The Top 5 Unwritten Rules of the Service Department

The technician who drove the customer's car home 0:00

Steve Shaw: Welcome back, Dave Rogers. What's on your mind tonight, Dave?

Dave Rogers: Fixed Ops Focus, Steve Shaw. That's all that's on my mind. Fixed Ops Focus.

Steve Shaw: I think people need to be more focused on their fixed ops. You know what I heard today? For some strange reason it came up in my feed. Remember the Mercedes-Benz technician in Tennessee who drove the customer's Mercedes home? I did a follow-up, wondering what's going on with that situation, and I thought this might be an interesting conversation. The article said the dealership and the technician are going to court next month. Not only is the dealership going to court, because obviously the technician works for the dealership, but the employee himself is being sued by the customer, and he's facing criminal charges. I find that interesting for lots of reasons. And a conversation came up about who's right. Think about it from our perspective, internally. Is the technician right? What would happen in your store?

Dave Rogers: Well, we unfortunately had that happen to us once, and the technician was terminated. He took a car home without any permission, deciding on his own that it was okay. The customer had a tracking device in the car, saw the car was not where it was supposed to be and reported it stolen. It turned into a big fiasco, and we wound up terminating him. Unfortunately, the conversation never got to where I wanted it to go, because I kept asking the GM, "How does this happen?" I think the guy had worked for us for six months to a year. Does this happen all the time? Is it a regular occurrence? At what point does somebody not know that you can't take a customer's car home without their permission? When I read that story a few months ago, I thought, "Jesus, I thought it only happened to me," and then I saw it happen to someone else not too long after.

Written rule or common sense? 2:22

Steve Shaw: It's funny in our episode tonight, but it's not funny in the real world. Here's the question: is that a written rule at your dealership, or at dealerships around the country? Or is it just one of those things that's implied, one of those unwritten rules everybody's supposed to know?

Dave Rogers: Well, you're forgetting bad parenting and no morals and values. If you have to have a written rule for things like that... We always did have a rule on taking a customer's car home at night: you got the customer's permission. We tried to shy away from technicians doing it. It was usually a manager, advisor or lead person, sometimes the shop foreman. With Chrysler we used to have to put the co-pilot in the car and take it for a ride, and we'd get a shop foreman or master technician to do that. But it wasn't like anybody had permission to take a car home. Was it written down? Probably not. It was just a rule. Common sense says you can't take someone else's property at all. Isn't that kind of the law?

Steve Shaw: Well, what other things are rules, or common sense, or maybe should be policies? Here's a dumb question, and I can think of so many right now. Do I have to tighten all the lug nuts on a car when I'm doing an oil change, or a tire rotation?

Dave Rogers: If you take the lug nuts off to do an oil change, we'll probably find another career for you, because there's no oil there. But yes, I would think that if you loosen a bolt, the normal process would be to retighten it and torque it back up. That would be part of being a mechanic.

Steve Shaw: You would think. But in the state of Michigan, and I watched this on a podcast recently, so it must be true, the statute in their consumer law doesn't specifically say that if you take the tires off, you have to retighten the lug nuts appropriately. It doesn't say that. So technically you don't have to. It's the craziest thing in the world, but it's a true statement, according to a prominent attorney in the state of Michigan.

Dave Rogers: Well, most of the manufacturers, especially the European ones, have had work instructions for years. There's a book and a process for everything. This is how you take the starter out, these are the bolts you take out, and of course when you put it back together, you torque them with a torque wrench. But it's pretty funny that there's no law saying you have to do that. If you drain the oil, there's no law that says you have to put the plug back in? That just seems ludicrous. If a doctor opens you up and takes out your appendix, they can just leave you open and not stitch you back up, and that's okay?

Steve Shaw: Well, a doctor has a practice. It's not perfect. We're held to a higher standard.

Side jobs and employee parts at cost plus 10% 6:03

Steve Shaw: All right, what else is not written down that's probably common sense?

