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My name is Jeff, and I'd like to welcome you on a journey of reflection and insight into the tolls and triumphs of a career in automotive repair.
After more than 20 years of skinned knuckles and tool debt, I want to share my perspective and hear other people's thoughts about our industry.
So pour yourself a strong coffee or grab a cold Canadian beer and get ready for some great conversation.
I want to hear Chris tell us about his background because I think it's going to be very interesting for a lot of people. He posts a lot of really good content that gets a lot of people talking. So that's what we want here.
00:38 Chris Craig So Chris, welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. And thank you for having me on and taking the time to set all this up and letting me speak at length. We know TikTok videos last about three minutes at a time, so it's hard to get the whole message across. So when I get opportunities to come on these podcasts and get in front of a different audience, kind of get my perspective, my two cents and then what I've experienced in the industry across all the different things I've done.
01:01 Jeff Compton I always really appreciate that opportunity. Yeah. Well, and that's you're our first TikTok kind of celebrity. So that's that's going to be on. So, I mean, we're certainly we encompass all social media is here. We don't discriminate. We want to have it's about the person on the other end, not how they're what platform they choose to be. So tell us, give us kind of, you know, you're big on TikTok. How big are you? How do people find you? What is you know, what are you using TikTok for?
01:32 Chris Craig Sure. So TikTok, I'm at I had one hundred and four thousand followers today. My name on TikTok is Chris M.F. Craig. So Chris M.F. Craig. That's how you can find me. I'm also on YouTube under the same handle. I have about four point six or forty forty six hundred subscribers there. Some longer videos there. Not too many because I don't have a lot of time. I am editing one, though. So you want to look out for that and that'll that'll encompass the pages of the e-book that I wrote before I get too ahead of myself. Though on TikTok started for me. Actually, we were talking about the jaded mechanic. I was kind of jaded and I did a rant post about something that had happened to me when I was writing service. And I did it in a comedic way because it was kind of a release, like, you know, comedic thing. And I did it and it got some attention. So I was like, I'll do that again. It got some attention. I was like, I'll do that again. I got some attention. But I started getting comments and the comments were questions. And in TikTok, you can actually hit the comment, hit record and you can answer the question. So it slowly transitioned from complaining, actually very quickly transmission from complaining to answering questions. And I've been doing it like that ever since. Right now I'm starting to do kind of the skits and stuff and try to like just show I'm trying to portray what can actually happen in the industry with some comedic effect to it. Show an example and then discuss it afterward, but not completely because I want the people in the comments section to discuss it further.
02:54 Jeff Compton And that's what I see happening a lot of your your posts. The comment thread is gold because he's so many different perspectives right from from other service advisors to really disgruntled text to some, you know, PO customers to the DIY contingent. Like it's it's a it's a smorgasbord of people with opinions. It's great.
03:18 Chris Craig So you wrote service. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was a technician even before that. But yeah, I wrote service for four years or not four years, four different dealerships for about a year and a half. And so start as a tech or did you start as a writer? Well, I started as a technician, but not in a dealership. So like I'll kind of give you like the takeoff into the automotive industry, if you will, because it started way back in like 10th grade of high school. Good. OK. Actually, it may have started before that. So I was always kind of interesting and interested in technology that had encompassed like automotive four wheelers, snowmobiles. I grew up in the country. So that was all the kind of stuff we did. If your stuff broke, you know, you had to fix it to continue writing it. So got interested in that. So I wasn't a great student in high school. So VOTEX sounded like a really good thing for me because I got to take half the day off and go to an automotive shop and mess around with my friends and learn about cars on the side. And that's exactly what I did. So I did three years of that. I actually ended up graduating top of that class, which is small class. So that's not like a big accomplishment by any means. But it got me started. It got me a scholarship and it got me going to go to college. So I went to college for automotive. I completed a two year degree there with some some breaks in between. I joined the military in that time. I joined the Army Reserves in that meantime. But I earned my two year associate's degree in automotive technology. I stayed on for two more years. I earned my bachelor's degree in automotive technology and business management. So those are my my educational backgrounds. During my time in college, I worked as a parts retail salesperson, then a parts retail manager. I worked as a technician in an independent shop where I did everything from the oil change up to like the head gaskets, internal engine repairs, transmission replacement, all of that. Pretty much anything under the sun. You think of it, you name it. I did it in this little two bay garage. And then after that, I became a service writer. I started off at a Toyota store. I went to a Ford store Chrysler store back to a Ford store. And then I ended in a Lincoln store.
05:14 Jeff Compton Hmm. So can we talk about why? What was it? Was there did you have an injury to leave as a tech or did you feel like you were better suited writing service?
05:24 Chris Craig Once I got my two year degree, I started to like I said, I was a bad student in high school. I wasn't a great student, didn't have too much interest. Once I got my associate's degree, I became really enamored with learning, reading, learning, educating. So I said to myself, all I need to do is two more years. I have another degree and I have the means to do this now. So I continued on with with that. And I also there was also an opportunity for me to join the ROTC program and commission as an officer in the military. So there was a dual purpose there. So I continued on with that. And when I went into those business management courses, I found myself even more interested in that side of the house than I was in the previous side of the house. So I'm still interested in the technology and stuff. But the business management, I found myself enamored in that. And I said to myself, that's kind of the direction I want to go. So once I completed college with my business management degree, I wanted to aim towards management. I felt hitting the service advisor side of the house and doing that side of the business, that side of the desk, if you will, I felt that was my best path forward to head towards that business management aspect.
06:30 Jeff Compton For sure. I can see that because I mean, you know, I see that where I see I've known lots of service advisors that made it into a managerial role in a dealership. But I say that I've seen as many techs make it to a managerial role in a dealership. It could be done. I've seen them become form and then eventually service manager. But I want that route takes a lot longer and is not as common as an advisor being able to move into management. I think it just has to do with the manager, you know, management management people need to be people people.
07:01 Chris Craig And traditionally, service advisors are good people, people, technicians, not always as good at people. So I can see how that is a good step for for young Chris to do. So you left the independent shop. You kind of had a taste for that. What was your first when you walked into the dealership, you started to see how things were done, how the techs are like, was that a was that a shock for you or was it like a learning curve? Tell us how that went. I so I started off I had finished my basic officer leader course at Fort Lee, Virginia, completed that said to myself, I want to move to my hometown again. I haven't been there in like eight years or something like that. So I'll move there. And it's a small town. So it was a small dealership, smallest dealership ever worked in. You know, it was eight base, probably three to four main technicians. The rest were maintenance, two service advisors, one manager. And I fell in love with the store. I felt right in the place. These were my people. This is where I'm from. So the customers, I all kind of pretty much knew them already. I knew the people I was working with generally already. And I fell in very well. The culture there was incredible. It was immaculate. Everything was great there, except for I realized I didn't want to live in that town anymore that I kind of like being away. I like traveling and stuff. And that that store with the pay was really not the best because it was such a small place. And I felt that for me to spread my wings, I had to move along. So I ended up leaving that store for stores now where I live. Now I live in central Tennessee. So that's where I ended up moving to for for bigger stores and different things to experience different things. But that first store, man, it's still the best dealership I ever worked in hands down. Just the culture was just it was perfect there. I actually was excited to come to work. And that's a big reason why I get into what I do now, why I'm so passionate about like bringing the issues to social media and talking about it publicly. Because when I hit dealerships here, it was a different world, man. And I I fell out of love with it right away. And I've been in love with the automotive industry this whole time. And all of a sudden it just like the first day at this new dealership, when I moved down south, it was just like I got slapped right in the face. I'm like, where am I? It was it was night and day difference. I mean, absolute night and day difference.
09:20 Jeff Compton Tell us about that. Do you think it's because just a faster pace or is it a everybody is out for themselves type of attitude or you know, because I want to say probably at the first dealership, you were you saw what flat rate, how it went and how it works. And you were familiar with that. But that seems to be always and we're not trying to have the flat rate conversation again. That's always where it seems to go right as people go. Because I've seen little dealerships. And you're very right. Like the culture is different, right? It's it's like they're playing the long game. You know what I mean? Yeah. With with customers that this is their second generation and has now bought that particular brand at that store and is bringing it back there for that. And, you know, an advisor that's been there 20 years, that's nothing. You know, we got our service manager has been here 30 years, the guy in parts has been there 30 years. Yeah. And I've seen a lot of where when you go to the big dealerships, I've seen the complete service drive turn over in a two year span. You know, so what when you hit Tennessee and you hit that second dealer, what was the what do you when you say you got slapped in the face? What was the where did that come from the most right away?
