Sowing the Seed

End of the month, and spring training 0:00

Steve Shaw: Well, here we go again. Dave Rogers, what's going on today? How you doing?

Dave Rogers: I'm doing wonderful today. Couldn't be better. I really am.

Steve Shaw: All right. What's on your mind? What's happening in what I like to call the real world? And now the real world is outside the car business. What's happening in the car business?

Dave Rogers: Car business, another end of the month today, the last day of March. It was a typical month-end for me, looking around to see what people were leaving open and not closing, and then trying to prod them a little to get moving. I could sit home at night and close until midnight, which I used to do. But then I'm just rewarding bad behavior.

But the weather's been nice. I think things are popping a little and starting to come back. It was a cold, cold winter in the Northeast, so it's great. I think we're ready for the spring season, just like you baseball fans are ready for baseball season.

Steve Shaw: We're all ready for the season. I'm excited for the St. Louis Cardinals. I think we're two and two, so .500. I'll take that for the Cardinals. The first couple of games were amazing. I get to listen to them, I get to watch them, and I watch the YouTube recap every day.

That's exciting, especially the strategy, growing your teams and growing all these new kids. It's funny. I remember sitting with my grandparents as a kid, talking about all these kids playing baseball, and I'm like, they're older than me. Now I'm the grandpa, the old guy, watching the kids play ball. But it's pretty cool to see

the kids growing up in Major League Baseball. So what's on your mind tonight? What do you want to talk about?

You reap what you sow 2:08

Dave Rogers: Well, I'll piggyback on that. One thing I think a lot of people need to consider is comparing the real world to the sports world. For the last two months, Major League Baseball players have been in camp, working on the fundamentals and the basics. Football season, I'm an NFL guy, I like all sports, but the NFL is my thing, and they do their

OTAs and all the preseason stuff, working on the basics and the fundamentals. And you did your podcast interview with Father Bob the other day.

It got me thinking. I think I've told you that I grew up working on a farm from when I was twelve until I was twenty-two. A regular vegetable farm, not one of those massive ones in Ohio. It was a hundred acres, which was a lot. Don't get me wrong, it was a good farm. But you learn a lot, like Father Bob was saying, about

"you reap what you sow." Very biblical, the way he was saying it. But you learn the same thing in the real world with Mother Nature and farming.

In the springtime you have to plow the field, disc the field and plant the seeds. Then you have to water and weed, and then you can harvest the crop in July, August, September, whatever it is. And baseball is the same way. You work on the fundamentals. These guys are practicing their sport now for the real season. And a baseball season is 162 games, so you've got to assume they have plenty of practice and plenty of chances.

But when Father Bob said that, I thought it's a lost art, because a lot of people want to go from point A to CEO in six months. Or they start as an advisor, maybe a trainee, and look at the guy next to them, who's writing a ton of work and making 100 grand a year, while they're an express advisor making 30 or 40 grand a year. "I want that guy's job." Well, you haven't put in the time.

In the farm world, you can't skip the spring and summer and expect to harvest the crop. It just doesn't work that way. "You reap what you sow" is so true. If you sow nothing, if you don't water the field, if you don't weed the field, you've got no crops to harvest. The same thing goes in the car business and in every business. People need to start putting the foundation, the fundamentals,

back in place. When he said that, it really got me thinking, because I used to preach this all the time when I was in the store, and I've gotten away from it a little. I know that was a good conversation for you. What did you take from it?

Steve Shaw: I take the same thing. Bob was a big mentor of mine growing up. I was twenty-something when I met him. And even in the podcast I said I learned about people through Bob. I learned the numbers before that, and trust me, I know the numbers as well as anybody. But you can't manage people as if they're a number. I mean, you can, but...

You can look at this from an employee's perspective or a manager's perspective. As a manager, as a leader, I can only reap what I sow: what I put into you as an associate. That's what I learned from Bob. How do I put back into my associates so that I can reap the reward for what I've put into them?

