Setting Technician Objectives

Fixed ops is math 0:00

Steve Shaw: What are we going to talk about today?

Dave Rogers: Let's talk about setting goals for 2026. To tie in the topic, I think it was you last time that mentioned fixed ops is math, right? Fixed ops is math. What better time of the year than setting objectives for your technicians and your advisors? I think that's what it starts with, setting a goal.

I use a 2,000-hour goal as a benchmark for people annually. Fifty weeks times 40 hours a week, right? 2,000 hours. And obviously that's a minimum standard. That's not a goal. And then go from there. 200 hours a month, 2,400 hours a year, I think is a decent number. But I don't think people do this. I don't think they sit down with their technicians. We want to plan budgets and we want to forecast gross profit, but we never back into the math. Can you hit these numbers?

A budget that didn't add up 1:10

Steve Shaw: I think it's funny. I was at a group out in Denver one time and they had this budget. It was November and they had this massive budget. Let's just say they wanted to do 500,000 in fixed gross. And I said, okay, let's do the math. We started looking at their technicians and who was off, and we did the whole spreadsheet day by day by day. And I go, "Yeah, you guys are going to do like, I don't know, 1,500 hours in December." And they're like, "What?" And I go, "Well, here's the math, it's on a spreadsheet. Who wants to go tell the CEO that you're not going to do a half a million dollars?"

Maybe we ought to rethink those vacation days, and maybe somebody ought to rethink days off during the holidays, budget-wise. It's an interesting conversation. You're right, people don't think about that. Do you look at things on a daily basis?

Know your hours every day 2:11

Dave Rogers: When I was running the store, yeah. I think it's super important. Every day you should know how much gross you did the day before you go home. You have instant docs now, real-time reporting. You don't have to wait till the next morning like we used to do. You need to get real-time posting, so you know where you're at before you leave. If you leave before you hit the number you want, that's kind of silly.

And the same thing goes with hours. The next day, by eight, nine o'clock in the morning, you should be out talking to your technicians about how many hours they did for the day and how many hours they did for the week. And you do it every day. It's what drives the machine. I don't believe in paying advisors and other people off hours as a key component, just because it's too easy to Mickey. You pay them off gross, you want them to sell parts, you want them to sell labor, and hours come with that. You sell jobs, there's hours. But the next morning, you've got to be talking to these technicians about how many hours they turned yesterday and where they are for the week.

The dispatcher they almost fired 3:19

Steve Shaw: Absolutely. It's crazy. We did a job in St. Louis once where they had a dispatcher. I might've told you this story once. This young man came to work for them, and he didn't make it in sales. So they go, "Let's make him a service advisor." What a great idea. And then they said, "Well, he's not really going to make it as an advisor. We like him, so let's make him a dispatcher." Oh, even better.

So we get there, and they were like, "Well, we think we're going to get rid of Zach." And I'm like, "Well, have you ever trained him?" They didn't train him to do anything, quite frankly. So I sat down with him and said, "Zach, would it be okay with you if I taught you how to be a production manager?" And he's like, "Please, do anything." And just what you said, we went off of eight hours starting out. I had 18 techs or something at the time. I'm like, let's just look at eight hours a day for your guys, so we have a starting point. I'm not going to go into looking at your last 12 weeks or anything like that, but let's start with eight hours.

So we plotted everybody out on the calendar, did that exact same spreadsheet, and I think somewhere around 2,100 hours was what they could produce if everybody made their eight hours. Well, he really took the ball. When he started dispatching, he started actually dispatching based on production versus "get this done, get this done," making sure all his guys had their time. And within a very short period of time, literally less than 30 days, this guy was a rock star. A young kid, probably early twenties, barely.

We talked about, I want you to be between 95 and 105 or maybe 110% of your goal, and once you start hitting at 100% or a little bit higher, then you can adjust your goals. He had the dealership buy an 85-inch TV, created a Google Doc and put it up on that 85-inch TV on the walkway between the shop and the parts counter. So literally live, as he flagged a ticket, it popped up on the screen and showed everybody. It was the coolest thing I ever saw. And they were going to fire the guy. I talk about Zach every chance I get, because he had a new tool and he ran with it. It was awesome to see.

Dispatch is an art, and 2,000 hours is the floor 5:56

Dave Rogers: That's the thing about dispatch, right? It's an art more than it is anything else. It's not a science, it's an art. I always tell people both of my daughters are really good artists. They couldn't teach me how to paint, because I don't have it in me. But if you have somebody that has that in them, they can think ahead. It's not dispatch by desperation. There's actually thought involved. You've got a rock star, you just have to teach them how to do it.

But it starts with the goal. I say it almost facetiously, but 2,000 hours a year used to be terms and conditions of employment for a technician. Now everyone's afraid. "We can't hire technicians, there's nobody out there." I look at my group and I see some stores where guys are averaging 1,500, 1,600 hours a year. We give annual retention bonuses, so it goes from December to November 30th, and I get the list of how many hours everyone turned. And listen, I've got guys turning three, four, 5,000 hours a year. We've got some guys that are producing. But I've also got guys turning 1,500, 1,600, 1,700.

