Your Advisors Aren't Selling Maintenance — Here's Why

The prophet of profit 0:00

[Steve Shaw] We are back again, pushing that hundred, Dave. Pushing one hundred. It's going to happen anytime now.

Dave Rogers: Anytime. Feeling old, man. We're going to hit the century mark. That's crazy.

Steve Shaw: Going to hit that century mark. In your old age of podcasting, you've become quite the philosopher slash, what do you call it when somebody predicts things? The prophet. You are the prophet of profit. You've made some predictions that are coming true. Why don't you tell us about those?

Dave Rogers: It's funny you say that. Jamie didn't like "prophet." He said I'd get a John Lennon thing and people would hate me. But I've said it a few times, I've been saying it for a while: we've been chasing people away from the dealership for twenty years-ish with these maintenance minders and one-year maintenance and stuff. And anybody with any common sense wasn't going to listen to us. Here's my example. Steve, you bring your car in, and you've got my twenty-five-year-old kid in the express drive-through. You've got five thousand miles on whatever brand, doesn't matter. Let's say Toyota, because I don't have a Toyota store. You bring your car in and want your oil change, and they're telling you no. "You don't get it done until one year, ten thousand miles." Or you have free maintenance through the manufacturer, like Hyundai and Honda had, two years of free maintenance: "No, you're not due for it yet. The light's not on," this, that and the other thing. So I've been saying for a while that these customers are leaving. You're not going to tell me no. I know better.

Turned away at 5,000 miles, gone for 12 years 1:43

[Dave Rogers] I have a car. I'm an older guy. If you're over thirty or forty years old, you know you don't go a year without changing the oil in your car, right? So I've been saying this all along. And I was talking to a neighbor of mine over the weekend. His son bought a 2014 Toyota 4Runner or something like that. It was his first new car, and he was all excited. His father told him, "Bring it in every 5,000 miles for the oil changes." And Toyota had the free maintenance at 10, 20, whatever. I think it's 24,000 miles they get free maintenance for. So he brings it into the local Toyota store here in Pennsylvania and goes to express, because all he needs is an oil change and a tire rotation. And the advisor says no.

And he goes, "What do you mean, no? I want to change the oil." And they go, "No. You get a free one at ten." He goes, "But I want to do it now, at five. My father's been a mechanic for forty years, and he says I should change the oil at 5,000 miles and rotate the tires." And of course, the young express advisor has got to fight to be right, and I'm sure he was trained properly, right? I'm sure the training was in depth. He doesn't offer him a scenario, doesn't say "you could pay for it," doesn't say anything. Just says no. So the kid goes outside, calls his father and says, "Hey, Dad, what do I do? They won't change the oil." And his father goes, "Just bring the fucking thing home and I'll change it in the driveway."

This is twelve years later, and this guy has never been back to a Toyota dealership since, right? And when I was telling you that 50% of the Honda customers in this region have not been back to the dealerships in ten years, I said the same thing: this is the reason why. We're telling people we're not going to change their oil until the light comes on, and they're going, "Screw you. Jiffy Lube's going to change my oil. Firestone's going to change my oil. The gas station, or my father, is going to change the oil." And guess what? Those people have never been back. And it's all for what? Because we drank the Kool-Aid.

0W-20, 5W-30 and what suits the manufacturer 3:31

[Dave Rogers] And this is the other killer. I won't even mention the manufacturer. This is a great one too. They've been putting 0W-20 oil in these cars for how long? I think Toyota started in '05, right in there. They do it for gas mileage. We know why: for the EPA, right? It actually equates to about 0.8 miles per gallon, so they can meet all the CAFE requirements across their broad car line. I get why they do it. But they've never said anything about a replacement oil you can use in the car. Some of the manufacturers say you can use an equivalent, or a recommended replacement, but they never get into the details about what kind of oil.

So there's one manufacturer, today, because you can't get 0W-20 right now. The refineries that make it are only in the Middle East, and they got bombarded by Iran, which destroyed the production facility. So guess what? You can use 5W-30 now. After all these years, 5W-30.

Steve Shaw: How about that?

Dave Rogers: But only if it's their oil. It has to be their approved oil. But 5W-30 is now a suitable substitute for 0W-20, which it's always been. A little thicker, a little bit nicer, a little better with heat, a little less thin. Geez, imagine that. Now it's good, because it's convenient for the goddamn manufacturer. That's why. Because they can't get it. And this is the part everybody has to remember: it's convenient for the manufacturer. That doesn't mean it's good for the customer. Because I'm telling you, the customer is not stupid.

