If You Don't Care, You're in the Wrong Business

Training Dave's managers 0:00

Steve Shaw: Welcome back, Mr. Dave Rogers. How are you today?

Dave Rogers: I am doing fandamastic, Mr. Shaw.

Steve Shaw: You always are. I am whipped, bro. I am freaking whipped.

Dave Rogers: You're whipped. Did you actually work today?

Steve Shaw: I worked for a living. I know it happens few and far between, but every now and then I have to work for a living, and today was one of those days. Man, I got my butt kicked.

Dave Rogers: That's what happens when you're not in shape.

Steve Shaw: Hey, yesterday I ran four miles through Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and I got to see all the old-world stuff. It was pretty cool. I'm a little bit exhausted from that run. And you know what they say in training? We have a saying: if the trainer goes home tired, it means the class did not work hard enough. I tried to live by that philosophy today. I tried to get all the attendees up and around, doing my little carousel training, working really hard so I didn't have to. But it turned out I worked harder today than I normally would. It was good stuff, though. I learned a lot. It was a great class with quite a few people, and it was a lot of fun.

Dave Rogers: Just for full disclosure, everybody should know it was my group he was training, and we wore his ass out. I don't want anybody to think it was another group that wore him out. It was my group. We had fifteen or sixteen service managers, lead advisors and assistant managers in the class today. Everybody with experience.

Steve Shaw: Yeah, about sixteen people, and they learned a lot. The managers were certainly experienced. There were no first-time managers. There were a couple of up-and-coming advisors who'd been around for many years. One advisor had twenty-five-plus years, everybody else twenty years plus, and the two assistant managers had been advisors for years. There were no green peas in the class, that's for sure.

Surface knowledge 2:16

Steve Shaw: But it's interesting. I think a lot of people know this stuff, but it's also interesting when you dive deep into people's knowledge base. If I'm a service manager or service advisor for many years, what do we know, and what don't we know? We covered a lot of topics: everything from the financial aspects of the business to production, selling and coaching.

And what I find interesting is that a lot of people, and again, great people, they're probably watching our podcast, had what I'm going to call a surface knowledge. I think that's probably what a lot of people in the industry have: a surface knowledge, and then maybe a little bit of depth. But when you start to peel back the onion and really dig down with questions, that's where the rubber meets the road. I don't know what the right word is. It escapes me because you guys beat my ass so bad today. But as you peel back the onion, you start to really figure out what people know and what they don't know.

Dave Rogers: Well, it occurred to me when we were talking after class: you only know what you know. We're all the same way. And I don't want to criticize anybody. I've been a student of the game, you've been a student of the game, and a lot of people in the room today are students of the game.

But if you were brought up in an environment where your job was just to dispatch and hand out work and keep the techs busy ten hours a day, and you didn't have to run numbers or run a dock because someone else did it, then you didn't have to know those things. I wouldn't have been able to survive in that. I would have gone crazy. But some people just slot right in, and they're okay with that. Or their mindset is not to rock the boat.

I think some people just don't have the self-confidence. They're not going to go to their boss and say, "Hey, give me more to do. Let me run these numbers. Send me to school." That's another one. Not a lot of people necessarily do that.

Whether it's laziness or complacency, I don't know. I have a group of thirty stores, roughly thirty service managers and thirty parts managers, and they're all over the place. Some can't roll over on their bellies yet; they're lying on their backs. Then some crawl, some run, some jump, some high-jump. They're all over the place.

But when you were talking after the class, the word "proficiency" came up. I meant to tell the group today that it's not a real word in this sense. Don't tell an English teacher. But it is a term in the car business. We devised it for what reason? Because we were lazy and didn't want to know exactly how many hours somebody worked, so we based their productivity on an eight-hour day and came up with a proficiency number. That's what we did. I always laugh at that. Maybe somewhere out here in Pennsylvania they've never heard that term. That's always possible.

Proficiency, productivity and efficiency 5:12

Steve Shaw: It's like the word "drivability." That's not a word either. In the car business we put "ability" behind everything: runnability, drivability. We just made up our own words. That's exactly what we do. But it was interesting, the word proficiency. I'm not going to get into the definitions of everything, because that's training, but a lot of people confuse productivity with proficiency and efficiency, and what exactly each one means.

I'm not even saying anybody's wrong. But I think most people will substitute productivity for proficiency, or proficiency for productivity. A while ago I was at a Ford store in South Carolina, and I said to the service manager, "Tell me about your proficiency." He got a big smile on his face and went, "So you actually know the difference." And we ended up having a conversation about productivity, efficiency and proficiency, the combination of the two.