10:30 Chris Craig So this is the store when I tell stories, I have a lot of service stories. You want to hear some horror stories, I can call this my nightmare store, man. It was it was different. So the main thing that that store was very seriously suffering from was a core management issue, which was kind of my saga that I was dealing with in the industry and a lot of what I feel needs to change out there is just poor management in general. But that's really what it was. Because I got there and everybody was just miserable. Nobody I was like, I got a huge pay raise coming here. I'm in a great mood. Everybody's upset. Nobody wanted to meet me. Nobody cared. Every customer would look at me and say, Oh, another new guy. You know, all the all the yeah, all the technicians were like, Oh, yeah, how long is he gonna last? There's people like, you know, talking, making bets and how long how long do you think it's gonna take for him to get out of here? And the reason was, is they were dealing with such heavy turnover. I mean, it was unbelievable turnover. And I'll give you an idea of what that looked like. And just seven or eight months, I went from being the maintenance writer to the most experienced service writer on the service lane of a 37 Bay facility that usually would house I think it was five to six mainline advisors and two maintenance writers. Big, big dealership in a very big, heavily densely populated area. Yeah. So that was you had no choice. They were wasn't a situation you wanted to jump in the fire. You were like, it's, you know, the ship is sinking underneath you in a perspective, I guess you could say and you had no choice. Right? I mean, yeah, you if you get that progression that fast. But that's like going to war, dude, you know, it's like, it's just dropping around you and like, what's happening here? Be scary, man. And that's the thing, man, is they're dropping like flies going to other stores and everybody's miserable. And I'm like, why? I started making notes in my phone because I I'm an officer by this point in the military. So I observed things. And it's the first thing I do when I get into a new scenario is I very quietly observe, I don't try to change anything. I don't try to suggest anything. I only ask questions so I can function. But I observe and I was sort of taking notes in my phone. And it was just, you know, over and over, people were just upset. They're miserable. You know, they're complaining about management complaining about this. People are talking about like, they also went through a buyout. That's the other big thing is this the store was only about two years old, I think at the time. So they were under new ownership, new management, stuff like that. So there was some growing pains there. A lot of it used to be betters going on. I used to make more money when the other owners were here. So that was the other part of it. Everybody was complaining about I get less pay now, but I work more hours. And it was it was a very troubling place for sure. I mean, I, I can't even I can't even describe some of the things I saw go down there from that one particular manager. The things that he would do and authorize and, and try to solve problems with it was just I was nervous to have my name on some invoices. I'll put it that way.
13:20 Jeff Compton Yeah, that's that's that makes it hard to want to want to be enthusiastic and, you know, and want to get in. And like you said, you're excited to go to work. You love to go to work. Yeah. And then huge culture shock. So how long did you last at that place? Just over 12 months. Just over 12 months.
13:37 Chris Craig Yeah. And I'll tell you, one of the biggest things, this is one of the biggest turnoffs I had in most dealerships. I have to get this one out. If I'm going to get anything, I have to get this out. It was I was constantly getting hassled for having to take time off for military service, like constantly. Now, when I came to this dealership, it was August of 2019. March of 2020 was thereafter, which we know the pandemic kicked off right there. I had just taken command for the first time. And my very young officer career of a company in the military, which has an end strength of 140, what soldiers and like 12 million dollars of equipment that I'm directly responsible for. And we have a worldwide pandemic that I'm trying to manage through the military being a leader, which taking it takes a ton of my time while trying to be an employee at this dealership. And I the support I got was very minimal. It was it was often I was getting in trouble for having to take time away to do those things to go serve. I mean, it was. You know, you had the schedule. He knew what times I had to be gone, which times I had to be out. He called me in the middle of like my service, my meetings and stuff that when you're going to come to work, it's like I can't. I'm in uniform right now. I'm doing my job. So that was that was one of the big major, major reasons I ended up leaving that particular store.
14:54 Jeff Compton And see, that's hard for me to wrap my head around, because like up here when when the pandemic hit, a lot of dealerships became ghost towns. Like there wasn't work coming in. There was not a lot of tax were laid off. A lot of tax were fired. A lot of tax quit because if you weren't on a guarantee and there's no customers coming in, you're not staying around. Yeah. So it really struck me as it strikes me as weird then that your boss manager, whatever you want to call them, has such an issue with you being away because were you guys was busy, busy? Was it busier? Did it ramp up or?
15:29 Chris Craig No, we definitely slowed down, but we were dealing with so much turnover that I was one of the few service advisors left. And this particular manager, I'll use the word inept, he did not know how to use the DMS, the dealer management system. Like he didn't know how to cut a repair order. He didn't know how to look things up in the system. He constantly had other people do it for him. And I was told by what was the senior most service advisor there before that person had left was that person was compensated something like $400 to complete that manager's OEM training. So he never completed his own OEM training. He never learned how to use the DMS. He would have to ask me to print things out for him. He didn't learn how to do that. So the big thing was, was I think that he needed someone like me there to do things for him that he should be able to do for himself. Right.
16:20 Jeff Compton So how did this inept example of whatever get this job if he doesn't sound that qualified to be doing it? Was it like, well, they work for cheap. Is that why? Or is it like, you know, did a different role of the dealership for a while and they got put in that role? Like, how does that happen?
16:39 Chris Craig So here's the thing with that. He was a manager prior to that. He was a service manager for a store prior to that for a very long time. And the general manager knew him from somewhere, said he's a great guy. Let's get him in here. Let's get him in the store. He was compensated to my understanding very well. I was pretty good friends with the people up in the office at the time. So I did learn some things like that. So he was compensated well. But what I think happens is there's they don't really allow for progression. Most of these stores that dealt with. So and the reason is, is if you take a service advisor and you promote that service advisor to manager, you have to train that manager because they've never been one before. Not only do you have to train that manager, but you have to hire another service advisor and train that service advisor. So you're now training two individuals simultaneously. Now that's what long term is going to be best for that business, because that's what's going to create the best culture. Because that manager is bought in. They care about this place and they're being given an opportunity and they're being empowered. And that manager, that new manager is going to become a great manager nine times out of ten, especially if you're selecting the right person. What happens is, is they go on Indeed or whatever. This general manager knows a guy and they find someone, oh, you've been a manager. You know how to do this. And they throw them in there. And then you get this person that's that's an alien to the place. It doesn't quite fit in with the culture. It comes in there and tries to change a bunch of things to make it like his old store, because that's how we used to do it. And it doesn't mesh that well and doesn't vibe with the team. And all of a sudden you have morale issues, you have cohesion issues and it just it just falls apart from there. And it's cancer like rust on the bottom of the truck.
18:15 Jeff Compton Amen. I saw something similar. Like when we the dealership that I was at for the longest tenure, when they finally terminated. And I don't mean finally, like it was just his time was up and he was it was it was time for him to go. They took the acting shop foreman and made him service manager and just progressed him. And there so there was literally like one week. He's just another tech on the floor. Yeah, not a well liked tech. And he becomes an SM. And all of a sudden we had I know we had one mechanic that as soon as that happened, he turned his notice in because they had they had beef ongoing. So he was like, I'm not going to be able to work for him. This is he could see that the writing was going to be on the wall. He was not going to make the kind of money that he was making. Right. As soon as this gentleman took over from a service manager, a lot of techs didn't see that this was necessarily a good positive step because he was a good tech. And to take him off the floor, it was really hard for him to step into the leadership role. I'll say this when I've worked with you and I've seen the things that you've done, I don't deal well with hypocrites. So all of a sudden you start to say to us, well, you can't do that or you don't do this or don't do that. And it's like last week you were doing that very thing. Right. It's very hard for a lot of us then to just go, OK, yes, I'm going to all of a sudden swallow that pill and get right on board. Right. So I've never been necessarily thought that they should take an acting foreman and make him a manager because I think it's a very different role. I've always felt that a good foreman is kind of the go between. And a manager has got to be a manager that has to then be the go between or part of the other groups in the dealership, parts, sales, you know, service. They all have to work as a unit. And I always felt that the take I know for myself, if you took me as a tech tomorrow and made me a service manager and I all of a sudden started to have to interact at a manager level with parts and sales, I wouldn't be the most friendly person to interact with. Right. Because, you know, I got a lot of history, a lot of baggage and, you know, somewhat jaded on how it's how it's been treated. Because, you know, you put up the videos and you talk about how many times the techs been want something done for discount or something done for free or sales is always, you know, can you just do this for us? Like we can't I can't pay you right now, but you know, the drill it's hard for those guys to step into that role and all of a sudden become a manager without bringing that baggage in. You're when you talk about this guy coming, it's did he have at least familiar? Was he familiar with the brand?
