How can a service advisor get in the fast lane and jump ahead in their career? Today we’re talking about the top five career moves a service advisor can make.
Summary
Service advisors can move ahead by using pay tied to results, favoring quality customer talks over sheer volume, learning the sales side of the store, thinking like an owner, and avoiding paths that slow growth.
This guide also covers the service advisor career path, service advisor pay plan, service advisor commission structure, service advisor customer retention, and service advisor training tips. The main idea is simple: know the numbers, build loyal customers, use good systems, and line up your work with the store’s goals.
OnDemand Platform and Strategy Sessions
We’ve been selling a lot of our OnDemand platform that comes with Service Manager University. It includes service advisor training, tech training, pet the dog customer service training, and more.
When you buy it, you also get a free strategy session with me after you finish Service Manager University.
I do that for two reasons:
- I want to make sure you understand the next step and have no questions.
- I want to talk with you about our coaching group and the other help we offer.
I’ve also been doing a lot of those sessions. A theme keeps coming up: there are companies out there that charge dealers to help raise warranty, labor, and parts gross. I’ve heard that before, and maybe you have too if you’re in the field.
Maximizing Warranty, Labor, and Parts Gross
So why don’t we do that? Because when we work in a service department, effective labor rates usually go up first, and then the parts side gets easier.
Call us if you want help raising warranty gross profit in parts and service. We do that for coaching group members, and we save them a lot of money.
Some of these firms charge 5% to 10% of the gain for a set time. That may not sound huge, but it is still a cut of the increase. The problem is that this work is built on customer pay. We already add so much value on customer pay that warranty and labor gains often follow on their own.
I was showing them the ROI, because the warranty rate can jump $30 to $40 the first time we go in. I wouldn’t want a company that’s set up to upsell or boost warranty for its own gain and not the dealership’s gain. Of course we want better results, but that cannot be the main goal.
Top 5 Service Advisor Career Moves
1. Choose Performance-Based Commission
The first move is a performance-based pay plan. Your paycheck is your monthly report card. If you had a strong month, the pay shows it. If the check is weak, that tells you something too. A good advisor should be able to judge his or her own work honestly.
When pay is tied to results, you stop hiding behind salary talk. You know that your results show up in your pay. Most advisors like that because they want the reward for a good month and the lesson from a bad one.
The store and the manager see you as part of the gross you help make. If the department grows, your pay should grow too. Most of the time, advisors are paid 8% or less of the gross, so learn the service advisor commission structure and know where you stand.
2. Focus on Quality, Not Quantity
Quality beats quantity. Better talks and better follow-up help service advisor customer retention in real life. We often show advisors how a better service advisor pay plan can let them make more money, have a better life, collect more customers, and make more friends by writing fewer ROs.
If you write eight ROs a day and work 11-hour days, you can spend more time with each person. Not every RO needs an hour, but the hard ones do. Those are the ones where you need to over-communicate and slow down.
And if you have a little extra time, make some TikTok videos and send us the links.
3. Sell Cars for Two Months
Do this early in your service advisor career if you can. Being a service advisor is not a sales trap. Selling cars shows you what the other side feels like.
You have to hear no after no to sell a car. That teaches you how hard it is to earn trust and build a relationship over time. It also helps you see what customers expect when they buy a car and what they expect later in service.
I also think it helps to see what salespeople deal with every day. It is mentally harder than most people think, and the commissions can be all over the place.
4. Think Like the Owner of the Dealership
Nothing moves your career faster than thinking about the company before yourself.
Put the company first. Think about how the customer sees the store. Think about how you represent the store. When you do that, you become more valuable.
A lot of advisors focus on me, me, me. The big lesson is that if you start thinking like the owner, you may become the owner one day.
Avoid Parts to Move Up.
If you want to move up, do not let yourself drift into a dead-end path. Not many parts managers become general managers.
If you are in parts, go write service and sell too. It is rare, but the best leaders usually know service, sales, and parts. Gary was one of the few parts managers I worked with who had done all of it. That is why he sold so much in his boutique. He saw the whole picture, not just parts. He also understood marketing, display, and how to push for more.
Quick Recap
- Performance-based commission.
- Quality over quantity.
- Go sell cars for a couple months and learn the other side.
- Think like an owner.
- Avoid parts if your goal is to move up.
That was the Top 5 Service Advisor Career Moves.
Listener Hotline
We get so many questions that it was getting hard to keep up, so we set up a hotline.
If you want to ask a question, call in and leave it on voicemail. If your question makes it on the show, we’ll send you Service Drive Revolution swag like a coffee mug, t-shirts, and a notebook. Our number is 1 (833)-ASKSDR, which is (833) 327-5737 if you do not want to spell it out.
Question 1: How Did You Become a General Manager?
The short version is that I was never a service manager. I went from service advisor to advisor trainer, then to consultant. In my early 20s I traveled the country working service departments on commission and taking a cut of the new customers I helped create. Most of my work was in California, and the job was intense, but it taught me a lot.
Learning the Financial Statement
The financial statement was the key. It sat on the dealer’s desk, and I kept trying to understand it. I knew that if I wanted to understand how a dealership really worked, I had to learn the financial.