And the same thing goes for the associates. What do they put into themselves? What's that phrase, working in the business or on the business? Are you working to improve your craft, to be a better service advisor, or are you just trying to collect a big fat paycheck? I absolutely take that from it. Over the years, Bob and I probably had that conversation once a week for twenty-plus years of my life, especially

when I was a young service manager traveling around, and as I grew in my career. Having that type of mentor, I had to learn how to sow the field, and I had to sow it with myself and with my people.

The technician in sneakers 6:56

Dave Rogers: I think that's the big thing. You have to do it with your people too. It's not just processes. It's people and processes. I had a great mentor, EJ, whom I love to death and still talk to today. He was a great teacher, and with me it was always tough love. He gave me challenges and things to do. But he was not very patient with people.

We had a technician one time named JR. It was a crappy shop in a real hellhole area. And EJ had a thing about wearing the proper footwear in the shop, a thing about work boots. He walks in one day and says, "Dave, JR doesn't have the right work boots on. Write him up." It was a union shop, and you kind of had to be that way.

So I walk up to JR. JR was an older guy, like an old hippie Harley guy, ponytail, headband. A nice guy, he really was. "JR, why do you have sneakers on? You've got to have work boots on," steel-toed work boots, whatever the rules were.

"All right, boss." He does it. Two days later, I'm walking into one end of the shop, EJ's there, and JR is walking through the middle of the shop at a snail's pace.

He was older, but not that old. He was in his forties, and I was still in my thirties. I come walking up on him and say, "JR, I've never seen a human being walk this fucking slow. What's wrong with you?" He says, "My feet are killing me, man." "What do you mean?" "Well, you made me wear these boots. I've got bad ankles. I screwed up my feet riding my motorcycle. I broke my feet, I broke my ankle, I've got this heel issue." And I'm like, "Well, why didn't you tell me that?"

"The boss said I've got to wear the right boots." I said, "Wear your sneakers tomorrow. I've got no problem with that." So of course, fast forward three days, and guess who sees JR walking around in sneakers again?

My boss, EJ, says to me, "Fire him. Throw him out of here." I said, "No, he's got bad feet. He's got to wear the sneakers." He said, "I'm going to fire you." I said, "You're not firing me. Fire me, I don't care. But I'm not making JR wear work boots anymore." He said, "You feel that strongly about it?" I said, "Yeah, I do." And he said, "All right, I'll let you win this one." It's a true story. He just didn't have the patience. But I think you do have to

invest. When I turned that shop around, there were thirteen techs when I started at that store, and I fired twelve of the thirteen within a year. JR was the only one who stayed. I was in that store six years, and we went from doing diddly-squat to being one of the best stores in the mall. And he was the one guy I saved.

Listen to the people who fix the cars 9:53

Steve Shaw: That's awesome. So cool. There are so many things I can think about. If I refer back to that episode, we did process improvement groups. What was so cool about that was that we took a cashier, a porter, a technician and an advisor, a whole team. Every lateral support group had its own representation, they came up, and we had discussions, and we talked to those people.

They got to know us. We were their managers, of course, but we were more than managers. We listened to what they had to say. And we built that whole organization, which is now, or was, the world's largest dealership, because we were with these people. I learned so much about how to do that and how to listen. And I believe in my heart of hearts that it's a lost art.

I believe there are so many people right now who are, as even Bob said, scared to death to go out and stand in front of a group of men because you might get your ass kicked. And yeah, we got our ass kicked in the beginning. But you get your ass kicked because you're not listening. We live off of these men and women who fix the cars, but we're not supporting them in their role. And that's really,

I guess, sowing, I get that confused, putting all that effort in and hearing, "Fix my hose." "Can I have a mop?" "If you park a car over here, it's going to cause me heartache. If you park it over there, it's going to help me out." Learning how to build your business around what a group of people has to say. I've got great ideas, but what the fuck do they mean if they cause somebody else a bunch of heartache? I think that's where you plant the seed: listening to what people have to say. A group of guys working in a car dealership

is a hell of a lot smarter than one service manager. I think it's important that we listen to these guys. We sow that field, we pull those weeds, and we listen to what they have to say. Let them tell us how to run their store. I promise you it'll be a lot better than if I just tried to do it myself. What the hell do I know?

