He Went From Technician to GM — Now He's Changing the Service Business

Meet Ed Roberts of Bozard Ford Lincoln 0:00

[Steve Shaw] Welcome, everybody. Welcome back to Fixed Ops Focus with Steve Shaw and Dave Rogers. Dave, what's on your mind today?

Dave Rogers: I've got a guest on today, Ed Roberts from Bozard Ford, COO and GM, and I want to talk to him about mobile service. But before we get into it, I want to talk to him about how he got into the business, because this guy's an amazing, amazing human being. So I just want to bring that up and talk about it until he's sick of hearing it.

Steve Shaw: That's awesome. We love successful people in the car business. I love it. Welcome, Ed. Great to have you here.

Ed Roberts: Hey, glad to be here. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Steve, for having me. I'm looking forward to this. This should be a lot of fun.

Steve Shaw: Dave, why don't you start us out? He's your guest.

Dave Rogers: So Ed, you're COO and general manager of a Ford store. Where are you located? Tell me about what you do and what your role is now. I know you were the inventor of mobile service at one point, but now you've moved on and upward, so that's good.

Ed Roberts: This is an industry that I've been blessed in. I've been in this business since 1992, so I'm coming up on thirty-five years. The last fourteen I've been here at Bozard Ford Lincoln. I started here as fixed operations director, moved to COO about six years ago, and late last year took on the COO and general manager role. But I tell people all the time, this is a no-money-down business. You don't have to have all the education. You don't have to have all the elements everybody tells you that you have to have. You have to be willing to put in a little bit of grit, a little bit of effort. Not a little bit, we won't say that. A lot of effort. And bring the right attitude every day.

If you do those things, there are no limits in this business. And I love sharing my story, because I want people to see that they can do the same. There was nothing special about me. I was just determined to change where I was coming from, and this was the vehicle to do that in. And I've been blessed.

Dave Rogers: So tell us how you got into the business. You said 1992, so you've been in thirty-four years now. That's good. So I've got you by ten. Although, I look it. Yeah, I've got you by a couple of days.

Ed Roberts: Yeah, you've got me by a couple days. I'm chasing you down, though.

Steve Shaw: As a guy who's just turning fifty-seven, you guys can have those old days.

Growing up in downtown Jacksonville 2:27

[Ed Roberts] Right. Some of the people in the audience have heard some of my story before. I grew up in the ghetto of downtown Jacksonville, Florida, in a family that did not work for a living. They took things from people that did. They dealt with drugs, and there was prostitution in the family. It was anything they could do to earn a dollar. Not earn. Take. And from about the time I was seven, I said, you know, I think there's something wrong with this lifestyle. But up to any point, you don't really know there's something wrong with how you grow up, because it's what you're accustomed to. You don't know anything different. The people across the street do the same thing, the people next door do the same thing. That's the environment you're in.

And over time, I decided I've got to do something different. I had my head stepped on plenty of times when they'd come in to address my dad or my sister or my brother. What you see on Cops is very accurate. If they don't know what's there, but they know there could be some violence, they come and knock down the door and parade through the house and take control of everybody in there. Those are tough moments to live through. I've had my head stepped on numerous times. Ultimately, they've got to take control of those things, and I get it. They get a bad rap for doing that, but they're putting their life on the line every time they do it. I lived in it. I totally understand it.

So I left home when I was fourteen, and I continued to go to high school. I didn't know what different was, but I wanted to be different than the path my family had led me down. My dad dropped out of school in the third grade. Both of my brothers never made it past fifth grade. Mom didn't graduate. To me, school was a system that was provided for us. It was a public school, so I kept going down that path and said, "I don't know if it'll take me anywhere, but we'll try it."

When I got into high school, there were vocational programs that certain counties offer, and I was lucky enough to be in a county that offered some. I didn't know anything about which one I wanted, because I wasn't exposed to any of them. What I was exposed to was crime. Top of the list was auto body. Next one down was automotive. And I thought, well, cars are cool, so let's go with that one. That was my vocational program, and that ultimately led to going to a job fair in mid-1992.

I met a gentleman there and told him I needed a job. I was digging in dumpsters, living in my car, collecting recyclables, whatever I could to make enough to get by. I had a normal route that I went on every day. I just had to beat the other people there, because there are people who do those things every day. And he says, "Well, what do you want to do?" I said, "I don't have a clue. I don't mind the stuff I've been learning here. I just want an opportunity." He said, "Come by and see me."

