Book your Profit Gap Analysis Book Call

Why More Service Traffic Isn’t the Answer

July 20, 2026

Most dealership leaders say the same thing when service sales start to flatten:

“We need more traffic.”

At first glance, that sounds logical. More appointments should mean more repair orders, more labor sales, and more profit.

In this episode of Service Drive Revolution #368, Chris Collins, Adam, and Hogi challenge that assumption and explain why the real problem is usually technician capacity, shop efficiency, and customer retention—not a lack of traffic. The conversation focuses on the patterns they see repeatedly across hundreds of dealerships and why the wrong diagnosis leads to the wrong solution.

The market has never been better for Fixed Ops

New vehicle sales are softer than they’ve been in years. Customers are keeping their vehicles longer, driving more miles, and delaying replacement purchases. That creates a huge opportunity for service departments.

When the average vehicle on the road is older and has more miles, it needs:

More maintenance
More wear-and-tear repairs
More inspections
More technician time

In other words, demand for service is already there.

That’s why many dealerships that claim they need “more traffic” are actually sitting on a significant amount of untapped work.

For a deeper look at how Fixed Ops performance drives dealership profitability, read Service Department Menu: 6 Tips to Increase Service Profit.

The phrase “we need more traffic” is often misleading

Here’s the pattern Chris describes repeatedly.

A dealership says it needs:

More traffic
More marketing
More advisor training
More appointments

Then the numbers are reviewed.

What usually shows up?

Appointments booked out 4–10 days
Low shop efficiency
Inconsistent maintenance sales
Technicians leaving the dealership
Advisors hesitant to sell additional work

The issue isn’t a shortage of customers.

The issue is that the shop can’t absorb the work it already has.

Why advisors stop selling

This is one of the most important insights from the episode.

If you’re a SERVICE ADVISOR, think about what happens when:

Diagnosis is backed up
Parts are delayed
Technicians are overloaded
Cars sit for days before being touched

Are you excited to sell additional maintenance?

Probably not.

Most advisors won’t flood an already overloaded shop with more work. They become more conservative with recommendations because they know the department may struggle to deliver on the promise.

That means leadership often mistakes a capacity problem for a sales problem.

The real bottleneck is usually technician staffing

Chris and Hogi repeatedly point to the same metric: shop efficiency.

Seeing a dealership run at 60–70% efficiency is becoming far more common than it should be.

For many brands, especially high-volume import and domestic stores, that level of efficiency is a major warning sign.

What usually causes it?

Experienced technicians have left.
The remaining team has a weaker skill mix.
Production capacity has shrunk.
The department is trying to do more with fewer productive technicians.

Adding more appointments to that environment doesn’t fix the problem.

It usually makes it worse.

The fastest way to increase efficiency is counterintuitive

Most managers assume efficiency improves when you push the current team harder.

The episode argues the opposite.

Hiring one more technician than you think you need is often the fastest path to higher efficiency.

Why?

Because available capacity changes behavior.

When technicians have room to absorb work:

Advisors sell more confidently.
Maintenance recommendations increase.
Vehicles move through the shop faster.
Customers wait less.
CSI improves.

This is the classic “slow down to speed up” principle.

Maintenance is the forgotten opportunity

Another major takeaway is how much maintenance revenue dealerships leave on the table.

Many departments have become very good at:

Oil changes
Major repairs
Warranty work

What often gets missed is the B and C work:

Brake fluid
Coolant service
Differential service
Transfer case service
Fuel induction
Battery maintenance
Belt and hose replacement

These services are not only profitable—they also help stabilize technician productivity.

Capturing maintenance work consistently can create a meaningful jump in both hours per RO and overall shop efficiency.

If you truly need more traffic, you have a retention problem

This is the part that hits hardest.

Chris makes a simple but powerful point:

If your service department genuinely needs more traffic, it usually means you failed to retain the customers you already had.

Most dealerships lose a large percentage of customers after warranty.

Customers leave because of the experience:

Long wait times
Poor communication
Lack of trust
Feeling rushed
Feeling like a number

Bringing in a new customer is expensive.

Keeping an existing customer is dramatically cheaper.

The math is brutal

Acquiring a new service customer can cost $150–$300 or more depending on the market.

If that customer comes in once and never returns, the dealership may lose money on the first visit.

That means the real profit doesn’t come from the initial RO.

It comes from the third, fourth, and fifth visit.