Dave Rogers: Listen, back in the day, Chrysler Five Star was process-oriented, Toyota Signature was process-oriented, Honda Excel was process-oriented, with little flow maps and all that. They were all exactly the same thing. Sit down with a group of people from different parts of the dealership, map out what we think is the best way to do things, and come to a conclusion. And you're right. When you think about it, they learned who you were as a person.

You weren't just the boss. Then you learned about them, and you all came to conclusions together. A cashier could have just as good an idea as one of the general managers or general sales managers, if not better. It was amazing, the input you'd get. But it goes back to believing in your people, and to the fundamentals and the foundation.

There are a lot of different ways to look at it. I don't want to get religious, but you have religion, and people have religion. If you look at this planet,

at the earth, at what I call Mother Nature, it's perfect. It has a yin and yang for everything. There's no skipping. There are four seasons, tides, storms, forest fires. There's a reason for everything. People who are very religious will say that's the way God built it, and I get that. But the fundamentals are in human nature and in Mother Nature, whatever you want to call it, and in

"you reap what you sow." You can't skip the basics. And the car business is like every other business. It starts with people. If you ignore your people and don't spend any time with them as a store-level manager, you're not going to get the results. You're not going to get the crop at the end of the season.

Hearing out the troublemaker, and pulling the weeds 14:07

Steve Shaw: Exactly. You could have fired that guy and moved on with life and never thought about it. But think about the message. I can generalize, and there's always an exception, but if somebody's being a real asshole, most of the time there's something truthful behind it. "I've got a problem and nobody's listening to me right now." Look, I do this in my personal life.

If somebody's not listening to me, I'll become the biggest asshole that ever walked, because I've got an issue and I'm raising every red flag trying to get someone to listen. The easy thing is to say, "Well, you're fired, Steve," or "Go away, I don't want to deal with you." But then what message does that send to forty other people in my organization? Or I can sit down with this guy and say, "What's up, bro? How can I help you out?" Listen to the guy, and all of a sudden the whole shop goes,

"This new guy actually paid attention to me. He actually gives a shit. Maybe this is going to be different." What did I just plant by sitting down and having that conversation? Did it cost me any money? It cost me fifteen, twenty minutes, an hour of my life, and it probably ended up making the dealer a lot of money.

Dave Rogers: There are people out there who are squawkers, troublemakers, acid, poison, whatever they are. But a lot of times you're right, there's a reason they got that way. There's a fine line you have to draw. Everyone needs to be heard and listened to. But if you've got a cantankerous pus bag throwing grenades in the middle of the shop,

then there's another part of leadership, and it goes back to the weeding. You've got to take the weeds out. If you don't, they grow faster than the crops. They'll outrace them and get bigger than your corn, your corn doesn't see the sun, and guess what? You don't have any crops. So you've got to kill the weeds, and the same thing goes for some people. It's not always that easy, especially today, when you put up with some bullshit and some less-than-desirable people because it may be hard to find anybody.

But listen, when Bob said that, it got me thinking. You can use the analogy of construction. You've talked about this before: if you don't have a good foundation for your house, everything you build on top of it is destined to fail. For the managers out there, when you build a process, you pour the foundation and put in the footings. You're not putting the windows

in yet, and you're not building the roof. You put the sticks up and frame the house, then you put the roof on. Then you can start talking about where the furniture goes. "Hey, maybe we should put walls up first." And that goes for your people too. However you want to look at it, there are a lot of analogies:

reap what you sow, build a house on a foundation. But you've got to look at your people and take care of them, and you've got to start from the fundamentals and the basics. There's no other way around it. Without people and without processes, you've just got anarchy and chaos. You're not going to run a good business. I don't care what anybody says.