Told no, then turning right 5:40

[Ed Roberts] So I went by and saw him a couple of days later, and he hired me. I had to go through a drug test, all that stuff, and he told me, "I'm going to be on vacation next week. Come in and see my assistant, and he'll put you to work." So I went and handled all the stuff I needed to. I had to go see a shrink and all those different things. They want to see if you're going to steal anything. And then I showed up there on a Monday morning while he was on vacation and asked for his assistant.

His assistant judged a book by its cover, and I can't blame him. I looked like a hoodlum, I sounded like a hoodlum, I probably smelled like a hoodlum. And I said, "Hey, Conrad hired me and told me to come see you today. Where do you want me to put my stuff?" And he was very quick to say, "There's no place for you here."

I'd had my family tell me I was never going to make it out in that world. "We're not cut from that, and that's not who we are." And I chose not to believe them. And then here I am, being told that. I had picked up some tools over the weekend. It was Fourth of July weekend, and thankfully us Americans like to have fun, so I was able to pick up a few more recyclables than I normally would. I got $420 worth of tools from Sears, and my family told me I wasted my money on that. I resisted believing that, but now here I am standing in front of a guy, and he's telling me there's no place for me there. All of that's flashing through my mind.

And you instantly start thinking about your next move. That's just nature. So I'm thinking, I'm going to take this stuff back to Sears. They were right. I start to leave, and I'm sitting out in front of the place at the traffic light, waiting to turn left. Thankfully, it was a light long enough to allow me to process a bit. Everything I knew was to the left. Back home, Sears, the entire environment I grew up in was to the left. And I said, "Well, maybe there's somebody else that'll give me an opportunity." So I said, "I'm going to turn right and see where this goes."

I turned right instead of left and said, "Let's go see what's in the unknown." About five miles later, I pulled into another Ford dealership and met a guy by the name of Charlie Waters, and he gave me an opportunity. Every day I tried to make the most of it, and let him know I appreciated it by returning it with the right attitude and effort. He never knew how much that meant to me, for probably twenty-five years, before I really circled back to him and told him what it meant. It gave me the vehicle to do something different from what I had lived up to that point.

Thankfully, I never got into the crime and all those elements. I was the fourth kid of five, and being able to watch my dad and my other siblings, I knew I wanted to do something different. In order to not get involved with that, I left home. I left home on my own at fourteen and chose to sleep in my car and take showers where I could. Sometimes it was back there, to take a shower. But I knew I needed to separate myself from them, or I would have gotten pulled into it.

With all that being said, there are ones out there listening to this who understand, because they've been through some struggles themselves. The reality is you've got to be persistent. And I don't know how persistent I would have been. I don't know how many no's I could have taken before I would have said, "Yeah, my family's right." But I only had to take that one no, and then the next guy told me yes. Sometimes we'll get told no a few times. I was very fortunate that I was only told once, and I made the most of it from that point forward.

Steve Shaw: It's absolutely amazing. I'm thinking of myself as a young kid going through tech school. My instructor had told me, "You're going to get turned down," right? All of us. But I was very lucky. As soon as I graduated from St. Louis Community College, they had a program with the school, and I went over there, and of course they said yes. But I'm thinking to myself, wow, what would you do? It's powerful. My gosh, how do you have the fortitude, thinking about everything you went through, and then you turned right? That to me is the most powerful thing I've heard in a long, long time. That's pretty amazing. I love hearing that.

Ed Roberts: A book I'm reading right now is Life Is Luck, and I have to agree with a lot of things in there. There's a lot of luck involved, because in my mind I said, I'm going to turn right and see what's out here, and before I knew it I was passing another Ford store. The first one was the store that was originally going to give me a chance, so I felt like my next best chance was another Ford store. But what if it had become very rural, and there was nothing there? I didn't know what was to the right. So there was a lot of luck involved. But there was also a higher power that said, "Hey, let's go try something different." And sometimes you've got to listen to those voices.

Dave Rogers: That's the thing, right? You went with your instincts, you went with your gut. And I think sometimes luck is created. It's not always lucky number seven or throwing the dice, right? It's a matter of creating your own luck. I was laughing listening to your story, because my first job in the car business, I had to borrow three hundred dollars from my grandmother to buy my toolbox. I didn't have it. I did the same thing. "Do you have tools?" I'm like, "Yeah, I have tools." I was living with my grandma, and I'm like, "Can I borrow three hundred dollars? I've got to go to Sears and buy some tools." I came walking in with my little red Craftsman toolbox and a chain and a lock so I could lock it up so nobody would steal it.