Without strong retention, buying more traffic becomes a very expensive treadmill.

What great SERVICE MANAGERS focus on

The strongest departments don’t obsess over appointment counts.

They focus on:

Technician recruiting
Shop capacity
Maintenance penetration
Hours per RO
Effective labor rate
Customer retention
The overall customer experience

If you’re working on becoming a stronger SERVICE MANAGER, Chris Collins has several leadership-focused articles that pair well with this episode, including Top 5 Mistakes SERVICE MANAGERS Make That Hurt Their Dealership.

Build the experience first

One of the best lines from the episode is essentially this:

Customers become loyal when they feel seen, heard, and important.

That applies to both sales and service.

When the process is intuitive, communication is proactive, and the vehicle is repaired quickly, price becomes less of the primary issue.

When customers feel ignored, rushed, or uncertain, every dollar becomes a negotiation.

The bottom line

Before you spend another dollar trying to generate more service traffic, ask a different question:

Can my shop deliver an exceptional experience for the customers I already have?

If appointments are backed up for days, technicians are overloaded, efficiency is low, and maintenance opportunities are being missed, the answer probably isn’t “more traffic.”

It’s:

More technician capacity
Better recruiting
Stronger maintenance processes
Faster throughput
Better retention

Fix those first.

In most dealerships, once the shop is properly staffed and the customer experience improves, the traffic problem tends to disappear on its own.

Feel free to explore the linked articles above for deeper insights into each strategy. If you have any further questions or need additional resources, don’t hesitate to ask!

FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Managing Pre-Recorded Media Trajectories

Welcome everybody to the big show, Service Drive Revolution. Usually, we’re coming live but this is pre-recorded, even though it appears to be live. You can see the live one on Wednesdays. Most of you are listening to this on Monday recorded because what we do is we go live Wednesday and then we put it up on Monday. We take it down and we put it up because Hogi and Adam have a hard time showing up for things live. They’re busy, they’re out in the field, they’re doing stuff, and so we’re going live every other week, truly live every other week. Even though we’re going live, man, how confusing is this? If we’re confused, the audience must really be confused, right? Got to keep them on their toes. So funny. How are we doing, gentlemen? How are you doing, Hogy? Pretty good, I’m doing pretty good.

Sizing Special Edition Cowboy Hats

Did you see Stetson had a 250-year cowboy hat that they put out? I did, I think I’m going to order that one, actually. I thought about the same thing, I just don’t know my size. Just go into like a Cavender’s or something like that locally, try on some different Stetsons, and then you’ll know your size. No, I have two Stetsons, I just got to go look at the size of them in the box. I have them in a closet at home.

But it looks good, yeah, you should get that, that’s a nice hat, especially for the money. I thought it was going to be a $1,000 hat. You know, I like to dress up like that when I go to a country music concert. Where do they run, like a buck 50? I think that one’s like 275 or 300, yeah, something like that, three 400 bucks. But special edition, that’s how you justify it, Adam, America, right? Yeah, sure.

Evaluating Alternative Luxury Asset Prices

What those mounts behind you cost? See, it’s all relative. What was the brewery school or whatever it was you went to? That was $7,500 because he tried to get me to go to it. Thanks, Chris. 500 for the class, but then the hotel and how many bottles or cases of whiskey did you buy while you were there because that’s really the thing, right? They get you there to teach you how to brew or distill, but they’re really trying to sell you.

I bought zero bottles because I can get better ones around. Yeah, but definitely they do try to sell their merch or whatever. So how much was the hotel, and did you fly there? All in, drove there, but all in, yeah, you’re probably right, about 7,500 bucks. But when Adam walks in a room, Hogy, he can say I’m a master distiller, we can’t. Yeah, it’s true, no doubt about it.

Unregulated Blenders and Blindness Myths

Made like one bottle or one batch, it’s more than I made. Me too, still got to chase that dream. My grandpa used to make wine, which was way more like moonshine than wine. Oh man, I’m on some of these groups and the way some of these guys make moonshine, they just throw some corn in a blender, put some sort of liquid with some sugar, and just put it in a big plastic tub.

Unlike all the stuff that—I mean, I guess if you’re wanting to make it that way and don’t really care what happens to you or whatever, I guess game on. I don’t know if it’s true that you go blind if you drink the stuff that’s got too much alcohol, but I remember when I was a kid, my grandpa would say, “Oh, you know, if you don’t do it right, you go blind.”