20:39 Chris Craig No, no, no. And he would do things like I'll tell you the story because I have to get this out. I'll tell you something he did one time. I had a customer that came in for a door latch recall. So the door latches were failing on these vehicles. They had to be replaced. So the technician working on it broke the cable, the door cable. Things happen. We're going to get it fixed, but it wasn't in stock, which means we now have to keep the vehicle overnight. OK, I know how to handle this. I'm a service advisor. I go up. I'm like, hey, do we have any loaner cars? Oh, great. We have a loaner car. Awesome. I'm going to tell this customer, hey, broke your door cable. It's going to be free. Come pick up your loaner car. Take care of handle everything. Call the customer. Tell the customer this information and say, hey, make sure you come in with your insurance information. Oh, I don't have insurance. Well, you don't have vehicle insurance, which means I can't give you a loaner car that store policy. Now, I know that we could put it under the dealership's insurance. It's probably something we work out, but that's above me and I can't do that. And our policy is that they don't have insurance and just don't get the car. So I'm sorry, Mr. or Mrs. customer, you don't have a vehicle this evening. I tried. You're driving your vehicle illegally. Can't do anything. That customer came in at about 430 in December. So it's dark out already screaming and yelling, I want my car. Sorry, it's torn apart and it can't be put back together. And you don't have insurance. Well, my manager caught wind of this and he was sort of spineless in these situations. And what he wound up doing is he went into the shop, got the car, bungee corded, the door shut with the door panels ripped off and everything. And without closing a repair order, without annotating anything with mine and the technicians name and numbers on that, at least the vehicle that evening.
22:20 Jeff Compton Wow. That looks good for the company, doesn't it? It's a great, that's just one of many, one of many with this one individual. Wow, dude, that's I've seen I've had managers get upset and in rant and rave and, you know, go on tirades and stuff like that. I would have never seen them bungee corded doors shut to get out, you know, and I can understand it, right? Because that customer is like, I want my F and vehicle and you guys. But I mean, and yeah, you're in a tight spot. That customer can, you know, trash your CSI, can give you a Google review that sucks, all that kind of stuff. But there's a right way to do things. And that's not it. You know, bungee cording shut and sending them out there with the license. That's the thing that always drives me crazy, right? Is it's like they're not people are not always remembering the license plate tag around frame around it.
23:10 Chris Craig Yeah, dealership name on it. So they're there with a with a bungee cord holding the door shut. Doesn't look very good. Oh, that was dangerous for that customer. Yeah, yeah. You know, you put that customer in harm that evening. I mean, that customer, it was December. I mean, it was winter time. So the roads are a little, little, little fidgety that time of day. And the traffic is absolutely insane in that area. And here this customer is with a door that's not secure that we've released out on the roadway. I mean, that's with an open repair order on it. So first of all, liability. But first and foremost, humanitarian. I mean, we put this person in very legitimate danger.
23:44 Jeff Compton Wow. So I got to ask them, did you outlast him at this?
23:49 Chris Craig I did not. But he outlasted me only by like three or four months.
23:52 Jeff Compton OK, so you went on to the next place. I went on to the next place. Yeah. How was that? Nightmare store number two. So I got to ask them before we found a nightmare store number two. And I don't mind if you listen, if you got four nightmare stores and you want to tell stories about them, I'm good with it. Yeah. You find like we'll go back a little bit. So you're 12 months there. Did you really was that kind of like you're you're forging by fire of like you must have learned a lot real fast, right?
24:21 Chris Craig That's where I learned a ton as a sir. I mean, I was a pretty novice writer. You know, I only had about six or seven or eight months under my belt service writing before that because it was a logistical move. I loved that Toyota store, but I was ready to move. So that was, you know, and that was a small store. I sold a lot of brakes. I sold some engine jobs, but it wasn't it was Toyota's. It was, you know, elderly customers that traded in a sixty thousand dollars. I didn't deal with a lot. And it wasn't it was day by day. There was no backlog in the shop or anything like that. It was it was open and closed repair order same day nine times out of ten. Unless we're doing like a frame recall or something. It was open and closed the following day. So, yeah, this I learned so much there and I didn't learn from that manager. But the dispatcher, particularly in that store, took me under his wing because he saw that I was getting rapidly promoted. So he pulled me under his wing and he said, hey, listen, like, we're going to get you right. He goes, I saw potential in you. You seem like you want to do it the right way. We're going to get you right. And he taught me because he's a dispatcher. So he knows that that the organization side of the house of getting tickets into the shop and in the fish of way. And he was a service writer before that in that store. So he knew how to handle these customers. He knew what verbiage to utilize. And he taught me so much in my short time at that store. Most of what I know, like boots on the ground was blurred in that particular store from that individual. So I call it my nightmare store, but I definitely did learn so much baptism by fire, get mind you, but I learned so much in that particular store.
25:51 Jeff Compton I've always said it every even a negative experience I've ever had. Terrible place to work, whatever. I've always taken something positive from every place I've ever been. Right. Even if the positive thing is, whoa, don't do it like that. That's still a positive, right? If you choose to spin it that way. So yes, your, your dispatch guy, I gotta, I gotta say this, the dispatch men and women in this industry don't get enough recognition and certainly don't get enough appreciation because they truly are some of the people that absolutely keep the wheels on the machine every day, right? They cannot agree more. They understand the ebb and flow. They understand the strengths of the techs in the shop. They can understand our moods. I can understand. Okay. Like, you know, he's hurting, so I'm not going to give him this job because it's going to really, you know, he's, he's hurting. He's going to take longer on it than, than if I give it to somebody else. But yet they know, okay, this guy's really strong at, at Diag or this guy. My tower was fantastic. Like they understood that like, okay, he's kind of knack for something. Like I just need him at, listen, we know that X, Y, and Z are coming in. We know that your hours are whatever. I'm going to give you this job so that you can bang it out real quick. And then please get onto this one. And that's part of the teamwork thing. And it's like, when I see more and more dealers that are trying to do the automated dispatch thing, I just shake my head because I've seen that work, but yet any place I've ever seen it work, they always still had to be somebody twiddling the knobs per se, because otherwise, you know, sometimes these service advisors don't want to use the correct code or whatever, because it gets in the shop faster. We had a situation, everything was started as a waiter because waiters, everything. Like, so you can see cars dispatch to the wrong tech and you're like, how does this happen? Oh, well, oh, that's why, because we put it down as an old one labor code, which trumps everything. And then a transmission guy picks it up for a water leak. And we're like, you know, examples like that. It's just terrible. So my love goes out to the people that do dispatch and do it well, because you're, you're definitely unsung heroes. So your next nightmare store, can I ask same brand?
28:01 Chris Craig No, different brand, different brand. I mean, you know, I, when I say it all together, it seems like, oh, this guy's just complaining. It's this is what inspired me though, to do what I do on social media and do the work that I do that train people in the industry to do everything I can to breathe fresh air onto these service lanes and help these people out that I just know. Most of them in my experience, we're just suffering from lack of training. That's where the turnover comes from. That's where I don't want to do this anymore comes from. And that's why every time you come in for an oil change, you talk to a brand new person. Yeah.
28:31 Jeff Compton Chris, this is your story is starting to sound very similar to what made me want to do what I, what it is I do, which is not, you know, I don't have the big, a huge platform like yourself or following, but I mean, I'm well known for people like that, just like, yeah, he's got a lot of stories. I've got a lot of nightmare, you know, rants, all that kind of stuff. So you jumped to the next dealership, a completely different brand again. Yep. Um, is that within this, can I ask, is it within the same dealer group or is it
29:00 Jeff Compton like, different group, different group? Yep. Yeah.
29:03 Chris Craig Completely different, completely separated, different zip code and everything. I took on a longer drive to go to this individual location.
29:10 Jeff Compton And when you get there, day one is tell me about it.