And I have these conversations with the service manager: there's got to be a minimum standard. I get it. You have express techs, you have trainees, you have oil change guys. Okay, you have a guy that was out on leave. That's fine. But when you're looking at these flat rate technicians, A, B or C, and they're not turning 2,000 hours, you're wasting a bay. You want to set goals for the year: I've got 20 bays and we've got to turn this many hours a day, this many a week and a year. You're not going to hit your objectives if you don't do the math on this. Like Steve Shaw says, fixed ops is math. I've got to give you credit for it, because it's really just math.

The five-minute production meeting 8:00

Steve Shaw: It is funny. My favorite question to ask is, "How many hours did you do yesterday?" And they all scratch their head. Not all of them, but the good ones will know: "I did 6.5," or "I did X, Y and Z hours." A lot of guys have no idea how many flat rate hours they did. I was working with another group and I taught them how to do production objectives. And I go, "Let's have a meeting every day." As an AtCon guy, I love the whole five-minute production meeting. That's it. That's totally the thing I would do if I was your consultant, and that's not a shameless pitch, because I don't really want to do that. You go out into the shop every day and have a five-minute meeting: this is what you did, these are your hours, great job, why are you down?

So I had a gentleman say to me, I said, "Well, you're doing your production meeting?" He goes, "Yeah, we started, but we kind of ran out of things to talk about." There's only one thing to talk about: what did you accomplish yesterday? How many hours did you produce? So I had to kind of kick his butt a little bit and say, get back out there in the shop and have that meeting again.

Dave Rogers: It's funny you say that, because I always call it the 90-day thing. After 90 days, if you're not paying attention, these habits fade off. We stop having the meetings, we stop talking about the production, everyone gets too cool for school, and then you go, "Well, that system sucks. It didn't work after three months." But you're not doing the same thing you did from day one to day 60.

I was at a BMW store, a big one up in New York, and there were a lot of young guys. There were 40 techs in the shop, pretty big. Everyone says, "Oh, it's warranty, you can't make money." But we had some guys doing 250, 270 hours a month, every single month, month in, month out. I got there and started teasing them and challenging them: "How come you don't get to 300?" And they're like, "What do you mean?" At the end of the month I would hand out a t-shirt at 250. I had two or three guys there. Then I got guys at 275, and then we finally got a guy at 300, and I gave him something bigger than a t-shirt, a sweatshirt, a hoodie, whatever, out of the pro shop. And all of a sudden you have three guys at 300 hours, and everyone's like, "Whoa, you can do 300 hours."

But the thing that happened was the guys at 150, 160, because that's really the norm when people think of it, 40 hours a week times four weeks is 160, all of a sudden started creeping up to 200. Instead of having just five guys over 200, you had 10 guys over 200. And we took the shop from a million in gross to 1.4 in nine months. Listen, gross pays the bills, I get it. But you forget about what drives the machine. You've got your car, you're going to go on a trip, you're not going anywhere unless you fill up with gas. The fuel for the shop is the hours. If you've got 10 technicians, you've got to make sure they're getting a minimum of eight hours a day, but hopefully 10, 12, 15 hours a day, depending on the brand.

Owning the bad days 11:19

Steve Shaw: Exactly. We did it in the good old days. I've been in some very large stores and a couple of really tiny ones, and everything in between. Back in the day when times were tough, I always felt like as a manager, I can go out on a good day and say, "Rah rah, guys, we all made our time." That's an easy thing to do. But on the days that the time sucked, when nobody made their time yesterday, there were no cars that came in the drive, I felt like I had to walk out to the shop, stand in front of my men and say, "Guys, we had a shitty day yesterday. What are we going to do to make it better? We're in this together. Let's make it better."

Those are the little differences that people rallied around. All right, let's bear down, let's make it happen, let's look over cars. I'm not sure there are a lot of guys out there right now that are interested in standing in front of a group of burly technicians at a Ford dealership and saying, "Yeah, we had a shitty day yesterday, guys."

Dave Rogers: There have been plenty of times in my career where the day was light on appointments, and you got on top of it early enough and turned one of those crappy days into one of your best days ever. Everybody made their hours, you made the gross, you sold a bunch of work because you merchandised every car. The stars lined up, whatever the case may be. If they do have a bad day and it's your fault as a manager, take the hit and let them know.

But the same thing goes back to the production meetings we learned with AtCon too. If I went out there and I had five technicians, three of them had good days and two had bad days, but I know one of them had a bad day because he was outside smoking cigarettes on the phone, whining to his girlfriend for three hours, I tell the one guy, "Listen, I know you got stuck on a wire harness job. We're going to help you out today." And the guy that was on the phone, I'm just going to throw him his time: "Six hours, terrible job." I'm not going to make a big scene out of it, but I'm going to let him know there are no excuses for him. And if the job gets the bear on you, as a manager you've got to take care of that guy. That's where I think people mess up big time. They're not out in the shop, they don't know, and then they get to the end of payroll and go, "How come Fred only turned 30 hours this week?"

