Fixed Ops War Stories

Operation Focus at a big LA Ford store 0:00

Dave Rogers: Hey Steve Shaw, how you doing, man? Now tell me a story. That's what I want to hear. Tell me a story.

Steve Shaw: Man, I'm off the chart. How about you? Tell you a story? Shoot. Well, what do we have a podcast for? It's story, strategies and success. So we might want to tell a story or two. You know what? I've got to tell you my favorite story. I just got back from Los Angeles, and I grew up in the car business in LA. I spent the greatest majority of my time running some pretty big Ford stores.

So I see a buddy of mine while I'm out in California. This young man worked for me, and when he worked for me, he was a service porter. Our dealership was in LA, and my dealership was open seven days a week, 24 hours a day. And we crushed it at this dealership. We were doing 8,000, 10,000 hours a month back in the day. I mean, we were crushing it.

And I had this young man work for me. I'm just going to say his name, because his name is Duane and he's my buddy. I hadn't seen Duane in years and years, but I ran into him recently, and he does have a position of authority now. But back then this young man was a service porter. We were a large-volume Ford store with a decent-size operation, but we were pretty compact in SoCal. I won't say the city, because then it'd give it away, but we were a pretty compact location for selling five, six hundred cars a month.

So Duane and I would always do these little things where we'd move cars around. We'd fuck with, we'd mess with the new car department, and they'd mess with us. You know, all the fun stuff we did growing up. Every night when we would go home late, I'd call it Operation Focus. I'd tell Duane, "Operation Focus," and he'd go move all the Focuses and get them off the lot. So this kid was great, and he and I had a great time working together.

The shuttle van that went to Tijuana 2:01

Steve Shaw: Well, fast forward. One day I leave on a Friday night, and Duane, 19 years old at the time, 20-plus years ago easily, he and his buddies decided, "Let's go to Tijuana for the night." They all worked at the dealership, they were all service porters, and they all had to be at work the next day. So they decided, "Why don't we take the shuttle? Let's take the dealership shuttle to TJ and go drinking."

So these characters of mine go to TJ, and they go drinking all night long. And then of course, 5 a.m., these guys get pulled over by the federales. They're all 19-year-olds, and there must have been five or six of them in our service shuttle. It was a Ford Aerostar van, something like that, and it's got the dealership name on the side and everything. So you've got to wonder, why is the dealership Aerostar in TJ on a Friday night at 5 a.m.? So the federales pull these kids over and they're shaking them down.

And they said, "Yeah, 500 bucks." These kids had to come up with $500 or they were all going to jail. So they drove them over to the ATM, and the kids emptied their bank accounts, every one of them, and they had to give the federales enough money so they could get home. Well, lucky enough, they made it back. They paid the money, they got through border security, and they were at the dealership at 6:45 a.m., because we opened at 7 a.m.

As my buddy is pulling the shuttle van in to open up, because he had to open up, the GSM comes pulling up right behind him, because my GSM came to work early every day. So Duane opens the gate, lets the GSM in, and goes to work. Nobody said a word about it, and this went on forever. Nobody told me about it. It was the best-kept secret in the car business for years. And then they sprung it on me at my going-away party, when I was leaving LA. They're like, "Did you hear what we did?" I'm like, "No, what happened?" So they tell the story about stealing the shuttle, going to TJ and having the time of their lives.

Dave Rogers: Sounds like it. That's funny. That is good. I love it.

The parts driver who sold bootleg movies 4:50

Steve Shaw: What about you? What's a good story that's on your mind?

Dave Rogers: I'll give you a best-kept-secret story of mine. 2008, 2009, right in the era of layoffs and cutbacks. The economy took a crap. I was at a nine-store group as fixed ops director for the group. The area vice presidents were talking to the stores one by one, bringing them in. We're talking about headcounts and what we needed to do, and this was a union environment.

So we're in this one meeting at one of the stores, going through the headcount, and the GM mentions this parts driver and mentions that he'd been with us for 10 years. Again, a union parts driver. And I look over and I'm like, "How come I've never heard this guy's name before? He's been here 10 years." I think I'd been there five years by then. He's like, "What do you mean?" I go, "Because everybody who starts as a parts driver eventually wants to move up to counterman, and those promotions all come through me." He's like, "I don't know." I said, "Well, how old is this guy?" He's like, "35." "Kids?" "Yeah, he's got two kids. I think he's married." Okay.