Distillation Flammability and Flash Points

So when he passed away, but when my mom went to sell his house, there were bottles there still that had never been opened. Boy, it smelled more like rubbing alcohol than it did wine, and I was just like, I’m not going blind. The smell told you that it wouldn’t be okay. And distilling it, they call it the spoils or whatever, it’s just the first ever so often of the beginning, it’s ethanol.

So yeah, you don’t want to drink straight ethanol. Ethanol is what’s in your car, right, make fuel, yeah, very flammable. Well, most of it all is anyways. But yeah, I think the most interesting takeaway from that entire thing, I was talking to my father and brother-in-law too, just like probably if there are any farmers that are out there, when you have these grain bins and a lot of the grain gets so dry, there actually can get to a flammable flash point.

Turnaround Lessons from Brewery Research

I forget what the technical term is, but that’s the same thing when you mill down or you grind down the corn to make it into meal, it can get to a flammable point. So like where you store it, how far away, there’s a lot of science that goes around it, so it’s kind of interesting. They try the first two days that you’re there in class, they try to scare you out of actually making the stuff. Smart, safety first, there you go. When I was doing research for this series that I wrote for the syndicate, which was about a guy who inherited breweries from a dad he never met, kind of a thing, and the breweries were losing money, it was kind of my way to teach you how to turn a business around. I did a bunch of research and I went to breweries.

Bacteria Scurries and Culinary Expansions

I even paid a guy who owns a couple breweries to just teach me the business, and one of the things that you always kind of overlook but is a huge part of it is just the disinfecting of everything. Every time they make a batch, it’s like a hospital, they are completely disinfecting everything, and bacteria and all that is the enemy of anything that’s going to go in a bottle.

Yeah, for sure, I’d say that in distilling it can kill a lot of that, but it can definitely come out in the flavor. It’s an art, all that stuff’s an art, yeah, it’s really kind of fascinating to me, at least. I don’t think there’s enough alcohol in beer to kill everything, though, so it’s a little more precious. What I found really interesting to that though, was a lot of the people that were in my class were chefs.

Deconstructing the Lack of Vehicle Enthusiasm

They either were a head chef in a restaurant or owned a restaurant and they were already doing brewing and making their own wine, but now they wanted to get into spirits, so I learned way more about the industry on that side of things, and it was really kind of interesting on the processes. The thing we wanted to talk about today was when you say you need more traffic or when we say we need more traffic in our service drive, what are we actually saying? We have a unique experience in that we see hundreds of dealerships and patterns of what is actually happening, what are the results, and then what are people saying, and there seems to be this huge disconnect. If we just talk about the environment we’re in right now, new car sales are dramatically down.

Uber Realities in Middle America

I don’t know that that’s going to change anytime soon in the sense that people are just keeping their cars longer, and I think a lot of the manufacturers are just struggling with what they have to offer, like it’s not a car that meets the needs of the market. I think about if I was going to go out and buy a new car right now, there isn’t anything that’s that exciting, don’t you guys think that? Yeah, just talk to salespeople, just walk over to the sales floor and ask them, nobody’s really excited. Brand enthusiasm in some of the brands where there was a big following has fallen way off. You’ve talked about it before where thinking about my oldest daughter and kids her age, they’re not fighting and scratching and clawing to get their driver’s license.

Graduating College Without a Driver’s License

We could unpack that a lot, but not only is there not enthusiasm or anything to really be enthusiastic about right now from what’s being offered. but then you couple that with a big part of the consumer base coming up right now that is just as happy Ubering as they are wanting to drive themselves somewhere. I’m in middle America, it’s not like I’m in the middle of a huge metropolitan area. and that’s the case around here, there’s tons of kids that just Uber everywhere. And so it is, yeah, the enthusiasm from both sides I think is way down, it’s so funny. My sister-in-law is in college and she’s dating a boy that just graduated and he doesn’t have a driver’s license. He just graduated from college and doesn’t have one.

Stagnant Technologies across Premium Brands

I was asking her how you are going to see him, and she’s like, “Oh, he’ll ride the train down.” I’m like, “No, he won’t.” because he’s four hours away now that he’s going home since he graduated, and it’s just so odd. Could you imagine going back to being 22 or 23 and not having a driver’s license? No, that was the first thing I wanted, I was 16 and I got it as soon as I could. So yeah, I think that’s a big part of it, and then I just think the offerings aren’t there. General Motors has done a pretty good job with some of their technology and keeping things fresh. and new, but for the most part, the technology in the vehicles hasn’t advanced. If you buy a 2022, what’s better about a 2026 than most cars?

