Your New Hire Is Already Failing... Here's Why

"I don't know" 0:00

Steve Shaw: Welcome back to Fixed Ops Focus, everybody. It's great to be here with you and with Mr. Dave Rogers. What's going on, Dave?

Dave Rogers: How you doing, buddy? How are things? I've got to smile a little more. One of my guys told me I looked like a grouchy old F on the live version the other day. I started laughing. Well, I lost a tooth, so I didn't really feel like smiling, and I didn't want to look like a hillbilly, and he's still making fun of me. So I'm going to try to smile more, everyone. Sorry about that.

Steve Shaw: I'm doing awesome. I might have said this in an episode a long time ago: I watched a guy talk about debating, and he said, no matter what, just have a smile on your face. I'm generally a happy person anyway. I've got a great life, a wonderful company, great people who work for me, and I get to talk to people like you and people all around the country every day. So I've got nothing to be unhappy about. I'm always in a positive mood. You want to hear a funny story?

A trainer walks into a store with a parrot on his shoulder. I'm not sure how to phrase this properly, so I'm just going to say it. We went into a store recently with about eight technicians and three or four service advisors, with a couple of people on vacation. We said to the service manager, "What are we going to do today?" His response was, "I don't know." Okay. "Are you practicing what you were taught?" "What do you mean?" "How many alignments are you selling?" "I don't know." "How many alignments can you do?" "I'm not real sure." Every question was "I don't know" or "I'm not sure." We were blown away. How can you not know? You're the manager, and that's your job. Before I tell you more, what do you think about that? I know it wouldn't happen in a Dave Rogers store.

Dave Rogers: Well, at least your trainer is in the right place to start. This guy definitely needs some training. Hopefully this was your first visit there.

Steve Shaw: Yes, it was the first.

Dave Rogers: I think there are people in this business who just go into work and clock in. Either they're reactive to everything that's happening, so they don't sit down and run the reports and look at their numbers, or they're just not qualified sometimes. So continue on. It couldn't have ended there, or that would have been a very quick funny story.

Steve Shaw: The interesting part is that it was our first visit. They're a newer client.

Dave Rogers: That's good to know for Steve Shaw training customers out there: this wasn't your twentieth visit, and the guy still didn't know.

Promoted from the shop without the tools 3:08

Steve Shaw: Thank you for that testimonial. It was our first visit, and we were given direction. But it's interesting. Going back to our previous episode about working in the business and on the business: this gentleman was a technician who got promoted, so he had more of a technician mindset. My expectation would have been different. I'd expect a technician mindset to be, "I've got to take care of my guys. I've got to get them work. I've got to feed them. I was a tech." His mindset was more, "I've got to take care of my guys. I don't want to overwhelm them."

I'm a sales guy. I sell, sell, sell, and sometimes I let the chips fall where they may from a sales perspective. But as a numbers guy, I want to know how many hours I can do today. I've got eight techs; how many hours can they flag? I'm always going down that path. So the ending of the story was setting production objectives, having a meeting, and going out there every single day and talking to people. We were able to get that accomplished over a couple of days. How many alignments can you sell today? How many can be done on this rack? That's not a sales pitch; it's what happened. But it goes back to: did we put the right person in place, and did we give that person the tools? This guy didn't get hired yesterday. He's been there a long, long time. How do we put people in these positions without giving them the tools they need to do the job?

Dave Rogers: We've mentioned it before. Sometimes this happens with a technician or a high performer, making a lot of hours, and a lot of times that person's personality is very selfish. They're worried about themselves, and they can't just flip a switch and start caring about everybody else. They're worried about survival: "My God, we're shorthanded today. Somebody called out sick. Let's reschedule appointments." They're in CYA mode too, and technicians do that naturally.