When you have that desire to do something, it's amazing what you can do. I didn't have to pick up recyclables and cans. Thank God I had a grandma I could borrow the money from. But you picked up four hundred dollars over a weekend. That's pretty damn impressive, I've got to tell you. That's a lot of bottles and cans.

Ed Roberts: It was. I was fortunate. A lot of stars aligned for those things to happen. Would I still have shown up there if I'd only picked up two hundred dollars' worth of stuff? Absolutely, I'd have been there. But how many no's could I have taken? I don't know the answer to that, but thankfully there weren't that many. There are a lot of people who have similar stories, and mine may sound rougher than theirs or whatever, but ultimately our baseline is our baseline, and we've got to find our way up from there. You just have to have a vision that you want to do something different. You don't necessarily have to have all the pieces figured out. I don't hear no as finality. I hear no as not yet. And if we take that approach, a lot of times we can overcome the obstacles.

How managers answer the kid looking for a job 12:47

[Steve Shaw] I'm thinking about how many times, as a manager, when people come in and apply for a job, or come in to talk to you, or come in to ask for advice. In fact, a guy called me on Friday, which I could talk about later. How many people come in to see us who want jobs, and how do we respond to them? Maybe we're short, maybe that guy was having a bad day, whatever, right? But he gave you a no. How many times have we as managers blown somebody off? "Kid, you're not ready for that." What did that young man or woman do when they were given that no? Did they go and turn right, or did they go, "F it"? That's so powerful for us in the position we're in. A lot of times everything we do has a life-changing impact on the people who come in and visit us. So wow, that's another lesson. We're only like ten minutes in, and we've got two or three amazing things.

Dave Rogers: You say that, but it's true. My whole career in the store, I always made time. Somebody came in and filled out an application, and I can honestly say I never blew one off once. I didn't care how busy I was. I always interviewed them, I always talked to them. I didn't always hire them. But I always felt that if they took the time out of their day to come fill out an application... The old days, right? Doing it online is a little different now. They just spam it out there. But in the old days, when they came in with the application, I used to sit down and talk to every single one of them. I always felt it took guts to walk into a store and do that.

But one of the things you were talking about: we're old enough to remember when they had vocational schools. I tell the story that at the end of your tenth-grade year, you sat in front of the guidance counselor, and they said, "You're an A and B student, you're going to college." And then if you were a C and D student, "What do you like? Electricity, auto body, cars?" For the last twenty years that's been lacking. The parents didn't want to hear their kids were going to go into vocational school. Everybody's Johnny and Sally were going to be a lawyer or an engineer. How many people have been passed up for this career because their parents didn't let them go to vocational school? That's how we didn't get those skilled guys and girls.

I think it's getting back that way. The pendulum's swinging. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in college loans isn't a cool thing anymore. So hopefully there'll be more Ed Roberts out there, and Dave Rogers, and maybe a couple of Steve Shaws, now that we can go to vocational school and get hired.

Ed Roberts: Well, I think we've realized, since we had such a big push over the last twenty, twenty-five years to force people to go to college, that someone has to build the products that get managed in those corner offices. Somebody's got to build those corner offices. There's nothing wrong with having a skilled trade, and a skilled trade is something you can always fall back on. So we need to talk about it that way. For the longest time we put down skilled trades, like they're less than first-class citizens, and we put this fancy title on it: they're blue-collar workers and I'm a white-collar worker. Well, no. They're part of the team, they're a contributing member of the team, and we need to treat them as such.

Dave Rogers: I read a book years ago, when I was going to college after my accident. It was The Millionaire Next Door, I think it was. Nothing fancy, a house, a couple of cars in the driveway, but a lot of those guys and gals were plumbers, they were electricians, they owned their own business, and they had the five or six million dollars in the bank. That was one of the reasons why I got into the car business. I'm like, well, if they can do that, I can do that. That was one of the things that persuaded me to go into the car business. And I think the vocational school, thank goodness, has come full circle. The pendulum's swinging. I think there are going to be more folks who get into this because they can, not because they have to.

Technician to COO, and Bozard's growth 16:43

[Steve Shaw] Was your path typical? Technician, advisor, manager? Is that how you grew up? That's what a lot of people did. That's what I did, and Dave did.

Dave Rogers: That's what I did too.

