The $100K Career Nobody Tells High Schoolers About

If you had to start over today 0:00

Steve Shaw: Dave Rogers, here we are again. How you doing, sir?

Dave Rogers: Doing fantastic, my friend. How are you?

Steve Shaw: I am off the charts as well. Hanging out down here in the Florida Keys for the summer.

Dave Rogers: It's 96 degrees today. We love it. It's May, it was 94 yesterday and 96 today. And just like Pennsylvania, it'll be 67 by Thursday. So it's perfect.

Steve Shaw: Good for you guys. It's better than the New England states, where they only have two seasons, the Fourth of July and the rest of the year. It's either cold or hot.

Dave Rogers: I always find it astonishing. They just go from heat to air conditioning, and you don't even get a couple of days with the windows open in the joint. It's just insane.

Steve Shaw: We had a beautiful spring here. What's on your mind?

Dave Rogers: We were talking about a few things at work, and I have a question for you. If you had to start in this business today, knowing nothing about the business but knowing what you know, what job would you take and why?

Steve Shaw: Knowing what I know now, if I had to start over, I'd like to say finance manager, but that would take too much work for me to go sell cars and work my way up to finance manager. So you know what I would do? I've often pondered this at my age. If I had to go back to work, or somebody made me the right offer, I would go back to work as an express service advisor. Yes, sir.

Why Steve would start as an express advisor 1:57

Dave Rogers: Really? Why would you do that?

Steve Shaw: Well, let's think about this. I have the privilege of talking to a lot of people where I live, and a lot of young people in my neighborhood. And I think the career of a service advisor is a darn good one, especially if you're coming out of the military, or maybe you're coming out of high school and you don't really know exactly what you want to do. I know there are a lot of trades you could go into. You could become a plumber. Gosh, if you had the stomach to become a plumber, that's one of those trades that's going to be around forever. But maybe I'm a person who doesn't have all of those skills, and Steve Shaw, at his age right now, does not have particular tradesman skills.

But I would say the role of a service advisor, an express advisor, and I think the best reason why I would do it is this: in a very short period of time, I would say six months, you can double your commissionable income. And a year later, you could triple it. What do I mean by that? Say somebody hired me today and said, "You're going to be on salary plus commission for the next six months. You just go out there and take care of every 5,000-mile oil change that comes in the store, anything below 10,000 or 15,000. You are an express level one writer. We're going to pay you X for the next three months, six months. We'll give you training, and you take care of those customers the best way."

It's not even like selling cars, where three years later you're going to have a return. In six months, you will have the opportunity to double your income, because everybody you took care of today is going to be back six months from now. And if you do that again, you'll have them in a year, and so on. So you could literally double, triple and quadruple your commissionable income in six months, 12 months and 18 months. You're going to be on fire. And now it's really brewing in my head: all of these young men and women. If I were a young man who wanted to go from service advisor to CEO, that's a pretty darn fast pay plan path. You start here, you double your income in six months, and then you triple your base income a year later, because you're now getting three times, four times as many cars, and those cars are starting to get older. What do you think?

Dave Rogers: I think that's a good starting spot. But like you said, everybody wants to be the CEO in a short period of time. If you start as an express advisor and do that for a year to learn your craft, you learn the trade, and you get a clientele that really wants to come see you. Then you graduate to the main advisor desk, and you're going to bring those customers with you. They're going to need brakes, they're going to need a 60K service, they're going to need something. So you're definitely going to make more money. You cut your teeth there for two years.

A career, not a stepping stone 5:15

Dave Rogers: But it's funny you say that, because it's something I always think about: being an advisor as a career. I don't know why it's not looked at more favorably. You can make really good money doing it. I always mention Chuck. He was a sales guy, he was a general manager, he was a finance manager, and he came back to service for the hours. He didn't want to work nine to nine, bell to bell. He didn't want to work six days a week. He wasn't looking for that adrenaline rush, or he didn't need the money anymore. Back when he said this there were no Saturdays. There are Saturdays now, but you still have a regular nine to five, or eight to five, or seven to four, whatever it is.