29:14 Chris Craig It's not, it's not bad. So at first I was like, this is pretty good. Hey, plan looks all right. The shop's a little bit smaller. I have air conditioning on the service lane. It works somewhat. Okay. My last one didn't have that and it gets hot in the South. So I was like, all right, man, this is, this is going to be pretty good. And then like, once the ball got rolling, you know, I realized that I might be wrong here. I mean, I start looking around in the shop and it's like extremely dirty. There's like this toolbox that like falls over in front of the door sometimes. And like, like, like it's not full of tools. It's full of like nuts and bolts that the guys might use sometimes, you know, and they go all over the place, greasing oil all over the place. And it was, it was the dispatcher was, I actually woke him up a couple of times at his, where he's supposed to work. So, and they had a particular issue there where there was one service advisor that was doing great because he got everything and it was set up that way. Cause it was, they were doing a lot of aftermarket stuff through sales. So he got to handle that. And you know, he's, and when you're a senior guy, you got a lot of customers. So that that's understandable. But he also, in my opinion, what I saw, you know, maybe there's some bias there, but it seemed like his tickets were always rise to the top of the stack above everybody else's and that was, that was a collaborative agreement among most of the other service writers in that particular location. So it was really hard to make money there. It was really hard to beat the draw and the draw wasn't, wasn't that great. And then when I started looking at the pay plan, I started analyzing it a little bit. I realized that, and it eludes me what it was, but the metrics were set up in such a way that if you succeeded in one, the other one naturally had to drop. Kind of like if you, you know, if you, if you sell more maintenance work, your ELR goes down, so if you're paid off, like the quantity of maintenance work and the ELR, like they'll never be in balance, you know? So it was kind of set up in a way where you really can't quite win. And it also suffered from some managerial issues there. The parts department actually stopped talking to the service department for a while. They locked their door. And that was, and like, I went in, I tried to go to the parts department, like, what's going on? They're like, oh, they're on like strike or something. They don't want us in there anymore. Like you can call them, you can email them, but they don't want you to go into the parts department. So there was a lot of stuff like that going on there. So yeah, that was, there's a plenty of nightmare stories there. I've told it on social media a couple of times about a particular truck that, that was sold. There's work sold for a lot of money and I can tell that story if you're interested. But yeah, I want to hear that. Okay. So this is, this is what turned me off to the dealership in all. I mean, I was already kind of looking because I wasn't making much money anymore. And I just felt like I can do that. And I felt like I made a mistake going there. So, but this is, this is the, this is the moment that I said, okay, I need to, I need to figure something else out for myself because it just didn't sit right with me. Customer bought $4,000 and some change worth the repairs and maintenance. So that all that work is getting done. This particular technician who I did not care for one bit, he had a very nice thing going. And the nice thing that he had going is that he had an apprentice tech that he was training. And every flat rate hour that apprentice tech turned was hours in his pocket. And that turned into him. I just told the story on TikTok. It's funny. He was cooking chili in his bay and his big pot. He wasn't doing work anymore because the other guy was doing all the work for him. He'd be in there like painting the axle to his Jeep and working on his own stuff all the time. Never worked on customer stuff nine times out of 10. Well, he brought the ticket out to me and he said, this one's done. Ready to go. He left at two o'clock pretty much every single day. So it was time for him to go home. So he comes out to my desk. He's like, Hey, this is all done. I'm like, all right, great. So I booked it out and everything, call the customer customer wants to pick up late, like have the keys up to the sales department. That's cool. Especially you spent that much money. So I went ahead and charged the customer $4,000 and some I changed over the phone. I'm like, I'm going to go grab this car and make sure the car wash was done. Right. I want to make sure I walk out there. And one of the things we were fixing was the headlight harnesses were getting replaced. I get out there and the front grill is off the vehicle. The headlights are not in salt. So the vehicle's not complete. I was told it was complete.
33:15 Jeff Compton Not even close to being washed either, obviously. Obviously. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
33:18 Chris Craig They definitely didn't wash it yet. That would have been like the icing on the cake. We sprayed water in there and stuff with a pressure washer. But so I'm like, great. And I mean, we're, we're very close to closing time. So, and this customer's in route. So I go up to the manager. I'm like, this is well above me. I'm not dealing with this issue anymore. I will help, but I, you know, I need, the manager needs to know. So I go to the manager. I'm like, hey man, here's the situation. I gave it all to him and he goes, well, he calls one of the technicians up. He goes, hey, go put the parts back in that vehicle. He goes, don't tell the customer. I said, what do you mean don't tell the customer? Because I should say before that, I verified from the parts department that the parts, like the harness and stuff had not arrived yet. So the work has not been completed. So come to find out that's what the manager wanted to do. So that's what the manager did. I ended up calling that customer later on my personal cell phone and telling him what happened and we got him set straight. You know, nobody, nobody was my number one fan in that shop when I did that, especially for management, but that's what I felt like I needed to do. No, totally. And that, that's essentially what happened is the technician told the apprentice to put the old harnesses back in it simultaneously to him telling me it's done. And the old apprentice, the apprentice didn't get around to doing it. So he skipped that. The apprentice skipped that and didn't do it. That's how I found out. Now that apprentice would have put that vehicle together. That car with the old parts would have truck would have went to that customer with a $4,000 tab and nobody would have known until it came back.
34:40 Jeff Compton And still, yeah. So, and still broken and then it comes back in and here's a, here's a comeback. Why is it still, was it misdiagnosed? Oh no, it was still, it was diagnosed correctly. Like it didn't need the harnesses. We just didn't install the harnesses in even though the customer paid for it.
34:54 Chris Craig Man, that's, that's, Or they say something else is wrong and say, well, I couldn't have known that this was broken until I fixed this.
35:01 Jeff Compton Yeah, that's, I mean, I've seen some sketchy stuff. I really have not. I haven't seen that. I've seen, I've seen some, so my biggest deal was I worked with a lot of guys that sold and I sold it to, you know, flushes, right? And here's the thing. A flush is, is sometimes a hard enough sell to sell to a customer when they can't necessarily see that anything was done. I'm talking like an induction service and induction, right? It's really hard sometimes to make that pitch that it actually does anything to make the car run better, whatever. I'm not here to discuss that. It's really hard to sell them when guys are not even doing it. That's right. Right.
35:41 Chris Craig That's definitely right.
35:43 Jeff Compton That's so when you have a customer that comes back and we all have comebacks. I've never met a perfect tech in my life. I've never talked to a perfect shop owner, perfect dealer. Yeah. Where, but when you come back and it's like the second tech has to go in, that was my role a lot of time was back cleanup and you go and you find that something hasn't been done. Ah, it's a slippery slope, right? It's different if it's like somebody forgot to plug something in or whatever. Yeah. Or all, but when you can go in and you can prove that something was never even done. Yeah. There's a art build or a labor art build. It puts you in a really bad spot and that's how I see animosity happen between so many techs within a shop. That's my big beef with when guys want to talk about team pay. I'm not a proponent of that. I'm not a fan of that. It doesn't work. It's a pipe dream in my opinion. It's really bad. It causes some real cancer within a shop. So when you, so you phone this customer on your personal cell phone. Yeah. And explain to him what happened, even though he's already like, he didn't that, did that cost you your job?
36:45 Chris Craig No, it didn't. It didn't cost me my job. I left that job on my own. I ended up finding a work at another dealership and I put my notice in, work my notice through, and I ended up leaving. So it didn't cost me my job or anything like that. I don't think they could have because again, another high turnover location.
36:59 Jeff Compton What are you going to do? But I mean, I can't think of like some managers would be like, I don't care. You know, like it's, it's always like, we got Oz behind the curtain and I don't want him showing, you know, our inept ability to, to, to do what we're tasked to do. You know, I don't want him. It's always like, okay, here's the, here's the line we're all going to sell. Everybody stand behind that, right? So that's yeah, I would have thought, I mean, kudos to you for doing the right thing, you know, because I believe that that's at the end of the day, what we're all supposed to do. And that's talking about sticking your neck in on a line, man. Good for you.
37:36 Chris Craig Yeah. I mean, I thought I kind of thought it was going to be my job to be honest with you. And I was at peace with that because I just, I couldn't, I couldn't let that go. I really couldn't let that go. You know, and when I called and talked to him, I won't, I won't give his personal details, but he was going through some things. So he definitely needed a leg up at that time. And he's like, I'm upset it happened, but I'm so glad you told me. He goes, because my headlights are already failed.