Dave Rogers: Listen, the point of this is that there's a lot of gray area in everything. I have this conversation probably a couple of times a year. I've issued written policies, and it still happens: technicians going to the counter buying parts, getting the employee discount, and doing side jobs. It doesn't work that way. If you're doing a side job, you pay full price on the parts. If you're working on your own car, or a household member's car at the same address, you're supposed to show the registration with the VIN, and we'll sell you the parts at 10% over cost. That's the thing we do for employees, and it's in writing. But we have to remind people, because it still escapes them. They think because they work for us, they get to buy parts at 10% over cost to go home and do side jobs on the weekend, which is ludicrous.

Steve Shaw: That could be another unwritten rule, because I suspect not every dealership has in its onboarding package, "This is what you get, and this is how you buy parts." That could vary from service manager to service manager.

Dave Rogers: Not everybody has the same philosophy on it. But when we onboard, it's going to take a Vulcan mind meld to get all that information into someone's head if you go through all the unwritten rules and all the written rules. It's hard enough to get somebody to take their self-study classes or their harassment training. Now we're going to tell them, "If you ever decide to buy a part, this is what happens. And if you ever decide you want to take a customer's car home at night, you can't."

Steve Shaw: Do I need an RO to work on a car in the shop?

Dave Rogers: Absolutely. I think that's probably a written rule in most places, for working on your own car or someone else's. But do people not follow that rule? That happens all the time too. For insurance reasons, you need an RO. You want a place to charge out the oil they use, or any parts. That's why you write the RO, so workers' comp insurance covers it and you have a place to charge out what they use. But do people ignore that rule? Yeah, I'm sure they do.

Steve Shaw: Is it a fireable offense?

Dave Rogers: Usually not, depending. But if it's the second, third or fourth offense, a lot of times I have an issue with the manager more than the employee. They're the ones who are supposed to be writing the RO, walking around the shop and knowing what's going on. I shouldn't say we've never fired anybody for it. We've caught some pretty egregious stuff. We had two mechanics who would stay on Saturday night. They told the service manager, "Everybody wants to get out of here. We'll lock up." Then they brought in side jobs, doing accessory work on cars overnight into Sunday. The reason they got caught was that the gate was locked, and the security guard found it odd that he was letting somebody out on a Sunday when he didn't remember letting anyone in. They'd stayed overnight. Those guys had to be terminated. They were probably doing it more than once.

Steve Shaw: Hey, along those lines, I heard that a very prominent store, and I won't mention any names, was allowing their shop foreman to work half days and do side jobs the second half of the day. It was just allowed. A very large auto group, but one store out of thirty allowed one person, their shop foreman, to do it, because he said he couldn't make enough money working at the store. It was definitely an unwritten rule. But could you imagine what would happen if somebody else in that organization pulled that stuff?

Dave Rogers: I don't think that would go over very well. How many of those side-job customers were people he gave business cards to during the week, who'd declined the work?

Steve Shaw: Now he has his own shop.

Dave Rogers: Of course he can make more money. But when you're onboarding people, there's got to be a certain aspect where common sense should prevail. Still, it's probably not a bad idea to have some written rules on some of these things. Taking somebody's car home at night is a pretty big one to miss.

Employee car purchases and the star performer 11:16

Steve Shaw: I'd like to hear from people in the comments about the unwritten rules in their car dealership. Is it okay to drive a car home? Do I have to tighten the lug nuts, and if I don't, am I fired? How much do I pay for parts? Cost plus 10? And what about when I buy a car? How much do I get to buy a car for?

Dave Rogers: That's a tough conversation sometimes. A new car is usually a flat amount. Used cars are where everyone always has an issue, because you don't want anybody stealing the good trades. Everybody always seems to know when the store got a good trade-in at a good price, and people gravitate toward it: "They stole that trade." Somehow everybody across all 30 stores finds out about it. They see it in the system, they see what it was bought for, and everybody wants it. That's where things are adjusted case by case: "You can buy this car, but this is the price," or "You have to wait 30 days before an employee can buy it." We have one point person who oversees all of that, the used car director, but it's a hassle every time, because you can't set a rule that covers these things 100% of the time. You just can't.