And it's a career where you can make $60,000, $70,000, $80,000, $100,000. And I always wonder why it's, "Oh, it's a stepping stone. Oh, I want to be a manager." How about you just stay? Some people could be an advisor for 20, 30 years if they wanted to, and retire with a good 401(k). There's nothing wrong with it. You'd probably have a lot more hair on your head than being a manager. Look at you. You still have all your hair.

Steve Shaw: And think about it. You go home every night with the weight of profitability for an auto group on your shoulders. As a service advisor, I go home at five o'clock, six o'clock at the latest, and guess what? I wash my hands of it. I don't take a phone call. I see you in the morning. As long as I do a nice job of wrapping up my day, I don't have to worry about an upset customer. I don't have to worry about anything. And generally speaking, I'm going to have two days off, hopefully Saturdays and Sundays, or Sundays and Mondays, or a couple of days off in the middle of the week. I'm going to have a great life with my family. I think it would be an amazing career.

Don't rush your best advisor into management 7:33

Dave Rogers: We've got some younger guys who are really aggressively making a ton of money. I don't know if they're going to want to stay there. That's always the thing. They want to be a manager. Some of them don't make it as a manager, and it's hard for them to go back. A couple of years ago we had one guy, one of our best advisors in the store, who wanted to be a manager. He became a manager, it just didn't work out, and there was no place to fall back. He had too much pride to go back to being an advisor in that store, so he left. Which is a shame, because he probably should have stayed an advisor. I thought that was his skill set. He didn't think that. A little delusional. I gave him an A for trying, but it wasn't a good plan.

Steve Shaw: We see these guys who are aggressive and making it, and we're in a hurry to promote them to driveway manager, to manager. How many driveway managers out there were a good advisor yesterday, and then you put them in the driveway and they fail? It's like taking your best salesman on the showroom floor and making him a sales manager. They don't all make it. And look, how many guys do you know who are career salesmen? They've been working in sales their whole life and making that top dollar, a couple hundred thousand or more. We can do that too in the service department, with great hours. Applying those principles, I couldn't think of a better gig.

Dave Rogers: I don't think I've said it on the podcast, but in order to be a really good technician, a really good advisor, a really good salesperson or a good F&I manager, you have to be a greedy, selfish, self-centered person. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It's what makes them good. They're focused on making money. They're focused on maximizing their numbers. The best techs I've ever seen were just greedy. They wanted everything: "Give me all the cars." I've got a service advisor doing $3 million, $3.5 million a year. He doesn't share. He doesn't play nice with others. He's a great advisor because of that.

And then you're going to take that guy and promote him to manager, which is now a selfless job, and everything that goes wrong in the place is going to affect his commission. That's why you watch these guys who are managers now get pissed off because somebody blew a tire out on the lift: "That's going to cost me a thousand dollars in policy." They're selfish at heart, and they should probably just face facts that they belong in that sales job, because that's what they're best at. Maybe later in life, in their 40s or 50s, when they get a little reality check and learn how to do things, they can go to the next step. But too many guys and gals want to be the next CEO by the time they're 30. That's not even puberty in the car business.

The Cardinals and the right seat for the right player 10:40

Steve Shaw: Hey, can I make a Cardinals reference? I'm so into the Cardinals, and I've refrained over the last many episodes from talking about the beloved St. Louis Cardinals. But a lot of things have happened, and they're actually doing really, really well. They're about 12 games over .500. And as you go down the line and look at all these players, it really hits home. There's one player who plays third base, Nolan Gorman. Everybody had this huge expectation that he was going to be the second coming. Well, he's batting seventh now. He hits 20 home runs, and he's about a .260 to .280 hitter. He strikes out a bunch. But they finally adjusted their expectations and their lineup.

So putting him in at six or seven, all of a sudden he can be a really good player in that slot, versus trying to force the issue and making him bat cleanup, or trying to make him bat leadoff when that's not the role for this guy. And when they put him in that place, he was doing really well. All of a sudden you see a smile on the guy's face, and you see the pressure off him. "Hey, I'm doing pretty good. I'm going to be an average ballplayer, probably play ball for 15 years and make a nice living."