We often talk about that in our classes. I think a very small minority of people in the world actually know the difference between all three. And I'll tell you, if you'd asked me fifteen years ago, I might not have known. I think I learned it in a class one time as well.

We never really tracked productivity in particular. I never tracked what my technician was doing all day. Was he actually working on a car? Did we track efficiency? Sure, we would track that, because we were clocking in on jobs for the warranty work. A lot of manufacturers, like Ford, for example, wouldn't let you be more than two hundred percent efficient on a job, because then they'd say you were double-punched or something. So we never really tracked it, until I got into the consulting world and we'd look at people and ask, "Why is this guy spending six hours at the back counter? Why is this guy spending all his time on road tests? Why is my master technician not flagging any hours?" Then you dig down and look at where that particular person is spending their time.

So it's not something that really comes up, until you're diagnosing why a guy isn't flagging hours. I think it's funny, in an interesting way. We go through life in the auto industry throwing these terms around. If somebody had asked me fifteen or twenty years ago, "Productivity: what's the answer to that?" I might not have given the same answer I give now. But if we're talking productivity in a general sense, everybody knows what it means: the flagged hours versus the hours they work. That's the general term, whether it's right or wrong. If you talk about it, everybody knows what you mean.

Dave Rogers: But it's not really that. Productivity is how productive you are for the day. If you only work on cars for six hours of an eight-hour day, you're seventy-five percent productive. Now, if you turn thirteen hours, you're two hundred percent efficient. That's always the difference. So we came up with the term proficiency to make up for not sitting out in the shop monitoring.

It's funny, I saw an AI program a few years ago at NADA, I think it was called Sky or something. It was cameras around your building, all over the place, tied into your time clock. It was AI, and it knew who everybody in the dealership was. At the end of the day you could see how many hours somebody spent working on a car, how many hours they spent on cigarette breaks, how many hours at the parts counter. I saw this thing and I was like, wow, this is really cool. And then I thought to myself, I could never use it. The minute everyone in the store knew you had it, they'd quit. Nobody would work for you. But the premise was to see what people did during the day so they could get better. There was a gotcha element too. But I thought it was really interesting.

That's the kind of stuff where there are places out there that are really good, whether they're using robots or dispatchers or whatever. I've had stores where I had parts countermen out in the shop. They had stations there to minimize time. I know somebody who uses robots, and I know that saves steps. I don't know if it saves time, because if they're waiting for the robot, they could have just gone and gotten the parts.

But all these little things: if you just took some of the hurdles out of people's way and made the techs more productive during the day. It's a key metric you should pay attention to. It's just very difficult to track. The European brands, Mercedes and so on, used to track W time, as they called it. Your dispatcher was supposed to track all the time your guy didn't spend working on cars. Imagine that job: the dispatcher in the shop trying to track all the W time, the time they didn't spend, so you could report it on your financial statement and show how much you suck. Can you imagine that? That's crazy. I laugh at it, but the key part of that whole conversation was getting them focused on technician hours. I thought we had a good conversation around that.

Steve Shaw: Absolutely. I remember in the good old consulting days, when I first started, we would have the techs punch in at the back counter. "Take your flag sheet and punch in at the back counter, and at the end of the day I'm going to find out how much time you spent at the back counter." Because we wanted to know: what are you doing back there? Stop talking and get these guys their parts. We were making the argument to deliver parts to them.

Dave Rogers: Remember that? We used to do that too. And now you have technology that tells you how long it takes the parts guys to put prices on the estimate.

The most coached people play games 12:00

Steve Shaw: Exactly. And proficiency was one of the topics. We got into the whole selling aspect, which was cool. We talked about net to gross, about having certain percentages, and the break-even you and I have talked about. But what was really cool was the coaching side of it. You kid me because I like to follow the Cardinals right now. But you said it, I think: the people who play a game for a living are the most coached people in the world, yet we run multi-million-dollar businesses and do very little of it.

And what was so cool: I asked the managers, "How much do you coach?" And it's really not much. With one exception, almost all of them said, "We don't really do that much of it." Then I asked, "How do you coach?" I was really trying to get to the crux of it. I wanted to get granular: if I'm going to have a coaching session with an associate, tell me what you would do. But we didn't get that low. It was more about what should be coached and what shouldn't. We were still at a very high level: setting standards, setting processes and managing that process, versus how to actually have a coaching session.