Steve Shaw: Those are the gray areas that get us in the most trouble. I was watching something about the guy who sells the most, whether in sales or service. Do we pay attention to whether he follows the process? He's over here grossing, doing the deal, and we just let him go. "Don't mess with Billy, because Billy's the shit." But everybody else has to follow the process, and when you start selling as much as Billy, then you don't have to follow it either.

Dave Rogers: That's just bad rules. I get it, listen. It seems like we always turn a blind eye to the high performers, and that's not the right way of doing it. There are certain processes that should be followed and certain points that should be hit every time. Maybe there's some deviation for personalities that you can let slide. But like I always say, there are misdemeanors, there are felonies and there are capital offenses. The high performer can't be getting away with capital offenses or felonies all day long. A few misdemeanors here and there, okay. It's like in California, where it's not shoplifting unless it's over 950 bucks. "Steve, if you want to steal, it's got to be less than $950, and you also have to sell 25 cars a month before I let you do that." That's the real world, unfortunately.

Steve Shaw: As an outside consultant, I talk about this all the time with my clients, especially when we're doing training. When we walk around a car, is one guy allowed to look at more things than the other guy? Is somebody who's really capable allowed to pop the hood and check every fluid, and is it okay that the guy who's not that capable doesn't? Those are our processes. Is that a misdemeanor or a felony? I don't know. But customers might look at it as a higher-level offense than we do. If two people look at the car differently, that could be an offense. Those unwritten rules were the fun of the car business in the seventies, eighties, nineties and even the 2000s, but I don't know that they're good for business anymore.

Dave Rogers: But if you go back to the onboarding conversation, what are you going to do, overwhelm new people with all these different things? It's hard enough to teach them all the systems and tools, and that the process is what's important. Now you're going to go through all these other rules, and the person is going to get up and leave: "This business is crazy. I'm not staying here."

But on process: we have a salesman in one of our stores who sells 1,200, 1,300, 1,400 cars a year. At one point I think he was going for the Guinness Book of World Records, but they determined it wasn't a valid record because they couldn't prove it. Frank sells 100 cars a month. Does he follow every process? He probably follows a lot of them. I'm sure his customers love him. They keep coming back. Are there steps he doesn't do? I don't sit there and watch the guy. But if you're going to do a hundred cars a month, maybe you can't follow the same processes as somebody doing 20 a month. Maybe those processes aren't geared toward the volume he's doing.

So it's based on the person and the job role. You don't want a technician leaving the lug nuts loose because he turns 100 hours a week and never tightens a lug nut. That's not going to work out well. But within reason, you have to look at these things and say, "Okay, maybe it's a stupid rule." Maybe we shouldn't let somebody work on side jobs. We used to do Wednesday nights where everyone could stay late and work on their own cars or a family member's car. That's a perk of the business. But coming in on your day off to do side jobs so you can make an extra thousand bucks, I don't know. If somebody asked permission to work on their mom's car or their stepfather's car, okay. But making cash that way is where I have a problem.

Steve Shaw: I would have picked you to be a little harder line on the rules.

Dave Rogers: The side job one I have a problem with. But working on a family member's car, or even a friend's, if you're not making any money on it, I've always been pretty lenient. I want to keep the employees happy, and I think being able to work on a lift is a perk and a benefit for a technician sometimes. But you've got to follow the rules leading up to it. You can't just sneak into the shop.

Road tests and the rules managers write for themselves 18:00

Steve Shaw: Hey, Dave, wink, wink. It's a perk. I'm going to drive that Mercedes-Benz home tonight. Is that all right?

Dave Rogers: Nope, that's not all right. But you know what? Every general manager and sales manager takes the hot trade home at night. They slap the dealer plate on that Mustang Super Cobra out there: "I want to take that home." "I want to take the Tesla truck home." They make the rules for themselves on that one.

Steve Shaw: Exactly. And again, it's just a conversation. I'm not here judging. I lean into the camp of "write it down and have a discussion." I was pretty hardcore on rules as a manager and director. Ask anybody, like Armen, who worked for me in the past. There were certain things I was very hardcore about, like bringing a car into the shop without a repair order. Whatever the dealer wants, I'm going to follow those rules and make sure they're very well known. If there's a good reason to drive a car home, the customer is going to sign the RO saying it's okay. How many miles do we drive on a road test, and what's the route?