When I first started, I came from the shop. I had a pause in between, recovering from my accident, which gave me a chance to reflect. But when I came back, I still had that mindset. If I told you that you needed a $400 alternator, and you asked, "Will you guarantee that'll fix my car?", my first reaction was, "I can't guarantee anything. Who am I, the Amazing Kreskin?" Then you realize after a while that yes, I can guarantee it. My tech said you need an alternator, you need an alternator. It's going to fix your car. These guys get promoted from the shop, and they don't know it. There's nobody to teach them, train them or coach them. Maybe they figure it out themselves, or maybe, like you, they come out with a gunslinger mentality.

There are different personalities. But I'm sure the minute something goes south, this guy is cocooned up, shutting down the faucet. I guarantee that's what they do, because I've seen it a million times. The technician mindset: they stop selling. I've seen places where they just stop recommending things. "Don't tell anybody they need brakes today unless they're red. We can't get the work done." That doesn't make any sense.

"What do I do now?" 7:00

Steve Shaw: It's crazy how that happens. Cindy was a trainer for me for a long time, and she ended up in Idaho one day when they promoted their shop foreman, a long-time veteran, good man, good employee. She was there on his first day, so kudos to the dealer for bringing us out. He sat down in the chair, looked at Cindy and said, "What do I do now?" He had no idea. The best person ever, and maybe he was right for the role because of his status and his attitude. But he said, "What do I do?" And Cindy was there to say, "Okay, now let's talk." That was fantastic.

Cindy was also at a store up in Washington with kind of the same thing: a new manager, a woman, promoted from the shop. The dealer called me specifically to have Cindy work with her. I think she'd been in the role about thirty days. She got her feet on the ground, drank from the fire hose for thirty days, and then Cindy went out and gave her some tools and helped structure her day. That's important. That's a dealer doing the right thing: giving the new person a little time, then saying, "Here are the tools, and here are your expectations." But putting somebody in there to check the box, fill the shoes and walk away is almost dereliction of duty, I hate to say. And that could be the mentality too: "Just don't let anybody come to my office. I don't want to be bothered."

Dave Rogers: It's about awareness that the person may need coaching or training in that area, and not every general manager is going to recognize it. I know I get under people's skin in this organization, because I'll point out things I know aren't in people's comfort zones. I'm trying to push them, and maybe I don't always do it the right way, and sometimes time is not in your favor. But you bring things to someone's attention.

We mentioned training in one of the last episodes. I look at the report, and I've got a store where the manager and nobody in the store signed up for the training. We have the university. There's no reason for that. I'm not going to send an email directly to that manager, because I know he or she wouldn't take it well. So I spoke with the guy running the store and said, "Please bring this to their attention, because I don't want to ruffle any feathers." But the bottom line is they're not taking the training, and the store's underperforming. That's the kind of stuff I think I should try to do, because not everybody's a Steve Shaw. If you were one of my service managers, I might have to tell you, "Steve, this shop's a mess and needs to be cleaned," or, "You've got two hundred Google reviews that haven't been responded to. Somebody needs to fix this." Because you're going to be out there slinging the gun: selling, selling, selling.

Steve Shaw: Voicemail was my nemesis, bro. Fuck that voicemail. I ain't answering the voicemail. Delete, delete, delete.

Make the basics visible every day 10:41

Dave Rogers: But you're going to have two hundred percent upsell on alignments. I mentioned it the other day: we had a store where I was talking to the service manager, and last month the technicians had recommended a hundred alignments, and they only sold thirteen. How do you guys not notice this? He wasn't looking at it, and he wasn't looking at the advisors. The GM has been having meetings with the advisors, and now there's a clipboard on the alignment rack and a waiting list. It was just a matter of bringing it back to their attention, bringing them back to center. That's the prodding, the awareness. I'm not patting myself on the back, but that's the challenge most people don't see. You've got a service manager who came from the shop, a foreman, and he sat down in that chair. What if Cindy wasn't there that day? What if there was no Dave Rogers, no Cindy Lawrence? He could still be sitting in that chair all these years later, wondering what to do next.