No overnight sensations 17:33

Steve Shaw: That's true, no question. We've talked about my brother, who's a rock star, so I liken it to bands. Think about any band worth a damn, the great rock bands we grew up with, the Rolling Stones, KISS. They didn't start out in the arena. George Thorogood played

dive bar after dive bar after dive bar. I think about him because I've got his last poster on my wall. He played around Jersey for how many years before he got a break? His song, "$20 gig": I got a $20 gig, then a 30, then a 40, then I spent some money and got a 20. You've got to put in the time, and then one day all of a sudden you've accelerated. "Oh my God, you got lucky." No, I traveled

around the United States from dive bar to dive bar putting in my time, and somehow I got a lucky break, because I put in that time. I think that's what you were referring to with the young men and women coming in now: "I think I should be CEO. You're making 50 grand, and I should be making that money." But it's the time the men and women have to put in. You and I got our ass kicked for how many years

writing service, dealership to dealership, and growing? I started out with four stores, then I went to this, then I had ten, and now you have thirty stores. But you didn't start out running thirty stores. No fucking way. It's the grind. It's the circuit we all have to do if we're going to become a vice president.

Dave Rogers: It's funny you say that about bands, because everyone sees the "overnight sensation." The guy's forty years old. He's not an overnight sensation. He's been doing this for thirty years. And in all honesty, I give people a pass on this:

it's a Google world. You want to know something, you Google it. You don't have to read a book or go to the library or get an encyclopedia. You just Google it, or now you use AI, ChatGPT. You don't have to know anything to know anything. And I think that's permeated the way people think. "Well, Steve, I'm sitting in the cubicle next to you.

I've been here five minutes, you've been here twenty years, and I should get the same money you get because I'm sitting in the same cubicle." It doesn't work that way. Meanwhile, that same person will ask you nine million questions a week, because you're now their Google. Your information means nothing to them. Then they'll go to the boss and say, "I'm doing the same thing Steve's doing, and I'm not making the same money he's making."

No, but Steve's not making as much as he should, because he's answering all your goddamn questions all day long. They don't see any value in that. Again, that's skipping all the steps. That's jumping to summertime, to July 4th, looking for that Jersey tomato. "Oh, wait, I forgot to plant it. I don't have any corn for my barbecue on July 4th. Geez, I probably should have planted those seeds back in April." But they don't think that way, because there are no repercussions anymore. That's the problem.

Paying your dues on the road 20:59

Steve Shaw: I was kidding around on the car guy podcast. Sam said, "Tell everybody what you do," and I said nobody really knows what I do. People always wonder. If I was consulting, I'd go sit in your waiting room, and people would look at me like, "How dare you sit in my waiting room?" And I'm like, "I've learned more in the last fifteen minutes sitting in your waiting room than you probably know sitting in your office."

But my point is that when I started training, I watched lots of guys make a lot more money than I ever made as a manager or was making as a trainer. I had to do the circuit. I did it for ten years, dealer to dealer, hotel to hotel, seminar to seminar. Then one day I was like, shit, and COVID happened. And now we have our university.

And you were one of our first. I went from traveling every day of my life to not being invited to stores. I couldn't get in because of COVID. "Steve, sorry, we're out." Then we started our virtual training, and I started again with zero clients. I did have a good background and a good foundation. And then it was, "Well, how do we do this?" Now we have a thousand stores again. But we went from killing it to zero. And I couldn't look at

you, one of the first, and say, "Hey, I think I deserve my full daily rate, but I'm only going to teach for twenty minutes." So we spent the last four years figuring out the circuit again. I have a pretty good life, and people only see the surface. You don't see what goes on behind the scenes. I say that to a lot of guys who want to train.

I'm very reluctant to hire somebody who hasn't been on the circuit and boarded a plane for their whole career. Board a plane three times next month, then call me and see if you actually want the job, because we all know how difficult and how much of a pain in the ass it is to travel. My guys get on a plane every Sunday and come home late Thursday night.

If you're not used to that, if you haven't done the circuit and gotten your ass kicked by flight attendants and a hundred other people on an airplane two, three, four times a month, it's a tough life. That's planting the seed. You're sowing those things while you're doing it, and then there's going to be a fixed ops director job available to you. But you've got to set yourself up for that success. I hire people

based on their travels, their training and what they've done. There are a lot of great guys out there. I've talked to friends who say, "I'm ready to train, Steve," and I say, "No, no, you're not." Remember Cindy? You've been on her podcast. We had this whole conversation about getting to work. I was talking about my philosophy, and I said you just show up. It doesn't matter.