38:00 Jeff Compton So let's see, see how we've all seen from our side of the standpoint, how just being honest is so much easier, easier to work so much better than just trying to continue to snowball the customer, right? Like I just, I think this industry has gotten itself in part of the problem because when we do make a mistake, instead of just saying we made a mistake, we try to cover it up. We try to, we try to do something else, right? Blossom over it. Yeah. And, and that's never been, I don't think that's ever helped us other than maybe the bottom line, but I mean, you could, if you get into the metrics of, you know, customer's faith in a vehicle brand or a dealership or whatever, does it really, you know, help the bottom line? I don't think so. People have to have faith in what it is that they're driving and what they're buying and where they're taking it to. And if they don't have that faith, you might get them a few times for a little bit, but you're not going to get them long-term, right?
38:55 Chris Craig That's exactly where I was going to go. You said the word long-term. So that those actions, the glossing over it and trying to save it, salvage it, get a little money on this ticket and whatever we're going to do. It does help the bottom line that day in the short term, very, very short term. It does not in the long term because you're not going to retain that customer. That customer is not going to come to you again. That customer is going to tell their friends you suck. They're going to go on Google. They're going to bash you. Other people are going to see that and say, you're not going to go there in the long term. That is not going to benefit that shop. And I think that that's really one of the major problems out there. And I don't think many, in my experience, many people are looking at the long term. They're looking at the short term. And the only way to make any kind of capital gain in the short term is through manipulation tactics and manipulation tactics can be manipulation by fear or aspirations or promotions, all these different sales tactics you see out there like buy one, get one free. That's a manipulation short term gain tactic. An example of fear tactic is if you don't get an oil change today, your engine might not run tomorrow. That's a fear tactic. Aspiration would be, hey, so-and-so bought this product and saw these great results. Maybe you can too. But those manipulation tactics can also be used by poor leaders, i.e. poor managers. And what they'll do is they'll use it to get results out of their employees that don't care about these managers because they don't want to follow them as a leader, but they have a job and they need to get paid. So they use the same thing. They're like, hey, our metrics are down. And if we don't get them up this week, we're going to have to let someone go. Fear manipulation. Hey, if you guys want to work extra hard today and get your metrics up, maybe Friday will take an hour short or I'll pay for lunch or something. That's an incentive manipulation. So it goes both ways and it's all short-term benefit. If you want long-term benefit, you have to think long-term. You have to be a good leader. And by being a good leader, you have to take care of the people to your left, take care of the people to your right, the people below you, the people above you, be a team player, actually help your team, encourage them, empower them. And that's what's going to get you that long-term benefit from your team that actually want to be there for you, not the paycheck, but for you and in turn be there for the customer.
41:06 Jeff Compton So let me ask you, because you're a guy that's been exposed to a lot of that and seen it go wrong. What is your take or your theory or maybe do you disagree or agree with me on this? I think when we get to see a lot of that aggressive sales and incentivize pay driving, I want to say maybe the quality down. Do you think that's because it's a leadership thing or do you think sometimes they put too many cars through and some of the sharks have like a dealership that can, oh, you can really sell here, right? It tracks a different type of tech. Or do you see it's a situation of like what I saw personally at some is when there's too many techs for the amount of work that's coming in, you're not thinking about long-term with that customer of like, okay, this customer you're looking at as I was like, I am going to whack this customer for as much as you can because I may never work on this car again. I may never see this customer again. If I don't sell this now, the guy two days down from me, he's going to sell it and he's going to walk out of here next week with a bonus pay plan, right? He's going to, let's say, you know, well, once you get 40 hours, you round up to whatever, right? Pay your hourly rate. That just drives everybody to manipulate the system, I think. So how do you, Chris, how do you think when you've got incentivize people, and that's because we talk about all the time in the different groups, everybody should have some skin in the game and, you know, flat rate makes guys hustle and flat rate keeps people producing and flat rate. How do you control that when you're on, everybody's on incentivized? How do you police it so that quality and long-term playing long ball is still in the mindset of everybody on board?
42:59 Chris Craig Sure. So, you know, it's going to vary shop to shop and how you're going to fix the actual specific issues about why someone's getting more pay than the other, if they're ripping off the system, if they're not. So it's going to vary shop to shop. But I think it does come back to good leadership. And I think that's the reason because if a manager actually has their eyes open, they're actually paying attention, they can see, you know, this one technician turns, we'll say, 120 hours a week and the rest of everyone else is turning 60 to 80 hours a week. Why is that? Instead of saying that's really good, I'm loving how much money I'm making. Why is that? Oh, OK. It seems like they're ripping off the police station and selling a bunch of transmission services. They don't need to be done. These vehicles never get these services, but they're selling it to a police station. That's probably why that service advisor over there is like doubling the growth of everybody else, by the way. That looks like maybe I should have a conversation there, some engagement as a leader to tell them to stop doing that. And also, I will do my homework and look at the repair orders and the invoices and do my own personal audit, identify that and take care of that. And that means maybe it's a sit down conversation, some sort of corrective action, whatever it takes. And eventually, if you can't fix that problem, if you can't because that's cancerous to the rest of the team. Oh, that's why you lose other people. Instead of losing a plethora of good people, you might eventually have to cut the one bad apple
44:19 Jeff Compton from the tree. But that manager, if he's on some kind of bonus as well of his own shop, maybe he doesn't want to see the golden goose get kicked down the road. Right. That's what I've seen that firsthand personally myself. And I'll tell you for anybody listening, and I got to remember that a lot of people that listen to this are not dealership people. They're former dealership people or they're certainly not like the service managers of dealerships are not listening to this podcast. I don't think a ton. I'd like to see that change. When you have that person and you have that situation going on, if you thought that maybe your people were lacking some confidence in your ability as a leader before, when you make that okay, when you allow it, when you set that as the example and you try to hide it, you have no hope of ever leading that group again, ever. I don't care who you are, what kind of courses you take. If I've seen you to be that way and you know that you're that, I'm not going to follow you into war. There's no way. I know that you don't have it. Right. And that's my beef with the incentivized thing is like, I don't believe that managers in a dealership should be, I think they should get a salary. And I don't think that they should necessarily get a bonus on production because I've seen them too many times. I've seen service managers come in, fire some texts, bring some texts from where they used to work that are big producers, big aggressive sales to drive up their numbers. Right. It's like, come follow me into the promised land because watch this, I'm going to get over here and I'm going to, you're going to be able to sell this and that and the other thing. Pretty soon before you know it, you've got a whole bunch of people that maybe were core people at the place that you brought them into. They left. Right. And then you've got this new manager that brought two people, whatever, two texts, one tech. It doesn't matter. Yeah. You killed the culture within the shop. Even if it wasn't that great, you just killed it. Yep. And you're now stuck with a manager that nobody is going to follow as a leader and you've got awesome core people, people that are listened into this. It doesn't have to be a dealership. If you run a shop and you think that that is the, the right thing to do when you look at somebody for what their production numbers are as a manager, you're going down a very treacherous slope in my opinion. I just put that out there. Just, you know, I'm just a mechanic though, right? I'm not a manager.
