Interview with Brad Moyer

Meet Brad Moyer 0:00

Steve Shaw: Are we all here?

Dave Rogers: We are here.

Brad Moyer: We're here.

Steve Shaw: All right. I'm Steve Shaw, and everybody knows America's Fixed Ops Director, Dave Rogers. Dave, who'd you bring with you today?

Dave Rogers: I brought one of my big-gun service managers, Brad Moyer, from Pottstown, Pennsylvania.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. Did you specifically bring him so the two of you could gang up on me?

Dave Rogers: That was the plan.

Brad Moyer: That was the plan.

Steve Shaw: Two heads with no hair beat one head with hair. You know what I'm trying to say. Dave, why don't you start us off? Let's talk about Brad. What'd you bring Brad for?

Dave Rogers: Well, I think Brad is a good old-school-mentality service manager in a young man's body. He took on a store that was doing okay. It wasn't terrible. He can tell you, I think he's been there three years, maybe a little longer, and he's done an amazing job with this store. He's turned it around top to bottom, parts and service. I'll let him tell the story, but he's done a great job the good old-school way. He hasn't done anything really high-tech, besides maybe CDK Service, which we put in there. So let him tell you in his words what he's done.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. Well, Brad, Dave and I don't brag about ourselves, but we'd sure like to know about you and how you grew your business, what you did to turn that thing on. Because a little birdie told me it was an okay Honda store, and now it's a very good Honda store. So just so you know, I did my research too. Tell us a little bit about your store and yourself and what you did.

A good store that grew 15% a year 1:51

Brad Moyer: Okay. I've been here just over three years. December 6th was three years. Like Dave said, the store was good. It was fine, putting up some decent numbers. Everybody in the building was pretty happy with how it was going and felt like that's where we needed to be. I remember having a discussion with the general manager when I came to interview here. He showed me some numbers, showed me some of the back-screen stuff in CDK, and said, "Hey, this is where we're at." He was pretty proud of it, and they looked good.

It's always nice to come into a store that's not broken. In my career, I've come into quite a few stores that were broken, with massive process issues, and you had to start over and take it from the top. I took a lot of what I learned from fixing broken processes, and people who were either apathetic or didn't have the training to do what they needed to do, and put those processes into a store that was already doing well. And we've seen some pretty tremendous growth over the years.

I'm going to use round numbers, but we've grown 15% year over year, pretty much every year. This past year, 2025, the shop did a little over 53,000 hours with 15 main-shop technicians and about five or six Express guys. It's about focusing on the little things. I can't say there's any one thing I've done that's really moved the needle a lot. It's all the little things. It's making sure you're focused on all the little things every single day. If you take a day off, the team knows. If you take a few weeks off, or you get into January and go, "All right, I can sit back and relax now," the whole team knows. They see it and they do the same thing.

Steve Shaw: Are you telling me things don't just go on autopilot and run themselves?

Brad Moyer: I've never had a day in this business where autopilot was an option.

Dave Rogers: Pretty funny. One thing that store has done: I think it's one of only one or two of my Honda stores that's over 100% absorption, which is awesome.

Brad Moyer: 107 for the year.

Steve Shaw: Wow.

Numbers and reality: the 13-week average 4:08

Steve Shaw: Well, give us some examples of the little things you did. Not to make it about me, but I know running some of the stores I ran, it was always about those little things. I'm sure our audience would love to hear some of the little things that made a huge difference for you.

Brad Moyer: One of the big things I base all my processes on is numbers and reality. You can go up to anybody and say, "My product's better than yours." But why is it better? If I can't prove it, if I can't say to a customer, "Hey, my tires are cheaper or the same price as the discount guy down the road," and then go to that person's website and build a quote and show you why I'm cheaper or the same price, it doesn't mean anything.

It's the same thing with a technician. They're usually very black and white. It's a very particular skill set that goes into becoming a technician. If I say to a technician, "Hey, I feel like you've slowed down. I feel like you're not producing as much. I can physically see you're in another guy's bay a lot," he looks at me and says, "I've been producing the same amount of hours. Nothing's changed." But if I can pull up his numbers and show him a sheet that says, "Your 13-week average used to be 12.9 and now it's 12.1. What happened? What's the difference?"

It's those little things, watching those tenths every single day. If the technicians and the advisors know I'm not going to miss it, I'm going to see when you didn't pay somebody for diagnosis because "well, it's a good customer," or "well, they don't have a lot of money," or whatever the excuse may be. Those are the things I just can't let go. We have to make sure they're accounted for, that the technician is paid, and that he knows I expect him to get paid. I'm not expecting him to wake up the next day, see his times and go, "Well, I guess I just don't get that half hour." They're looking for that time, and they're holding the advisors accountable.