Even if somebody's twenty years old, they have a father who's forty-five, fifty, and a grandfather who's eighty. "I bought a new car. When do I get the oil changed, Dad?" "Make sure you change the oil, make sure you rotate the tires." "When do I do that?" "Every 5,000 miles." "Well, I brought it to the Honda store and they said the light's not on, so they're not going to do it." "Let's go see Bobby down the street," right? That's what's been happening. People don't want to admit it, but that's what's been freaking happening with these customers. And now I have a person who will swear to it, and I'm going to get his testimonial on tape.

Fighting the advisor to buy what you want 5:38

[Steve Shaw] Let's get him on the show. The same thing happened to Brian. Just ignorance. I'm not in the drive as much as I used to be, and I'm not traveling store to store as much as I used to, but I would go through the same thing with my Wrangler. I would say, "Go ahead and give me the full synthetic oil change. Give me the tire rotation and the balance. Give me the alignment." I'd always ask for extra, and if somebody offered me something, I would buy it. But I always used to have to fight service advisors to get the rotation and the balance, right? I'd have to fight them to get a set of wipers. "Well, you don't need that right now." Well, I want it, right? Why can't I buy what I want?

I want to say it's ignorance on the part of the service advisor, but what do they know, right? The advisor only knows what we teach him. So that goes back to our other conversation: who taught him? Who taught the manager? Who taught the advisor? Where is it written down? It's not anywhere, right? We stopped writing that shit down in 1999. There hasn't been another process improvement meeting at 99% of dealers since 1999, because the Ford Motor Company or Toyota or whatever Excel 2000 program you were following ended. The money dried up, it ended, so we don't have to do that anymore. Thank goodness, right? That's how it went.

Dave Rogers: Five Star, Blue Oval, Toyota Signature, Honda Excel. They all just kind of went away, right? All of them.

Steve Shaw: The fad ended.

Tires: from aggravation to retention tool 7:13

[Dave Rogers] A lot of it starts with the manufacturer. I think ChatGPT said it best when I was asking about oil change intervals one day with one of my GMs. It said, "Don't believe the marketing from the OEM." That's what it said. Quote-unquote marketing. And not to bore you with history, but let's say that in the year 2000 the car business had been around for a hundred, a hundred and twenty-five years. I think the first dealership was in the 1880s or 1890s. But let's just say a hundred years. For a hundred years, if you tried to warranty a tire, the car manufacturers would explode, right?

If you read the service policy and procedure manual, I don't care which one it was, it would say that if Steve brought his brand new Grand Wagoneer into my store with a bubble in a tire, the first option was for me to see what kind of tire it was and send you to that tire store. That is verbatim what was in the policy and procedure manual. The second option, if the vehicle wasn't supposed to be driven, was that I could take the tire off as the dealer and run it down to Firestone or Bridgestone and get them to warranty it. The third option, the least desirable in the book, was that I could do the work in my store and cost out the tire. I had to sell it at cost, and I could do it as goodwill, with pre-approval from the rep. Pre-approval.

So this is what the manufacturers had been telling us for a hundred years, right? Then all of a sudden, in 2000, Toyota wakes up and goes, "You know, we should sell tires. There's this new company out there, Dealer Tire. They're going to give us some money at the factory. If we put these tires in the stores and they sell tires, we get a vig. We should start selling tires." And what do they come out with a couple of years later? "Tires are the key to retention." It's a retention tool. But for a hundred fucking years, it was aggravation. It was garbage. Again, people listen to the factory, and it's just whatever is good for them at that given moment. Now that they have some skin in the game on tires, guess what? You can warranty tires. It's still goodwill, you still do it at cost, but at least you can do it at the dealership without a hassle. I laugh at these things, because it just goes on and on and on. But I can't stop laughing about today: "Now you can use 5W-30, because we can't get 0W-20." I'm like, okay.

Steve Shaw: It does crack me up, right? And we can bag on those guys all day long. The manufacturer drives that message to the consumer, through the propaganda for buying the car. And then there's our side of it, where we support that, right? Or our service advisors picked up the propaganda in one class they went to, or something like that. And I'm going to go back to it: it's got to fall back on us, because we're the ones in charge of retention, right? I'm loyal to the manufacturer's brand, but I should be retained by the dealership. It has to become our job.

