Every Service Manager knows that pit in your stomach.
You’re about to let someone go. You didn’t sleep the night before. You know it’s the right decision, but you can’t shake the thought: What will this do to them?
Chris Collins has been there. So has Christian. In fact, in this episode of Service Drive Revolution, they share the most gut-wrenching firings of their careers — from a young “head lot lizard” having to fire his first summer hire after two shuttle accidents… to letting go of a trusted technician who made a catastrophic mistake.
Firing someone never gets easier. But here’s the hard truth: in our industry, over 50% of SERVICE MANAGERS are turned over every year — and most of the time, it’s not because they’re lazy or indifferent.
It’s because they were set up to fail.
The Real Problem: A Flip of a Coin
Think about it — would you take a job if you knew you had a 50/50 shot at keeping it?
That’s the reality for most SERVICE MANAGERS. Some manufacturers have even higher turnover.
Meanwhile, in our coaching program, turnover for service and parts managers is under 5%. That’s not because our clients are lucky — it’s because they’re taught the truth about the job, given real tools, and held accountable.
The gap between 50% and 5% is the difference between winging it and playing to win.
🧠 Leadership Insight:
If your department’s success is essentially a coin flip, you don’t have a performance problem — you have a leadership pipeline problem. Winning teams aren’t built on luck; they’re built on systems that outlast any single hire. The best leaders focus on mentoring replacements before they’re needed, documenting winning processes, and measuring results beyond just short-term profit. When you build a bench of capable leaders, turnover stops being a threat — and starts being an opportunity.
The 9 Big Reasons SERVICE MANAGERS Get Fired
Here’s what Chris and Christian see time and again — and how to spot these career-killers before they take you out.
- Chasing Gross Instead of Profit
Managers are told “get me more gross” without being shown how to read a financial statement. Expenses rise faster than profit, and the GM loses patience. - Ignoring the Customer Experience
Great leaders design the experience from the customer’s point of view, not just “how we’ve always done it.” If your systems aren’t inspiring loyalty, you’re losing revenue. - Trying to Maintain Instead of Innovate
Dealership service is a closed-loop system — the same types of customers, same process every day. If you’re not improving it, you’re falling behind. - Weak Leadership
Management is telling people what to do. Leadership is inspiring them to want to do it. Most fired managers never make the shift. - Poor People Collection
The shops with the best techs and advisors win. If your roster is “whoever stayed” instead of “the best I could recruit,” you’re in trouble. - No Marketing Mindset
Depending on sales to fill the drive is dangerous. You need traffic strategies, retention systems, and marketing that’s more than manufacturer coupons. - Low Self-Esteem
Many managers don’t see themselves as worth investing in — so they don’t grow. That mindset keeps them small until the role passes them by. - Not Investing in Themselves
The best leaders pay to learn — whether that’s training, mentorship, or just buying an expert’s time. Waiting for the dealer to “send you to training” is career suicide. - Culture of Comfort
Change means discomfort. The top 5% lean into it. Everyone else leans back — and slowly becomes replaceable.
💡 SERVICE MANAGER Tip:
Before you dive into the list, rate yourself on each of these nine areas from 1–10. Then, ask a trusted peer or mentor to rate you too. The gaps between your score and theirs will tell you where blind spots are hiding — and where you need to focus if you want to keep your name off the turnover list.
Curious which mistakes take out more SERVICE MANAGERS than anything else, and how to dodge them?
Read The 9 Reasons Why Service Managers Fail (And How to Avoid Them)
What Top Performers Do Differently
SERVICE MANAGERS who last aren’t just good with numbers — they’re students of the game. They invest in coaching, surround themselves with other top performers, and keep reinventing how their departments work.
They coach daily, not just in meetings.
They recruit constantly, not just when someone quits.
They design experiences, not just fix cars.
🔧 FIXED OPS Reality Check:
If you’re only reacting to problems as they come up, you’re already behind. The best SERVICE MANAGERS don’t wait for the market, the OEM, or their GM to dictate change — they create it. That means tracking metrics others ignore, building a deep bench of talent before it’s needed, and relentlessly improving processes even when things are “good enough.” In Fixed Ops, coasting is the fastest way to get passed.