And one day she told me a story about how she had to fly from Fort Lauderdale to Dallas to Salt Lake, then get in a car and drive all night to end up in Idaho, because we had a meeting with a dealer at 10 a.m. Because of her training and her travels and everything she'd done over the years, she knew what to do and how to do it. We had the same philosophy: you've got to show up for work. She'd planted those seeds all her life. She said,

"I've got to be in Idaho. I don't know how I'm going to get there, but I've got 24 hours." Planes, trains and automobiles, so she could sit down in front of the dealer she had an appointment with. That's the circuit. That's the sowing of the seeds. And that's working in the business, I would say.

Farm work, duck eggs and sharpening the saw 25:03

Dave Rogers: It's true. And there's hard work involved. It's not "go plant some seeds, then go back in the house, smoke a cigarette and watch TV for a month or two." When I worked on the farm, we worked ninety hours a week in the summer, seven days a week if it didn't rain. If it rained, we got a little break because we didn't have to irrigate that day. But you worked every day.

You might not have done ninety hours, but you were up every morning, out in the fields picking crops, setting up the road stand, or driving to the market in Philadelphia. We used to wake up at midnight twice a week and drive to Philadelphia to get in line at the produce market. That stuff didn't just happen naturally. It was hard work, man.

You'd have nothing to sell at the farmers market or the road stand if you didn't make that trip, or if you didn't pick corn in the morning. I use these examples because it's the same thing whether you're an advisor, answering the phones, or following up with customers to let them know their special order part is in. There you go. That's part of curating, part of the process. If you're a technician, it's those requirements on the car and taking the video.

Those little things are all planting the seeds and reaping what you sow. If you do it every time, you're probably going to get something really good out of it. Nothing works 100% of the time.

Steve Shaw: A couple of weeks ago I was down in Brazil. I have a farm there, and my friends are there full time and teach me when I go down a couple of weeks a year. We've got ducks, chickens, cows and horses. I have to feed the horses in the morning. I have to herd all these ducks and get them into their pen at night. I have to get all the chickens put away and fed.

And my reward was some fresh duck eggs and fresh chicken eggs. Everything you said is absolutely true. If I don't herd all thirty-one ducks back into their pen at night, the puma comes down from the jungle and eats the ducks, and then I don't get the eggs. So it's funny that you're talking about a farm.

I'm fifty-something years old, learning how to farm, and it's so powerful. I want those fresh duck eggs and fresh chicken eggs, man. They're delicious. But there is a cost to living on a farm.

Dave Rogers: There is. Again, it's Mother Nature, however you want to look at it, God's perfect gift, whatever the case, and you can't fight Mother Nature. Like you said, let the chickens and ducks run around all night, and you'll come out the next morning and find a bunch of feathers. That's all you'll find.

It works in every business, not just the car business. You have to put in the work from the basics and keep focusing. I think it was Zig Ziglar who talked about sharpening the saw. You've got to take the time to sharpen the saw. That was your time off, your Sunday, whatever. All those things are important to make things happen: reading, learning,

understanding your craft, getting better at what you do every day. That's all part of the process, and unfortunately it takes work. If you want to be successful in this business, you really have to stay with it. If you don't want to be successful, then yeah, you can wing it. And unfortunately that's what you find with some people, like the service advisor at your Jeep store. They just wing it.

Because you can float between the raindrops in this business. You could last twenty or thirty years in the car business, and nobody blows you up, just doing the bare minimum. But that's not how you get to be the fixed ops director or the general manager. You don't get to be the dealer principal or the owner by coasting. It just doesn't work that way.

People, AI and paying it forward 29:24

Steve Shaw: That's 100% right. You reap what you sow. It couldn't be said any better. I'll let you wrap up with the GM tip of the day. I love people, and that's what's carried me through all of this, particularly what Bob taught me over the years. Jim is a great guy too. He was my first mentor. I love every speck of knowledge,

every spreadsheet I had to write. But what carried me through and got me here is why I love people. If you said go get a new AI instead of hiring, look, I get the economics of it. I truly do, and I love some of those AI tools. But I'd put my money on the human being over the AI any day of the week. But we've got to provide them tools.