Dave Rogers: I'm a firm believer in that. You set a route, and it's whatever it is, two or three miles. The map is up, and everyone knows what to do. I think that's good quality control, and that's what you need to do. Same thing with taking a car home at night: you need the customer's permission. But listen, at one of the companies I worked for, there was more than one case where a customer's car was taken home at night. In one, a technician was driving the customer's car and ran over somebody and killed him. There was always a debate over whether the person had fallen in the street and was already half dead or dead. But the bottom line is the guy was out in the customer's car at 11 o'clock on a Saturday night, probably where he shouldn't have been, and someone died.

You hear these cases, and I would have assumed, because it was a big public company, that these rules were communicated to everybody. Apparently not. There was no paperwork and no signature. Can you imagine being the customer and finding out your car was involved in a hit-and-run where somebody died? Or even just an accident where someone died?

Steve Shaw: I couldn't imagine it. And we're sort of dancing around the subject of onboarding, your employee handbook. I think some of the larger companies are much better at it than the smaller ones. Did you at least give them a handbook? Did they actually sign that they read it? Would it stand up in court? With this Mercedes dealership case, I'd really be interested to see how it unfolds. Is there a policy at the dealership? Did the technician follow it? Initially I think the manager said it was okay that he did that. The dealership said, "Yeah, it was okay. You signed the repair order." So now both of them are hand in hand, and I think some of that has changed as the case goes on. I won't bore everybody with the details.

We could probably sit here and talk about a hundred different things that may or may not need to be written down. But it's probably a good idea, and it's a little CYA. You were on The Car Guy last week, talking about covering the dealer's assets and the things that might drive an insurance company crazy. If you drove a customer's car home and crashed it, who's responsible? Is it the employee's insurance, the dealer's insurance? Is it Zurich? Who's going to pay that bill if something happens to that car?

Dave Rogers: Listen, that's happened before. I went many years without a technician having an accident in a customer's car. When I was up at the Mercedes stores, I think right before I got there, a technician had a head-on collision with somebody on a back road. He wasn't paying attention. It became a tangled web. Everyone wanted to go to the customer's insurance, and the customer's insurance wasn't buying it. There was no way. Our insurance paid for it. And the conversation with Zurich the other day was exactly that: store blindness, having a third party look inside your shop and see if everything looks safe.

You can do that with the rules too, with your handbooks, with everything. You have environmental concerns. A lot of stuff trickles into this that can make it overwhelming for a regular manager in any store. When you onboard an employee, you're trying to get the basics down and get this person functional, giving them the baseline of what they need to do. You're not trying to pour 32 ounces into a 16-ounce cup. That's just a fact of life. If I sit you down and go over all these rules, you're never going to get out front to talk to a customer. I'd keep you busy for a couple of years. Maybe you'd like that, Steve, getting paid your salary to sit at my desk talking about the rules.

Onboarding, handbooks and who teaches the rules 23:57

Steve Shaw: Well, there's a store here locally that I work with that has a three-day onboarding when you come aboard: company culture, company values, all of that, and they go through the employee handbook. Is it a good idea? I absolutely think so. And I think in the 40 hours a year of training, some of that employee handbook should be a refresher, every six months or some set amount of time. I've talked to a group in California that's going to put their employee handbook online, and we're going to create a curriculum for them for exactly that.

What I also find interesting is that I saw an ad where a dealership group was hiring a trainer. I know many dealership groups that say, "For what I pay you, Steve, I could just hire a trainer." I say, "You could. But as soon as you hire a trainer, what is that trainer's scope?" One of the really large auto groups I work with, 70 or 80 stores, hired a trainer per region, thinking they'd be a sales trainer or process trainer. Well, that person becomes the onboarding person. That person teaches how to write a repair order. They never do what the dealer thinks they're going to do in my role.

We have a very limited scope in our world. What we generally do is teach sales and how to improve someone's sales. If you're going to have that trainer position, HR needs to be involved in onboarding and, quote-unquote, the rules. Nobody would pay me to teach the rules of the dealership. But I'm in the camp that there need to be rules, and somebody needs to teach them.