Shifting Fleet Inventories to Traffic Centers

It’s the same. In fact, I’ve found that I think the technology is worse in the Ford than it was in 2022. it’s worse in the BMWs, it’s not any better in a Mercedes. Maybe in a Kia it’s better, I don’t know, I don’t have a ton of experience driving a Kia. but I just don’t see it there to pay $80,000 or whatever these cars are versus something for 35 or 40 that’s used. It just doesn’t make sense, the new car thing, and the leases aren’t there either, which I’m surprised a lot of the manufacturers aren’t coming in with crazy leases because they’re sitting on this inventory. The quickest way to get rid of a six-month supply on the ground is to have them in traffic, right?

Navigating Import Tariffs and Vehicle Math

Elon just played that card where there’s zero down and there’s all of these crazy incentives, and he’s getting vehicles—his sales are exceeding what was expected in the sense that he’s using his financial arm. It used to be that GMAC or BMW Financial or Mercedes Financial would be the difference maker, but they’re not, and I think maybe that’s interest rates and then residuals. The residuals just aren’t there because the cars are just too much, and for some of these cars that are imported, you’re financing a tariff. Also, it’s just the math doesn’t work, so to make a very long story short, people are keeping their cars longer, way longer.

Heightened Openings for the Service Drive

The average car on the road has more miles on it, needs more maintenance, needs more repairs than ever before. The other thing is people are driving more than ever before because flights are insane, the cost of the flight is just insane, so people are driving. Driving is up, they’re keeping their cars longer, and there’s never been a better situation for the service drive. But then we hear this thing, and so what is happening—and I feel like we’re always at the forefront of this and nobody listens to us until we’re saying, “Oh, well, that’s what we were talking about,” but it’s always after it’s already happened, right? One of the things that I said about Tesla for the longest time is stop thinking about the adoption of electric cars and start thinking about the market share that they’re going to have.

Deleting Profit Margins via Top-Off Discounts

They took a lot of market share from brands, and that market share ended up being their profit. These manufacturers have to make so many cars and sell so many cars or trucks in order to be profitable. Just like in the parts department or in the service department, if you discount 10% off the top or you lose 10% of your traffic off the top, that usually is your margin of profitability in most businesses. If you’re running at a 20% profit margin, that 10% off the top basically deletes your profit in that way. That’s the thing that a lot of times everybody seems to be talking about the wrong thing to me, and it always looks like common sense, but I feel like we are the only ones talking about it.

The Secret Backlog of Advisor Diagnoses

We continually see this pattern where people say we need more traffic. They want to hire us and they say, “Hey, we need more traffic and we need advisor training,” and 100% of the time that’s never it. The reason why you think you need advisor training is because you don’t have enough techs in the shop and your advisors aren’t selling anything because they can’t get it done, and they won’t tell you that, they’re not going to come tell you that. But you think that your pay plan and whatever is going on, your lack of sales, is because of the advisors not selling it. You have to put yourself in the seat of the advisor for a second, and I was this advisor.

Collapsing Shop Efficiencies to 60 Percent

When you can’t get the work done, when you can’t get the work diagnosed that you wrote up, you’re certainly not going to flood the shop with a bunch of additional work. And so 100% of the time, even though people think they need more traffic and they’re running out of work, they’re not running out of work, they need more techs. And then the other part of this is the efficiencies in the shop have dropped. It is insane to me how often now we are seeing the efficiency in a shop be 70%, which is completely unheard of for a Toyota or a Ford dealership. That makes no sense whatsoever that a Ford dealership in middle America mostly working on trucks would be at 60% in the shop, can you imagine that, Hogy?

Hourly vs. Flat-Rate Commercial Truck Systems

No, it’s crazy, it’s a reality though, it’s out there and way more common. I think it’s the same with commercial truck though, too, as we keep seeing like the 75 to 80%, it should be higher than that at best. But the difference I think when we compare a service department that’s servicing cars and trucks versus heavy truck is, for the most part, the techs on the automotive side, 90-something percent, are flat rate, and on the truck side it’s exactly the opposite. It’s like maybe—what are we guessing—but 30% are flat rate or lower, probably lower than that. There’s one group out there that is doing it that way, but for the most part they’re hourly.