We've got to sow them as a seed so they can be successful. Where we get off track sometimes is, "Well, there's an AI for that," or, like we asked Dave, we throw somebody out there and say, "Just go to work, see you later," and we don't sow the seed. Then we end up firing the guy six months later. So is AI better or the human being better? It really depends. And Dave said you've got to sow the seed with the software too.

I love that conversation. You're much more expert with AI than I am. I was listening to him and really trying to think about what he had to say. We can train somebody over and over in our BDCs or our advisors, but if we train the AI once, it's going to remember and follow the process. If we train people,

it's a forever process, unless we find that one person who takes the ball and runs with it. So there's a balance we have to strike between the human being and the AI. But regardless, we have to sow those seeds, water them and weed them. Great analogies. Regardless of

which path we go, we've got to sow those seeds to make sure we end up with whatever reward we're looking for at the end of the month. A lot of ranting there.

Dave Rogers: Well, listen,

for anybody out there listening: if you have children, you don't just let them run amok for eighteen years. You teach them things. You train them. If your two- or four-year-old daughter is reaching up to touch the hot stove, you grab her wrist and tell her not to touch it. There are some people who want to put the wrist on the burner: "There you go, you won't do that again."

The same thing goes here. And my GM tip of the day would be the same thing. You got where you are today, I'm sure, because someone helped you. You had a mentor, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. Somebody believed in you and saw something in you. Unless you're the dealer principal's son or grandson, you probably had some help along the way. And even then, you probably had a mentor somewhere besides your relative who gave you a hand. So think about that.

You didn't get there because you're God's gift to general managers. You got there because somebody helped you along the way. We've talked about why we do the podcast and why we do what we do. Part of it is paying it forward, letting people know, teaching the next generation the right way. So for you guys out there:

be a man about it. Let's be men. Let's tell them, "This is the way it works." Let's not sugarcoat it or run away from it. "If you want to be successful in this business, this is what you've got to do." And for you women, I don't mean to be insulting. But I think a lot of times we want to skirt around it because we don't want to hurt people's feelings.

It is what it is, man. Tell them how to get there. Tell them what you did to get there. Teach them and train them, just like somebody did for you. That would be my tip for any position, whether you're a general manager, service manager or parts manager. Invest in people like somebody probably did with you. Don't forget the things that got you where you are today.

Steve Shaw: Absolutely. And that's really why I like our podcast: we're not beholden to anybody. We don't give a shit. We might drop an F-bomb here or there, but it's the real world. I'd say there are a lot of people out there who grew up the way you and I did. In fact, I met a guy at a Honda store up in Milwaukee last week. No bullshit, no bones about it. He went back to the store, and

he didn't say it the way it's going to come out, but he said, "This is the way we're going to do business, gentlemen. We just learned this, and we're going to do business this way because it's the right way." He didn't take any shit. He didn't have to coddle everybody. He was just old school: "Guys, this is the right way. I can see it, I can feel it. This is how we do business." And he took the ball. I'm looking at this guy thinking, he did the circuit. He did the grind. He paid his dues. Now he's the fixed ops manager of a big store up there, and he's laying it on the line with people.

For me, at least, that's super cool. We can just say, "This is how it works. This is how I did it. This is how the business is." You can go learn bullshit on LinkedIn, or you can learn something real. We can talk about the real deal. And I invite anybody who wants to talk about the real deal to come in here and tell us, no shit. That's what I want to hear.

Dave Rogers: Listen, we've had some great guests on so far, and we're still young in this thing. I'm looking forward to bringing more on. I learn something every time somebody comes on the show, and every time I talk to people in the real world. So bring it on. I love learning. I love reading. And I challenge anybody out there to hit us up. We'll bring you on the show and learn something from you.

Steve Shaw: Well, that sounds great. I think we ought to get out of here right now. We might have set a record.

Dave Rogers: There we go, thirty-five minutes. Whoa.

Steve Shaw: As always, it was good to see you, and we'll rant again. Hey, just so everybody knows, we have cracked 1,000 subscribers. And as our outro is going to say, we're not begging, but if you don't subscribe, I can't tell you what's going to happen in your store.

Dave Rogers: I like it.

Steve Shaw: All right, guys, we'll see you next week.

Dave Rogers: Have a good one, man.