shoes and if you’re struggling to get techs consistently, well, that’s again, one of the reasons if you ain’t sending it out, what am I going to do it for? Or I’m just not getting the payoff. I’m not getting these. This should have been an easy sell, but you didn’t,
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:49:54):
Yeah, and we’ve actually had techs, right? We’ve brought in a new service advisor who wasn’t drinking the Kool-Aid, and we’ve had techs getting ticked to those guys. I’m doing these great inspections. That guy’s not even sending them to people. So that gets back to that culture thing we were talking about before. Keep each other on us.
Tom Dorsey (00:50:15):
They’re honest. That’s right. Yeah, that’s critical. So Marc, how many times, especially initially, maybe you weren’t a Kool-Aid drinker yet, how many basic service tickets did you write up and then hit that send and the waiter’s over there and then all of a sudden it’s a $750 ticket? Oh,
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:50:35):
Yeah.
Tom Dorsey (00:50:36):
Does that ever happen? It could happen daily
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:50:39):
Happens. A lot happens. It happens all the time
Tom Dorsey (00:50:42):
Daily. And that’s really the key is jet to the phone. I was just talking with a guy the other day, said same type of thing was they went through and this guy was admitting I kind of dropped the ball here. I was busy. I didn’t really set him up. I sent it late kind of at pickup. I remembered, oh, shoot, boom. On the phone, on the phone, on the ride home. Hey, about this.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:51:06):
I
Tom Dorsey (00:51:07):
Get back in tomorrow.
(00:51:11):
Just don’t prejudge ’em. Get it out there early as you can because there’s even shops out there that’ll send it on kind of first draft and then send a second kind of edit as it gets completed and just keep ’em right away in the loop and engaged with those recommendations and giving ’em those options. Because if you do that right, matter of fact, you get you everything. You’re going to get everything. You might not get it all today, but then it’s like, Hey, my plan is let’s get this done and then let’s come back and let’s get these things. Which ones can I defer? And then you’ve got the exit schedule. You just have to remember to confirm it and they show up. That’s the Well,
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:51:53):
And that’s a great point, right? Because a lot of service advisors fear is this car is scheduled here for whatever, for an oil change. And I’ve kind of in my head allotted a half hour and now we found five hours worth of work. The car needs. My God, how might I be able to get all that done? And again, if you’re doing it like you should be doing anyway, prioritizing the safety concern with maintenance type things, it’s so much nicer when you can schedule that workout. Your days are more consistent. You don’t have slow days followed by slam days, followed by dead days. You’re just constantly feeding that pipeline because you’ve got this bulk of work that you can now help a customer do on their time. And when it’s good for everybody’s schedule and everything just gets better when you can do that. Right?
(00:52:47):
Also, I think that service advisors often times think that they need to have that estimate ready before they send the inspection report out. Because if the customer calls, they want to be able to give ’em the estimate right away. But I think really the better way is you send that out once you’re done editing it, just send it out. You’ll see the customer start to look at it. The phone will ring, they’ll call you won’t have an estimate ready, which is great because you can just say, Hey, look, I was getting ready to call you, give me another five or 10 minutes. You hang up with them, you watch the clock start ticking again. They’re looking at it some more, right? They’re starting to figure it out and look at it. And then when you call ’em with the estimate, they pretty much know everything at that point. And you’re just having a conversation about what’s it going to cost and when can you get it done? Yeah,
Tom Dorsey (00:53:33):
My question.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:53:34):
So I think sending it out, as soon as you edit it, just send the thing out. Take your time. Right? In the estimate, that takes the pressure off the surface advisor, right? They don’t have to spend, they’re not hurrying up trying to get an estimate ready. They can take their time and do that. And it’s better because the more they look at it, the more engaged they are, the more they’re going to buy.
Tom Dorsey (00:53:56):
Yes, exactly. And again, it might not be today, but they’re going to buy, they’re, they’re going to get it done because they understand it. And they came to that. That’s the real trick. They came to the conclusion. You didn’t twist their arm to make that decision. They came to that conclusion. They’re in charge of the process and of how they’re going to transact with you. It’s like, I’m on Amazon, right? I’m in the driver’s seat. I figure out what I want to add to cart. You ain’t going to tell me. But I mean, and that’s really, if you think about it, those are two very simple things to implement in your shop that are highly repeatable, easy to adopt, and you can measure them. I can measure the number of pictures and the number of recommendations that my technicians are putting in there. I can measure, like you said, the sales to estimate rate and the picture edit rate and the scent rate.
(00:54:56):
I can measure those and I can tell somebody exactly where they should be. And then it’s just the weekly meeting to reinforce it and maybe make some stuff a little public. If you’ve got somebody dragging their feet, it’s not a bad idea to nudge ’em a little bit by saying, well, here’s how the guy next to you is doing, figure it up. And nobody wants to get called out and that way, and then they’re going to, like you said, teamwork makes the dream work actually. And another great nugget is just stay the course. Just stay the course because these are two guys that did it. Right? And I mean, I got to tell you, if you’re new to the program today, you have no idea what it was like when these guys got started. We didn’t know what was up or down. Our training was. Well, I think the power button’s on the side of the tablet,
Bill Connor (00:55:47):
And that’s a great point. We’re not in the early adopter phase of the digital inspection process anymore. I mean, those guys, they came first as an industry. We’re shifting from a repair business to a business that we realize it’s our job to deliver a safe, comfortable, and dependable vehicle. Give the customer the information and let them decide. As long as we adopt that mindset and we’re encouraging them to authorize based on education we provide, not somebody else, you’re going to win every time.