When I joined the consulting company, I traded advisor training for financial training. They paid me for service drive training, and I used that chance to get them to teach me the numbers. They trained me on the whole financial, every department.
Becoming Trusted by Dealers
As I fixed stores and got results, dealers became friends. When you take a department from zero and turn it into a department that makes $3-4 million a year, people notice. That kind of change builds trust fast.
They invite you to dinner, you meet their spouse, and the relationship changes. Once they see you as someone who can read the financial statement, they start asking for help with other stores too.
Reading the Story in the Financials
A financial tells the story of a business. You can see the culture, the leadership, and the systems. If I get a financial statement today, I still get excited because it tells me what is really going on.
Creating Projections for Dealership Opportunities
One client I had done well for was thinking about buying a Saab dealership. I built an Excel model and projected car sales, F&I, used cars, service, parts, and backend results. That gave him a clear look at what the store might do.
Choosing the Path to General Manager
My goal had always been to be a dealer, so I knew I needed either a general manager role or the dealer academy. I did not work for a dealership at the time, so I needed someone to sponsor me for NADA academy.
I had a client I liked, and we became friends. He hired another guy whose dad had just sold his dealer group. When I was in the store, that new guy told me to go help customers even though I was there as a consultant. I pushed back because I was not the service advisor, but the fit was bad from the start.
I did not get along with him, so I told my client he needed to tell the guy to be nice or I would be back after it fell apart. It did fall apart. After that, my client said, instead of sending you to the dealer academy right now, why don’t you come run my stores as the general manager? Once I was the operator of record, I no longer needed the academy.
That was my path: service advisor, advisor trainer, turnaround specialist, then general manager. I later bought my own dealerships, and then the downturn in 2009 took those away.
Wanting to Own a Dealership
I first started thinking about owning a dealership when I was a lot attendant. I looked at a store in Seattle that had Volkswagen, Audi, and Subaru and asked what it would cost. When I heard 7 or 8 million, I thought I could find that kind of money.
Using Repair Orders to Understand a Business
The way our ROs look lines up with our results. That is true in dealerships, but it also applies to gyms, doctor’s offices, restaurants, and other businesses. I look at repair orders first because they show what is happening in the service department.
By checking them, I can see the history, whether work was recommended, and what the phone numbers tell me about quality and culture.
You can learn a lot from that. When I went to run the dealership, my goal was to be #1 in the country in new car sales. That was one of the reasons I was brought in. I did not have a lot of sales experience, but I had set up a couple of internet sales departments, and I had sold cars when I was an advisor.
If you have a system, that system can work in almost any situation. When Christian was a sales manager, he brought parts of his system from sales into service.
The System Is the Star
The big lesson is that the system is the star of the show. People do matter, but the system comes first. If you have a system, you can do almost anything.
Question 2: How Should I Make the Most of Shadowing a Service Advisor?
If you are heading into an RV and camper store, the first thing is simple: do not kill your customers. The real point is that your income and your future come from staying in one place and collecting customers.
Service advisors are sales people too, but the easiest part is selling in service. Your job is to build trust with people who come back again and again. You want customers who trust you, who know you did right by them, and who know you will help when they are late, broke down, or in a bad spot.
Focus on Rapport Before Product Knowledge
Collect customers, make friends, and remember that the vehicle is the commodity. What you bring is the relationship. Product knowledge matters, but it comes later. The real skill is rapport and a real interest in people.
That is service advisor customer retention in plain terms. If you are curious about people, you will do well. I have always done well as a service advisor because people fascinate me. I can meet a stranger, ask 10 questions, and stay interested the whole time.
Recommended Training and Reading
Read How to Win Friends and Influence People. Use our on-demand platform, learn the pet the dog system, and look for service advisor training tips you can use right away. The product knowledge will come with time.
Question 3: How Should a Young Advisor Negotiate a Pay Plan?
If you are 20 and everyone else in the store is 20 to 30 years older, use the speed you have. Take lunch at a different time. Get there early. They will often take longer lunches, and they may skip the night jobs. I used to go in on Sundays and write the night jobs.
Seek Higher Commission and Understand the Numbers
If I were starting as a service advisor, I would want the highest commission I could get and less base pay. If you are new or unsure, some base pay can help, but the commission matters most.
Some stores pay on sales, and some pay on gross, so you need to understand the service advisor pay plan and the service advisor commission structure before you sign. A good rule of thumb is that most service departments want advisor pay to stay under 8% of gross.
Do not be afraid to ask for the numbers. If an advisor asked me for them in an interview, I would show them. I would never interview an advisor without giving them the numbers.
Q&A
It ties pay to results. The paycheck becomes a monthly report card, so strong work gets rewarded and weak work is easy to spot. It also keeps an advisor’s pay tied to the gross they help create.
Quality matters more than volume. Fewer repair orders can mean more time with each customer, better talks, stronger trust, and better long-term service advisor customer retention.
Selling cars shows you the hard part of winning trust and handling objections. It also helps you see what customers expect when they buy a car and later when they come back for service.
It means putting the company, the customer experience, and the long term ahead of your own short-term wants. Advisors who do that become more valuable because they line up with the store’s goals.
Start with relationships, rapport, and collecting loyal customers. Product knowledge matters, but trust, curiosity, and good customer care are what make a service advisor stand out.