Steve Shaw: Right. Now everybody has some sort of reporting tool, whether it's Chameleon, Accessa or Dynatron, or just your Reynolds and Reynolds daily, or your job stack report. We all have access to those tools. But another thing we did: I went on Claude and said, "Claude, make me an advisor checklist." It was basically how many tickets did I write, how many hours did I sell, and how many menu opportunities and alignments. Just four or five things. And I said, every advisor, walk this into your manager every day. Let your manager know how many tickets you wrote. That way, as an advisor, I have to look at myself, instead of waiting for the manager to give me the numbers.

And I told the manager basically the same thing: here are five things to look at today. How many tickets did you write, how many hours were available, and how many hours did you sell? Very basic things to get your mind around, instead of "We've got an Accessa report or a Chameleon dashboard with fifty thousand numbers," which I don't expect you to understand. But I do expect you to understand the very basics. The advisors hand it to the manager, the manager hands it to the GM, and they talk about it at a noon meeting. They decided on a twelve o'clock meeting with their ten-person service department, and I thought that was cool. Hopefully, ninety days from now when we go back, they're building that process. If they want to change the report, great. It's a guide, a tool, so you grasp the basics.

Sixty-four ounces and an eight-ounce cup 13:50

Dave Rogers: You have to build the foundation. You've got to have the basics done, some solid foundation to build on, and that's a big mistake a lot of people make. I use this example from years ago. At one store, we had a customer relations manager, Jackie, who was responsible for hiring the cashiers and receptionists. It was a Toyota store, and there was one main desk with one or two receptionists who answered all the phones and did a bunch of other stuff. Jackie had come from that job, so she knew every aspect of it. And she'd get frustrated because she'd hire people and they couldn't do the job.

It was a twelve-dollar-an-hour job at the time. She'd lose it, and she was the sweetest woman. She did a great job in customer relations. So I sat down with her one day and said, "Jackie, why are you so damn frustrated?" She said, "They can't get it." "What do they have to do?" "They have to answer the phones, check out service customers and sales customers, make receipts. They're responsible for all the license plates. The keys are back there. The deal jackets are back there. They're also asked to do a handful of things for the accounting office as needed." Plus, plus, plus.

So I said, "Okay, and this job pays twelve dollars an hour." She said, "Yeah, but I did it for years." I said, "Let me ask you a question, Jackie. On day one, did you do all those things, or did you just answer the phone?" "Well, I answered the phone and took money." "Did you have the license plates?" "No, the building was different then." "So you're taking this new person off the street..." And this is where I think I came up with the 64 ounces, the 32 ounces, the 16 ounces. "You're giving this poor girl sixty-four ounces of fluid, and she has an eight-ounce Dixie cup, if that."

It was a real casual conversation. It was organic, not planned. And it opened her eyes too: you're dumping all this on somebody on day one because the previous person did it. Well, how long was that previous person there? Ten years. They probably picked up more things to do over ten years than their regular job. We all make that mistake. "Steve was the service manager, and he retired. You can do it." No, wait. It takes time. You have to learn.

Train your number two 16:38

Steve Shaw: That goes to the other side of the coin. We bring people out of the store to a training class or a 20 Group, and how many people rush out at the break and get on their phones to check in with the store? Listen, if I'm out of the store today, I promise you, I ain't calling in. If I've got to call in on break to find out how many calls we made and whether this or that happened, that means I didn't do a good job of preparing my people for the day I'm not there. It cracks me up. If your store's going to fall down unless you check in at ten, twelve and two, maybe you're not preparing your people well enough for your absence.

Dave Rogers: There's that. Either they don't see it, or it's job security and they don't want to train anybody. I think the biggest mistake a lot of people make is not training somebody to be their number two, to be there when they're not. They're worried that person will take their job, and I get it. We've all been in situations in the car business where we trained our replacement. But I've always felt, and you learn this over time, that I want to raise everybody who works for me up as much as I can, because it makes my life easier, or it frees me up to do bigger and better things. If you just started the job, that's a different story. In your first month or two, different story. But if you've been there a year and you still have to check in at every fifteen-minute break, there's an issue. There's definitely a lack of management going on in that dealership.