Recruiting Productive Techs to Close Gaps

I think that has a big part to play in this conversation also. I agree, that’s fair. So now the thing is when we—and I’ve run into this my whole career—have a Ford dealership running at 60 or 70% efficiency in the shop, the thought process by leadership is, “Well, we need more traffic or more work.” But what has happened over time is they’ve lost their better techs, right? You start talking to them and you’re like, “So what’s the situation?” “Oh, we had a couple techs leave,” and it ends up those techs that left were the more productive techs. What you need is better techs, you need more productive techs in order to increase that efficiency.

California and Washington Minimum Hourly Laws

You’re not going to get it by having more traffic or, most of the time, by doing it with the techs you have. If you have techs that are okay running at—if your shop is running at 60% efficiency and let’s just say you have 10 techs, that means you probably have two techs that are running around 100 or 110, and then you’ve got a bunch of guys running at 40%. You’re not going to get those techs that are running at 40% to run at 100% because it isn’t who they are. They’re either not that talented, not that motivated—whatever it is, that’s too big of a gap to close, and you’re certainly not going to close it by having more work.

Reclaiming Forgotten 1990s Maintenance Opportunities

We’re just seeing this time and time again: we think that the problem is traffic, we think that the problem is advisor training, and the problem is your shop and techs, the mix of techs that you have, and your inability to recruit really good techs. One of the things that they struggle with is tech recruiting, which is a big conversation by itself. One other thing you said that is not intuitive to people, but I promise is the case, is the fastest way to increase your efficiency is to hire techs. There is a caveat to that with California, Washington State, and a couple other places where the laws are basically that the techs are all hourly and not flat rate anyway.

Accelerating Production beyond Single-Month Outlays

In those situations, there are minimum requirements and a couple other things you can do that kind of help with that. But most of the time, if you have a normal flat rate shop, the fastest way to increase production is to hire one more tech than you think you need. Another thing that I’ve seen time and time again, one of the cruxes of our system, is we’re looking at CP repair orders and looking at how much opportunity we’re missing in maintenance. For whatever reason, we have just let go of maintenance as an industry; it’s an odd thing. It reminds me of the ’80s and early ’90s when they said we weren’t in the tire business, and then dealers got back in.

Clogging the Facility Backlog to Drop CSI

They got back in the tire business because they were losing all the associated work, and now we’re in a time where we’re not really offering maintenance. In these shops, you have oil changes and you have major league repair like cylinder head replacement, but a lot of that B and C work, you’re missing a bunch of it. The reason I bring that up in regards to efficiency is it’s not uncommon when we kick off a store for us to sell more maintenance in a day or a week than that store used to in a month. One thing I see when they capture that maintenance and are intentional about it is efficiency takes a huge jump.

The Real Math on Retaining Customers

Hiring one more tech than you need and focusing on the missed opportunities from maintenance, you can watch huge jumps in efficiency that way, and it’s an interesting thing to sit back and watch. On the flip side, when you talk about kind of shoving everything in and the production isn’t moving, the customer service index is going down, right? So the customer experience suffers because you can’t get things out and you just keep cramming it in and you want more traffic. If the production facility can’t meet that demand, customer experience goes down, you don’t get calls, all that great stuff.

The Risk of Acquisition via Loss Leaders

If you do the math on this, if you really do have a service department that needs more traffic, the reason why you need more traffic is because you haven’t retained the customers you have, right? That’s not negotiable, that’s just a fact. The reason why you need more traffic is because you’ve lost customers, and you can make as many excuses as you want, but the truth of the matter is when you are a dealership, 80% of your customers leave you after warranty. They don’t like the experience, they don’t appreciate it, there’s no connection whatsoever, there’s no loyalty, and they leave.

Gaining Market Share through Availability Thresholds

In the situations where I’ve gone in and had to increase traffic, it costs between $150 to $300 for every customer that you get in that’s new. The thing that you figure out really quick is if you weren’t good at retaining customers before, if it costs you $300 to get a new client in the drive and only two out of ten stick, it’s costing you thousands of dollars to go out and hunt for traffic. Thousands of dollars. There should be a huge priority on retaining the customers you have versus acquiring new ones, and that’s through the customer experience.

Pulling Flat-Rate Timelines up to Next-Day Leads

It’s through the systems that you have that should make customers think, “Oh, well, this was a better experience than I’ve had anywhere else.” That is the best use of your time, of your money, anything else is retaining the customers that you have. Because if we go out and we buy traffic, we acquire traffic, you’re in the same situation where you’re going to see them once and then you’re never going to see them again. That one time that you get them in is usually on a loss leader, so you’re going to lose money on them once and not retain them.