Ed Roberts: I never really had a title as an advisor. I started as an apprentice technician, then became a tech, then a master tech, then a shop foreman. And I filled in when some advisors would call out or whatever. I just filled in on those roles. Because of that, my path took me right over that, and I became service manager. After that, Ford recruited me, and I actually went to work for Ford for a period of time. So there is no one direct path.

Talking about this path here, I started at this store as fixed ops director. I came in with the owner, between the second and third generation. When I got there, I was the forty-third employee. Today we have four hundred and fifty-one employees. A slight bit of growth, in a town that is not a metro market. We sold a little over nine hundred vehicles last month. To put that in perspective, Jacksonville is thirty miles north of us. Jacksonville has about eight hundred thousand people. St. Augustine is closing in on twenty thousand people. There are four Ford stores in Jacksonville, and you have to add all four of those stores together to come close to what we do down in St. Augustine. We don't have the population to do it with.

But what we do is try to look at things through a different lens and remove the friction the customer has always been exposed to. We talk about this industry being resilient, and it is, but it's resilient because cars are consumables. They wear out, they have to be replaced, so customers have to come back and see us at some point. We talk about how people would rather go to the dentist and have a tooth pulled than get the car serviced. If we start removing those friction points, so it's comfortable for them to come back and see us, it creates the opportunity for us to stand out.

We're blessed to be the employer of choice if you want to be in the car business in northeast Florida. A lot of people chase us down, and there are still times when it takes somebody two years to come to work for us. But we can't rest. We have to continuously get better every single day. We have to be better today than we were yesterday, and better tomorrow than we are today. That's our opportunity, in whatever position we're in. Let's not say, "It's not my job." Well, it's not your job yet. Let's go chase those elements down.

From fixed ops director to GM 19:30

[Steve Shaw] I was one of those guys. I was a fixed ops director, and I was chasing, "I want to be a GM," right? I want to be a GM. And I'm forty years old, a little burnt out. I grew up in the Ford world, primarily as a manager. And I was like, how do I go from fixed ops director to GM? So I kind of hitched my wagon to a gentleman who I love to death. He was a dealer partner, GM type of thing. But it never happened, right? I didn't make that jump. I didn't go sell cars. I was there. And I think there are a lot of fixed ops guys like that. So I ended up saying F it, and I went out and started my own company. I started doing training, and the rest is history. That was whatever, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years ago.

But how does a guy in today's world go from service manager or fixed ops manager to that next level? We've been so lucky to interview some really great guys, right? Back when I was trying to do it, it was almost unheard of, and now it's starting to become something. So how would you describe that to somebody? How would they go about making that transition, that next step?

Ed Roberts: Well, as leaders we have to be constant, ongoing learners. A lot of times we try to get better at our craft rather than learn the elements of how the craft got there. The reality is nothing happens in fixed ops until we sell that first car. If they don't sell the vehicle, we don't have anything to service. And a lot of times people will say, "That's not my job." Well, maybe it isn't your job yet. But if you learn it, it can be your job.

People ask me, "Well, what did you do?" I prepared myself for that role. Anytime we're looking to put someone into a role, we're not looking to put someone in there to back up. We're looking to put someone in there because the person who was there was either failing or wasn't getting it done, whatever the situation may be. Maybe they're retiring. And the last thing you want to do is put someone in there who's not ready to do the job, so you back up even further. So you have to prepare yourself for that next role, whether you ever get it or not.

I never set out to be a general manager at one of the most respected dealers in the country. I set out to be the best I could be, bring the right attitude and effort every day and learn everything about the surroundings I was in. Those things evolved into being the most prepared when that role opened. And being the most prepared made it an easier transition, because there was never a setback. It was, let's keep this train rolling forward.

Steve Shaw: That's some great advice.

Dave Rogers: There's an old expression I heard too: luck is when preparation and opportunity meet, right? Steve and I talk all the time about being a student of the game, reading more, going above and beyond. I learned accounting. When I was a service manager, I wanted to know, when I closed an RO, where did it go? I wanted to know how the money goes, where it lands. So I spent time with my controllers. I wanted to learn how this worked, how to read schedules and all that stuff, right? I didn't have to do it. I know people who have been doing a service manager job for twenty, thirty years who couldn't read the accounting copy of a repair order invoice. To me that's crazy. I want to know where the money goes. That's my paycheck too.

It was that never-ending quest to understand what the heck is going on in the business. I sold cars for a while just to understand how that worked. And it probably happened the same way for you. It just became available when they didn't have anybody else to stick in that role. "Hey, Dave, you want to be a GM?" "Yeah, sure, what the hell? I've been training your GMs for five years. I might as well try it," right? So hats off to you. That's the good old-fashioned grind, being a student of the game. We talk about it all the time. I think it's critical to success.