So the AVP is tired of the conversation and says, "Take this up later." I'm like, okay, fine. So I write it down. I've got to find this out. The next day I go to one of the other parts managers who'd been there for a hundred years, and I'm like, "Tell me about this guy." "Yeah, he's been with us for a while." I go, "Ten years, I heard. What does he do? Tell me about him." He goes, "What do you mean?" I go, "Ten years, parts driver, 15 bucks an hour, married, two kids. There's got to be a story here." He goes, "You don't know?" I'm like, "I don't know anything. I'm asking you about the guy."

"Oh, he sells bootleg videos of all the movies. He's really good." I go, "What do you mean, he's really good?" He goes, "He goes to the movies himself and films them. He records them himself, puts them in nice little jackets and sells them." I go, "Who's he selling to?" He goes, "Everybody around here buys them." I go, "I've never heard of this." He goes, "No, everybody buys them." I go, "How much is he selling them for?" He goes, "Five bucks." I'm like, "Really?"

So I go over to the store and tell the parts manager, "Get that guy in. Get the shop steward in there. I've got to talk to this guy." So I'm like, "I hear you sell videos." And he's all proud of himself. "Yeah." "I heard you make them yourself." "I do. I do a good job, man. I'm the best." And he's bragging about it. I'm like, "So who do you sell them to?" He goes, "Everyone." I go, "What do you mean, everyone?" He goes, "You'd be surprised." I go, "Is it my area vice president here?" And he goes, "No." I said, "You've never offered me a video."

And he goes, "No, but everyone else buys them. General managers, sales managers, service, everybody." And this is a mall, nine stores. So they're all giggling. The shop steward's giggling, the parts manager's giggling, because I'm the idiot who'd never heard of this before. So I said to him, "Let me ask you a question. Where do you take your runs? Where do you deliver parts?" "Delaware, Pennsylvania." We're in Jersey.

I said, "Okay. Do you sell videos to our customers?" "Oh, yeah." I'm like, "So wait, how does that work?" "Well, I usually go to Delaware twice a week and Pennsylvania twice a week. So on Monday I'll take their orders, and then I'll deliver on Thursday." I said, "What about Pennsylvania?" "I go there Tuesdays and then I go back Friday. So I take the orders and they just buy it. They give me all cash." This is what he does.

So I said, "Okay, you can go." He goes, "You want to see what I have?" I'm like, "No, I'm good, I'm fine." So I go back, I call HR, and I'm like, "I'm going to fire the guy." "What do you mean?" I go, "He's crossing state lines in my van with these stolen videos. This has got to be a crime." He'd been doing this for 10 years. True story. I had to fire him. Ten years.

Big Frank and the three-hour movie 8:52

Steve Shaw: Where's the GM tip of the day in either one of these things? I don't even know.

Dave Rogers: You never know. I had a parts manager one time who aggravated me. He was just one of those guys. I happened to notice that a parts driver would leave every day at 8:30 with his van loaded, and every day he would come back at 4:15. The guy's name was Big Frank, and he was big. He was a big guy.

We're sitting in our weekly meeting with the GM, everybody's there, and the parts manager was getting snippy. He was just an arrogant guy. He had a bunch of stores, he was parts director, and he said something. So I said to him, "You know, Mike, you really should get a job with FedEx or UPS." He goes, "What do you mean?" I go, "Because I don't know how you do it. You somehow manage to load Big Frank's truck every day with the exact amount of parts so he can leave at 8:30 and come back at 4:15. You're like the Amazing Kreskin or something. How do you know exactly how many parts to put in his truck?"

So, fast forward, my boss says, "You're onto something there." And I go, "What do you mean?" It was just one of those instinct things. You say it, you make fun of it. So we had the guy followed, and guess what? Every day he went to the movies. He watched a three-hour movie every day.

So maybe you want to put a GPS tracker on your trucks, which we just did, and put cameras on a truck. Maybe you find out where they go nowadays. I'm sure people have some better stories than that. I'd love to hear the better stories about where they've found their parts drivers on different occasions.

Steve Shaw: That would be awesome. I'd love to hear some goofy stuff in the comments, because I thought that was one of the funniest things I ever heard. And I always thought I was a pretty good manager, too. I ran a pretty tight ship. We were crushing it, doing eight, nine, 10,000 hours, making a million dollars, blah, blah, blah. And then you've got this kid who just decides to go to Mexico, or to go to the movies, or just go hang out. Who's paying attention? And of course we'd always tell you that we're paying attention. The parts manager probably said he was so busy he wasn't looking after it.