46:43 Chris Craig Well, you open a Pandora's box and it's a very, very interesting Pandora's box. And, and the thing is, is you can take that set manager and you can put them on a salary, but the fear from an ownership or general manager perspective is that quality or maybe not quality, but production is going to go down. That's why we're afraid to take technicians off flat rate. That's where we're afraid to pay our advisors by the hour. We think that everybody's just going to be like, well, I'm not going to work anymore. But, you know, if you go out to like roads that are being paved and you go out to jobs that plumbing's required and stuff, that's not necessarily the case. And they're not incentivized by any kind of pay plan that it requires that. But, you know, setting that aside, you know, maybe we, maybe we incentivize our service managers off of different metrics, not primarily monetarily, maybe CSI, maybe CSI, because that tells us that we're satisfying our customers. That is important. That's a team effort, but maybe we incentivize our service managers off of quarterly surveys that our employees fill out about the climate of current management. Maybe we have morale surveys, questions like that, different metrics that we can, they're less tangible, a little more harder to measure, but anything can have a percentage, or you can actually see an increase or decrease quarter to quarter, month to month. And if we see a morale drop issue and we could also maybe incentivize our managers off of employee retainment, you know, technician retainment. Oh, you lost three technicians this month. Sorry, that bonus ain't going to be there for you. Oh, you mean to tell me that your retention went up like 10% month over month for the last three months? Okay, congratulations. Here you go. Maybe we, maybe we got to change the pay plan a little bit. I like that idea. So as you progress to this store, this is store number three, you go on to store number four. Did it ever get good for Chris as an advisor? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The next store got good. The next store got good. I was back in my element. I was back into a Ford store. It got good. And it was nice for a while because it was, it was a well put together organization. It was, it was dress right dress, like we say in the military. It was, everything made sense. And it was my vibe. Like it was, everything was, there was order to things. Everybody was on the same sheet of music. You know, we had our meetings running, like, like it was running great. I can't really complain about anything I experienced in the
49:10 Jeff Compton Ford side of the house there. It was, it was great. And, and so talk about what was the differences on the shop floor, the why, why do you think that that worked better? Or was it like, cause you know, me, I'm always going to go back to, I want to know what the tech level was like at that one store versus the other, their tech attitude, their tech perspective. Why did it just work better? I mean, you're going to say better leadership and I understand that, but you know, better leadership
49:36 Chris Craig leads to general better attitude amongst all the people involved. But tell me how that sets up the one difference versus the other from a tech perspective. Yeah. So, you know, I will start with leadership, but there's some other stuff in there. I mean, the manager there, I have a lot of respect for this manager, even though things kind of went sideways between me and this management team. And we can get into what, what occurred there because it ultimately left him I leaving that place. But he, he treated those technicians like family, man. He took them out to lunch all the time. He was constantly in the shop, walking through. They needed anything that happened. They even took, like they were talking about how it was kind of dim in that shop. They're like, all right, rip all the lights down. We were placed with like double fluorescent lights. Now it's like so bright, you need sunglasses in this place. It was a very clean shop. They had a team that came through and cleaned the floors. They had to put the lifts up every single night because they had a team that came through with like what, what are those things are called? This clean and mop the floors and everything. Very clean shop, very engaged leadership team that kept other technicians that were kind of falling behind in check. There was a support system. The foreman was not making flat rate hours, which I think was awesome. He was on a salary based pay, which made him to be able to be a complete support asset, which I, in my opinion, that's what a shop foreman is, a support asset to the technicians in the shop. You know, a subject matter expert, somebody that can help out when things go sideways, somebody that can get you, you know, out of the hole when you're in the hole. And there was just good morale in there. There was, they were just treated better. They were just plain flat out treated better. No tech trying to be the next Gork Ramsey making chili, right? Just. Right. There was nothing, nothing like that going on there. I mean, it was the climate and culture in that particular shop was really good and they didn't have high turnover either. So that made technicians happy because here's the thing. What happens when you hire several service advisors over and over? Well, now as a technician, you're training several service advisors over and over because if you have turnover on the service lane, it tells me managers are not training people. And guess who gets to do that because they need to make flat rate hours. It's the technicians. Yeah. And then unfortunately they can necessarily get trained wrong by the techs, right? They can get me told, Oh no, that gets done this way. And that they don't know. No, the only thing they can teach them is like, Hey, you got to sell a diagnostic. Don't forget to do that next time.
51:54 Jeff Compton Yeah. Yeah. And it can be tough because I know I saw a lot of one dealer I was at, they tended to take guys, kids that worked in the quick loop and made them service advisors. Sounds crazy. Yeah. You know, I'm sure I'm not the only tech that's ever worked in the dealership that didn't see that happen because you know, the quick lane kind of operated on its own. Yep. I'd hustle. So it was like, Oh, they're kind of booking the customer and taking the filling the computer out pretty soon. Oh, well they just, you know, they did an oil change invoice. Let's give them some custom work to sell. And before, you know what, they're sitting there going, I can get bonus what? And then all the lights go off and they start to hear the cash register bell and they're like selling big jobs. That's good. As long as it's all on level or it's
52:42 Chris Craig on the board. It should be. Right. Right. Do you think that's the key point of a dealership running properly? Do you think it's the service department? Yeah. I mean, I would probably argue yes. So here's the thing about the service department, right? Is the service department sells every car after the first sale, right? When a salesperson sells a car to a brand new customer, great. They're going to come in for an oil change. If they like that experience, they'll probably buy their next car from you, but they didn't come in. This is where I break the internet when I say it, but that novice maintenance service writer, that entry level service writer sells more cars and is more important to customer retention than most people really understand because if that customer does not like their experience, just getting their simple oil change, the chances of them buying their next car from that dealership is very, very slim. They spend more time in that service department that they do anywhere else. They go to that sales department every 60 or 70,000 miles. Even if it's a stellar experience, they love the sales team over there. Some customers can overcome, I don't like your service department, but nine times out of 10, they're not going to care. They're going to take their vehicle. They're going to trade in somewhere else. They're going to try something
53:51 Jeff Compton different. So I got a story. I'll tell you about that. The perspective that when the light bulb went off for me, a girlfriend at the time bought a brand new Pontiac Sunfire in probably 2005. Okay. Went to the dealership for first brand new car, had never owned a nice car, bought this Sunfire. She has a car about a week and the starter acts up. So she takes it back to the dealership. They give her a rental car to drive around in. She drives around in a rental car. It took a couple of days because it was brand new to get the starter in. So it took a couple of days. She got her starter. She put it in the car. They kept the car overnight to make sure that it was just a starter. You know how that goes, right? Tech probably started it a hundred times to make sure that the new car is only brand new. I don't even think it had 5,000 kilometers on it, like 3000 miles. It's pretty new. She goes to pick the car up and all she could notice, and all she was disappointed about was that the back doors weren't locked. Somebody had locked the back doors of the car. That was what she made it. So the sales lady that had sold her the car, she sent her a bouquet of flowers and the whole thing. And then of course trashed the CSI report for the fact that somebody, and I'm just pulling my hair out going, you have no idea what it is like in my world, because I could tell you how the doors are probably unlocked. It's probably because when they pushed it in, they rolled the windows down, grabbed the door frame, four people pushed it into the bay to get it. And somebody just forgot to lock those doors. But it just blew my mind how there's the salesman, salesperson, excuse me, sales lady, they got all the accolades. Such a great experience. People that are responsible for that car. And she couldn't say enough good things about the sales. And I'm like sitting there going, why do you not get mad about the sales lady? She sold you a car that within the first three months didn't even start. But it's just those rotten service department people, like she had nothing nice to say about them. And I was just like, people are never going to get it. So that's why for me, I so side with what you just said about it's built in service. It's not built in sales. It's not by accident that we can replace a sales department with vending machines to sell cars. That's our reality is people are going to order cars online, they're going to walk in, they're going to pick them up. They're barely going to have any interaction with a salesperson. There is always going to be a service person for a long time that's going to be fixing their car. Now I've seen dealerships try with kiosks. Have you seen that yet? I have not particularly seen it, but it has appeared in my comment section that there's people that feel that there's some ferocity to that, some validity, if you will. Statistically, apparently, they do very well for customers picking services, yes or no, selling, that kind of thing. It's not much of sales. It's like ordering food now. It's the same principle. You can get a kiosk at McDonald's. But that will stick in my mind till the day I'm gone about what my girlfriend at the time, how she was so mad about what the service did. And I'm like, that makes no sense to me. Because here I am, I know how hard that is. I know how hard that job is in the service department. And there's somebody that's just like so mad about something that's so insignificant, so insignificant in the greater scheme of things. But the person that sold you the car, like A, that saleswoman doesn't remember you a month later. You're just another person that they sold the car to. She can't do anything about the reality that your starter failed on your brand new car. She can't get Hart to come there any faster. That's not her department. She couldn't tell you how a starter works. It just frustrated me.
57:47 Chris Craig Well, you just sang the song of the Bayne of every service advisor. Service advisors constantly, because here's the thing, as a service advisor, you handle everything, flows through you. You're like a ball joint, if you will, for our technicians out there. I feel like a lot of technicians, you pivot all the time between parts, between service, between men, between customer. You are the liaison, the central, most focal point, and you are the face of the dealership. So when things go wrong, it's your fault. But when things go wrong, it's usually, unless you suck, there's something outside of your control. That's something like, I got a survey one time. I'm so sour about the survey, because it was a survey that tipped me over the edge in the last day of the month and lost me a bonus that was well into the forefingers. I mean, it was going to be a good month. And she tipped me over the edge. And her survey was complaining about the quality of her previous vehicle that she owned that wasn't even from the same manufacturer. And they accepted this survey. The OEM accepted the survey because they don't read them. You know what I mean? They didn't read it. There was like no audit process I could go through. They're not even talking about your OEM. They're talking about like your service at a different dealership. Slammed me on a survey. I mean, this lady was kind of crazy. She definitely was crazy, but it cost me so much of my bonus. And it felt extremely unfair. But that is the story of a service advisor right there. What you would subscribe to happening, that happens all the time.