Ed Roberts: Absolutely. Your story is very similar to that, Dave. We can talk about my story, but we all have one. You could have gone down a different path after you got hurt way back in the day. And I agree with what you said earlier, we do make our own luck. But there are some elements that come into play to help us create that luck. Like that traffic light. If that light had been green when I pulled up to it, I'd have turned left and gone on about my business, and maybe I wouldn't have even gone and looked for another store. Who knows? So it was luck that I got a few minutes to pause there. But we have the ability to turn what could be bad luck into good luck, and what could be good luck into bad luck. It's what we do with it when it's there. I won't say when it's handed to us, but when it's there, it's what we do with it.

Mobile service, from fleets to 47 vans 24:36

[Dave Rogers] That's amazing. You're very forgiving, you're very, very humble, you're very honest. You could have been bitter for a long time, and it's amazing how you've turned that around. So let's go into the other topic. I call Ed Roberts the savant of mobile service. You got into mobile service before it was a thing, before COVID even. Who would have thunk to go to someone's house before COVID? So tell me, how did you get into that business? What made you go down that road? Was it a program back then, or did you just wake up one day?

Ed Roberts: We started doing mobile service back in 2015. Remember what I said earlier: I was the forty-third employee when I started at the dealership back in 2012. We didn't have a commercial fleet department, we didn't have a government department, we didn't have all those things. We had four or five salespeople, a couple of counter people, three advisors and seven technicians. There wasn't a whole lot there. So we set out on an intentional path: let's build a commercial department, and let's build it through service first. There wasn't anybody in our town with large fleets, but the fleets they did have were predominantly Ford, and Ford typically owns work trucks. Because they didn't have a channel to take care of those vehicles, a very low percentage of them were in our brand.

So in 2015, probably the August or September time frame, we set out to introduce ourselves to business owners in our community. We did a lot to get engaged with our community, but we wanted to take that a step further. We told them it didn't matter what vehicles they had, we would come during their company meetings and service those vehicles and minimize their downtime as much as possible. In doing so, you become that familiar face. Every one of them was receptive to it. We weren't going to charge any more.

We were doing it out of the back of a pickup truck. We'd send guys with the case goods they needed and a few tools. If it was Fords, we could do some recalls. If it wasn't Fords, we'd do whatever maintenance was needed. If we needed to put tires on some stuff, we'd take the wheels off, bring them back, put tires on and take them back out. At times, if it was a fleet vehicle the employee drove home, we'd go to his home and service it. But it started out as creating a fleet and commercial department. Now our fleet and commercial department sells about 250 vehicles a month. That was the foundation.

Then Ford embraced it in the first part of 2019 and said, "Hey, let's do something with this." They branded some vehicles, and we instantly ordered a couple of them, because it certainly makes it easier. We can haul more around, we can do different things, and it's a rolling billboard. But I still hadn't introduced it to a retail customer yet. We got our first vehicle from Ford in December of 2019, and our second vehicle showed up on March 11, 2020, the day before the world shut down. That was the introduction: let's go see how customers take it. At that point we were a large service center, servicing about three hundred and fifty vehicles a day.

We made the decision that we weren't going to lay people off. We were going to push through this as hard as we could. We might have someone doing different things. But customers started canceling their appointments or not showing up. They'd have enough courage to set the appointment, and then fear would set in, or life would happen. We knew they had a need. So rather than call those customers back and say, "Hey, I see you missed your appointment today, let's bring it in tomorrow," we said, "Hey, stay in the comfort of your own home. We'll come to you."

That was the introduction, and we saw that customers would embrace it from a retail standpoint. Look at DoorDash and Uber Eats, and how all those things skyrocketed during that time too. It really highlighted what we know today as the experience of convenience. So we layered in on that. Before the end of 2020, I'd ordered ten more vehicles. In 2021 we had a few more on the way. And then in the first part of 2022, I said, "What if we had two hundred vehicles?" So we chased and ordered as many as Ford would let us have, which brought us to forty-seven.

We haven't grown past forty-seven yet, because I brought those in very early. I wanted to make sure I had those pieces, and it took us until probably the middle of 2023 before we had all forty-seven on the road. What I preach to my team right now is let's get better at this every single day. We figured out how to do it, but now how can we do it efficiently? We will get to two hundred vehicles. We have a plan there, and we may even go past that. It's an experience customers love. Once they experience mobile once, that's all they want going forward.

