Appointments vs Walk Ins

A pedicure and an appointment nobody wrote down 0:00

Steve Shaw: Dave, welcome, welcome, welcome. It's good to see you again. What's on your mind? How you doing?

Dave Rogers: Well, I'm going to deviate from normal and tell you that it was 74 degrees today and sunny. 74 degrees, two days in a row. So I'm in a great mood. I think everybody's in a great mood. You ride around and see everybody outside, like they came out of hibernation for the last two months. Other than that, just back to the grind. It's a new month, the 10th day of the month as we're recording, and I'm just trying to have fun and figure out if the spring season is going to bring more business.

Steve Shaw: Yes. Is Punxsutawney Phil going to see his shadow, or however that works? Isn't he up there by you?

Dave Rogers: Yeah, that was February 2nd, I guess. I think the little shit didn't see it. I don't know what that means, but I don't think he saw it.

Steve Shaw: Well, I'm in Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil, and we're on the opposite seasons. Right now we're leaving summer and going into fall, so it's closer to the 80s and 90s where I'm at. It's absolutely wonderful. I hate to rub that in.

Dave Rogers: Thanks. You do it every day anyway, so what's the difference? One of these days you'll be in Nova Scotia or something and it'll be cold.

Steve Shaw: Hey, when I get back, I have to go to Sheboygan, Wisconsin. I'm sure there are only one or two days of summer in Wisconsin anyway, so I'm sure it'll be cold. I'll be there on a Tuesday, so we can have a conversation.

Dave Rogers: I'm going to get Damon to hire you in the winter up in Canada. That's what we're going to do.

Steve Shaw: I had a buddy who worked up at White Bear Lake, up by Minneapolis, and for some reason he always wanted me to come up in March. I said, "Look, bro, I'm happy to come up, but my price goes up when the temperature goes down."

Dave Rogers: So what's on your mind today, Steven?

Steve Shaw: Well, I did go on vacation, and I shouldn't let the cat out of the bag, but I had a pedicure recently. It's a creature comfort. Get a little mani, get a little pedi. I don't get my nails colored, and I don't even get the clear coat. I don't like the feeling of the clear coat on your nails. But we live in the heat and walk on the beach, so it's nice to have your feet taken care of. And I had a doctor tell me, because I run marathons, "You have superior feet." So I make sure I keep my superior feet in shape.

And I'm sitting there thinking, this is car dealership 101. There's a place in Port Richey, the Port Richey Mall, and there's a big sign on it that says something like "Hang in there, because if the Port Richey Mall can make it, you can too." There are literally like two shops in the place, and one of them is a Vietnamese place where they do pedicures. So I'm in there getting a pedicure, and right in the middle of it, the lady's phone rings.

This could go in all kinds of directions, like, do you answer the phone when you're with a customer? But it leads me down the appointment path. She's taking care of me, the phone rings, and she's talking to the person. I won't do my best Vietnamese accent, because we could get thrown off YouTube. You could hear the person in the background say, "Yeah, I'd like to come in at five o'clock. There are going to be two of us. Can we have an appointment?" And she says, "Absolutely. Five o'clock tomorrow. I'm going to note that down. I've got you taken care of, and you're going to be with so-and-so. We'll be looking forward to seeing you."

As soon as she finished with the customer, she hung up the phone and went right back to working on me. There was no writing it down. There was no putting it in a log. It was, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, come on in, we've got you set, I look forward to seeing you at five o'clock tomorrow," and then back to work. There's no way she's going to remember all the people who called that day for an appointment. But it reminded me that's car dealer 101. That's how we do appointments.

"You tell everyone to come in at eight" 4:26

Dave Rogers: I used to tell this story all the time, and it's true, and it was me. I was working at a Nissan store, and I was the only writer there. I took the appointments and wrote the ROs. It was all handwritten at the time. I used to write like 40 cards a day. I'm not bragging, but that's what we could handle. It was Nissan, and it was pretty easy back in the early '90s.