59:09 Jeff Compton So for me, I'm famous for saying plenty of times, even when I worked in the dealerships, after I've been over the dealerships and I've been talking online for years, is to me CSI is nothing more than a dangling carrot. It is nothing more than made up money that, because I'll tell you right now, the dealers that I saw that chase CSI, they didn't make the kind of money that I saw the dealers that didn't chase CSI. Now we can talk if you want about if it's long ball or short ball that they're playing, I don't know. From a dealership standpoint, I always felt like if I peel a customer off, if I go and sell a car tomorrow, I just got one back.
59:47 Chris Craig Right. See, it's interesting you say that. It's not to cut you off, but it's very interesting because I had the opposite experience. Yeah. The best shop turning the most amount of money with
59:58 Jeff Compton the least amount of turnover was the shop chasing the CSI out of everywhere I worked. Wow. See, I had an opposite experience, man. I saw so many dealerships that sold so many more cars than we did that they were not chasing CSI. I'm not going to sit here and say that we were chasing CSI either because we weren't. We were just, but we were thorough with our inspections. We were aggressive with our sales, our techs, a lot of money. We were good. The dealerships I saw that sold a lot of cars that had lower CSI, their numbers were still good too because they were chasing that number. I worked at a dealership for my tenure, the longest one. They couldn't sell a car. They could have had a person's caravan break down in front of them and sales would have dropped the ball and not been able to get them in the moment. They were that bad. But yeah, I digress. It doesn't matter. For me, CSI, I always thought it was like, if you had to do what you had to do to get those kind of surveys, because you know how it can be. They take the best ones, throw them away. Take the worst ones, throw them away. You're supposed to be graded on a curve, a median, whatever you want to call it. Crazy people fill them out. Right. Somebody can be like, I picked it up and it wasn't like there was, they did a free detailing and there was a piece of gum left in the tray in the back of the thing. Something that they're not even responsible for. That can totally destroy your survey. So for me, I still, CSI is just always a dangling carrot. The last dealer I was at, the Nissan one, they went from in a six year span, they went from having one of the highest rating in the country, this little store, to having the lowest within six years. Now again, there's an ownership change there. There's a whole culture change. It's a lot of their story. We could do part two and talk about that. We'll talk about nightmares. It was, well, we made the news. We were so bad. Nice. Yeah. He was famous for selling oil changes for life. And then so you would buy a new car or you'd buy a used car, you get the oil change for life plan and you'd sign this big agreement. The oil change was free if you did the other maintenance on the cars. If you didn't do anything else, he would void the oil change for life program. Of course. Right. So we had customers that would come in. It's like after their fourth free one, they're like, we'd give them an estimate for, you know, a brake fluid flush, a brake service. You know, you got a headlight ball boats that are white plates. And they'd be like, no, I just want my free oil change. They'd be like, okay. They'd pull out the agreement and say, you signed right here, which you know how that is when people buy cars. They're so euphoric. They don't necessarily sign. So they'd be like, okay, well, sorry, your oil changes are not free anymore. Well, the customers didn't lose their minds. Well, what do I got to spend to get my next oil change for free? Well, can you buy an air filter today? Oh yeah, I can buy how much an air filter? $15. So if I buy a $15 filter, I get a $35 oil change for free. Yeah. Okay. Give me that air filter. So it became a running joke, Chris, is that we would like you, the next ticket you get handed oil change, change air filter. You'd pull it out of the air, open the air filter box. It was like brand new, throw it in the trash. We're sitting here going, there's no way this makes money. There's no possible way this makes money. And so what it really killed was it killed the, it attracted a different type of customer to the dealership. Right? Obviously it attracted the type of customer that's like, I don't want to pay for maintenance. Right. So CSI kind of to me has been the same way. It's always like saying, okay, we're going to write your dealership a check for a quarter of a million dollars. Right. That's a hypothetical number. I didn't see that person or know if it's accurate or not. I don't care. But you got to get whatever 85, 89, you know, whatever the number they want it to be. Oh, you got 84. You get nothing. That to me was why it was always, it was a dangling carrot. Right. Because it's, you're not, I know that you're in control of it to a large extent, but I think that when you still leave, especially the way, you know, how people are now, when you leave so much of it in the hands of the customer's mood and their attitude and their experience that maybe you're not in control of, just like your survey response you talked about, to me, it's something I will never, if I'm in a management role, I'm not chasing it. I'm not even going to put much effort into it. I'm going to put my people there. I'm going to have them well trained, well-tooled. They're going to fix cars. They're going to, you know, do thorough inspections. They're going to sell work and the CSI will be whatever it is, you know, or even, you know, if we take it to the Google or the dealership context, the Google review thing is hard for me sometimes to really take all that serious from my standpoint. Right. Because it's like, and I understand other people much smarter than me in marketing and whatnot explain it to me. But when I see guys and they're like, oh, I got a one-star review and it becomes like this thing of how do I get that eliminated? I go to them, call me nuts, but I don't understand what's the, why is this such
01:05:01 Chris Craig a, why is this such a tragedy? Right. Like other than the CSI money, why was it so important for you? Like you talk about the CSI, why was that so important for you in the dealership? For that particular dealership I was working at, they were, you know, and this is above me, but my understanding is that, you know, you can set up certain programs with the OEM and they give you very sizable bonuses for good CSI, you know, that's, that's the route they chose to go. So that was their heavy focus. And, and the reason why that store actually did that very well is because it was owner driven. The owner of that store wanted good CSI and he was super engaged in that CSI score. So it became very important in the pay structure, the pay plans, honestly, it was all right. If I sold a lot of work this month, as long as my CSI was good, I was grinning because they paid handsomely off of CSI. But what I found through that is once I figured out how to actually, because none of the other stores ever cared about CSI, this is my first time ever caring about my customers. That's sad to say, but you know, the other stores were that like slam drive, let's get sales. I don't care if they ever come back. I just need you to sell everything you can. So I came from that. I learned all that. And then I came here and I'm like, okay, this isn't going to work here because I got to make these people actually like me. So I learned the customer service side of it really, really well at the store. I learned a little piece everywhere I went. That was, that was what I learned there was the customer service piece. And I learned all the tactics that you can utilize to satisfy your customer. What I discovered from that is that metrics like my hours per RO, my one line repair orders, my effective labor rate, my sales numbers gross, all that stuff started to go up from what I used to actually see because I was serving my customers so much better and being so much more thorough with my walk around, sitting down with my customer, taking the time to explain things. I was actually selling more work on accident. Like I wasn't trying that hard to sell the work. Like I wanted to sell the work because it's fun to sell the work, but I was really going for that CSI score, but I actually found naturally both of them progressing upward. But that's not really because of CSI. That's because I was providing good customer service. CSI is a bit of a dangling carrot because it's really, really stupid to sometimes with the questions they ask. Like I got a bad survey one time because they, they said I was great. They hit five stars in the survey, but one of the questions they answered was about the waiting area amenities in their coffee. And they put it down to zero because they didn't have decaf that day. And that naturally drove that to a four and a half star from the five star. And it's like, I, you know, I don't run the purchase orders or order the coffee or I don't manage that area. So why am I being rated on that? That's a dealership level issue, but it's affecting the service advisors pay. So I provide good customer service. You should always do that, but you should be
01:07:45 Jeff Compton graded on what you can control. Yeah. It's a 1000%. I've seen them say that, right? Oh, there's no diet coke in the complimentary soft drink machine, right? There's no, oh my God, we brought you a vehicle that three other dealerships in the local area had not been able to solve that noise. And we did it and you trash us on the CSI because we don't have a machine go fly a kite, right? Like it's so hard for me to wrap my head around. It's so hard for me. Yep. Yep. That's the stuff that Joe Meen has. Do you think because CSI was such a push at that particular dealership that they just put a pace in that allowed you, like you said, you were able to sit down with your customer, you go through the work order. Is it because CSI was there and it was a goal, did it change the pace and the, I mean, obviously changed the culture, but is that, is it a pace thing that you think you were allowed to spend more time because you didn't have to rush through?