I think there's a ton of work that can be done from that perspective, on setting the bar. You and I were talking about this last week. What is the bar, what is the standard, what is the process, so everybody knows it, not just our managers, but everybody all the way down to the porter? Because how can I coach somebody if there's no standard or benchmark out there? How can I coach somebody to stay within the rails of the process?

Vince Lombardi: coaching is teaching 14:03

Dave Rogers: I think the best coaches are great teachers. They go hand in hand a little bit. It's probably why your gym teacher is a coach. A lot of times on your football or baseball team, the gym teacher or one of the other teachers in the school is also a coach. And I think if you look at a lot of coaches' histories, they were teachers. Vince Lombardi, for one. He was a teacher.

I never realized that until around 1998, 1999, maybe 2000, when I read the Vince Lombardi biography, When Pride Still Mattered. I'm one of those guys who's a reader, and I love football and I love Vince Lombardi. I've always loved the way he coached and the way he did things. I remember finishing the book and coming in to my parts manager at the time, Joe Camarada, who's now the fixed ops director of the East Coast for Penske Automotive. He's a big shot, way bigger than me now. I remember handing him the book and going, "This is the greatest management book I've ever read in my life."

He was a football fan as much as I was, probably even more so. We went to Lambeau together two or three times to see the Giants play. We were walking through the stadium on a tour, we came out in the end zone, and he reached down, grabbed some grass and stuck it in his pocket. I said, "What the hell are you doing?" He said, "This is where Bart Starr did the quarterback sneak in the Ice Bowl in 1963. This is a religious experience for me." So I knew he would love this book.

I gave him the book, he read it, and he was like, "Holy shit. This is what we do." The coaching aspect, "winning is a habit," teaching everybody what to do, the way Lombardi did it. Paying the price was one of the big things with Vince Lombardi. He ran the power sweep until people couldn't stand up anymore, because it was all about the footwork, the choreography and the price it took to do that. He practiced out in the cold because he wanted to see what they would do under adverse conditions. He was very big on responsibilities, everyone taking responsibility for their role.

I was kind of doing some of this stuff, just not as much. At one store I was at, the place needed to be revamped. It was a good store, but the attitude and the culture were poor. We had to turn the Bad News Bears into the Green Bay Packers, and we did. The store really turned around. We got everybody on board. We started sharing everything. I shared my trackers with my team leaders. We did lessons on what gross profit is for the techs, so they understood.

When you read these things and grow up learning as you're doing it, you realize how much coaching is teaching. That's really what it is: showing somebody how to do things. And then we talked about it today: acting like you care. Show people you actually care about their success.

I've read a bunch of books by coaches. I always lean toward football, but I've read basketball too, Pitino and a bunch of others. It's always been the same thing: care, and show the way. And that's what most guys and gals in this business need to focus on a little more. It's not just numbers, it's not just nuts and bolts. Teach them. Coach your advisors how to sell. Coach your technicians.

Honestly, is there any service manager out there who can teach a technician how flat rate should work? I had a guy teach me how flat rate works. I'm not a mechanic anymore, I don't work on cars, but I used to show my techs the way to flat-rate. I can tell you the mentality and how to line things up, because a guy who worked for me, Rob Hickey, taught me how to flat-rate and make a hundred hours a week in a Chrysler store. That's what he did, week in and week out. But are there service managers out there who can teach their techs how to flat-rate a job? Or is it just, "Here, bring it in and fix it"? It was eye-opening today when you said that word and started talking about coaching. I don't think most of them do any of that, with the exception of a few of them in the room.

Direct, not a bully 18:43

Steve Shaw: Right, there are a few who do. And we were kidding around when we were doing our presentations. I said if it were me, I'd start out with a joke about how much I love to coach, because everybody would get a chuckle out of it. It's something I think we avoid. And it's not because we don't want to. You've said it many times: "I'm a production guy, I'm a technical guy. I haven't been taught. It's not my skill set. How do I sit down with somebody?"

We talk about Vince Lombardi. He'd start out every season with, "This is a football." He'd start at the basics. And we could start a class and say, "This is an RO." We've done that before in the past. But then you have to realize it's really about the way I do it. It's about my presentation. It's not about me talking down to you like you're stupid: "This is a repair order." Lombardi wasn't telling these people, "Just so you know." His presence and the way he did it made people go, "You're right. I'm getting back to the basics. This is a ticket. This is an RO. It is a legal document," and all the things that go along with a repair order.

It really becomes: how do you handle that? What's your demeanor as a coach? How do you handle the person in front of you? Are you talking down to them like they're idiots? "Of course I know what a repair order is. I've been writing service for twenty-five years." It's the way I approach that particular scenario. And I think we've all been in that situation before.