I'd answer the phones, and I would never really write anything down on an appointment calendar. Never did. I had a girl who would come in every once in a while to help me out. So one day she's in early in the morning, and I get done with the morning rush and say, "What the freak is it? Everybody shows up at the same time." She looks at me and goes, "You really want to know?" I said, "Yeah, I really want to know." She goes, "You tell everyone to come in at eight o'clock." And I'm like, "I do?" She goes, "You tell everyone to come in at eight o'clock. You don't tell anybody 7:30, you don't tell them nine. They're lined up. That's you."

I never realized it, and I'd been doing it for years. So it was an eye-opening experience. But I've seen the same thing for years. Nobody writes it down, which drives me crazy. Now we have appointment schedules, and I think we're a little more advanced than we used to be, but there are still those appointments that never get put in the computer. And the side effect is, you walk in, Steve, and say, "I called to schedule an appointment," and I can't find you in the system. Then I start treating you like you're a liar. "Oh, really? Who'd you call? Are you sure you called this dealership? I don't know if we can get you in."

The independent shop that thanked the dealers 6:12

Steve Shaw: Well, listen, my pet peeve in life, and I'm not a manager anymore: if I have to do an oil change, like in express, and we've sort of had this conversation before, as a service advisor and a manager I'm saying come on in right now. You come in right now, and I will adjust my people. I will grow my business until I cannot take it.

Now, the funny thing is, I was doing a 20 Group in Phoenix, Arizona, one day. Best story in the world. They're having a discussion about appointments, how fast you can get people in, technician staffing, all this crazy back-and-forth. A guy gets up from an independent shop, a place called Sun Devil Automotive in Phoenix. They've expanded from the Phoenix area to the Vegas area and out to Dallas, Texas. Expanded, expanded, expanded. And the gentleman who owned the company goes, "Hey, all you car dealers, I just want to thank you guys."

We all thought he was going to say thank you for letting him work with us and learn all this great stuff from us. And he goes, "I just want to thank you for helping me grow my business." Like, what? And he goes, "Well, all of you guys make people wait for an appointment. Some of you are a day out, two days out, a week out, whatever. Our service is called Right Now Service. I will have a technician standing around waiting for the next customer to come in, and I will keep hiring people as long as I have one technician standing around. Because we take care of business now, and all of you car dealers take care of business down the road. All of your customers who don't want to wait that one day, two days or a week come see me, because my guy's ready to take care of them right now."

So I am of the opinion that that's how we have to do business, and I know that doesn't make me popular. But the way I see it, if we want to grow our business to the extreme levels Damon talked about, and he was a big appointment guy too, we have to drive business in right this minute. I thought it was funny that the lady at the shop said, "Yeah, come on in at three, five o'clock, sure." They've got a line of chairs. Come on down, we'll get you taken care of.

Finding the happy medium 8:47

Dave Rogers: You know, listen, I think there's a happy medium. I'm all for same-day service. Bring your car down. I'm all for that. If somebody calls me up and says, "Listen, I screwed up, I'm going on a trip and I want to get my oil changed," or "I want to come in today, I've got the day off," whatever the case is, bring it down. I'm going to get you in. "Can I have your last name? I'm going to put you in the system just so everyone's expecting you." I'm not saying no.

The other thing I'll say is, "Steve, you're in a hurry? All right, listen, the schedule's a little heavy at 11 o'clock. Why don't you come in at one?" And if you say no, then come in at 11 o'clock, and I'm going to get you in. You can do this without being a jerk-off and without postponing them. I think about same-day or next-day service for an oil change all the time. Now, you have to be careful. You can't just say, "Oh, just an oil change?" because that diminishes your service. I hate when people do that. And number two, you can look in the computer real quick to see what they're due for.

But I agree with you. Bring the car right on down. You can tell by the person's voice: "I need to come in today, I've got off today, I'm going away on Friday." Come on down, we'll take care of it. It drives me crazy if my people won't do it. But if you call me up and want to schedule an appointment, I need to schedule an appointment for you.

Steve Shaw: See, I'm good with that. I'm totally good with making the appointment.

Dave Rogers: If you request an appointment, I'm making you one. There are a lot of people who want to schedule appointments. My Philly Honda store back in the '90s started this "no appointment necessary" thing. That was their thing. It morphed into "we don't do that here, we don't take appointments."