Bottom line:
If you’re a SERVICE MANAGER, your job security is not about luck — it’s about whether you’re playing the real game or the one you were handed.
⚙️ Leadership Shift:
Most SERVICE MANAGERS inherit someone else’s playbook — and never question it. Great leaders rewrite the rules. They measure success beyond this month’s gross, create systems that make average people great, and develop future leaders before they’re needed. The real game isn’t about surviving your current role — it’s about making yourself so valuable, the dealership can’t imagine running without you.
Break the cycle. Learn the numbers. Invest in yourself. Build a team that wins.
Full Video Transcript
Welcome to the big show. Today we’re going to talk about why service managers get fired in an industry where over 50% are turned over every year in leadership or management positions. Why does that happen? What are we seeing? Christian and I also talk about our most traumatic firings, and they’re pretty interesting stories. Christian gets a little choked up. So if you want to see him cry, stay with us for this edition of Service Drive Evolution.
I don’t care how long you’ve been doing something, how old you are, it never becomes normal or gets easy to fire somebody. Never. The pit in your stomach. There’s a list of things that you go through. So, I recently had to do it, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to let somebody go because there’s never a situation where I have to. Everybody that’s let go is down the food chain. So, I don’t ever have to. In fact, I thought about in this situation—I’m not joking, I haven’t told you this—but I thought about…
I know where you’re headed with this. You were going to have me do it. I was. I had it all planned, too, because I was going to do it, and the person called in sick. So I had the stuff all done, and I was like, I could just leave it, send you a text, and tell you to do it before you go. Oh my god. There is a little bit of that. I am kind of the grim reaper of Chris Collins because I’m pretty sure I’ve had to do that a few times over the years.
The funny thing is, even if the person has—there’s just no question that it has to happen. There’s no way to fix it. There’s no way around it. Whatever it is, and for me, that’s pretty far down the road. I think I go further down the road than a lot of people. Even in that situation, I still can’t sleep the night before. Can you sleep the night after? It depends on the situation. In this situation, I slept really good the night after because it had to be done. I wanted to do it on a Friday, and they called in sick. So then I had to do it on Monday. So the whole weekend I keep thinking about it. I just think about it and think about it. I just want it to be over.
So then when it’s over, I mean, I don’t feel good about it in any way, shape, or form. I feel like, every time somebody doesn’t work out, I feel like I failed. I let them in here. I let them into the company. I interviewed them. At one point, I thought they were the solution to whatever that was. And so I’m really hard on myself when it comes to that because I don’t like that. I feel like it’s a waste of my time and their time that I need to be better at that. So, it depends on the situation. In answer to your question, in this situation, I slept really good because I had gone all weekend with not being able to sleep. And also, Friday I was up all night filming, so that didn’t help either. You should have slept like a baby on Friday night. Well, I didn’t. I had to get back up to be down here for sunrise to film again. So, we filmed after as the sun was going down, and then we filmed as the sun was coming up.
This is off topic a little bit, but I do appreciate our production team, and you really learn—I get to see it from this side—how much goes into all that crap. It is crazy how much goes into it. I agree with you. We’re making some good stuff. We have a lot of talent here, and we’re having fun. Diverse and cool stuff. If you haven’t seen the “Books That Changed My Life” stuff that we’re doing over on the library channel, check it out. There’s some great ones on there. I don’t know what I would say. I mean, people probably think Kelsey Grammar, some of the more famous, like Jenna from Dancing with the Stars, are the better ones because they’re famous, but man, there’s some good ones. The stories that people have about books that change their life are pretty incredible.