Steve Shaw: So you talked about the 13 weeks. You do the 13-week rolling average, setting objectives, that type of thing?

Brad Moyer: Yeah. I have an Excel spreadsheet with a couple of different tabs on it, and every morning when I run the sheets out of CDK, I print my RTH, punch their numbers into the spreadsheet, then hand the sheets out to the technicians. That sheet tracks a lot of different things. The 13-week average is the big one I really look at. I have a number in there for what I want them to turn every day, and it's a number the technician and I have discussed. We've talked about it: "Hey, where do you want to be in the next six months, and how are we going to get there?" And then we can follow up and show them how we got there.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. That's amazing. Dave and I talk about that all the time, and I have those conversations with managers a lot, but it's a rarity to run into somebody who's actually doing it. So kudos to you, Brad. Great job. We lost you, Dave.

Dave Rogers: I said, if you focus on the technicians and on the goal they helped you establish, right, Brad, you're not just arbitrarily pulling a number out of your butt. You're out there talking to them. They think you care. They think you're concerned about their welfare, which you should be, because that's the engine that pulls the cart. Like I said, old-fashioned, bare knuckles. That's what you're doing, and it's great to see. And the results are showing it. We didn't give you any extra lifts or extra bays. You're not open Sundays, you don't have a night crew, and you're pumping out that many hours. Do you know what the number was when you first started?

Brad Moyer: How many hours they made that first year? I think it was like 47,000, if I'm remembering off the top of my head.

Dave Rogers: Nice. That's a very productive job.

Steve Shaw: I love the fact that back then you were doing about 47,000, and now you can say, wow, we did 53,000 hours. You probably know it down to the tenth. That's so powerful to me as a trainer and manager, that a fixed ops guy actually knows the exact number of hours he produced. Not only in a month or a week or a day, but annually. I think that's a testament to you.

Timers on everything, and a backup for everything 8:40

Brad Moyer: Yeah, I think it's important to know those numbers and be able to talk with the technicians about them. "You had a really great stretch here. What's going on? What did you do?" And if things aren't great, talking to them and finding out why. That's a huge part of what we did. I start with technician production and work backwards from there. If I get feedback from a technician like, "Hey, I've got an advisor who's really slow, especially on waiters," what I end up doing is pulling the car outside. We all know if a waiter goes outside, that car's done as far as the customer is concerned, as soon as they see their car outside. So I've got to go help that advisor and make sure they're doing things as quickly as they should.

So everything has a timer on it. The parts department has five minutes or less. The advisor has five minutes or less. Everybody's got to present this stuff quickly. Everybody understands, "I can't just space out for five minutes. I have to stay on these estimates and get them going." And I've gone into CDK and done everything I could to get service pricing guides set up, anything that might slow down or stop an advisor. All of us have worked with these guys enough to know it doesn't take much to derail them. So if I can keep them on the rails every day and keep moving forward, the techs make money and everybody makes money.

Dave Rogers: It's true.

Steve Shaw: Have your guys come to expect you out there every day? Let's say you were running late for work, which you're probably not. Is their expectation that they're going to get their hours from you first thing every day?

Brad Moyer: Right now I'm blessed to have a production manager, and he starts at 7 a.m. every day. He's the one typing in the numbers and handing out the sheets, so he's always there. If he's not there, I'm doing it. So I have a backup for it, and I try to have a backup for most of my things. For other things, I have a lead advisor who's my backup. So if I'm not available, if I'm on vacation, nothing stops.

I've been at plenty of stores where we were really good, and then I'd go on vacation and come back, and maybe we were usually making 20 grand a day and that week we made 15 grand a day. I always said to myself, "Why does this happen? How is it that much of a drop-off? I'm not that important to the shop. I don't make that much of a difference." And you realize that if you don't have somebody responsible, one person you can go to and hold accountable, those processes slip, and they slip very quick.

Steve Shaw: That's amazing. What are your thoughts, Dave?

Dave Rogers: Yeah, that's it. Any process is only as good as the people monitoring it, making sure it's working and correcting when you get off track. That's one of our episodes one day, Steve, managing and making a good process.

A multi-point on every car 11:27

Dave Rogers: But in addition to the technicians and the daily goals, what are you doing with the advisors? When I look at your electronic service reporting, your multi-point inspection percentage is close to 90, a little bit over 90 last time I looked. Your ASRs are probably around 50, 55%. And the closing ratio obviously depends on the advisors. I know you and I have discussed it and we're working on it. Not every store can say they're at 90% on MPIs, and we know that's what's going to drive the business. The ASRs are a percentage based on the miles of the cars coming in, and your mileage is pretty high, seventy-some thousand miles last time I looked. So what are you doing to make sure the techs do the multi-points? I know videos have been a challenge, but you're getting better at it.