And look, if the general manager is going to push that off onto the service manager, okay. Then the service manager's got to get the correct information, right? There's a disconnect somewhere along the line. I can't put my finger on who's actually to blame, other than the name on the sign. But we have to take the responsibility, as you've so eloquently said: "This is how we are going to do it in our world." Forget about everybody else. "My set of Hondas are going to get serviced at X," right? And then we have to monitor that, track that, and make sure we have all of those things in place, so we know what we're getting and we know our customers do come back.

If the manufacturer says come back once a year for an oil change, or every six months, then we need to hold ourselves to a standard: "I want to see X, Y and Z customers every six months." I know a particular Kia store I call on that sells five, six hundred cars, and in their marketing area their customer pay RO count is going down. Why? Because they raised their labor rate through the roof and started to focus on engines, and they said, "Well, we're not going to live on maintenance anymore." So the customers went away. I would love to blame that on the auto manufacturer, but that's that specific dealership, and that's their fault, right? So there's a disconnect between what's right and what's right.

Recalls and the path of least resistance 11:48

[Dave Rogers] I think for me the biggest carve-out between the two is laziness, and people just taking the path of least resistance and doing the easy thing, right? Ten years ago you had the Takata recall. Mass panic out in the world, right? The manufacturers are beating the dealerships up: "Get these cars in, get them in. It's only a half hour. Get them in, get them in." So now you're filling your whole day with Takata recalls, thirty minutes supposedly, in and out. You're not even checking the cars out. You're barely doing a multi-point. And guess what? You don't have time for your normal customers to come in and get the goddamn oil change, and what do they do? They go somewhere else, right?

Now, is it our fault that we allowed that to happen? Because we got bullied by the reps, and nobody had the guts to stand up to these guys and stick up for the business. We just took the path of least resistance, and that's never the way to do it. Anybody who's ever accomplished anything great has never taken the easy path, right? It just doesn't work that way. But that's what we do. Again, I'm not saying the manufacturers are a hundred percent to blame. But they trigger this action, and we keep falling for it like idiots. That's what we keep doing, right?

There was a period in my career, I'd say in the eighties and nineties, when you used to hear customers say this out of their mouths: "My father and my grandfather told me only to bring my car back to the dealership for warranty work. That's the only time I'll come back to the dealership." You were in a Ford store, and that's what you guys lived on, right? I was in a Chevy store, and then Chrysler. People would say, "I was told only to bring my car back for warranty." That's what people thought car dealerships were good for, right? It's taken a long time for us to get past that. It was the normal way of doing business.

So now we get past that, and we should be doing the maintenance, doing this stuff, doing the tires, right? You want to argue with me about when you should change the oil? Well, every tire manufacturer says to rotate the tires every six months, six thousand miles. So even if you don't want to change the goddamn oil at six months, bring the car back to get a tire rotation, right? Do something. Check the car out, look at the suspension, make sure there's nothing wrong. But like I said, when we get these little slivers of garbage from the manufacturer, or from the public, or from the press, or NHTSA on a recall, we don't even stick up and try to do it the right way. We just follow along. We're like sheep too. We're just as bad. That's what we are. Just a bunch of sheep.

Train them, even if they leave 14:37

[Steve Shaw] Well, I look out there in the world, and I've gotten to see hundreds, if not thousands, of stores in my career. And I could count on two hands the progressive, innovative people who are really out there making a difference. I listened to you talk to the gentleman in Indiana, right? He's built a school, he's doing it his way, he wrote his own manual, and he's going out and teaching people his way. And I'm like, kudos to you, bro. Kudos to you for going out there and making that shit happen, right? There's a handful of other guys out there doing it. But most everybody else, you're right, is just following the lead: "I'm collecting a check, and I'm going to ride this out as long as I possibly can."

And if you keep following that back, and I've been researching like a madman recently: who did we hire? We hired a guy as a porter and didn't train him. When he moved up to advisor, we didn't train him then. Then we made him a service director, and who the hell knows what he's doing? He has no idea. Like I told you in the last couple of episodes, they're just drinking out of a fire hose, and the dealers know it. So we hired the wrong person, is where I'm going, right? We hired the wrong guy, and that guy doesn't care. He's going to ride it out. The average service manager right now has less than a six-year tenure at new car dealerships, right?

And most dealers will say, "Well, I'm not going to train him, because he'll probably leave me. I'm not going to train my advisors, because they're probably going to leave me." I think most people credit Henry Ford with saying it: if you train your people and they leave, great. But if you don't train your people and they stay, now what do you have? I think that's the biggest statement you can make. What do I have? A shop full of untrained people. And then I go out and try to recruit and hire people from outside my business because I think they're better? Where? Where are they any better than the people right inside your own store right now, who we're just ignoring? That's the criminal part.