So everything was chaos. You'd pull up to this dealership, which opened at 7:30 in the morning, and there was a line down Essington Avenue like a state inspection line, like people lined up to get concert tickets. You had 80 people bull-rushing you at eight o'clock in the morning. And you know what their hours per RO were? 0.9. They couldn't sell shit.

One last thing. I'm sitting there one day, and a customer calls and wants to make an appointment, and the service writer says, "We don't do that here." My owner said, "You'd better get rid of this no appointment necessary, because it's causing a lot of havoc." So there is a happy medium on this stuff, and I know there are places out there that love no appointment necessary. But I'm just going to tell you, unless you've got a fleet of 100 loaner cars, you're going to have a hard time capturing enough work to make it viable.

Staffing for it: the world's largest Ford store 11:38

Steve Shaw: Well, see, we could debate that, because, Dave, you know my famous line as I was growing up in the business: "I don't have enough techs." Now, again, Steve is old school. I haven't been in a store in 15 years. I've been a trainer. And I'm going to get people mad at me, but I believe you can hire people if you want to.

I think the retention side is where it falls apart. We could hire 20 techs today, keep one of them and lose 19. People leave us for a myriad of reasons. I did a study with a dealer group one time. They hired 27 technicians in one quarter, but they lost 25. I'm like, OK, well, we might want to find out why all these people left us.

But I watched a dealership in Los Angeles grow from a normal-sized store, 4,000 hours, up to 10,000-plus hours. It was not my store, it was another store, but it became the world's largest Ford fixed operation. It was no appointment necessary. Come in right now, it was a 30-minute minor service or it was free, and they never gave an oil change away, because they staffed for it. They were prepared for it. Similar to what the guy from Sun Devil said: I will have someone ready to work on your car momentarily, or right this minute. I personally believe it's a mindset: how do we go from zero to hero and never stop?

That dealer was at 2.5 hours a ticket. It was a Ford store, in their retail operation. So like you said earlier, if we're prepared for it and staffed appropriately, we're not going to lose. If you just say "everybody come in" and I've got 20 techs or two oil change guys, then yeah, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot.

And that's why I love being on the training side versus the consulting side. If you want me to come in and consult, we're going to get down to the goal. We want to grow, and we're going to get to some crazy shit like what Damon had to say, and we're going to make it happen. But it's not the way we did it before. If you want to grow, you've got to allow people to show up at your store. You've got to allow people to come in, and come in, and come in, and take care of that business. That's got to be a mindset where the manager goes, "I'm ready."

Dave Rogers: I agree. Listen, I used to run my stores as controlled chaos. That's what I like, controlled chaos. You want an oil change? I'll get you in. But I'd talk to the customer and feel them out, because not everybody wants to come in right away, and it depends on your facility. You're in a Chrysler shop, you can have some big, heavy work, and you have no idea. You pull five Grand Cherokees into the store with a check engine light, and you're going to have five different fixes for those five different cars. You pull five Toyota Corollas in, you're going to have the same fix for that check engine light. There's a total difference.

Then you go to Mercedes-Benz. I made a mistake one time. I'm at the Mercedes store, and my previous store had been a Toyota store, so when I get there they're like, "You're a Toyota guy, you don't know anything." I'm like, "The car comes in with that door broke, it leaves with that door fixed. It doesn't get any more complicated than that." And they're like, "Yeah, right." So one day the phone's ringing, and this lady calls up with a headlight out on an early-2000s E-Class. And I'm like, "Come on down." That's the way I am. Right now. Bring it down.

Of course the car comes down. "Pop a bulb in, guys, let's go. Write up an RO, let's get a bulb." "A bulb? 50-50." "What do you mean, a bulb is 50-50?" The lady's waiting in the waiting room, and they come back and say it needs a wire harness. They couldn't get the goddamn thing to work. The sockets go bad and all this stuff. OK, but I don't care. The lady called the day her headlight went out, and I said bring it on down, because I gave that person a loaner and kept the car. They ground my ass up for that one. But that's just the way I think.