So it's our first appointment, and we set it up right from the beginning, so you experience our best service during your first service. If we can't do it with mobile, we'll do a pickup and delivery. We'll pick up your vehicle, bring it in, do the work and bring it back to you. And if we ask ourselves what we can do, we won't restrict ourselves. A lot of times we'll say, "Well, you can't do that many things out there." Hey, you're in this business. Go walk through the shop. Every vehicle being worked on in that shop that the lift isn't set for is a vehicle that can be worked on out in the field. Module programming, all those things. When you do that, you open up a whole other channel of what's possible.

Steve Shaw: Let me ask you a question. I'm thinking about back in my Ford days. I was at a big monster Ford store in Los Angeles, right? And we were fleet, fleet, fleet. We had the commercial department, everything. But I will tell you, I was service manager, and my buddy was fixed ops director, and not one time did either one of us look at each other and go, "Hey, why don't we just take a truck over to the airport and fix all these cars at the airport?" In my brain, I'm thinking, how silly were we back then? We probably had forty-seven drivers picking up and delivering cars. But it never occurred to us to go service the car there, unless it was a post office or something, some nickel-and-dime thing. So my question is, did a customer say, "Would you come here?" Or did you guys just have this idea? I'm a forward-thinking guy, but it would never have crossed my mind to do that.

Ed Roberts: It actually came from a guy sitting in our waiting room. He was pretty loyal to us, and I'd see him there about every three months. He'd sit there for an hour and a half or two hours, whatever he was in there for. His vehicle's not earning any income. He's not earning any income. The company's paying for him to be there. So I looked at that business and asked, what could I do to allow him to stay effective without having this downtime? That was the first company we approached. "Hey, you've got Scott, who comes in here all the time. I appreciate him coming in. I appreciate the loyalty. But what if he didn't have to?" That's where it started.

One of our tenets is innovate. We want to innovate, we want to challenge the industry. When you try things, you're going to bark up a tree that doesn't work. And you have to ask yourself, have I just found a way for it not to work yet, or is this truly not effective? You have to be able to fail fast. A lot of times we get stuck on ideas where we think, "Well, that's a good idea, I just have the wrong person on it," and we stay glued to an idea that doesn't have the effectiveness. You've got to accept it and move on. You fail fast and keep rolling.

Steve Shaw: That's a great story.

Dave Rogers: You guys definitely jumped a hurdle that most people don't. Most GMs in this business, a lot of service managers, a lot of dealer principals, but mainly GMs, worry about their pay plan above all else, right? So you got somebody to invest. Forget about forty-seven. You got ten vans on this idea, right? And you just started doing it, when you know damn well in the very beginning it was not very profitable. There's no way you were making money in the beginning. But you believed in it, and you got somebody to sign a check, and they stomached it. I don't know how you did the accounting, I don't know how you bolstered people's pay plans, but you definitely put the cart in front of the horse and made it happen, and I've got to give you credit for that.

I was talking the other day with one of my stores about online parts, doing RevolutionParts and all that stuff, and you've got GMs who won't spend a thousand dollars on SEO optimization, because there's no ROI on it. Well, first of all, thank God Jeff Bezos didn't know you back in 1999, or there'd be no Amazon now, right? This is the kind of stuff where you have to have the vision, and somebody in your organization had a set of balls, or deep pockets, and let you run with it. I give them a lot of credit for that. It's amazing.

Ed Roberts: It does take that. It takes trust, a high level of trust. The way I landed there, I was at a perfectly good store before, and I was making good money, but I was constrained. I'd spent a lot of time with one of the corporate groups, and everything was structured, and I was very constrained. So I actually went to Bozard for a third of the money I was originally making, because I knew what their vision was, and it aligned: hey, let's go try some things, let's go break some things and see what we can do. When that level of trust aligns, and you've got someone backing you and saying it's okay to make a mistake, let's learn fast and not do the same thing twice, it gives you the freedom to try different things and challenge the status quo.

And we have another plan. I'll tease it out there right now. I think it will elevate us as much as mobile service has, and we're going to try to put it together over the next four months.

Steve Shaw: You heard it here first.

Ed Roberts: Right now we service about twenty-five hundred customers in the driveway every month. I think it'll take that to around the ten thousand mark.

Dave Rogers: In the service drive, you mean? In your base?

Ed Roberts: No, it's going to amplify mobile. It will amplify mobile to an extreme that changes the game a bit.