When I was young, and I'm six-foot-four and two hundred thirty pounds, people would say I'm intimidating. I think I'm the nicest guy on the planet. But I guess people thought I bullied them, because I was a big guy and I was very direct. I remember I was in a union store, and one of my guys, a young apprentice, went out on leave. He was gone for months and months, and we were trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with him. He was having anxiety because he couldn't work for me anymore. He said I bullied him. And I'm looking at myself like, me? Twenty-seven-year-old, twenty-nine-year-old Steve, running a Saturn store? You think I'm bullying you?

My dad used to say I was very flippant. I didn't care. So it was an art I had to learn: to demonstrate that I had empathy. I had to work on it, and I've probably worked on it more since I've been out of the store than ever, whether it's VAK or DISC training or all that stuff, so I can relate to someone who's not direct like me.

In DISC, I'm a high D or a high I, depending. I'm very direct, and I like to tell stories. But if you're not that way, I've got to change my way to match you, so I can relate to you and you don't feel like I'm trying to kick your ass, when I'm really not. So I look back on my career, and I think when this guy thought I was a bully, it was probably because I just told him how it was, but I didn't have any finesse. I didn't have any of that empathy when I talked to him, so he took a dive and was gone for months.

If you don't care, act like you care 22:07

Dave Rogers: Well, the people who know me are going to find it hard to believe that this has been my problem too. I'm blunt. I tell people how it is. Shock, shock, right? Anybody who knows me: shock. I'm very passionate about what I do, so sometimes it comes across as intense, or like aggravation, and it's really just passion. It drives me crazy when people aren't putting in the work and the effort.

I think that's one of the reasons I've been able to do what I do: I've always outworked everybody. I've always tried to out-study everybody. And it drives me crazy when I see people not fulfilling what I think their destiny should be, because they're giving up on themselves or taking shortcuts. But I've heard it over and over again: "You're a little intense, you're intimidating." I'm like, what, man? I'm the nicest guy in the world.

I'm as loyal to people as I am demanding. That's one of the things I learned years ago. I demand a lot from my people, but I've got your back. I'm not throwing you under the bus. And listen, if I screw up, I'm going to tell you I screwed up. You saw a conversation I had today with one of the service managers. "Listen, I'll take seventy-five percent of the blame. Miscommunication, whatever it is." I don't even know if I was at fault. I really don't. But I'll take that responsibility, because that's just what I do. I'm not worried about who's right and who's wrong. I want to get the job done.

I think it's hard for people to distinguish. I had a conversation today with one of the groups, and I said, "Listen, even if you don't care, act like you care. Let people think you care." And I mean that sincerely. If you're busy and sidetracked and you're talking to a technician who's limping: "Are you all right? Is your leg hurt? Something going on?" Act like you care, because I think it's important.

And of course the response I got back was, "Is that what we get from you?" No, I actually care. I really do. If you tell me you're home sick because you don't feel good, when I say I hope you're all right, I mean it. I said it facetiously, but I think that's one of the things people get mixed up. You don't have to know all the intimate details about everybody, but you should give a shit about them. If they work for you, you should give a shit about them. Really, if they work in the business with you, you should give a shit about them, because you're only as good as the rest of the team.

That's one of the other things you learn from football, baseball, soccer, basketball, whatever it is. You're only as good as the team. You're one cog in the wheel. If you're a tennis player or a long jumper, it's a different story. But on a football team or a baseball team, you're only as good as the people around you. So why not make sure everybody around you feels like, at the very least, you give a shit?

Passion for the brand 25:17

Steve Shaw: Well, you added a word in there that could be a session on its own: passionate. We started talking about the Mini Cooper, about our brands and about being passionate. I asked, are you passionate at your Nissan store? And I get it, Nissan is not a super-high-line brand. It's hard to get passionate behind it. But if we're not like the Harley people or the Jeep people or all the other knuckleheads, if we're not that passionate, then what does that convey to our customers?

There are a couple of things I'm passionate about in the world. Obviously I love to train. I love to stand up there, and I'll give it everything I've got, even though I kid around about being exhausted, like I really am. I give it a hundred percent for the six or eight hours that I do it. Give it everything you have, because you care and you want to deliver the message. Because if I don't give you the message with all my heart, then you're going to think the trainer doesn't give a shit, and then it really wasn't that important. It was just another class.