Yeah, there was easily 10. I thought that my—I’ve got a bunch of favorites. IA Hanks was one of my favorite; she’s probably my favorite, too. I thought she was pretty amazing. The Easter eggs on that channel, though, that I think that everybody, even on our car side, would get a lot out of are these little videos, and I didn’t know you were doing them. But the videos about the way that you carry all your stuff and everything, they’re almost like a “Oh, my everyday carry.” Yeah. Like a really cool product review of understanding the high level of intention that goes into everything. The everyday carry review was so cool. The shots but also the information. There’s something for everybody on that channel. Just for those of you that don’t understand what we’re talking about, the everyday carry is how do I carry books around? Because I’m always reading books. I’m usually carrying three books at a time. Sometimes it’s more. When I go up to the lake to jet ski, I might take five. I took five last time, but how do you take books and keep them from getting damaged? Especially if they’re nicer books or collectibles that you’re reading, and you want to take care of. You can’t just throw them in a backpack, and they’re heavy, and so I have a system for that that I’ve figured out, and yeah, it’s all about books, though. It’s book-nerd stuff, but stuff that people don’t really talk about in a way. The other thing, too, like I said it in that video, but we could, you could, I could, Hogy could, a lot of us could do a video on how to pack. There’s no doubt we pack better. We are 97%, and only out of necessity. Not, this isn’t a, “Hey, we’re smarter.” No, it’s just we’ve traveled so much. The idea that when you travel so much that you have to check a bag, one is dangerous because if you check a bag and you’re connecting somewhere and your connection doesn’t work, your bag’s MIA.
Yeah. And inevitably it’s when you’re doing the presentation, and you have this beautifully pre-picked outfit. It is always in the checked bag, and that screws everything up. Yeah. It’s always that way. So, you got to know how to pack for a carry-on. I mean, I rarely ever check a bag. Ever. The only time I check a bag is I go somewhere, and I buy a bunch of books. Well, I will buy a suitcase. You don’t check going to. You check coming back. I have this vision of your garage having 347 suitcases that you… Actually, they’re easy to give away. You give them away a lot. Somebody will ask to borrow one, and then you just tell them they can keep it or whatever. But yeah, so fun stuff on that channel, and it’s good.
Back to the firing thing. It’s never fun. It’s never easy. And there’s always this thing that even if the person has done wrong by you, anybody who has a family that’s going to go home and tell their family that they no longer are employed is a terrible thing. It’s not something that I take lightly. I don’t know. I’m very empathetic when it comes to that sort of thing. I’m a little bit of an empath, and so I replay that stuff in my head more than people would think, and it’s terrible.
We have a mutual friend that I used to work for that he gave me two pieces of advice that are great. Is his last name Camp and his first name Steve? Yeah, Steve Camp. Love you, Steve. He told me two things. One is when it’s time to do the deed and let them go, that it should be super fast. There’s no dragging it out. There’s no world where if you get to a point where you’ve made a decision, you’re terming somebody, they can’t talk their way back into the job. It’s gone. And there’s no reason to get a piece of skin going out the door the other way. There’s no need for anybody to get a piece of skin or let them try to get a piece of skin. They’re not going to feel better about it later on down the road. And then the second thing he told me, and that’s what that just reminded me of what you just said, is he said, “before you start feeling sorry for yourself on how hard it was for you to fire somebody, remember what it’s like for the person on the other side.” It’s way worse. And I’ve never forgot. That was well over a decade. It was probably 15 years ago that he told me that. And I still remember that every time I have to let somebody go. Yeah.