I do think there's a caveat. You have to be equipped for it, staffed for it, and have a facility that can handle it. We talked about it once before: down south, at these big behemoth dealerships, you pull into the center lane, and there's the cute little girl sitting there with the pad and her Daisy Dukes on. "Hi, Mr. Shaw. Did you call ahead? Yes? You're here for the main shop. Pull over here, underneath the overhang." It's outdoors. "No, I didn't call, I just need an oil change." "Great, pull over here," and you have eight pits lined up outside that they can drive into. If that's the setup you have, you never have to call for an oil change. But that's not the Northeast, and it probably wasn't your California dealer either. You probably had facility limitations.

Steve Shaw: The one in California was a monster. No question about it.

Dave Rogers: You probably didn't have extra land, is what I'm saying.

Checkout lanes and opening at 5 a.m. 16:54

Steve Shaw: No, they didn't have extra land, but they maximized every space. What pisses you off more than anything when you go to the grocery store? What's the number one thing?

Dave Rogers: I can tell you: when you get to the checkout aisle and there are no cashiers. That's the number one thing.

Steve Shaw: There are 18 or 25 checkout lanes and two cashiers. So now they put you over at the self-checkout. I look at it from that perspective: there needs to be a cashier in every lane. Frictionless, right? There's the friction point. The sign at Publix says something like, "Now for the easy part." Well, it's not easy if I'm standing in line behind 10 people. And for whatever reason, every time I go to the grocery store, at noon, at three or at seven o'clock at night, it seems to be the busiest time of day. Publix doesn't have enough cashiers. Personally, I don't want to check myself out at the self-checkout. Give me a discount, maybe. But there should be enough checkers at the checkout lanes to take care of that.

Dave Rogers: I hate checking myself out. It takes too much time. I can't stand it.

Steve Shaw: I'm of the mindset that it's the same thing for us. If 50 people are going to show up in the morning, then we have to be prepared and ready for that, if I'm going to say come in, come in, come in. There was another store in SoCal, a small Ford store, and they wanted to do Saturday service. They'd open at seven, and all these cars would show up at seven, a line of cars down the street. So the dealer said, "Let's line up rental cars, so when someone shows up on Saturday morning, they can drop their car, get in a rental car and drive away." Well, you know what? Nobody wanted a rental car on Saturday. Why? It's 7 a.m. I want to get my car serviced, get my hair cut and do all my errands.

Dave Rogers: And get the hell out of there.

Steve Shaw: You know what the answer was? Open at six. Let's get prepared and get people in. And the manager says to me, "Well, Steve, what happens if I get here at six and there are people lined up?" And I'm like, "I don't know. Maybe we open at five."

People are showing up at your establishment, and you are turning them away. Everybody knows I like to talk about quarter time. If you want to maximize the multi-point, you've got to have the multi-point back in 15 minutes. Well, quarter time in Steve Shaw's world starts the moment I drive into your drive. You can tell me you can get an oil change done, but if you want to maximize that opportunity with me, quarter time starts the minute I pull into your parking lot. You're on the clock. And if I'm waiting behind 10 people, yeah, I'm going to get an oil change and get the hell out of there, because I've got shit to do.

So we have to staff. If 6 a.m. is the right time, or 5 a.m., or 24 hours a day like Damon said, we've got to get to that mindset. That's my personal feeling. That's how I would run my business, and if somebody hired me to do it, that's what I would tell them to do. We've got to be available. We've got to make it easy for our customers to give us money. If they want to show up at 5 a.m., fine. That's what your buddy did, right? That's why he did mobile service. If we don't want you here, then we've got to come to you. That's why we have mobile service: so we can go out to you, keep you off our lot, make it convenient, make it frictionless. My mentality may or may not resonate with everybody, and I know I get in a lot of trouble, which is why I just keep in my own lane and teach people.

Staff the drive like a Las Vegas check-in 20:47

Dave Rogers: And overcome all the objections. Well, I think there are a couple of aspects to what we do. When you go to Vegas and check into one of these big hotel casinos, check-in time is normally around three o'clock in the afternoon. When you get there at three, as opposed to the supermarket, every one of those pedestals is filled. Every single one. There's a person with a jacket on. Some of those people are probably in housekeeping. It's all hands on deck. Checkout first thing in the morning is probably less of a thing now, because people just check out on their own. But at check-in, every one of those stations is filled as a general rule, because they want you to be able to check into your room as quickly as possible. That's the friction point they eliminate.