Cars that went home at night 11:12

Dave Rogers: I spent six years in Jersey City, and I used to say I'd seen it all and nothing could surprise me anymore. It's not true. We had a technician in one of my stores at one time who decided he could take a customer's car home at night. She happened to have a GPS tracker in her car, and she saw that it went home. I've never had this happen before in my life. He just decided to take the customer's car home, and she had a GPS tracker, so she reported it stolen, and the cops came to the house. Some of the stuff people do. Sometimes you wonder how much more is going on.

Steve Shaw: You know how when you watch a murder mystery, they put the guy in charge who's actually the criminal? "Okay, you're the investigator, and we need you to solve this crime." And it turns out he's the murderer. So I was working at a GM store in Southern California, a Saturn store, and somebody's car kept getting taken home. We were getting all these calls at night about people's cars being stolen or being at someone's home, and we were having to put a lot of gas in cars.

I'm like, "Donnie, listen to me. You've got to help me out, bro. We've got to find out who's taking these freaking cars home." He's like, "I'm on it, boss. I'm going to find out who's doing it." I'm like, okay, cool. So this goes on for weeks, and we never find out. Then, randomly, I decide I've got to stay late and do some work. So I'm sitting in my office typing on the computer, and it's freaking Donnie. He's the guy stealing the cars every night.

Dave Rogers: Of course it is. The guy who took the van down to Tijuana.

Steve Shaw: Now that's another story, because yeah, I shouldn't even go into that story, but my buddy did that for a while too. He drove the same fleet truck home for like a year. I wasn't the manager at the time, but for like a year this truck was in for service, and it went home every night with him. And the fleet company never asked about it. They had so many freaking trucks. He just drove it home.

Dave Rogers: They forgot about their truck. Listen, from the Jersey City days I could tell you about a couple of cars that were the same type of thing. We had a parts guy up there one time. There was a car that was stolen and recovered, one of our cars, and it was sitting outside for a while. People had been looking for this car forever, and we found it. I had gotten transferred, and I get a phone call from the boss over there, and he's like, "Hey, what'd you do with that car?"

I said, "It's in the bullpen, in the lot. It's got no wheels on it, it's just sitting there." It was a Volkswagen. And he goes, "It's not in the lot." I said, "I'll be right over." I drive across the street to the other side, I go over there, and it's not there. I'm like, "I don't know, that's where I left it. I got transferred two months ago, and that's where it was when I left."

As I'm leaving, I drive down a side street, and there's this red Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible sitting there, wheels on it, nice and shiny, all cleaned up. So I call him up: "I found your car. It's right around the corner. Somebody's driving it." It had license plates, everything. One of the employees decided to get some tires and wheels and put the car back together. I'm telling you, it was sitting on its rotors for I don't know how long. And then he decided he was entitled to drive the car because he went out of his way and did all the work on it. He was driving that car for probably two months, and nobody even knew.

The video multi-point that went to the wrong customer 14:55

Steve Shaw: Okay, so I'm going to tie this all back to process, following the process. We've been talking about that a little bit, accountability, process and so on. Multi-point inspection. You and I have a mutual friend, and you might have heard this story before. If you do video multi-point inspections, I always ask the dealership, the clients, "What's your process? If you do a video, does it go tech, parts, advisor, customer, or does it go tech to customer?" And my favorite way, by the way, is tech video straight to the customer. Fast, expeditious, none of this.

So I'm talking about this in class to a friend of yours and mine, and we won't mention his name, because it could get us both in trouble. But this one particular very large organization decided they can no longer have video multi-point inspections go directly from the tech to the customer. Because one day this young man, evidently a very handsome young technician with a very beautiful girlfriend, instead of using the app to record the video and send it, decided to take the video with his phone.

Well, he took the video with his phone and then he sent the video to his customer. It was supposed to be the video multi-point, but it happened to be what they reverently call a booty dance. So this video of his girlfriend doing something with her booty, as they called it, went to the customer. And the customer called the GM and said, "I'll take it."

Dave Rogers: That's classic. That's a good one.

Steve Shaw: So this one very large organization is no longer allowed to send a video from tech to customer. It must have advisor approval.