It’s terrible for the person on the other side. I remember the very first time I had to fire somebody. Just one of those situations where I was the porter, and then the person that was in charge of the porters—they called us the lot lizards. We were the lot lizards. You can’t say that anymore. It’s not politically correct, but we were lot lizards. Like lots. Can you say that? No, we were lot lizards. That’s what we called ourselves. That’s just what we were. But I don’t know. There was a group of seven of us, and we washed every car, and it didn’t matter, rain, cold, whatever it was, we were washing cars. My boss, the person who hired me, so I’d started off part-time, and then I was full-time. They quit, and so then they put me in charge of the lot lizards. I was what you call the head lot lizard. Were you still a teenager when this happened? I think I was 18. Oh my gosh. I think I was 18. The story might be better if I was 17. It doesn’t sound like an exaggeration. So 18, and you’re in charge of people. You know what’s funny? You know that—we’re going to jump all over the place—but the, you know that thing that I have during the leadership workshop where my mom put together this thing of me through the years? Yeah. The collage thing. We were filming the other day with that, and on, I think it’s third grade, the synopsis was that I was a natural leader. My mom used to always say that if you want to find Chris, he’s the one organizing a game of kickball or something, but that was in my thing, which I thought was kind of funny. But yeah, so I was in charge naturally, and I think my first hire was my first fire because there was this advisor there, and she was my mentor. She was the one that let me write her internals to learn op codes. She was the one that when somebody would call in sick, she would call me up and have me write some customers. She literally took genuine interest in me. Now it benefited her, too, because I’m writing and closing internals in her number. But she was a really good advisor. Yeah. And just a pro, and just took care of people, and was—she was just a very hardworking, genuine person, and her husband was awesome, too. He was a tow truck driver, and they were just incredible people. But she comes to me and says, “My niece needs a job for the summer.” She’s back from college, and I needed somebody to drive the shuttle. Can you believe the synergy with this? Yeah. So, yeah, so I went through the whole process. I hired her. She was really sweet, really cute, really nice. She got in one wreck, and that wasn’t good. We had a year. She was driving the Euro van. That was our shuttle. And then not much down the road from that, she got in another wreck. And then my boss, the service manager, calls me in and he goes, “You have to fire her.” And I was like, “What? What are you talking about?” He’s like, “You have to do it.” Which, he kind of… I would have loved to have delegated it to you. It was just going downhill. There was no way he wanted to because she was so sweet and nice. I think I borrowed his office, and I called her in, and she started crying, which is its own episode. How to handle when people cry. Let’s not go too deep into worse because she just wasn’t a good driver. But it wasn’t that she wasn’t a good person. It was terrible. Yeah.
It’s really funny how rare it is that when you term somebody they’re a jerk. Way too often it’s that they’re these really sweet, nice people. That’s so hard. Oh, so your first hire was your first fire. That’s… And I know what a lot of people probably are thinking is, how was she insured and all that? But I’m telling you this was back when insurance was easy. I don’t… I would assume that most those insurance companies at that point in time were asking who was driving the cars here. No, no, it was a blanket thing. That came later, all of that. But yeah, so that was my first time firing somebody, and hated it. The good news is it wasn’t like he told me the day before. He told me and I had to do it. There was no waiting. It was immediate. I’d prefer that. Yeah, because the waiting is the worst. I just, if I’m done, I’m done. I just want to get it over with.
Well, I’m trying to remember. My first was… What was your worst? Okay, let me just go with the worst because it’s way worse than the first. At the time, I was living with a friend of mine, and his brother was one of my technicians, and they were just the most open. It was a wonderful, just an amazing family. They welcomed me, and it’s like one of my first experiences with a Latin family, and you immediately recognize when you didn’t grow up with a really loving family like what that was like. And they were just family first, and they were just the most loyal, loving people, and they loved spending time with each other, and I was, I sat in awe of it most the time. The technician that worked for me, good technician, heart of gold. Early to the shop, stayed late. He was my Saturday guy if I needed an extra guy on the Saturday. All these wonderful things. But he left a wheel loose, and the customer basically wrecked the car and everything. I had no choice but to do it. My lunch was at my neck when I had to do it. I’m not a super emotional person, but I do remember I was holding back tears when I had to do it. So how many times you seen me cry in the eight years that you known me? Zero. Zero. So, that was really… But I feel like you’re about to cry right now. Yeah. Even kind of redoing it, it’s a thing. Can we see you cry for the first time right now? No. Can you go back to that moment and try to pull up the emotion? Stop yourself. What did it feel like? What was the room like?