Dave Rogers: That's actually the key as a general manager or a service manager: finding the right person for the right seat. You have to move people around a little bit. That's what you do. The problem is that some people are delusional. There's nothing wrong with having grand ideas of what you think you are, but you have to look in the mirror every once in a while and figure out what you're good at today, based on your skill level, based on your maturity, based on whatever it is. Maybe I'm not the number one starter, to use your baseball analogy. Maybe I'm number four. Doesn't matter. I get to pitch every fourth time I go out there. I get to make a good living. I can do this for a while. I'm not the big gun going up against the big gun on the other team. I don't have to worry about that.

Steve Shaw: I get no stress.

Dave Rogers: I can go home at night. And when I think about all the years of different advisors, there have been some great guys who did it for a long time, some real characters who were very good at it and made a good living. It just doesn't seem to be the norm anymore. Everybody just wants to blow past that job and go do something higher and different. I don't see the point.

Steve Shaw: I think you're right. And we have to do this one time: we have to talk about the role of the manager. In fact, that's going to be a new class we're introducing in 2017. The manager's job is to find those places for people, find the right role, find the right spot, put them in that place and help that person be successful. You said being selfless. And there are times you have to have that conversation with somebody. To quote Caddyshack, the world needs ditch diggers too. Every single person is not going to be Tiger Woods. You've got to find your spot. And in a manager's job, it's not to put anybody down. It's, "This is your role. This is what you do well, and we encourage you."

If you can make 100K-plus in the role of an advisor... I'll sidetrack here for a second. Take a plumber. I don't want to be a plumber, but when I've got a problem, who am I calling? I never ask the plumber for a discount. The guy comes to my house and does a job. My neighbor is an amazing individual who was a plumber his whole life, built his home, raised kids and grandkids, and is now retired, living off being a plumber.

So what's the difference with being an advisor, raising a family and working in your hometown? Or maybe your wife has a super-duper job and you have to travel. There's a car dealer everywhere that's going to hire you. Be that rock, that person who comes in and says, "I'm going to give you great CSI and X, Y and Z gross month after month. You never have to worry about me. Go about your business." That would be the guy I'd want.

The most important job in the dealership 15:13

Dave Rogers: The other thing is, you can do it with some physical limitations. It's not hard on your body. It's a great second career for technicians, let's be honest, when their back is giving out and they just can't handle it anymore. If they can learn the people skills and figure that part out, they can do a good job. The one thing about technicians as advisors is they always have that CYA mentality. The customer says, "Do you guarantee it'll fix it?" "Whoa, I can't guarantee that." You start backing up. A real salesman will go, "Absolutely. I guarantee it'll fix it." Not even a hesitation. "I'm going to buy that brand-new Wagoneer from you. Is it ever going to break down?" "Never, Steve. That's the best part. I haven't seen one come back in my four years here."

That's the difference with a really good service advisor. That doesn't mean you have to lie. You just have to be confident in what you're fixing and what you're selling. A lot of times the technicians want to backtrack. But I think it's a good career, and you can make a lot of money. I always tease Gina that if she ever got bored, I'd put her in as an advisor. She can sell. She says she can't. I said, "Yeah, you sell pretty good. You close everybody."

Steve Shaw: Well, I think about this all the time. I hate saying this, but our service advisors have the toughest job, and they have the most important job, because it's their responsibility, and you do take the livelihood of a family into your care. I get that the technicians are fixing the car, but everything you do, based on what you present, what you don't present and how you do it, has an effect on that customer. We always say in training, if you say this word, it's going to have a positive effect. If you say that word, it could have a negative effect. By the words you use, you're showing that customer how to maintain their vehicle. You're guiding them, and they're following you.

Can you make the argument it's tough? Yeah, it's absolutely tough. We probably create our own misery most of the time. But the role is probably the most important role in our dealership as far as retention, loyalty, keeping that customer's family safe on the road and keeping that customer down the path the way they need it. That's the role of an advisor. Think about Enterprise Rent-A-Car, or even the manufacturers, who recruit out of college. We as an industry don't look at college graduates, or even high school graduates, other than "here's a technical trade." Why aren't we going to these people and promoting the role of a service advisor and what it does for them on a career path, if they want one?

Look at all the different roles you could have within the organization. But if you want to be a career advisor, raise a family and see every baseball game, every hockey game and every football game your kids have, be a service advisor. How cool would that be? What a great life.