Dave Rogers: Listen, I agree in philosophy. I just think it becomes overwhelming, a bureaucratic pileup. We're here to sell things, fix things and make money for the company. Mitigating losses and reducing risk is part of our job, but there's only so much time in a day. I do agree with you that part of the 40 hours of training probably should be this. Once a year there's some HR training that has to be refreshed. Certain positions, like the body shop guys with the hazmat, the masks and the paint equipment, have to go through training every year, and there are health and safety things done every year. But do we refresh "don't take a customer's car home on a Friday night and go drinking at the bars"? No, we probably don't refresh that rule often enough. Maybe we should, because it did happen to us a year or so ago.

Steve Shaw: It happened to a big Mercedes store too. It's like the five o'clock huddle: "All right, guys, hand in the keys, put the repair orders back with the advisor, hang the keys up on the desk, and by the way, don't drive a customer's car home tonight."

Dave Rogers: There's probably a Reddit forum for technicians where they got the idea. "That sounds like a great idea. Let me take a Benz for the weekend and go impress the ladies."

Tommy, the Pantera and a second chance 27:33

Steve Shaw: Exactly. When I was service manager at a big Ford store in California, one of the technicians, a super great guy, quick service in those days and the AC and electrical guy, took a Pantera out, back when Ford used to sell those, drove it 100 miles an hour behind the dealership and wrapped it around a pole. Of course he was fired. Many years later, I become the fixed ops director and I'm hiring people, and my shop foreman says, "Hey, you've got to call this guy and hire him." I don't know the story yet. I bring him into my office, and this guy's the shit. And then my shop foreman, Monty, says, "Well, let me tell you a story."

So he tells me the story. I get my shop foreman and my four group leaders, and we go sit down with the GM. I told my buddy Jeff, "Hey, I'm going to hire this guy, Tommy, back." And Jeff looks at everybody in the room and says, "If that MFer screws up, I'm not blaming Steve. I'm going to blame every one of you clowns." Then I brought Tommy into the office, and we had a whole conversation and signed documents saying Tommy would never drive a customer's car at all. So we were creating our own rules for one individual so I could give him a job back. Maybe there are exceptions to things. But I think the better we do at documenting these unwritten rules, probably the better off we are as an organization.

Dave Rogers: I think you do have to weigh it out. It's a balancing act. The onboarding process can't be three months long with all these rules. You have to pick and choose what you train an employee on. We need to get them up to speed and making money, earning a living for their family. Unless they're total green peas who can spend a week in an office taking classes online, I just don't see how you could ever cover all these unwritten rules. You can't cover these things in a 20-year career sometimes. I've been doing this for 40-some years, and there are still things that happen where I go, "Wow, that's a new one. I never thought of that one."

Steve Shaw: Exactly. What's the name of your book going to be?

Dave Rogers: You Can't Make This Shit Up.

Steve Shaw: I think you've got to wrap us up with a GM tip of the day after that.

Dave Rogers: The GM tip of the day: pick and choose your battles. According to Steve, you need to write a rule book for all the unwritten rules. I'd say make sure your employees are trained, and onboard them the right way without overburdening them and scaring them away. Like I said, if you give somebody 32 ounces when they only have a 16-ounce cup, it's not going to hold. There's going to be a lot of spillage. So pick and choose what you train them on. And, I shouldn't say maybe, definitely do a once-a-year refresher on some of these rules. Maybe you go through the handbook a chapter or a section at a time. That's my lesson of the day for the GM: do something I never did when I was a GM.

Steve Shaw: There you go. You've said it many times: common sense ain't so common anymore. We'd better get out of here on this one. If anybody has any unwritten rules, drop them in the comments and we'll talk about them on our show.

Dave Rogers: All right, brother. And don't forget Fridays, man.

Steve Shaw: Friday, absolutely, four o'clock. From sleeper to giant: we're going to interview a guy who took a four-technician store and turned it into a million-and-a-half-gross service department. So come in, everybody, and join us for that one. It's going to be awesome. Later.

Dave Rogers: All right, brother. Talk to you.