In our business, you have the front-line service advisor, and I think we fail a lot of times by not having enough people on first thing in the morning. We should have more advisors, because sometimes customers don't want to wait. They don't have to wait. They've got a ride coming, whatever it is. If you can get them in and out of the write-up area real quick, you take away that friction point. I've always said, let's staff a little extra in the morning, let's have a couple of extra valets. I think that's the first part of it.

The second part is you've got to have techs on who can do the work. How many times have you gotten your ass handed to you? You write them up at 7:30, the guy decides to wait, 7:30 is usually the drop-off time, and the techs might mosey in at eight. All of a sudden the guy at 8:05 is going, "Why isn't my car done yet?" And you're like, "The mechanics don't start till eight, buddy. We open at 7:30 for drop-offs. I didn't know you were waiting." It's happened a million times. If you open the doors at seven, you probably should have a tech or two in at seven. Maybe not a full staff, but maybe a couple.

Steve Shaw: Well, yeah. And I can relate this to a hotel story. A line of people shows up at seven, and certainly they're in a hurry. But what do we do as advisors? We try to rush you through the process so I can get from car number one to that last car at the back of the drive. Hurry, hurry, hurry, so I can finish. And the managers are out there rushing people: "Come on, man, get this done, get this done."

Instead, the manager or the support staff should be out there: "Hey Dave, while you're waiting on your service advisor, can I get you a cup of coffee? Can I invite you in here? Your advisor will be with you in just a minute." As a manager or a general manager, I could walk out there like the guy with the red napkin and say, "Hey, as you can see, we're a little bit busy today. Can I get you a coffee? Can I get you the newspaper? By the way, we have a kiosk over here. If you're in that big a hurry, we can walk over and get you checked in and get you out of here." Instead of rushing the customer and our staff through the process. That's why those things get missed. We're just in a hurry. We're not walking around the car. We've got to get to the end, and everything we say we stand for goes right out the window.

Dave Rogers: Well, that's almost like the Disney thing. You're waiting in a long line, and they entertain you, so you don't realize how long the line is. You can do that. There are ways to do it, like you said, with the coffee machine and different things. But you still have to overcome the objection if you can't get that car into the shop, because that's the second part of what we do. Writing you up and getting you out of there is a big part, but if you're waiting, getting your car into the shop is the next challenge. That's where, and we talk about this a lot, managing the different aspects of the business becomes a challenge for some people.

Some people are better off in back-end dispatch getting the cars done. Those people are generally not your most customer-facing, friendly folks. So what are they going to say? "Waiter? What does that mean? The guy waits. It doesn't mean we're going to rush and get him in the shop. It means he's going to wait." Have you ever heard a dispatcher say that?

Steve Shaw: I've said it myself.

Dave Rogers: So I do think that with the advent of loaner cars, Ubers, Lyfts, valets and all that stuff, if we use it to our advantage, it helps. I think it was Damon who said, who wants to wait in a store with a crappy TV station and crappy coffee? Nobody. Your best bet is to get them the hell out of there. So I agree with you 100%: come on down. Get the keys, as we were always told. But there's a nuance to balancing the schedule against the customer's expectations. You've got to figure it out.

Master of the Waiting Room 25:58

Steve Shaw: There was a company for a while, Dealer TV or something like that. I was at a convention one time, and they said, and I may get the numbers slightly wrong, that the average customer spends 19 minutes in a Walmart, and Walmart spends those 19 minutes marketing to that customer. You get the signs, you get this, you get that, you get a greeter. Walmart's always marketing to you when you're in their store.

But when a customer comes into a dealership, I think the average customer spends two and a half, three hours there, and we spend as little time as humanly possible interacting with them. We ship them off the drive, we run them into the waiting room, then we rush them home, and three days later we call them: "Did you have a good experience? Can I count on you for CSI?" And yet for the two and a half hours we had them in our store, we ignored them.