Let people make decisions 18:32

Steve Shaw: It cracks me up. I always say I've never missed a lunch in my tenure as a manager. I'm going to lunch, and unless the place is burning down, do not call me. And I did work at a dealership that burned down. There was a fire on a Tuesday night, they called me, I actually answered my phone at five in the morning, and I went in at 5 a.m. But the place burned down. Other than that, please do not call me, because somebody needs to be able to handle it.

And if you do that, and somebody makes a decision that isn't the one you would have made, okay. They made a decision. You weren't there. That's the coaching opportunity. That's when you get to say, "Thank you for taking care of that. You made your best decision. Maybe we could do it differently next round." I'm not going to get mad at somebody for making a decision when I'm not there. They did the best they knew how, the best they were trained. So make a decision, right or wrong. It's okay to fail. This is the car business. I think car dealers will last a lot longer than any of us will. If somebody makes a poor decision, what's it going to do, cost me a couple of bucks? Come on. We spend more than that on donuts.

Dave Rogers: That's the thing. People get all riled up over a hundred or two hundred dollars, and I get it. When I was running the Chevy Cadillac store, my mantra was, "Don't do dumb." They had lost money over and over because they did dumb stuff, and I'd harp on the dumb stuff whether it was fifty bucks, a hundred or two thousand. But once you got it up and running and everybody was thinking on their feet and doing the job, we didn't squabble over pennies. I wasn't going to beat them up, as long as the reason something happened wasn't that we did something dumb. If you made an honest mistake, if a customer came in and needed a tire fixed and you took it upon yourself to do it as goodwill, that was fine. But the dumb stuff: we'd send a Hummer to the back, put running boards and tires on it, do five thousand dollars in accessories, and the idiots up front wouldn't cost it into the deal. That was dumb. We owed somebody floor mats and didn't set it up in the deal. That was dumb. And you have to get it through people's heads: if you make the wrong decision, I'll discuss the decision-making process with you, but I'm not going to question you in front of everybody.

Steve Shaw: Absolutely.

Dave Rogers: That's another reason I always tell service managers, advisors and GMs: let people make the decision, but make sure it's in writing why they did it. If I'm writing an RO and giving Steve Shaw a free oil change because the wait was too long, put it in there: "One-time goodwill, free oil change, apologies for the wait," whatever it is. If I look at the RO and see an explanation, I'll move on with life. If there's no note, I'm going to ask what it's for and why you did it, and then we can discuss whether it was the right decision. As long as it wasn't a dumb decision, I never had a problem with it.

Steve Shaw: My buddy Don Crowder from Saturn Corporation taught me this, and I've said it before. Here's the decision-making process I've lived by my whole life: Is it right for the customer? Is it right for the dealership? Then what does it cost? Let's do the right thing for the customer and the dealership, and it costs what it costs. If we always make decisions based on the right thing, you can't go wrong. Nobody can argue with you.

Dave Rogers: I don't know when I developed it, but I call mine the three Cs. Not cause, complaint, correction. My three Cs are the customer, the company and my coworkers. Is the decision good for the customer? Is it good for the company? And how does it impact my employees? Sometimes you're going to ask somebody to do something they won't get paid for, but it's good for the customer and good for the company because of long-term loyalty. Other times, I'll give the customer something that's $500, I'll pay my technician the full five hours, and the company eats it. It's a balancing act among those three things. And sometimes you're going to make a decision that's not good for us. It's just not.

As I always told my staff, and I think I developed this in Turnersville: if it wasn't for the customer, there would be no company. And if it wasn't for the company, all these coworkers would be picking corn in a cornfield, because there'd be no dealership here. So keep it in mind: the customer has to come first, then the company, then the coworkers. It's one, one-A, one-B, but you have to set a priority. Without the customer, we've got nothing. So sometimes we're going to take it in the shorts.