Brad Moyer: Yeah. The multi-points right now are just an expectation. When I first started here, they were pretty decent on it, probably 75%, but they weren't completing the multi-points all the time. They always had an excuse: "Well, this guy was here three months ago," or the technician didn't fill out the whole multi-point, just the important stuff. "It was only in for a software update, so we didn't check brakes. We didn't look at anything else." So I've kept repeatedly reminding them, politely, that I expect it on every car.

I do have it very set in stone: if the car was here a thousand miles ago or a month ago, we can skip it. If it's coming back for a part we just ordered, we don't have to do one. I don't want to get too carried away, because I don't want to lose the reality of what we do. But if you miss it, I'm going to catch it and follow up with you. That's where some of the software can be helpful. CDK has a lot of reporting, so I can go in, look at the ones we didn't get a multi-point on, and follow back up with the technician. Anybody, advisor, technician, whoever, who knows the manager is going to come by and ask why the next day is much less likely to skip that one. If no one's there to ask why, it's a free-for-all.

Accountability without yelling 13:52

Steve Shaw: So it's really that accountability piece. How do your people feel? When you talk accountability with managers, very often they look at it like discipline, or "I've got to write somebody up." It's hard for people to hold others accountable without sounding mad, without yelling or barking at them. Can you talk a little bit about accountability and how you do it?

Brad Moyer: I stopped yelling a long time ago. It doesn't usually help. It's really trying to find out why. "Why didn't you do it?" is really my first question. If it's a tech, it's my production manager; if it's Express, whoever it is, I'll go to that person and say, "What happened? What went wrong?" Same thing with a survey. If they get a survey below 95, I'm going to ask why. "Hey, what happened? Was the customer difficult?" I'll probably go into the customer's history and look at what happened before, just to have a little bit of numbers, a little bit of basis, so I can see what's going on.

But I try to approach it as, "What happened? You tell me what went wrong." "Well, I had three waiters at the time, so I couldn't sell everything on this. That's why my hours are at 1.8 instead of 2.2." "All right, well, let's figure out how to get you more time. Let me space out your appointments," whatever the case may be. I'm going to try to remove that roadblock. And a lot of times, and the three of us have gone through these conversations a lot, it's just in their head. It's not a real roadblock. But if they see me actively trying to help them remove it, they're less likely to use that excuse next time.

Steve Shaw: There you go. You've been there about three years. The first time you went out and questioned them, they may not have appreciated it the way they do now. How long did you have to do that before they really believed you were there for them, and not just being a real jerk?

Brad Moyer: It really depends on the person. I think most of my main-shop advisors bought in within probably 90 days. And for everybody I work with, it really comes back to one thing: money. Are they making more money now? People measure the business's success by how much is in their personal paycheck. If they're not seeing more there, they don't think we're winning. But when they see more there, I point it out and show them how much more they've made and how much more they can make.

Advisors in particular: "Hey, listen, if you guys are at 2.2 hours per RO instead of 2, or 1.8." I think last January, as a main shop, we were at 1.78, 1.8 hours. Right now we're tracking 2.36 for the month. That's a huge difference in their paycheck at the end of the day. It's a huge difference for the technician when he can get 2.3 hours on a car instead of 1.8. They make a lot more money, everybody's more efficient, and everything is designed for that efficiency.

When I went back to the advisors about a year later for a yearly review, "Hey, we've been together for a year. Talk to me. What's better? What's worse? What do you think we can do better in the year ahead?" they all said the same thing: "Well, I don't really feel like I'm working that hard, but it looks like we're making more money." One guy did not get on board and didn't agree with it, and he left us after about a year. He's at another Honda dealer, and I wish him the best, but it's funny, he still compares himself to us to this day. He asked our Honda rep about our CSE scores for the different advisors, and he knows we do very well. We finished number one in the zone for CSE for Honda this year again, two years in a row. And he said, "Oh, did I beat this person?" "No, you didn't." "Did I beat this person?" "No, you didn't." "Was I close?" "You weren't close."

Higher sales and higher CSE, together 18:04

Steve Shaw: So I have a question, and this is going to sound kind of smart-alecky, and we all know the answer. You were able to improve your performance and sell more hours, and you're telling me your CSE went up as well?

Brad Moyer: Went way up.