Dave Rogers: I said the other day, most of us barely graduated high school, and you can make a living doing this. It's one of the best-kept secrets out there, right? But I guess that's the downside right there: we're a bunch of idiots too. Maybe we need a few more college graduates in here. But you're right. Listen, in the old-school car business, you'd leave a manager in place for five years, because then the place would level off, and you'd fire him and bring somebody else in, and it would go back up. It would look like a ladder, right? And they used to do that on purpose. They'd move people around. There are a lot of dealerships that still do it. They move people around every five years. Some manufacturers move the reps around every eighteen months for the same reason. So there is an old school out there that thinks that way. But we don't do a good job training.

William, the guy at Tom Wood, is awesome. Like I said, I want an autographed edition of his book. I've got to get that book somewhere along the line. He should put it on Amazon. He's got one for the writers, one for the technicians and one for managers, I think he said. So kudos to him, right? And then he got his owner to put half a million dollars into a school, a training facility, and he's in the high schools. I was out in Indianapolis last year. Next time I go to the race, I'm going to spin by his store.

Steve Shaw: Well, that's a guy who should be held in high regard, saying this is the right way to do it, right? I know there are other stores. There are a couple of big auto groups I work with that have their schools, and they do a great job. They're out there. But that's not the majority, right? We need to be putting people out there, like the car guy did, saying, "These guys are awesome. These are the people we should model ourselves after." The manufacturers should be putting those guys out there as the model, right? Instead of giving rebates on dumbass shit. Instead of paying you to have video software in your store, why don't they pay you to have a school to train people? There are all kinds of ways to spend that money a lot better.

Dave Rogers: It's true. I guess the full circle of the whole thing is that you have to be holistic when you're looking at this, right? Like I said, I harp on the maintenance, and I harp on the fact that we drank the Kool-Aid. I'm only one person harping on this. I'm sure there are hundreds or thousands more just like me out there. We're little voices getting drowned out. But if you're not going to stand up for what you think is right, and you're not going to look out for the whole dealership, and you're not going to coach and train for it, you have a good point. You can blame us, and it's valid. We do take the path of least resistance as an industry. I just don't understand why we do it. That's what drives me crazy, I guess, is the real thing of it.

Steve Shaw: Listen, we all make a big fat check every month, right? And we want to make as much money as humanly possible. And it really has to come from our dealer, for one. There's a handful of guys doing a great job, but our dealer is getting the message from the auto manufacturer as well: move the metal, sell the car, sell the car, sell the car, right? Get the customers in, turn them around. So the message is coming down wrong, and the dealer's interpreting it, and the dealer obviously invested a ton of his money as well. So there's an expectation: "If I'm going to spend this kind of money, I should get a return," right? Nobody's questioning that.

But I just think sometimes our direction is off. We're missing the mark, right? Years ago I wrote an article where I used a foul ball as the example. Foul by inches. I think in some cases that's where we are, just on the wrong side of it. Not that far off. But if we could just steer this big ship a little bit to the other side, what could we do?

GM tip: the owner is number one 21:03

[Dave Rogers] Well, I'll roll this into the GM tip of the day. I used to say all the time that the owner, the guy who signs your check, he or she, whoever it is, has to be your first priority. Number one, right? The manufacturer, you need the franchise to sell a car, but that's not number one. It's one A. And I think too many times in the past we've listened to one A instead of one. Maybe sometimes it's because number one doesn't tell us what he wants. Maybe number one doesn't know. Maybe number one is just a business person who plunked down ten or fifteen million dollars and wants a return on the investment, and that's all they want.

But at some point the owner of the dealership, their way of doing things, their culture, their business, has to be the priority, no matter what the manufacturer says. And I think you have to be a student of the game. You have to go out there and look and research, and you can't just be lazy and follow the path of least resistance. That's where my biggest aggravation comes in: people just go, "That sounds easier, let me just do it that way." So you've got to look out for the owner, and the way to do it is not always to follow the manufacturer, because they've been bullshitting us for a hundred years. A hundred and twenty-six now. Are you going to keep falling for the same shit over and over again?

Steve Shaw: That is a good GM tip of the day. Well, we better get out of here. I think we've pissed everybody off, from the manufacturer to our dealers to the people who work for us.

Dave Rogers: Yep, pretty much. Anyway, I'll talk to you later, bro. Have a good one.

Steve Shaw: I'll talk to you later.