We're backwards. We have that captive customer, and we could do so much with them, but we ignore them, send them home and hope we get great CSI. My book is called "Master of the Waiting Room," because that's where I need you to be comfortable: walking out and talking to people in the waiting room.

I remember once, after hours, we were going to go train in the waiting room, and I had a group of service advisors say, "We don't go in there." And I'm like, "Why?" "That's where the customers are." I'm like, "Yeah, but you've got to be comfortable in that waiting room, or why are you here?" If you don't want that face-to-face customer interaction and you aren't willing to do it, you're in the wrong profession.

Back in the day, when we first started working together, I used to talk all the time about going into the waiting room. We called it the Star Trek thing, the Kobayashi Maru: how we handled those customers in the no-win situation, because people were scared to death, and no matter what they did, it was wrong. The whole point of the book was to be able to communicate with that customer the proper way in the waiting room, in front of every other person. I just think it's important that we get back to that mentality. We're pushing up against the 30-minute mark, but appointment versus no appointment, what's the right answer? I guess it's up to everybody to decide for themselves. You're on mute. You muted yourself.

Capacity, strategy and the GM tip 28:44

Dave Rogers: I was printing something before, and I didn't want it to interrupt your ramble. No, I think whatever your shop load is, whatever your capacity is, you have to be smart about it. If you can do 100 hours today, that's your limit. At two hours an RO, we've talked about it before, you need 50 cars. You've got to schedule part of that for walk-ins. You have to leave room for that, and you have to leave room for upsell. That's part of the nuance of being a manager. You have to figure that stuff out. Maybe it's 35 appointments a day in the case we're talking about. 100 hours, I need 50 cars, maybe I take 35 appointments.

Could you come up short? Yeah, you could come up short. But if you're answering the phones and telling people to come on down, there's a good chance you'll fill the rest of the day. It's just a mindset. There are a lot of people who don't like that, because they don't want the aggravation. What happens if we don't fill the day up? My technicians will be mad at me. My boss will be mad at me. That's why most people fill the day up with 50 appointments, and then, "Steve, you want to bring your car in for an oil change? Let me check the calendar. I can get you in 10 days from now." That's what happens. It's unfortunate, but we have to do better at that. We really do.

Steve Shaw: There's no question about it. I can always go back to strategy. What do you want to do? What's your objective? Do you always want to write 50 tickets a day, or do you want to grow and improve your business? And you said it: capacity. This is the amount I'm going to get done. We could go off on a whole thing about capacity, or about marketing and driving more traffic, but the bottom line comes back to whether I have the capacity to take care of business.

And if I don't, well, you can push me out three weeks, and I'll go to Sun Devil Auto, and he'll expand his business to 15 locations in Phoenix, Vegas and Dallas, and that company will still be three weeks out at 50 cars a day and flat. So ultimately, what's the strategy? What are you trying to accomplish in your store today? You might have to wrap us up here, because we've definitely gone long.

Dave Rogers: Man, we went long again. The GM tip of the day: you have to have feet on the ground and your ears perked up, listening to what's going on. I know this is a crazy thought, but maybe show up before nine o'clock. Get in there a little early every once in a while. I know we have some GMs who do get in early, so I say that facetiously, kidding around. But those of you strolling in at nine o'clock: come in the back door at 7:30 or eight o'clock, sit in the waiting room and have a cup of coffee, and listen to what's going on with your customers. You don't have to have your name badge on. Just sit there, pretend you're a customer and listen. Then listen to what your advisors are doing.

Listen to them chasing away people who don't have an appointment. That's where you have to get together with your service manager and help coach them up, because that person might just be focused on risk management, making sure the day doesn't go to shit. Some people don't like controlled chaos, and you have to understand that. So manage your people, manage the process, and try to help them out with your ears and your eyes. That's all I've got on that one.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. I know we've rambled. My brain is spinning right now, and I think some great topics could come out of this. I think we've got topics for the next dozen or so.

Dave Rogers: I'll tell you what, I listen to the show and get more topics every time, so that's pretty good. It's never-ending. It's like the song that never ends.

Steve Shaw: It is never-ending. Well, it's good to see you, and I'll catch up with you when I get back from vacation. All right.

Dave Rogers: All right, drive safe.