Dave Rogers: Imagine that. It defies gravity. That's Newton's law: you can't do both. That's what everyone's been saying for 50 years, since CSI has been around. You can't do both. That's BS.

One thing Brad was talking about: before we went to the electronic multi-point, they had the handwritten ones, and I think he's being generous when he says they did 75% of them. He and I had a talk. With the manager prior to him, I'd be looking through the ROs, because that's the only way you could do it, and it seemed like every car that went through Express, these 20-year-old kids just out of school could somehow look at a car and decide the tires didn't need to be rotated. They could see it. Amazing talent, these guys. Because I'd ask, "Why are there no brake measurements?" And the advisor said, "Well, it didn't need a tire rotation, so we didn't take the tires off." I'm like, how the hell does a kid know the tires don't need to be rotated? You look in the history, and they weren't rotated the last time. They were never getting rotated, because nobody wanted to take the tires off.

So that was one of the first things Brad picked off. He's like, "There's no excuse. If you don't rotate tires, you have to come see me." Express didn't know what to do: "What do you mean, I have to come see you?" "If the tires can't be rotated, in your opinion, you have to come see me." Of course, we didn't have that problem after that.

Brad Moyer: No, it all ended. And the other thing I did was tell them, "I want brake specs anyway, so you've got to pull off each corner." And since they had them off anyway, it was a done deal.

Dave Rogers: So these were hourly kids who thought their time was so valuable they didn't want to take the tires off to do the brake specs. It's crazy.

Brad Moyer: And they were averaging a half hour for each Express RO, which I don't even know how that's possible, but that's what they were doing.

Dave Rogers: And Steve, you'll love this. When we went to electronic and started tracking it, they had a whopping two-tenths upsell in Express.

Steve Shaw: We'd say you have to try not to sell. You're trying not to sell at two-tenths.

Brad Moyer: Yep. A lot of times they were talking people out of it. Like Dave said with the rotation: a customer would come in and say, "I want an oil change and a tire rotation," because that's what we've trained them to do. And they'd go, "Oh, you don't need the tire rotation today. Your tires are good. The technician looked at it. Everything's okay."

Steve Shaw: I'm sure the customer walked away going, "Wow, that was really nice." And then six months or a year later, when the tires wore out prematurely, you're not such a nice guy.

Brad Moyer: Yeah. The other interesting thing is it rolls into so many different things. When a customer comes back and they haven't rotated their tires for 20,000 miles, they have two front tires that are gone and two rear tires at 7 or 8/32nds. I can sell you four tires now. I want to sell you four. I want to sell you the road hazard package, everything at the same time, and give you an alignment. Everything goes with it. And now we've trained customers that their tires should all wear out at the same time. As long as they don't hit anything, we're going to replace all four at once. Three years in, they're used to that. That's the expectation.

Steve Shaw: That's amazing. Great job.

Closing rates, video and explaining instead of selling 21:36

Dave Rogers: I think the other thing, the continuous improvement part Brad knows about, is getting the closing rate up for the advisors. That's probably your next big hurdle, right?

Brad Moyer: Yep. It's definitely a challenge with Express in particular. I have two very, very green advisors. One came out of the restaurant industry and the other out of the physical therapy industry. They're very new to the business, and I don't know that they have the same confidence yet. Right now they're averaging, I think, 0.85 or so per RO. So we're trying to take it from there up to about an hour an RO, where they should be selling alignments, selling all the little things. That's the next challenge.

The main-shop advisors, like I said, are at 2.36 an RO. They're doing a nice job. I think they're all over 35%, with two of them over 50% for the month. So they're definitely on the right track, buying in and understanding that they have to have that conversation. I don't want to see deleted recommendations from the techs. When I started, I had an advisor who would jump in there, and 30 seconds later he'd declined everything. Well, you didn't properly sell anything in 30 seconds.

You have to go through a process now. We send them the text message with the recommendations. We send them the technician's video. We're at about 80.6% with TrueVideo right now. We give them a couple of minutes to watch the video, then the advisor calls and says, "Hey, did you have a chance to watch the video?" A lot of times they've already reviewed the text and the video, and they're kind of ready. They have an idea, and they're coming to the advisor with, "What's this? I have some questions about it." Now the advisor is simply explaining, consulting, advising. They're not selling anymore. They've taken that hat off and they're helping the customer out. That's really what it is.