Bypassing Four-Day Check Engine Light Exclusions

It’s a hard game to play; you can play it, but you got to be really good at retaining customers in order for that to work because you’re not going to make anything until the third or fourth RO. It’s very risky, and so just saying like, “I need more traffic,” whenever we hear somebody say that, we tend to ignore it and be like, “Yeah, okay, you need more traffic,” and then as you dig into the numbers and dig into the process, traffic never comes up again. There’s so much low-hanging fruit that you’re not getting; traffic is the last thing anybody’s thinking about.

Boosting Profitability beyond Import Door Rates

It’s always the thought up front that is said: “Oh, we need more traffic.” Even to the point like I’ve seen it recently where they’re booked out a week, so they’re booked out more than five days and they say they need more traffic. I’m like, I’m confused, no, you need techs. More techs is more traffic, right? Because if you have the ability to pull that five days forward and get till you’re booked out one day, not only are you going to pull that traffic forward, but you’re going to get the call-ins, the drop-ins, the non-appointments.

Quality Time Adjustments for Individual Accounts

You’re going to gain market share that way, too, because if you tell somebody they got to wait a week, they’re going to call somewhere else. You’re losing a pretty big percentage of your clients by not being available next day. There’s an important connection to make there, too, and people overlook it all the time. They’ll be like, “Man, a couple years ago we were booked out two weeks.” And I’m like, “Oh, okay, so you’re writing more ROs now than you were a couple years ago?” “No, we’re writing about the same, maybe even a little bit less.”

Theory of Constraints inside Factory Shops

You just let everybody leave, that’s it, that’s the crazy thing. It just came up when we were live in academy the other day where I was like, “Okay, how far are you booked out?” He said, “Oh, it’s not bad anymore, it’s like four days.” I’m like, “Okay, now hang on, if I’m a consumer and I got a check engine light on, I promise I’m not waiting four days, I’m going to call around and figure out who can get me in now.” The worst thing you can do is say you can drive it with the check engine light on, so then they just start to ignore it and don’t come in at all.

Sins Covered by the Variable Sales Environment

There are a ton of different things that come up with that, but looking at how you’re performing per RO, a lot of people will say we need more traffic, and there will be a Japanese import store that’s just over an hour per RO or an hour and a half RO. Their effective labor rate is 60% or 70% of their door rate, so their performance per RO is awful, and they think that profitability is going to get better with driving more traffic. There’s some pretty simple math you can do where you can figure out if you’re not doing a good job with one, it’s not a great idea at all.

Out-Pacing Competitors through Automatic Test Drives

Not only from a customer experience standpoint, but also from a financial standpoint to go do that thing more times, right? So I would just challenge everybody out there to focus on the systems that you have and retaining the customers that you have before you think about traffic. If you do that, in my experience, 100% of the time you forget about traffic because you’ll start making more per customer, creating a better experience, and spending more time with the customers. You have more quality time, making them feel like they’re not just a number and you’re not just rushing them through the quality of work; everything improves.

Designing Processes from the Customer Perspective

What comes to mind is build it and they will come, that’s how you get their traffic, and by build it, you mean techs, you got to add techs. Build your processes, build your people, find your people, build that production. It continually surprises me when we’re talking to somebody and we’re going to fix their business and we say we have to hire five techs, and they’re like, “Huh?” Nobody sees that the problem is that their shop has shrunk; they used to have 24 techs and now they’re down to 18 and their efficiency is down.

Unconscious Compliance via Seamless Steps

Everything is driven by the techs; if you don’t have the time to sell, you have nothing to sell in available capacity. I would recommend everybody read that book The Goal, The Theory of Constraints, because it explains it really well. If you just think about the shop like a factory, you have to have downtime in order to increase your production. If you’re always trying to run it on the edge of disaster, there are just too many mistakes and it just doesn’t work, you can’t sell more or do more, and then you’re just running them in and out like a number.

Standardized Courtyard Marriott Regional Maps

You don’t sell the maintenance or the additional repairs they need, then they’re unhappy and don’t perceive quality, it’s just a vicious cycle. I wanted to talk about that because I’ve been seeing it a lot, it’s out there a lot. If you’re coming from the variable side, when I have this conversation the most, it’s definitely with service managers, but a lot of times it’s an extension of the service manager being pushed, whether it’s by the manufacturer or by their leadership. It makes sense when you’re on the variable side to want more volume, like it’s a game of numbers and how many ups I have.