But it was one of those things where he just sat down. “Hey, I got to let you go.” And he looked at me and he said, “I know.” And that kind of let the weight go off a little bit because he just probably… When he said, “I know,” did he say, “I know, gringo?” No, surprisingly, no Latino would… they wouldn’t fire each other. No, but in this case, he understood, and he left. I wrote him a really good letter of recommendation, got him another job, and everything like that. So you lied to the next place. No, because I would hire him again if I could. But he left the… He left the wheel loose. The number one job of a technician is not to leave the wheel. Couldn’t work in my shop. He could work in someone else’s shop. But it’s terrible. Terrible. That stunk. If you can’t tell, but yeah, that was a thing. No, it’s terrible. And that was one where it happened really fast. I let him go that day. I feel like I probably didn’t sleep for three or four nights afterwards because… You were afraid your roommate was going to stab me in the middle of the night. Fair. What happened with the roommate? I moved out a couple of months later. Not because of that or because of that. No, just because it was time to move on and everything like that. But he understood, and he’s like, “I bet that sucked.” He’s like, “Yeah, it’s terrible. I wouldn’t have liked to do that either,” but he understood that there was no world where there’s no sweeping a wheel falling off and a customer getting in an accident under a rug. You couldn’t make that go away. Yeah.
The thing about this, too, that I think about all the time, and we talk about internally, is the amount of turnover at the service manager, parts manager position. At the service manager position for most manufacturers, it hovers around 50%. Some are higher, some are a little below, but it’s around 50%. The fact that we don’t look at that as an industry as a huge failure always surprises me. That it’s a flip of a coin whether somebody makes it. I can’t think of any situation in my life where I want the outcome to be a flip of a coin. At a one out of two chance that half of the time I’m going to fail at something. Awful. Terrible. Nothing really changes. Now, like I said, we take it very seriously, and we think about it and talk about it a lot. We were trying to do the math on what our turnover is for service, parts managers in our program. To the best of our ability, the number that we could come up with is less than 5%. I think that’s even a little high, but we’re trying to be conservative in our number, but it’s pretty rare that a manager in our program gets let go. And if it does, it happens early. I would say there probably are years where we have more managers become general managers than we’ve had fired. I can think of at least two of the last three years that would be like that. So that’s a drastic difference from the industry as a whole. You have all these manufacturers, you have all these dealers, all these dealer groups, and the training and the mentorship and the environment that they put people into ends up being a flip of a coin, which is nuts for the amount of customers the service and parts departments touch and how important it is. The amount of profitability, employees, all of that. That the managers aren’t given the right tools and aren’t really told the truth about what it is. And so Christian and I came up with a list of the main reasons we see that managers get fired. Each one of them is kind of a conversation, but we care. It sucks. There’s no way that 50% of the managers out there aren’t talented, that go to work trying to mess it up, that go to work indifferent. No, these are people that for the most part work really hard, care, want to do good, but it’s just not set up that way. It’s a churn and burn. They were recognized and promoted from a different position. Usually somewhere in the dealership. There’s a lot of that going on. I think we probably could have done more than this list. This is just a good starting point, but it’s a good list.
So, the first one is maybe the most important one, and it’s a trick bag in the sense that most of the time when we go into a service department, the general manager dealer is telling the fixed ops managers to chase gross. They don’t see the financial statements. They don’t understand it. They don’t know how to read a financial statement. So they’re chasing gross, but they have no concept of profit. Now, what the dealer general manager means when they say, “Get me more gross,” is more profit. What the dealer and general manager usually don’t understand fixed ops enough to understand that you can increase your expenses and get more gross. A lot of times what we see is the expenses will be up 15%, and the profit will be up five. Most of the time the expenses are up more than the profitability in a scenario where the manager doesn’t see the financial, doesn’t know how to read it, doesn’t understand what’s going on. I say this all the time because I was a dealer. There isn’t a dealer that I know or respect that doesn’t have the financial statement within two feet of their desk constantly. They’re looking at it. They’re referencing it, and the first thing they do is go to the bottom and look at the profit. Every one of them. So, it’s a trick bag. The industry doesn’t teach managers how to read financials. We see it time and time again when we do our master classes here in the library. We do them every month. And invariably there will be, really good people that have been in this industry for 20, 25 years that have no idea how to read the financial statement.