I think that's why people often enjoy my training: "Look, I'm giving you all I've got." When we talk about people who are cheating or abusing the system, I'm not really interested in dealing with people who aren't interested. But I am interested in sharing a message and giving you everything I have. And I hope that when you leave my class, you're fired up and have that same passion for what you do, which is going to talk to a Nissan customer or a Toyota customer or whatever brand you work for. I hope you have the same passion as an advisor or manager that I have getting to speak to all these people.

I think bringing that passion to the job is something we've lost. I've worked at Toyota, Hyundai, GM, Cadillac, all these stores. For me as an associate, it was just a job. But not for the guy behind the wheel. I think sometimes that passion for the brand has to be brought back up, like we did with the Mini Cooper and the other brands we were discussing today. Where's that passion? Where's that fire in your belly about the customer?

Dave Rogers: Well, I think that is a topic of conversation. Sometimes you don't get a chance. You're in a store, you have a weekly meeting, and you talk about the numbers, where you're tracking and what you're doing. We have that with the GMs every month: where you're at, where you're heading. Me personally, every month I want to beat last month. Every month I want a new record. That's just the way I am. I never want to go backwards. I always want to go forward, and I always want good CSI.

The passion can consume you. It really can. When I was in the store, forget about it. I'd wring every dollar out of every RO and every parts counter ticket. It didn't matter. Selling cars up front as a GM, I wanted to crush last month. If we netted $150,000 last month, this month it had to be $151,000. And we know it doesn't always work that way. One month you've got twenty-four days, one month you've got twenty-six.

But when you're talking to folks in the store about brand or culture, the Mini brand was a great example. And Mazda has a clientele. They're near-luxury. That's their thing. Those cars are quality vehicles. It's one of the best-kept secrets in the business. They've got pretty good tech and great fit and finish. Most people don't realize it. They don't squeak, they don't rattle, they have nice paint jobs and nice technology, and we don't get a lot of repairs on those cars either. It's amazing. I've taken people out of Hondas and put them into Mazdas, and once they drove one, they were astonished. "Holy cow, I didn't even know."

But what are we doing to make those people feel special when they come in, other than "What's your name? What's your phone number? What do you need?" I mentioned to the service manager at one of the Mazda stores that one of the girls in the office needed her car serviced. It was a Mazda, and I said, "I want you to pick it up and valet it for her. Just come over here, give her a loaner, pick her car up, whatever it is. This is Mazda. You're near-luxury. You should have valet service. You should be picking up people's cars. This should be an everyday occurrence for you."

He looked at me like I had three heads. "I'm a quick lube. I do oil changes and tire rotations all day." I said, "No, you're near-luxury, babe. Let's go. Step up." And they haven't gotten there. They're still running it like a quick lube. Now, they had a record-breaking month last month, and I want to give them credit. I patted him on the back today. They cracked $200,000 in service gross for the first time ever. Jay did a great job. Jason did a great job. I don't want to take anything away from it. But I think they could do three or four hundred thousand if they got to the near-luxury style they should be.

Steve Shaw: That's it. Good job. It's a beautiful thing.

Teach your people what they don't know 30:29

Steve Shaw: Why don't we wrap things up today? Give us a GM tip of the day about passion, or whatever.

Dave Rogers: Well, I think maybe take a second, take a step back and review the basics. Talk to your people, your service manager, your parts manager. Heck, maybe you'll learn something yourself. See what they know. What's the productivity of the shop? What does that mean? What's the proficiency of the shop? What does that mean? Go back to it a little bit and see what your people know, because maybe you hired a guy who was a tech and doesn't understand how to sell. Maybe he doesn't know how to figure hours per RO, or what the formula is. Hell, I've had service managers who didn't know the calculation for gross profit.

When I was with a big group up north, I realized early on that the techs in the shop and the advisors had no idea why we were shooting for year-over-year growth or how our quarters worked. It was a public company, and they had no idea. So two or three nights in a row, I had the crew up in stages, and I taught basic accounting: what they were looking for, year-over-year improvement, all of it. The GM was over there taking notes. He said, "Nobody's ever explained this to me before." Joe was a good guy, but nobody had explained to him how important it was for a public company to hit year-over-year numbers, net return on sales, all these different things.

So I think sometimes we forget. As a GM, I'd say: you only know what you know, and think about it, your people only know what they know. Take some time out of your day. Coach them. Be their coach, be their mentor, be their teacher, because I think that's really what's going to separate you from your competition.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. That is true. And be passionate about what you do. That's it for me, Dave. I've had my butt kicked, so I'm getting the heck out of here. I'm going to get on an airplane.

Dave Rogers: All right, bud. Have a good one, man.

Steve Shaw: All right. Talk to you later.