Post the hours and book to capacity 14:14

Steve Shaw: And along those lines, I love posting the hours on the board. I'm probably one of the few dogs that want to post the hours. They do it in sales. You've got your chart, you've got your cars, you've got all the numbers, you've got your guy that sold 18 cars and your guy that sold three. There's a reason for putting that up there, not only for the manager but for the salespeople. There's some competition, and I absolutely love posted hours. The guys always tell me it's the guy that flags the most that hates his hours up there: "I don't want people mad at me." But it does the same thing. Put those hours up there, drive that competition, give rewards and incentives.

That warms my heart. When I went to your store at the airport and your service manager said he does production objectives, I was like, "No way." And then I asked him for his ID, because he had to be like 65.

Dave Rogers: It's Brad. Brad sets objectives. He's good old school, he learned the right way. I've always said if you don't know how many hours your shop's going to turn, then how do you know how many cars to bring in? How do you know anything? I always use the example: if I've got 100 hours a day my shop can turn, based on the math, maybe 20% of my work is internal. Okay, so 80 hours is going to come from customer pay and warranty. Maybe I get some walk-ins, so maybe my appointments are going to be 60 hours. Everyone's like, "How do you do that?" Well, it's simple. If I know I'm averaging two hours per RO and I've got 60 hours, I can bring in 30 cars a day.

Now, it doesn't always work out that way. I'm not going to scrutinize a customer on the phone and say, "Mr. Shaw, just so you know, you want to bring your car in Thursday, but I've got too many oil changes that day." No. You bring your car in when the customer wants to bring it in, and we'll figure it out. I always laugh at these guys that want to time bucket and do all this stuff for appointments. Again, it starts with how many hours the techs can turn, and you've got to work backwards from there.

Steve Shaw: That's it. If you don't know how many hours your guys are going to turn, you don't know anything. It doesn't matter how many advisors you've got if you don't have people to produce the hours. If you met me 15 years ago, my mantra was, "You don't have enough technicians." I would always tell people that, and they would go, "We know, we can't hire any." And I got tired of hearing that, so I started changing. I would say you can't make quarter time or you can't do this, or you don't even know what you can do, but it always boils back to: do you know the hours in your shop, and can you get the work done?

The guy that changed me from saying "you don't have enough technicians" was at a Toyota store in Florida, and they had like 89 techs. So I didn't tell him he didn't have enough technicians. Then I went and saw his advisors and found out he had like 25 or 30 advisors. And I went back and said, "That's not my line anymore. I'm not going to say that anymore." If you knew me as a young trainer, that's what I would tell you: hire more guys. But it's the production side of it. If I can't produce the hours, what am I going to do?

The goal: 200 hours a month 18:05

Dave Rogers: Right. Again, it's a new year, so the key is to look at what the production was last year. If you have somebody under 2,000 hours, let's figure out a way to get them up to 2,000 hours. I don't think any technician comes to work to break even. That shouldn't be the goal. And if you have guys at 2,000 to 2,200, 2,300, let's figure out how to get them to 2,400, 200 hours a month. That should be the goal. And then your ultimate goal is to get everybody up to 3,000 hours or above. Now you've got technicians that are making good money. In our case, like I said, with our annual retention bonuses, there's nothing better than handing a guy a check that's 3,000, 4,000, $5,000.

And you've got to piggyback on that. How many techs have I got? Do I need more techs? Steve Shaw says I need more techs. Well, I've got four techs that are only doing 1,500 hours a year. That's 2,000 hours I'm leaving on the table right there. That's one expert tech. So in your case, you're right, I need another tech. In my case, I need those four guys to produce 2,000 hours. That's the beginning of the year. These are the goals we should be setting.

And the same thing with advisors. Set a goal for them. If you're a volume brand advisor, you shouldn't be doing less than 80,000 in gross a month. We can save this for the next episode as a little teaser, but depending on the brand, set goals for your advisors too, and then hold them accountable. But it starts with the technicians. You cannot do this business without looking at how many hours you can turn in your shop. In the old days we used to base it on 93% calendar utilization, whatever you are with sick days and vacation days. The bottom line is, get your guys over 200 hours a month to start. That should be the benchmark. That's what I like to target.

Steve Shaw: That's awesome. That's a great way to end it. Get everyone to the 200-hour benchmark. Who's ever going to leave you? There's your retention strategy. Why would I go anywhere else? What an awesome way to end the segment. Next time we'll talk about the service advisor benchmark.

Dave Rogers: Yeah, I think we should. Setting goals for them, because I don't think anybody does that. They set it for sales.