Dave Rogers: Yeah, and over the years we've taken a lot of responsibilities away from it. It's become more of a sales-type job. There's some technical knowledge you have to have, and you have to play around with some technology to get the job done. But back in the day, you answered the phones, you made appointments, you cashiered your customers. We made our appointments, we dispatched the work, we filled it out. When I was handwriting ROs, I could write 35, 40 cars a day without a problem. You put a computer in front of somebody, it slows them down to 20.

When I first started, I worked in a store where, as an advisor, we didn't take phone calls until 10 o'clock in the morning. They were way ahead of their time in the 80s doing that. It wasn't a real BDC, but they took the load off the advisors so we could write our own in the morning, and then we answered the phones and made our own appointments. We've taken a lot of the load off the advisors, to where you really do have a customer relationship, salesperson mentality. I don't mean selling something to somebody who doesn't need it. I'm talking about selling work, recommending, telling people what they need, coaching them, whatever you want to call it. And unfortunately, we sometimes put the wrong person in that role. And to your point, they say you're 80% more likely to buy a car where you service it. So how important is that advisor?

Closed from 12 to 1 for lunch 20:31

Steve Shaw: Don't get me started on my rant again. The Steve Shaw Wagoneer saga does not need to continue. But you brought up a great point, and I love this idea: don't pick up the telephone until 10 o'clock. Listen, this is mind-blowing. Craig and I were working at a big auto group up in the Virginia area. They close from 12 to one for lunch, and everybody goes to lunch from 12 to one.

At first I heard that and went, "What's wrong with you people? Are you crazy?" And then I went, "These freaking people are brilliant." They don't have scheduling issues. Nobody's on the drive. It's part of the deal. There's a sign: "We are closed from 12 to one for lunch." How brilliant is that for everybody's mentality, and for the customers?

Dave Rogers: I've seen that before, and let me tell you, it still drives me crazy. CVS Pharmacy closes down every day from 1:30 to 2, and you know what time I wind up walking in all the time? 1:45. It never fails. It drives me nuts. I think you could schedule lunch breaks between 11:30 and 1:30 and split your crew. That's an idea. But I get what you're saying. To go back to what the job is: it's a job where you can go see your kids play baseball, go do things on the weekend, see the dance recital. I just don't know why we don't sell it as a career, instead of a stepping stone, or a job you get after you can't be a mechanic anymore, or for the guy who can't sell six cars a month, so you stick him back in service. Unfortunately, that's what it becomes, a dumping ground, and it's one of the most important positions in the dealership. You're absolutely right.

Steve Shaw: Yep. Give a guy a little bit of training and send him on his way. And if you think about it, the career path doesn't have to lead to manager. This goes back a little old school. If I start out in express, learn that and move to the main shop, I eventually want my own team. I want my group of four, five, six guys I can work with and gel with. We can go to lunch together from 12 to one. I get everything handled, and then I go home at five o'clock. If you start thinking about it from that perspective, why couldn't I do that? And I get the Saturdays and the Sundays and all the wacky shit we try to come up with. I know there's a new trend now, Sundays coming back on the table for certain people, good, bad or indifferent. But keeping this on the career path: if we can make it a simple, easy life for people, why not?

Dave Rogers: I agree. We get a lot of people from the aftermarket who don't want to work Saturdays. We get them all the time. They're tired of working Sundays. I think six days a week is enough. During or after COVID, you could do five days, and you really could have done no Saturdays, because everybody was home or working from home. But I think Saturday has to be there for the people who work Monday through Friday. I think you should make it a full day. And I do agree with you on teams and lateral support. If you're an advisor and I give you one team of five guys or gals, you can make a career out of running that small shop of five people, write a hundred grand in gross a month in a regular store and get paid a decent amount of money.

The pay ceiling that drives good advisors away 24:27

Dave Rogers: And I was thinking, while you were talking, about one of the problems we have. Let's say, Steve, you do 80,000 a month in gross. That's your average, month in, month out. That's just your limit. I think in this business we have a problem giving you some kind of merit increase, or tweaking your percentage so you can make a little more money every year. I'm just going to take a number: if you're worth 10% of what you gross, you're going to make eight grand a month, $96,000 a year. That's what you're going to make. We have a hard time going, "Steve deserves a raise. He's consistently been doing 80 grand a month for 10 years." Not in our business. We go, "Nope, he's pigeonholed. That's all he's going to make."