You know, I mean, there’s two parts to that, I think. One is, I knew very early on in my early 20s that the financial statement was the key to everything. So I bribed somebody to teach me how to read it. I don’t know, I’m a little more pushy and crafty than most people. A lot of people want to know but they just are never in the situation where they can feel comfortable. What invariably happens, too, is especially to guys because it becomes a part of our identity, is if you’ve gone five years being a manager and you don’t know how to read the financial statement, you pretty much start to bluff after that. Pretend like you probably should. But you’re already going now. And so you never stop and reinvent yourself. You just kind of keep maintaining. And so, the first one is not understanding profitability and gross and how profit is more important than gross even though you’re told that gross is more important.
The second one is just the customer experience and understanding how to create systems, how to create a customer experience. The customer experience is designed. You got to design from the customer’s point of view backwards, not from our point of view. What most managers do is they’re managing to the system that they followed when they were an advisor or tech or whatever it is, not the one that’s the most effective. I think that that is probably one of the bigger mistakes that I see with the service managers is when they first get into the job they got promoted, their initial thought is, “Oh, great. I don’t have to talk to customers anymore.” But I think that customer experience starts with leadership. Your team is watching how you interact with customers and not just in the heat cases that people don’t want to do, but literally, I have a client that says this all the time. Says, “It’s shaking hands, kissing babies.” That’s literally you’re out there being the inspiration for the team. Like you said, if you can’t create a system that manufactures a great customer experience, you are behind the eightball. 100%.
Want to hear a joke? You’re asking? I’m going to tell it anyway. But, knock. Who’s there? Cow goes. Cow goes. Cow goes who? It’s my favorite when you figure it out.
The next one we have on the list is just trying to maintain. That kind of follows into the next one is a closed loop system. My background is the car business, but through my career, we have helped a lot of other businesses, and we have other versions of our company that interacts with people in other industries. The one thing that I hadn’t ever quite put together about the car business is one, even though I know this, I never put it together in the sense that car dealerships are franchises. These guys with big egos that are car dealers, they’ve never made, invented, or done anything. They bought a franchise, and they’re selling somebody else’s creation, and they get kind of lumped into an entrepreneurial stereotype a little bit. They are not inventing or creating anything. They are following a franchise model no different than a Pizza Hut or a McDonald’s. They are at the mercy of the franchise that they are representing. The one thing that you have in the automotive industry is it’s a closed loop system. In the sense that for parts and service, it’s the same thing every day. Customers are coming in in the same way. It isn’t like customers are parachuting in one day. They all drive in. They all go wherever the lane takes them. They get an advisor, and a repair order is created. It’s exactly the same thing every day. That’s a closed loop system. Well, in the absence of having to invent something, having to do R&D, having to do any of that that somebody would have to do if they started a company or a startup, the thing or the outcome of a franchise model is even though it’s not required, people tend to just follow the same thing they’ve always done, and they never question. I mean, not never because there’s plenty of dealers out there that are questioning it and reinvent how customers are handled and all that. But for the most part as an industry, we aren’t improving on the advantage that we have that it’s a closed loop system, and it’s the same all the time.
Do you think that that’s because I think that the rest of the world is advancing faster? Do you think that that’s making the car business stick out more like a sore thumb? Because they don’t change as fast, they’re falling behind faster almost. Do you know what I’m saying? The rest of the world seems like it’s on a super highway to different things. I think that question has a lot of answers. Because I don’t know why, but I don’t think that people are in love with cars the way they used to be. I don’t have any friends buying cars and going, “Hey, you got to come see my new car” anymore. It just doesn’t happen. When I got my Rover last year, I was super excited about that car and showing it to people, and nobody since then has got a new, none of my friends with money have got a new car, and they’re like, “Hey, check out my Ferrari, my… nobody’s excited about cars like they used to be.” Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s really turning, and the more that there’s self-driving and all this, the more that they’re a commodity. The relationship keeps dwindling. It’s not this world that we grew up in where you had a picture of a Corvette on your wall. That isn’t the thing anymore. It’s anime now. So I think the relationship is changing, and we are not changing as an industry as quick as we could. Now, if we did, we could get ahead of it, and we could change it because people are human, and they’re emotional, and you can tell a better story and create a better experience that would change that.