Slowing Down to Speed Up in Service Capacity

But when you come over to service, it really truly is the case that you got to slow down to speed up; you got to get to do a good job with the customer experience and build it out, add the techs, add the capacity, all those things. It’s not intuitive because there are a lot of other businesses where the volume covers a lot of sins, but there’s a bunch of data that shows you it’s not the case in service. It’s not a bad thing to add it, but you’re not doing a good job with what you got, but it is the topic of conversation right now, no doubt about it.

I’ve seen that in the sales department too though, Hogi, in the sense like when I took over a BMW store, the BMW dealership nine and a half miles away down the freeway was selling more cars than us and everybody in the dealership was convinced that it was because the prices were lower, right? Meanwhile, we couldn’t get cars, we could sell more cars than we could get, but the mindset was we got to be competitive on price. What we did is we designed a system where the test drive was happening automatically, taking price off the table.

The Psychology of Floor Process Compliance

It was all psychology, just like we do in service, but we were taking away decision-making. People perceived it was the easiest buying experience they’ve ever had, and our grosses were continually five or six hundred on the front higher than the market. We went from losing to that dealership by 20 cars a month to beating them by 150 cars a month, and it had absolutely nothing to do with volume, it had to do with the experience, it was all psychology, it was perception. That makes sense, and the things that we thought were our disadvantage were actually our advantage.

Somebody will say we’re just a dealership in the Midwest, and it’s like, “Oh, so you sell a lot of trucks, yeah, okay.” Well, I’d rather have a dealership that sells a lot of trucks than a dealership that sells a bunch of Toyotas, like cars, right? The advantage is always there, but nobody sees it because they can’t read the label to the jar they’re in, basically. But I think on the front end, it’s exactly the same: gross is a state of mind, and if you focus on the customer experience, people challenge the price because they don’t feel value, they don’t feel seen or important.

Designing Systems Around the Consumer Vantage

When they feel seen and important, price is less the object, and if you put customers on what I call a train, like there’s just momentum and steps in the process, they just comply. They unconsciously comply to the process when it’s intuitive to them, when it makes sense. It’s when they feel like things don’t make sense, they feel like we’re not listening to them, that they don’t matter, that they’re sitting there for an hour and nobody’s talked to them—like there’s just a bunch of things that happen where we lose trust and then it’s about price.

But there are ways to design processes in the new car department, in F&I, in service, at a furniture store, software—anywhere. There’s a way to design a system to sell where people feel important and they spend more than they would have with your competition because of the experience that you create, but you have to design it from their point of view. Too often in our industry, the customers are victims to what is convenient for us, not them, it’s just crazy, it is. Thanks, gentlemen, this was a fun conversation, thank you.

Final Questions and Outro Links

We will see you next week, we will be in Iowa, we’re going to do it live from Iowa, coming at you live from Iowa, Iowa, sure, no, Idaho, Indiana. We’re going to be in Indiana, what about the—what are the ‘I’ states? Swami, swami, Samsonite, I think what we’re just going to do is take a dart, throw it at a map, and that’s where we’re going to be, it doesn’t matter, the Courtyard Marriott looks the same. Indiana, we’re flying into Chicago, Iowa, we’re flying into Chicago, it’s all the same, all roads lead to Chicago.

The only one flying into Chicago is Idaho, true story, probably flying into Spokane, Washington, I don’t know, we’ll see.

Well, thanks everybody, hope you have a great week and we’ll see you next time on Service Drive Evolution. Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Drive Revolution, we’re uploading new stuff every day, so make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don’t miss out. If you have a question you’d like us to answer on the show, call 833-3-ASK-SDR and we’ll answer your question on the show, that’s 833-3-ASK-SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com, now that’s offers.chriscollinsinc.com. I’m Chris Collins and I’ll see you in the next video.

Achieving and exceeding your goals is possible when you have the right systems in place. With Service Drive Revolution OnDemand, you’ll gain access to the proven systems that have made thousands of SERVICE MANAGERS IRREPLACEABLE. Start transforming your department today!

Need help updating your playbook? Let us know how we can support your team’s growth.

Book a 15-minute strategy session with our team. We’ll explore how to unlock your dealership’s real value.