Steve Shaw: "If you want to make more money, go sell more stuff." That's our line, absolutely.

Dave Rogers: But some people can't. That goes back to your seventh-place hitter. Some people can't. And listen, I even think that way myself sometimes. That's the hang-up we get on people, where we say, "If you want to make more money, sell more." Maybe the guy can't handle more customers. Say the average RO in that store is 500 bucks, and this guy handles however many ROs it is. 8,000 times 12 is 96,000, which is a good living. I don't mind paying a service advisor 10% of what they gross. But if you want to make 120, I don't know how you're going to get there, Steve, because you're Captain 80.

Steve Shaw: And that's when I leave and go find somebody else who'll pay me.

Dave Rogers: That's the challenge: making it worth more. I think that's the flaw we have, and we need to figure out a way around it, because I don't think it's the right thing to do. You should make more money even though you may not be able to add that much more in gross, if you're running five techs and doing a good job.

Steve Shaw: I think you're 100% right. I think it's rethinking some of those little things within our own organization, identifying the players who are really valuable to the store, versus always asking where the next heavy hitter or the next superstar is coming from. I've got my core people. Remember, we had the conversation once about being a long-term employee versus a loyal employee. If I've got a loyal guy who's really doing his job, who will go out and spin the sign on the road for me, stick with me during the lean times or whatever, that's the guy I want. Those are the core people I need on my team. I want those loyal people with me a long time, not just people there to collect a paycheck. So I'm with you a hundred percent on that.

Dave Rogers: So, to use your baseball analogy, our first three advisors will be our main pitchers, and we'll pay them all the money. And then we'll have two other scrubs as the fourth and fifth pitchers, and we just keep rotating them every year, because that's probably what we do anyway.

Steve Shaw: Perfect. Jackpot. But yeah, that's true, if you think about it from that perspective.

The shuttle driver who became service manager 28:00

Steve Shaw: It's been really good for me to watch this. I'm reading some really great books on customer behavior and human behavior right now, and I'll give you an update on those sometime. Human nature is human nature. Maslow's hierarchy of needs goes way back. If I'm not making my basic income, I'm going to go find a place. Years ago I had a guy leave me because he wasn't going to make enough on his check, and if he went to work for this other dealer, they were going to give him a bonus. I was like, "Bro." And he's like, "Steve, I've got to pay my bills, man. I've got to do what I've got to do." So we settled him down and got him taken care of.

But people have got to pay their bills, and we've got to provide a path for them to do that. When they get to that cap-out level, it's no different than our shop foreman. What do we do for that shop foreman who's been breaking his back? We've got to find another role so he can continue to make his 100K. It's the same thing for an advisor when he reaches his level. We've still got to be able to cultivate him and keep him motivated for the long haul, because how many customers have known him since he was in express?

There was a guy at a Nissan store in Nashville, Tennessee, and I'll let you give the tip of the day after this. This gentleman started out at the dealership as the shuttle driver. He made his way up from shuttle driver to service advisor to service manager, and spent most of his life as service manager. And now, at 80-something years old, he's driving the shuttle again, with oxygen. He spent his whole life at this one store. There was nothing better than getting a ride to the airport with that guy and hearing the stories he could tell about every single customer for, what, 50 years? What an amazing deal for that particular guy. And I know there's more than one of those, because I've met other guys along those lines. Those are the people we want to keep in our store. Anyway, wrap us up with the GM tip of the day.

Dave Rogers: The GM tip of the day: get involved with the hiring process. Try to find the candidates, whether from within or externally, who fit your mold of what you want your advisor to do. Just like you don't need a salesman booming ups outside, you don't need that cantankerous, old, grouchy guy. You need somebody who's going to be friendly. You've got to coach. You've got to be a consultant. It's just like hiring a salesperson, or anybody in the showroom. You want that same personality in service. I know it's not easy, because we have that challenge every day where we are. But it's something we've got to start really honing in on, because if we're going to have loyalty and retention, and people coming back, you've got to treat them well in service. There's just no other way of doing this. That's the GM tip of the day: hire smart.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. I love it. Let's get out of here. I'll chat with you next week.

Dave Rogers: All right, good.