One thing that I’ve been watching that’s right over by me is this Tesla drive-in diner. Nuts the line for people to charge their cars. And how many times have we had dealers fighting with the manufacturer that they don’t want to put charging stations in their dealership or they put the minimum amount. How many times have we said you should open a coffee, you should make it into an event, a place where people want to hang out. You should have a boutique, all of that. And Elon’s the perfect example of that. That thing is packed. People are waiting hours. It’s running 24 hours a day, 24/7. And everybody’s dying to go to it. Everybody’s dying to go to it. Was it four years ago we started suggesting that? That feels like it was a long time ago, but man, it’s come to fruition. That’s interesting. Think about all the money dealers spend on different stuff and how cheap that is. I used to do this marketing workshop, and I would teach in there how to open a coffee shop and do things inside of your dealership that kept people there. A lot of people left that and did it. I mean, less than 50 grand a lot of times, but never more than a hundred to do something that completely changes the way customers perceive and think about us, and how they feel when they’re waiting, all that stuff, but we just don’t think that way. All that is is a reallocation of your advertising or marketing budget anyways or just an investment in market share. You’re going to get market share in that scenario. So, it is a closed loop system, and for the most part, we’re just trying to maintain. We’re not that ambitious in a lot of ways, and I feel like a lot of service and parts managers feel alone in that. So, I’m saying this as a critique, and it’s the reason why managers get fired, but I also understand that it’s a lonely job. Service is usually the afterthought. In a lot of ways. So it is a disadvantage mentally for a service manager, parts manager.
The next one is just poor leadership, not being able to hold people accountable, to get people to do stuff, and management versus leadership. Not being able to create a vision for how things should be done and then get, inviting people on a mission. It’s just very top down, authoritarian. “I’m your manager so do what I say.” There’s no real curation of an actual human vision that makes the world a better place. I would suspect that a lot of people in that arena, that little group of people you’re talking about, is, they would define leadership and management as the same thing. When it’s not, it’s not even close.
The other one we had on the list is that they’re just poor people collectors. A lot of times their shop is just down to who’s stayed. They’re not good at getting the best techs, getting the best advisors. There’s no shorter line than having really talented people in order to change your trajectory. So being a people collector, most people don’t see themselves that way. If you’re a really good people collector, you can almost be bad at half the other things on this list and still be okay. Another one, too, is most service managers aren’t marketers. They don’t know how to get more traffic, and so they’ve just depended on the sales department to sell cars, and then people are coming in, but they have no concept of marketing or how valuable the customer experience is as a marketing tool in a perfect closed loop system like what we have. Actually that’s the one area where a service manager could be creative, but they outsource it to whatever the manufacturer tells them they should do for marketing.
And I got an email from some company today where they do these checks, customer checks that are coupons, and it’s like coupons are not marketing. That is not marketing. I’m sorry. Most of the time, the coupon that you’re sending out to your database, they’re not even due for the thing you’re sending them a coupon for. The way that marketing is done in our industry is insane. For the most part, people don’t even track it, but it’s very ineffective the way that it’s done. It’s just how do we lower our margins and our price to get people that only care about price, and there’s no relationship. It’s a lose-lose on every end. And that, yeah, that’s the marketing stuff. And then we can co-op it. Here we go.
The other one, and this is kind of one you came up with, which I think is really on point, is just the self-esteem. A lot of managers just don’t see themselves as valuable enough to invest in, valuable enough to go learn and take the thing that they’re doing seriously and shoot for something bigger. They just shoot very small. Just the idea is just to maintain, not to be the best, not to create something special. It’s just, “Hey, how do we survive? How do we get by?” They’re very much in a reactionary mode. But, I kind of in the 17 laws of leadership, that’s a big one is the fear of success is way more dangerous than the fear of failure. Most people just don’t see themselves as the one that is making things happen, that has the solution, that’s out there figuring things out, networking, being a part of a community. They just don’t see themselves that way. And so they’re alone, and when you’re alone, you’re very vulnerable. Yeah, for sure. You’re kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop, not thinking that the investment itself could be the answer to the shoe going away. I mean, so many managers went to work today wondering if they were going to get fired. Is today the day? There’s no way that someone listening to this didn’t raise their hand. There’s just, and we feel for you.
