Today, we are going to talk about tire season!
It’s important that we get ahead of this and talk about it. We also are going to read a letter from a concerned citizen in parts, which is funny in and of itself. Lastly, we’re going to start off by saying, if you do not have your tickets for Top Dog, make sure that you get them right away.
I want everybody to know that it means a lot to me that you’ve tuned in or if we’ve met or spent any time together. I want you to know that it is really special to me and I’m going to miss everybody. Top Dog is set up with or without me to have some amazing guests.
Now, we’re always looking on social media, we have a team of people scouring on social media.
All we had to do was check our LinkedIn to get this question from a gentleman named Dylan.
Dylan works in parts and he messaged us on LinkedIn and he says, can you answer this on your YouTube channel? Dylan specifically asked us,
“Why does the parts department get so much hate and always gets blamed for everything? Being in parts for the past eight years and seeing how service and sales make plenty of mistakes that the parts department usually fixes for them. I’d like to understand why parts get a lot of hate when all they try to do is help everyone”
Here’s what we’re going to do, Dylan. We’ve decided to name a special Top Dog after you, which is going to be, Bring Your Parts Manager with you to Top Dog. Because I don’t think we dislike parts at all. We love parts. I think that you’re projecting this because when have we said anything bad about parts? I do think that sometimes the service department, not every time, uses the parts department as a scapegoat for their problems.
So it’s tire season and it makes me think of a really impactful story that everybody should really pay attention to.
I’m about seven at this time and my mom and her guy friend sat me down and they informed me that they’re getting married and then upon getting married, they’re moving to Mexico to be Missionaries. It was like a corporate family meeting for a family that I didn’t know existed. Besides getting in a lot of trouble, being a pastor’s kid, you participate in the behind the scenes activities of a church.
When we would come up from Mexico in the summer, I would work in my step grandfather’s church and one of the things that I got to do is help with the offering. So the way that the service would go is they would start off with praise and worship. All I had to do was grab the offering plate and hand it to the next row. It was a very fun responsibility for a kid, you felt like you were a part of it.
Just as a kid, seeing my Grandparents separate the envelopes and the checks from a big mountain of cash was an interesting thing to experience as a young kid.
I remember my step grandfather said, “It’s time.”
And they said that back and forth, “it’s time”, I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but come next Sunday… I found out what “it’s time” meant. So the praise and worship happens and then the announcement happens and I’m ready. Ready like how you’re just a kid and little soldier and you’re ready for your, your task, your job that never happened. No offering was taken. My step grandfather goes up to give the sermon and the sermon starts off with how people have accomplished things that they never thought possible. Their wishes had been granted, all of a sudden all these people got lucky.
I learned from my stepfather, being a pastor in Mexico, that “it’s time” means that you have to remind the congregation that they need to pay their ties and how important it is to pay your ties.
It’s an honor system, in a sense, even though the Bible says to pay your ties, you still have to remind people that they need to pay, there’s a lot of lessons in this story. It’s really a leadership lesson more than anything else, but at a young age, I understood that there’s just certain things that you have to do to gear up and remind people, or plan for something that can be represented by the term “It’s time”.
And so we do the same thing in our industry with tires.
Most of the time it is way too late, the tire season hits us like a freight train.
Even though we know when the freight trains come, most of the time we are caught by surprise. That’s our reality in the Automotive Industry. It always blows me away when clients actually want us to charge them to store tires and rims.
I worked in Washington, where the weather’s terrible, however, you don’t store rims and tires like you do in Illinois or Canada.
Customers have an extra set of rims and tires for clients that paid in store, we store them for free. Whatever it is, they will come in and get their winter tires put on and they just swap. But what happens is that Service Advisors get completely bombarded by all the customers coming in. Them wanting the rims and tires to be swapped, that Technicians don’t have time to inspect anything. Service Advisors and Technicians then don’t have time to recommend an alignment. It really is just a hold on and do the best you can for 45 days. Then that happens again when they come off.
What Christian and I are trying to tell you today is it’s time to start planning now for tire season.
Don’t wait until it’s too late. Get ahead of it with your marketing, get ahead of it with your inventory. Specifically, with how many Technicians you have available and how you train your Service Advisors.
We don’t need our $35 an hour diesel Technicians doing tires, let’s gear up and get some people in place.
Let’s get our marketing in place and let’s make tire season a big deal. Because customers are going to need alignments, when we have the wheels off, let’s look at the brakes. Let’s take a peak.
If the customers need it, let’s tell them, that’s it! We don’t need to over recommend. We don’t need to oversell. All we need to do is create an opportunity. If they need it, that we’re available to do it and we’re not overwhelmed. We have the capacity in the shop to do it.
Make this the greatest tire season ever and have some fun with the alignments and with the advisors.
If you’re not in the tire business, get in the tire business! Because that’s the future. These electric cars have tires and that’s about it.
The last thing is “It’s time”. Get ready now for tire season, let’s make this the biggest tire season we’ve ever had.
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Related Blogs/Podcasts:
Why Tire Sales and Service Matter
How to Use Tire Season to Steal Market Share
4 Hidden Ways Your Parts Department Can Sell More Labor
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