What the GM needs to understand 23:33

Steve Shaw: Yeah, we always talk about presenting the facts in our training. When Dave and I talk, or I talk to other fixed ops directors, what you're saying certainly warms my heart, because it's what we talk about all the time. But I was thinking about when you first came on and the conversation with your general manager. Things were going okay, everybody was pretty happy. It almost sounded like, "Don't mess it up, don't rock the boat." So where's your GM now that you've improved 15% a year? That's a lot of hours, 6,000 hours. How's your GM feeling about everything, and how did he come along with you on this ride?

Dave Rogers: Made him so much money he retired. That's what happened. True story.

Brad Moyer: Yeah, the first guy retired. The second guy, who was here at the same time as a GSM and moved into the role, comes back and gives me a hug every morning. No, I'm kidding. But a lot of general managers in the business, I don't know that they fully understand fixed ops. All they're really looking at is absorption and how much money you made this month. It's been an interesting journey with the current general manager, showing him what fixed ops is and what's possible and what's not.

I know there are a lot of conversations among general managers, and a lot of us out there say, "You can't do that. That's not possible." Like we just said: "You can't have high CSE and high sell rates. The two don't go hand in hand. You can only pick one." It's about doing it the right way. It's about understanding the business and having your finger on the pulse. If I have an advisor who gets into trouble with a customer, I'm 10 feet away, and I jump right in. As soon as I hear an elevated voice from a customer, or hear someone getting agitated, I come out and say, "Hey, what's going on?" My advisors know they don't have to bear the stress of that customer. Even if it's just a guy being a jerk, or a guy having a bad day, whatever it is: "Hey, come in my office. I'll take this one over." There's a certain group of my customers who come to me every time, because they're just that person.

It's about understanding that this business is not easy, especially on advisors. They have one of the hardest jobs in the world. So if you can come alongside them, put your arm around them and say, "Hey, this is where we're going, this is what we're going to do, this is how we're going to make it better. Here's how your job can be easier if you handle it this way. Don't forget to tell them stuff. Follow the process. Don't skip any steps. Call the customer when you're supposed to call them, or before you're supposed to call them." If you do those things and there's a problem, I take care of it. If you don't follow the process, you've got to dig your way out of that hole yourself, and that's tough.

Steve Shaw: I like that. So Dave, we're running up against the wall here. Brad said a lot of really cool stuff, and I think he gave us a bunch of GM tips of the day. Brad, I'll ask you first: what would you say to a GSM or GM who's stepping into that role? And then I'll let Dave wrap this up.

Brad Moyer: I think the biggest thing, if I'm giving advice to a GSM or a GM, is to challenge, but you have to understand a little bit. We have so many comparisons in this business, it's almost impossible not to find a good comparison for your store. Look at a few other stores' numbers. I compare myself to stores all the time. We're in 20 Groups, we're in all kinds of different things, and that's how I come up with a lot of where we should be. You can come at the service manager with that same thing. Ask questions. Don't just expect things; ask questions. "Hey, how do we get here? What do you think we can do to get to X, Y, Z?"

If you're getting a lot of no's, that's when you know you've got to push back a little and challenge that person. If they genuinely don't know how to get there, all right, let's see if you can find them some help. Find an older, more experienced, I should say, service manager who might be able to step in and help out. Steve, you're going to love this: I think we have a lack of training in this business on a lot of different levels.

Steve Shaw: Shameless plug. Congratulations, you are the best!

Brad Moyer: Shameless plug, right? So I think that's a lot of it. Some people don't know what they don't know. They need training. Some people just don't have the energy or don't want to. So you've got to figure out which one you have and how to help.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. Dave, you want to wrap this up?

Dave Rogers: Yeah. I think he's dead on. There's not much to add. Asking questions is the important part. And if you're going to do some comparison, look at other stores, but also look within your store. If you have five advisors, look at the five. Look at the numbers, the closing rates, whatever it is you want to evaluate. Then maybe pick the brain of the person at the top who's leading the way. Instead of just assuming, because you can't just drive numbers. That's one thing that just doesn't work in service. You're not going to get good results by saying, "I need 2.5 hours an RO or I'm going to replace you." That doesn't work. That drives bad behavior. We all grew up in the business with people like that, and we all know that's not the way to make things happen. Brad touched on all of it. Good job there.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. Well, Brad, congratulations. It sounds like you're doing amazing. Dave talks about you a lot. I won't go into that, but congratulations on everything you're doing and on the improvement. As much as I love production and production objectives, if you asked me, it sounds like you're doing it right, textbook. Great job. And if there's anybody else out there doing this type of thing, we'd love to hear from you as well. Let's tell your story.

Brad Moyer: Thank you.

Steve Shaw: Thanks, guys. Appreciate having you on. Thanks, Brad.

Brad Moyer: Yeah, thank you.