Tom Dorsey (00:56:18):
Yeah.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:56:19):
Yes.
Tom Dorsey (00:56:19):
Hey man, brother,
Bill Connor (00:56:22):
I
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:56:22):
Would love to because we really have four minutes left and we want to be on time. So Dustin prepared basically the summaries from Greg and Marc and we really would like to share them. And so everybody can take away what’s important for implementation. And so there are a lot, right? I like there’s a million good reasons to send it and zero to not the most. It’s a very simple instruction. Everybody can implement that, right? There’s not much thinking to do about that. But Greg and Marc, what do you think are the top three?
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:57:19):
I would agree with you on that. There’s a million good reasons to send it. Yeah. Stay the course. Yeah, stay the course and send it as soon as you edit it, I think is don’t wait, just get it out there and let’s make it for the half committed as opposed to not committed at all. I half committed is a very dangerous place to be.
Tom Dorsey (00:57:39):
Yeah, that is.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:57:40):
And how do you know whether you’re just half committed? Is it a feeding or do you see it in the numbers? You
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:57:44):
Can see it in the numbers. You can see it in inspection sent. You can see it in the technician effectiveness. You can see it in pictures edited. You can see it in motors. Research time. Yes. Right.
Tom Dorsey (00:57:59):
High inspection rate, low motorist research time.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (00:58:02):
Right.
Tom Dorsey (00:58:04):
That right there is telling you you’re about to run into the wall because your techs are doing it. Your service writer isn’t right. That’s right. That’s brilliant guys. Make sure you in the audience write that stuff down. Those are words to live by. And for the specifics, because Marc was talking about, and this is a critical thing, is sending the inspection sheet automatically, then you take it out of the hands. It’s not a decision that the service writer has to do anymore. Then he’s got to follow the process and he’s got to move that vehicle into the next stage. And that’s what triggers that automation. Two things have to happen. You got to have it set up and your advisor’s going to help you there. So contact your AutoVitals advisor. They will help you to get that set up and prepared. Now, it’s not one of those things you want to just turn on and go, okay, great.
(00:58:48):
Because why? The second thing that has to happen is you have to have the inspection ready to be sent before you move the vehicle. And so if you’re in the habit of sporadically moving vehicles or just moving ’em around kind of willy-nilly, however you feel like stacking ’em at any minute of the day, you’re going to run into some issues because it’s going to trigger, some automations may not be ready yet. So it’s pretty simple process change step before inspection sent stage, I do my edits. In other words, I go through my publishing, kind of editing and preparing of that inspection sheet before I move that vehicle into that stage. So get with your advisor, get that set up, because again, it takes lot of the pressure off it grows, the consistency, the muscle memory becomes proper use of the workflow, and that’s a good muscle memory to establish. And then if you wanted to, you could always turn it off, but most people won’t, right? Because it becomes A, that habit and A and B, when you’re doing it, it’s done right? And why wouldn’t you have an automation at that point? But if you got to tease ’em into it, you could say, well, we’re going to have it on for a short period of time until you guys get it down, then we’ll turn it off and then just never turn it off. That would be my other takeaway.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (01:00:04):
Yeah. I mean, we like to think we’re pretty good and we’re never going to turn it off, right?
Tom Dorsey (01:00:09):
Yeah, exactly. And the guided, and as you see, when you guys get onto the guided and the new TDPX, it’s the same type of thing. You’re thinking, I don’t need this stuff. I’m going to do it forever. I don’t need trading wheels. Oh my gosh, I’m so much more effective and consistent and faster at doing the inspections. Why would I ever turn it off? Guys, thank you enough for coming. Look forward already to seeing you on the next one.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (01:00:33):
Yeah, it’s great to see you guys.
Tom Dorsey (01:00:35):
Yeah, buddy. I’m glad you guys are doing good. I’m glad you’re dry. I’m glad you’re busy coming out of this terrible kind of season. You remember, man, at the conference, it doesn’t feel so long ago when we were saying, make more money in 2020, and then it’s like, we got N, but now it’s
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (01:00:52):
Just get through 2020.
Tom Dorsey (01:00:55):
Let’s get through 2020. Actually, you know what though? You guys were set up, you do it right and you found a way to make more money in 2020 regardless, and that’s what this partnership will do for you. Just don’t fight it. Stay the course.
Greg Masewic & Marc Arnold (01:01:11):
Yeah, yeah. No, you’re right. We’ve been fortunate, right? I think this has played a big role in us not being down in 2020, right?
Tom Dorsey (01:01:22):
A hundred percent. So no excuses folks. Get her done. We’re here to help. Post it up on Facebook. Get [email protected]/dstr so you get the notifications and you don’t miss episodes like this that are really going to help you solve some problems and be a better shop owner. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks again, Marc and Greg, Bill and Uwe. Appreciate it was a great show. Thank you. Hey, guys like you. Oh, next week, John Long, Adam Ick, and Scott Thorley from Protractor. We’re going to be talking specific Protractor solutions next weekend and kind of open your eyes to some process things that you probably can’t do with your current setup. Tune in next week, same time, same place. Thanks a lot.