Steve Shaw: Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. We hate to say in 2026 that the customer's always right, because sometimes they're not. But like you said, without them, we are nothing. And with some of the silly shit that's happened to me, I can look at it from the dealer's perspective: "Steve, you're thirty or forty miles from the store. We don't pick up and deliver. Too bad you bought a Wagoneer." That's a dealership decision. But wait a minute, I did spend a lot of money. And if you look at the research, a customer who passes multiple stores to come to yours has repair orders two, three or five times larger than the ones who live next door. So was that a good decision? Sometimes we're penny-wise and pound-foolish. We step over dollars to pick up pennies. I try to look at both sides of the coin. But if I'm a customer and I need something, it's really the dealership's role to take care of me, and that's where loyalty to that particular store comes into play.

Funny enough, I've been getting calls from my local dealership: "How was your service?" They recommended a bunch of fluid maintenance products to me on my Wagoneer, which I declined. They didn't recommend the alignment. And now they're calling me to sell me the stuff I declined. They still haven't called me to buy the alignment.

Dave Rogers: Because the damn advisor never noted it as a decline, and the tech didn't either. That's a total failure. They don't want to do alignments. It's crazy.

Acquisitions, DMS changes and the shock of day one 26:01

Steve Shaw: We got a little off our subject of people in roles they maybe don't belong in.

Dave Rogers: I think it's all part of the same thing. It's the graduation from one level to another for the individual, whether it's a cashier, a service advisor or a service manager. There has to be somebody helping them with those levels. You can't just hammer somebody on day one: "Here's the reporting tool, here's this, here's that." I watched Penske back before it was Penske; it was called United Auto Group. They'd buy a mom-and-pop store. We bought some stores in Connecticut with great people who worked there, run very conservatively. On the day of the closing, these experienced controllers, without great personalities, and the IT guys would come in, replace every computer in the place and put in a new DMS. It didn't matter what you were on. You were getting Reynolds and Reynolds. And they'd change your chart of accounts. They'd do a conversion behind the scenes, so on day one you had a clone of the image. They'd be there three-quarters of a day and then say, "See you later." I used to call it getting UAG'd. Ugged.

About four times, within the first month after we bought a store, my boss would send me up there because there was an issue. We were on ADP at the time, and there'd be a problem with the chaining of accounts. They'd run a financial statement, and it showed a hundred percent gross profit for every labor category. I knew the computer system pretty well, so they'd send me to fix the labor types, and invariably the image they used was wrong, and they never fixed it. But I'd go up there and talk to the women in the office and the guys, and they were all still in shock, fifteen or twenty days later. That's what I always remember: that's how they brought people into the business. Hopefully they do it differently now. I was with them about ten years, and I don't think they changed their tactics while I was there, though I think they had some nicer people on the acquisition team, so at least they sugarcoated it a little.

It's the same thing with a new employee. You hammer them with all this information. I said to one of the CFOs one time, "How would you like it if I came into your office and redid your Rolodex, with everyone's phone number in a different place?" "Well, I wouldn't like that." "Well, you just did that to that whole complex you bought. You changed their chart of accounts overnight without telling them. You changed their computer system without telling them. They had no idea what they were walking into. Welcome to the team, guys." And I think we do that on a daily basis, though not as brutally as that used to be.

Steve Shaw: They moved your cheese. We should do an episode on the dreaded DMS change. What a debacle. I have so many clients going from Dealertrack to Reynolds, or from here to there. And what frustrates Steve even more is when they tell me they're doing a DMS change, and I ask, "Have you ever done it before?" "No, first time." So I pull out my handy-dandy Steve Shaw checklist of things that are important to do. "I got it, Steve. The DMS company told us it's going to be no problem. It's a no-brainer. Don't worry about it." Three weeks later: "How you feeling?" "We're fucked right now." Sorry. I had a checklist, but you didn't want to hear it, because the DMS company told you how wonderful and easy it was going to be. I've yet to see one ever go easy. Those things are the worst possible.