Dave Rogers: You said when we were in Detroit that you write roughly eleven thousand ROs a month, right, in that area. And you're in a town with twenty thousand people. That's fifty-five percent retention if everybody owned a Ford. That's pretty damn good in itself. I'm kidding around. But you told me you're around eighty percent retention with your Ford customers, right?

Ed Roberts: We are. Our retention is about eighty percent, eighty-one percent, 81.3 to be exact. But we do a lot of pump out, pump in. And obviously when we're servicing on wheels, I'm not locked into my primary market area. There is no primary market area on wheels. I don't want to do this all the time, but I'm in North Florida, and I've gone as far as Miami to service a set number of fleet vehicles. A recall came out and took a whole slew of vehicles out of commission, so they couldn't be used, and we sent a whole team down there and knocked them out overnight.

We've done that in Orlando, we've done it in Tampa, we've done it in various places. When you do those things for those clients, they become very, very loyal to you, and then it starts to compound itself. When they're at their 20 Group-type meetings, they have those conversations about who did what, and the next thing you know you're getting a new phone call, a new conquest. That's what allows us to write those kinds of repair orders. We're outside the box on where we conquest from.

"What if you couldn't say no?" 37:31

[Steve Shaw] So there has to be a mentality within your organization that is yes.

Ed Roberts: We call ourselves the best team on the planet. And I tell my team all the time that we don't have to have all the best players to be the best team on the planet, but we have to bring our best every single day, and we have to play our best together as a team. It's not a yes mentality so much. It's a "what if you couldn't say no" mentality. So when they bring something to me, that's the question I'll ask: "Well, what if you couldn't say no?" And then they start processing through a different lens, and we find a way to go do it.

Steve Shaw: It's amazing. As we always talk about in the Steve Shaw saga, I travel and I meet dealers all the time. And in my own experience, with my own vehicles, I live just outside of Tampa, there's not much of "yes," or "you're not allowed to say no," in the industry right now. We talked about what's your wow experience recently and so on, and it seems like everybody is retreating versus saying yes and going after it. So it's certainly a pleasure, and exciting, to hear what you guys are doing. And even now going, "Just wait till you see what's coming," right? "We're not resting at eleven thousand tickets. We're going somewhere." That absolutely warms my heart. And I hope the people I train and work with, and people who just know us, get it in their minds: wow, we can still do stuff in this day and age, right? We don't have to just sit back. So I can't thank you enough for saying all of those things, man. That's an amazing attitude.

Ed Roberts: I'll save something here for a moment, but it's put yourself in the customer's shoes. If you do that, the friction highlights itself. We've all worked in dealers, and Dave and I still are, and you're in dealers all the time, Steve. We know manufacturers come up with programs that aren't going to work right out of the gate. It's because they don't put themselves in those shoes, and they don't look all the way through that lens. If we do that, and I'll tie something to it here in a moment, it's easier to identify the friction. We're not just there going through the motions of doing the same thing we did yesterday with whoever shows up today.

Dave Rogers: It's true. I had a boss who used to tell me I was negative, and I said, "I'm not negative." When I took the DISC training and everything else, my personality type, they said I was creative, and in the back they even said you can see things that haven't happened yet. That's just the way my eyes look at things, and the way my brain works. I'm like, "I'm not being negative. I'm just telling you, if you do this and this, you've got to watch out for this and this. I'm not saying I don't want to do it, but you've got to be prepared for these pitfalls and these hurdles," right? And I think that mentality, getting things to yes, not being able to say no, is a perfect way of doing that. I don't ever want to not do anything. I just want to make sure everyone's prepared for what could happen if you go down that road, especially with the OEM programs. Because if you follow these things blindly and you're not paying attention, it's going to be a disaster.

And guess what? You're going to have egg on your face, and the manufacturer is going to be telling you that you suck, when they're the ones who caused the problem, because you didn't look far enough ahead, right? So I agree with you. You have to use your experience, your know-how, your brain power, to say, "Okay, if we do this, this is the way we're going to do it. And if this happens, we're going to have to change direction, go this way or that way." And I wrote it down: we're going to have to have you back in four months and fifteen days to find out about this big new thing. I'm sure I'll hear about it on one of the other podcasts.

Ed Roberts: You'll see it. We'll be very visual with it, for sure.