Just to that, too, is investing in yourself. It’s crazy. I paid somebody to teach me how to read a financial statement. I did my buddy Mike’s show the other day, and we were talking about how much we’ve invested in ourselves, and it’s way over five million. I mean, it’s way over five million, but there’s been years where I’ve spent half a million dollars on some sort of training to make myself better. I mean, you just look around here, there’s a million and a half dollars worth of books here. You’re talking about books, you’re talking about going to conferences and learning, you’re talking about just hiring people outright to teach me the thing that I want to know. We’re really good at that, too, where we’ll just call somebody who’s an expert, and I’ll just buy a day of their time and go there and ask questions. Invariably, I always make friends with them, and it leads to some sort of relationship. But going for the people that really are doing the thing, and we have clients like that that come to us for that reason. They’re like, “Hey, we just want to be better. You guys are the best. So, what do we got to do?” They want to learn. And unfortunately, that’s the minority, not the majority. For sure. Most people are just waiting for life to happen or that they’ve gotten to a certain point, and they feel like they’ve arrived, and that the concept of doing something better than they did before never occurs.
It’s so interesting, and the band of people that you’re talking about, they on their own could say, “Okay, we do a good job.” But they never say that. You’re on this neverending search for an unfair advantage. Some of our clients share that kind of thing. And those people are such a match for what we do because we’re just never done. They talk the way that we talk, too. And it’s a different, it’s a different expectation. I say that all the time to people is that you get the best version. For our coaching, for instance, it’s never been better than it is right now because we’ve never had more information. We’ve never had more data. We’ve never worked harder to try to come up with our own advantages and laws of slight edge, and we’ve made tons of investments in trying to make ourselves better, and everything from sales to coaching to just the way that we’re trying to run operations. Everything can be better, and if you never forget that, you’ll always be a step ahead of many people.
Well, we talk about this quite frequently is that the master class boot camp that we’re going to do this month is dramatically different than the one we did a year ago. That’s because we’re constantly trying to make it better. We’re measuring it against the outcome. So, do people leave here and go implement? Do they understand? We’re going through the process of redoing all of our online training for it to be more of a journey for everybody. We’re always. We’re looking for that edge for everybody else, too. We want our stuff to be that secret weapon. And that’s not easy to do. You give a piece of your soul to create that sort of content, but it’s worth it because it works. So investing in yourself. That was kind of the last one that we had. I mean there is no reason why there should be this much turnover at this position. The industry has failed us. But you have the ability to take it into your own hands to get into a mentorship coaching program and learn and surround yourself with other people that are thinking different, doing it. That might be the most important part. I don’t know. I’m a visual person, so when I see stuff and I interact with people, I learn more that way. I just don’t want to be passive and wait. Yeah, that’s the thing. I’m not waiting for permission.
Do you think that there’s probably a thing, too, and we didn’t—this didn’t make the list—but I don’t know that we say this enough, is that there’s also a message out there to our dealer body that it can’t always be them. We have to set those teams up for success. If you’re going to promote somebody and not, try to get them and tell them what the games they’re really playing as opposed to just the silliness that the tribal knowledge that people have been instilled in our industry. The turnover is bad because of the employer and the employee. It’s not just that all the service managers are bad. I can’t stress that enough. For sure. That’s good. That’s all we got for today. But if you feel alone and you’re one of those that you know is struggling and you go to work and you’re thinking, “Hey, I might get fired.” I don’t know. Give us a ring.
Tune in next week as Chris and I unpack more of our most traumatic things that we’ve had to go through in our life. 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. That’s offers.chriscollinsinc.com. I’m Chris Collins, and I’ll see you in the next video.
🔗 Related Resources:
- Top Fixed Ops Performers: What Car Dealership Service Managers and Advisors Do Differently
- The 9 Reasons Why Service Managers Fail (And How to Avoid Them)
- The Service Advisor Benchmark Breakdown: What Top Performers Are Doing
- Boosting Service Department Profitability: A Quick Guide for Fixed Ops
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!
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