Dave Rogers: It's terrible. It's that sudden impact. It's painful for any employee, in any situation, when change happens suddenly and you're inundated with information. And that's where I think we make a mistake with the new service manager or the new advisor. We just don't take the time to teach. When I was with the public company, and we were on Reynolds, I had a thing: Have you ever worked on Reynolds? No. Have you ever worked with the brand, Toyota? No. Have you ever worked for Penske? No. That's three strikes. Unless it was a special situation, it was hard for me to spend the time teaching all three. Especially the DMS: if you couldn't operate the DMS, it would be very difficult for me to put you in front of a customer. I could teach the brand, or I could teach Penske, but I wasn't going to teach all three. I just didn't have the time.

And take your shop foreman out of the shop. He knows how to clock on in his computer, put himself to work and take himself off, and maybe he knows how to put someone else on. But does he know how to write an RO? No. Close an RO? Absolutely not. Run a report? No. And that's what we do to people: "Here you go. Welcome to the team, Steve. Have at it. Here's your login."

Steve Shaw: "But Dave, we promise you, we're buying your store, and nothing is going to change." Nothing is going to change until midnight tonight.

Dave Rogers: Right. In our company's case, we actually don't change anything we don't have to. There's good and bad to that, but I'd rather do it that way, so everybody doesn't blow out in the first week and leave you running the place yourself. But any new employee, same thing. That was the original point of this: what are we doing to this poor guy or girl? A parts manager starts today: "Listen, your cycle return is due tomorrow. You'd better get it going." If I was the parts manager, I'd quit. I'm not doing a cycle return in twenty-four hours. I'm out of here.

Steve Shaw: I'll let you do the GM tip of the day, but I took over a store, Crenshaw Ford, downtown LA. I was a pretty seasoned manager, the Steve Shaw character. My new GM was Gary Greer, a sharp cat. I still have a bunch of buddies from there. I sat down in the office, did my thing, got to know everybody, and at the end of the day Gary came in and asked, "How'd it go?" I said, "I think I've got a pretty good handle on it. Give me a couple of days, I'll know the numbers, and I'll come up and see you." He said, "A couple of days? You're going to know the numbers tomorrow, bro." And I was like, "Okay. I think I'm working late tonight." So I'm studying. But I was a veteran. I had the skills to figure everything out, and I got the message. But we do that to people. We light them on fire and see what they do.

Dave Rogers: But not everyone can handle it. That's the thing. EJ did the same thing to me. We pull up to work one day, and he says, "By the way, I'm firing the parts manager in the Chrysler store today." "Okay." At the time I was the service and parts director for the Hyundai store, in the same building, and I did warranty for both Chrysler and Hyundai. He says, "I need you to be the parts manager at Chrysler." I said, "I don't know shit about parts." He goes, "You will. I'll see you at ten." So you know what I did? I learned parts. That's how I learned, anyway.

GM tip: hire people to succeed 34:46

Steve Shaw: That's it. Well, wrap us up. Give us a GM tip of the day.

Dave Rogers: GM tip of the day: know your people and know the situations you're putting them in. Not everybody's a Dave Rogers or a Steve Shaw. There's no one size fits all. If you're going to make that move, and we just had one recently where we let a service manager go, and if you're going to promote from within, give the person a chance to grow into the job. You can't just put people in situations. Steve said it earlier in the conversation, and probably last time, about our hiring processes. Could you write a rule book? I think we all know inside whether we're doing the right thing for people or not. Our job is to make sure we hire people to succeed, not just to fill a body in a spot. That takes some awareness. So let's take a little time and try to figure it out. We're all guilty of it. I'm not saying I'm any better than anybody else. But I do think we put people in situations where they're never going to survive. They're running behind schedule the whole time, and at some point it's destined to fail. Let's start building it the other way, to succeed. That's my tip.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. Let's get out of here. We look forward to seeing everybody on Fixed Ops Fridays. If you've got any comments, thoughts, or your best war story of taking over a store, we'd love to hear it, and we'll read it, talk about it and discuss it on air. Dave, I'll catch up with you soon. Later.

Dave Rogers: Talk to you later, bro.