Steve Shaw: I'm super excited that you joined us and shared. I love your story. It warms my heart, and everything you're doing. Gosh, I'm sure it's been said a million times, but if we could clone you, or clone parts of you, and spread it around the industry, holy cow. It just goes to show you what the industry could be like if people opened their minds and were willing to take those chances. So Dave, I'll turn it over to you guys. Let you guys wrap this up. GM tip of the day, whatever. I'm just going to sit back and watch.

GM tip: eat your own dog food 42:07

[Dave Rogers] Before we get there: I met Ed for the first time in person, I guess, but somehow we had each other's numbers in our phones, so we must have talked sometime before that. It was me, Tully, Richard Long, Lupo and Ed. We all have different opinions, different ways of doing things. We agree and disagree on different things. But the one thing we've stayed firm on is we don't poo-poo each other, we don't badmouth the business, and no matter what's going on, we have to stand together, right? Too many people out there are trying to throw somebody else under the bus to make themselves look good, and when they do that, they're tarnishing the whole business.

I think we have to be positive. We need more role models like Ed, and we should stay focused on that, because that's what makes the car business great. You don't go from zero to hero... A lot of us had our challenges, right? If it wasn't for the car business, we wouldn't have had a lot of success in a lot of different ways. I've always said you don't have to have a college education, you barely have to have a high school education, but if you set your mind to it, you can make things happen in this business. So thank you for being on.

And I'm going to defer to you for the GM tip of the day. Ed, I don't know if you've listened before, but we try to give a fixed ops tip out there for the general managers, because we all know that 85% of them come from sales. The only time they find service is when they're having downturns and issues, and they learn the formula for absorption. So they go running in the back, following their popcorn trail, and they go to the service manager and say, "I need more, I need more, I need more." So give a tip of the day for a general manager. Maybe it's not me blabbing, maybe it's somebody different.

Ed Roberts: I'll say it a couple of different ways, and I said I'd tie this together. A lot of times, and this is what manufacturers do, but we do it in our own businesses as well, we put things out there that are convenient for us. It's a process that's built for us. What I preach a lot, and I stole it from John McNeil, is eat your own dog food. If you're going to put something out there that the customer has to go through, go experience it yourself. And experience it without people knowing who you are.

I mean, online appointments are atrocious at almost every car dealer, because whoever sets those things up doesn't go through and try them and make sure they work. And Steve, you said this earlier, or Dave, you said it about the creative mind, that you see things before they happen. Well, that's playing the tape all the way out. For every action there's a reaction that comes from it. I won't say it's an opposing action, but there's an action that comes from it. If an alcoholic takes a drink, in that moment it might be a setting he's having fun in, with the people he's hanging out with. But what if you play that all the way out? What did that just lead to? So you've got to play the tape all the way out. If that happens, this happens. And look at it through multiple lenses: the business lens, the customer lens.

And for all the fixed ops directors out there saying, "Hey, how do I get to that side of the business?" You've got to quit saying that fixed is better than variable, or putting them down. The glamour at the dealership is on the sales side. No matter what we produce on the back side of the business, the glamour is on the sales side. It always has been, it always will be. That's the shiny new toys. So go learn that side of the business, go partner up with those guys, quit putting them down, and say, "Hey, let me figure out what you do." There are a lot of moving pieces on the variable side as well. We think all they do is sell cars, but there are a lot of moving pieces in how all those things come together. So go find out what the glamour is all about, become a student of that game as well, and the opportunities will open up for you.

Steve Shaw: That's amazing.

Dave Rogers: At one point in my career I was probably one of those guys, way back when. But nothing good happens until you sell a car. Nothing. We don't have anything to work on. Nothing good happens until you sell a car, so go give them credit. Probably when I started selling cars is when I came up with that, or somebody told me that. My wife was pregnant, and she couldn't work anymore. The dealership I was at was a Monday-through-Friday store, and I wanted to make extra money, so I went up front and sold cars three days a week and Saturdays. It was an eye-opening experience. I thought it was a great lesson. And Ed, to your point, go learn that side of the business, because it was really eye-opening to understand what they go through to sell a car and all the other minutiae that goes with it. Programs, rebates, incentives. There's a lot to it. It's a lot harder than most people think. So good point, Ed.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. Well, we better get out of here today. This was a long one. Ed, it was so great having you on the show. We're definitely going to have you back in a couple of months, or four months from now, so we can learn more about the new program. Pretty exciting. Dave, I will chat with you next week. Talk to you later.

Dave Rogers: Guys, have a good one. I'm honored to have you on, Ed.

Ed Roberts: Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it, guys.