Dave Rogers: Yeah, like advisors are foolproof enough not to send the wrong video, right?

Steve Shaw: But hey, if we had a process, then we might not have had that. The process would have said.

Write the stories down 17:21

Dave Rogers: I think with the stories, and again, you could go on and on with these stories over all the years, there's always going to be an exception. There are going to be people who deviate. There's going to be that bad seed. In your case with TJ, kids just want to have fun, right? You've had people take vehicles, and you've had different things happen. I think the biggest thing is trying to figure out which way to stop it, if you can stop it. After all these years, like I said, I thought I'd seen it all. It's not true. There's always somebody around the corner who's going to come up with a new one.

One thing I did learn over the years: when these stories happen, usually you get aggravated. Something happens and it really torques you up. But you can laugh at it years later. So I'll cheat and tell everybody my word of advice to all the GMs and all the managers out there: write it down, take notes and memorialize it. Because you're going to look back in 20 years and you're going to crack the frig up, is what you're going to do.

So as angry as you want to be today, you're going to find some humor in it in 10 years. I guarantee you'll find some humor in it, because I know at the time a lot of these things weren't funny. I'm glad they told you the day you were leaving and didn't tell you ahead of time.

Beer at the shop meeting and the old days 18:44

Steve Shaw: Yeah, it was at my going-away party. But it is funny. We can all laugh about it. I've heard all the stories, and I'm sure you have too. I've had GMs tell me about the bags of coke in their desk drawer, and so on. Crazy stuff that I couldn't even have fathomed some of these guys did. But it is a different day.

I can tell you that at my first job as a technician, we had our shop meeting after work, and they gave us a beer, and I was not 21. I think I had three. I crashed my car on the way home. Now, did I tell anybody? No. I had a really cool Smokey and the Bandit Trans Am, and I rear-ended somebody. So we've all done it. But that's why we don't have alcohol at shop meetings anymore.

Dave Rogers: No, you don't have it at the PDI parties anymore. You really don't. The last time was probably in the mid-nineties, when we used to do that stuff. Then everything got politically correct and sterile and you couldn't do that anymore. We'd lock up, get in the parts room, close the shades, crack open the beer and finish closing the month out. Behind the scenes, we used to do it all the time.

Steve Shaw: Yeah. We worked in Cahokia, Illinois, and over the bridge was East St. Louis. We'd go to this restaurant called Kokotowich's, and we'd go drink our lunch. That's what we would say: "Let's go to Cokie's and have lunch," which meant, let's go get a Bud. We've got to stop talking about this stuff.

Dave Rogers: Right. I like it. The fun days, that's the one thing about the old days. And listen, I missed the martini lunches. I never got that. I wasn't in management when they did that stuff, so I never got to go out.

Steve Shaw: I was just a service advisor, but we would go drink.

Dave Rogers: Yeah, we didn't drink during the day. I've had people work for me who drank during the day, but I was never one of those guys. They did the martini lunches before I became a manager, I think, so I missed that.

Steve Shaw: My God, you've got my head spinning. I was a transmission apprentice at a Chrysler store when I was barely 17, and I'll never forget this guy. His name was Tony Viviano. He was older at the time, and he was our tranny tech at this Chrysler store. Tony was the biggest Italian dude. He could literally pick up an old transmission and put it in with one hand. I'd been in the store for a couple of weeks.

I was learning to do transmissions kind of on my own, with some help from people. And finally I went over to him and I said, "Hey, can I ask you a question?" And Tony goes, "So you're going to talk to me?" I'm like, "Yeah, I was kind of scared before, but I needed to ask your advice." And he goes, "Come with me, kid." He took me to lunch and we had a beer. I'm a 17-, 18-year-old kid, having a beer at lunch while he's talking to me about the theory of Chrysler transmissions. I know a lot about how governor pressure must overcome throttle pressure, because Tony Viviano taught me how these work.

Dave Rogers: God, that's great.

Steve Shaw: Shoot, we'd better get out of here, or we're going to give away too much about ourselves.

Dave Rogers: Yeah. The statute of limitations should be expired on everything I've mentioned, so we're good. But yeah, let's head out and call it a day. I think the GM tip of the day was early on: write these stories down. They're going to be funny later on. They're not funny today, but I promise you they'll be funny in five to nine years. So have some fun with it.

Steve Shaw: Very good, sir. I'll talk at you.

Dave Rogers: Amen.