01:08:39 Chris Craig No, not really, because that's, that's part of where the fallout started to happen. There was that, that the pace was becoming unacceptable. It had to be higher and it could have been higher. I could work faster. Like I can work very, very fast, but we were having issues with dispatch in that particular store. Tickets were just not going through the shop very quickly. I'm talking, I did the math one time. I had probably like 2000 plus dollars of pre-sold repair order work sitting in the dispatcher's office for over a week. I mean, this stuff was just not getting put into the shop. So we had a very big bottleneck issue in the dispatch area. So we slowed down because of that. And as a result of that, they saw us slowing down. They saw the sales numbers going down. And while the CSI was still good, you know, they start seeing the sales go down. So the flow was becoming an issue. But I need to go back to your question and answer it more accurately. If, in my opinion, if we're going to focus on customer service, you do need to allow that time. You can't rack stack, you know, five appointments out the door, like I used to at Ford, I go out there with a clipboard. These guys got to be the work. So I'm like, okay, okay, okay. And I'm getting all their stuff. And then I write five tickets after they leave, which is not the technical correct way to do that. But it's how you do it when you're slammed. You can't effectively service your customers properly doing it that way. You need to allow yourself like 20 minutes with each customer to do a proper walk around and talk about those tires are down to 30 seconds. Talk about, you know, the air filter and the stuff that you can check and make sure those wipers are good. Say, hey, you know, I'm looking at your history here. You are due for that 30,000 mile service. Would you like to get that taken care of today? You know, sit down and actually service your customer like that. And they will appreciate that so much. And I'll add one more thing into the customer service aspect. Just call them or text them one time while their vehicle's in the shop. You do that. And I promise you that survey is going to be good because I promise you not a lot of people are doing that. It's going to blow their mind that you actually talk to them before
01:10:30 Jeff Compton the vehicle was ready. Right. So can we talk about why the bottleneck was there? Because I've got some theories on why it happens. But I want to hear when you say you guys were having one and you had pre-sold retail work sitting there, what was, why was it backing up? Because to me, anywhere I worked, man, they pushed that through first. Like it would have been done by Monday morning. Yeah. And we did, you know, the warranty would have always been towards the end
01:10:56 Chris Craig of the week. Right. So why did that happen, Chris? So I'll be real here because, and I'll start this by saying, if these gentlemen ever do listen to this podcast, I have the utmost respect, even though things went sour, even though certain things were said and done that should not have happened in my opinion, I have the utmost respect. But the issue was, and I mean this in the most respectful way, was a, a gross lack of experience in that dispatch office. So this individual had been a service writer for about as long as me, was rapidly promoted to assistant service manager, only because my understanding is there really wasn't much else to pick from. And that individual also became the dispatcher in that same breath. So this person was just kind of overwhelmed with the job. He was learning, he was, in my opinion, still learning to be a manager. He should only still be learning, but he was learning a lot, you know? So he didn't have a lot of experience as a manager. So he's trying to figure that out and he's trying to figure out dispatching out. And what it turned into was, this is how dispatching worked there. The technicians would walk into the dispatch office, they would flip through that repair order stack. I want this, I want that, I want this. And that's
01:12:03 Jeff Compton how it would work. Yeah, that's not good. And that like, I've, I've never worked in a dealership personally where that's happened. I've heard about it. And I don't know, you ever heard of the term parking lot justice? I have heard of that term, yes. So I know for a lot of people that I've worked with, if that was tried, that's how it would have been handled. Now I'm not advocating for that, but what I'm saying is that like, I believe that that never, if there's a stack of work orders, the only person that should be touching it is the service advisors and the dispatch. The techs shouldn't even know, I don't think, what is in that pile. Because otherwise, we all know there's some really good jobs and there's some really crap jobs. Yep. The crap jobs always go to the bottom of the pile. And the crap jobs, unfortunately, a lot of the time that's, Mrs. Jones is squeaking, rattling under warranty, right? That's still within a CSI period of time, all that kind of stuff. That needs to be a priority. We need to fix Mrs. Jones' car, as minuscule a complaint as it is. We can't sell Mrs. Jones, you know, her 20,000, 30,000 miles of service if we never fix Mrs. Jones, you know, squeaking, rattling. Right. I knew we can't do it. So, but I, I would have never thought of you to told me that you had pre-sold retail services sitting there and you couldn't get it in the shop. I mean, I've seen people that are like slammed with warranty work. Yeah. We try to, at my shop, if I call them up and I, you know, we've got transits in our fleet and they're under warranty. And I was to call them up and say, hey, I've got a complaint with one. It's under warranty. They tell me it's probably four months, four weeks before they can even look at it. If I made a phone call and said, I got a transit with this and it's
01:13:44 Chris Craig out of warranty, I'd be in there the next morning. Right. So the fact that you had pre-sold work and it wasn't even going in the shop. Yeah. Wow. Well, the reason, the reason I know specifically that I had at least about that much pre-sold work is I tracked myself for one, but this particular day, this manager had sent an email blast out to everybody and highlighted a few of our metrics for the month, about halfway through the month and said, Hey, these all need to come up. These metrics are not looking good. Yada, yada, yada. I need better performance out of you people. Like we're going to have to start moving some things around and all this stuff. I very calmly responded to that email with five repair order numbers, with dollar amounts of pre-sold work. And I also put how long they've been in the dispatch office because it was the dispatcher sending this email. And I just very elegantly wrote, I feel that I said something like, I strongly feel that our numbers would be much higher than they currently are. If we could find ways to get work through the shop in a more effective manner. And that was the end of that conversation. But you're telling the truth, right? Yeah. I mean, because it was already sold. I was extremely good when I got to the Lincoln side of the house in this particular dealership. I was very good at selling that pre-sold work. I had a system down. I would do this walk around with the customer, bring them in, sit them down in my office, pull up their information. I studied my appointments before they came in. I already knew what I was going to talk to this customer about. I already knew I had their stuff together, but I pretended like, oh, hey, look, you got a 30,000 mile service. I would discuss it with them and I would sell those services almost every single time. I mean, I was very successful doing that. That's the best time to sell to a customer when they're
01:15:15 Jeff Compton checking that vehicle in. Yeah. For sure. Because a lot of it, you know how it is, they're just driving around, they're not paying attention. Like if the wiper blade is still clear in the windshield, they're not really necessarily noticing that the tires are getting low. Right? If the rate is high enough, they're not hearing the brakes, right? But they might notice it, walk around and point the brake dust out. You might say, hey, you might want to have that checked, right? There's probably some service that needs to be… I can see how your manager slash dispatch, you know, would start to take that as a personal attack. And it's sad that it is, but when you, you're just nothing more than a prepared coworker that's saying, hey, our metrics are down, but I've got pre-sold work waiting to get in the shop and it's not going there. Yeah. Yeah. I can totally rate that because it was the same as me. We'd have monthly meetings and it'd be like, okay guys, we're having too many comebacks, you know, yada yada, this is not being done right. And I'd sit in these meetings and eat my cold pizza and, you know, do the monthly training video. And I'd be like, okay, can I leave? Because, you know, my comebacks are not nearly as much. And the usual suspects, the repeat offenders were sitting there with you in the same time and you know, they're responsible for the comebacks, so they're responsible for this and that other thing. And it was to the point of where that killed my morale, right? So it's hard. I've said it before, it's hard to call yourself a team player in this business. It really is. It is. You know, if you want to be incentivized, like you're a very self-motivated individual, obviously, right? It's hard to think sometimes for the team. And then have you seen, because I know I've seen it, situations where dealerships, the culture is set up where they may talk like it's a team, but
01:16:58 Chris Craig you're not a teammate. Like it's every dog for himself. You seen that? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, hey, you know, really, you know, we're co-workers, but really this is more like a family. I mean, you guys spend more time in this store when you spend anywhere else with your families. You're practically like brothers and sisters already. So this is really like a family here. By the way, I ordered pizza for lunch. Yeah,
01:17:21 Jeff Compton I bet you that. Well, see, what I found is what the game that I would see is I would see an advisors that was a race, right? They're supposed to start at, you know, eight o'clock, everybody's supposed to start at eight. We had an advisor that show up at like six. He'd take all the night drops. Yeah. I saw that too many times. If they weren't even his appointment, he put them in his name. Yeah. Right. Then he gets this. And from the tech standpoint, we're like, why don't you just handle that? Yeah. Just handle it. But it became a situation of like, okay, so his work orders traditionally sold higher than the other three. Yeah. So then management didn't do anything about it. Now, what he was doing a lot of the time was he didn't even have authorization. Never call and sell it afterward. Oh, yeah. Okay. So you were in for your semi-annual service and, you know, we rotated tires while your tires were off. We noticed your brakes were shot. We replaced your front pads and rotors or your rear pads and rotors. We flushed your brake fluid and we also did, you know, a fuel service. That'll be a thousand bucks because they'd done that every year for the last three years running. Yeah. So he just made the assumption that they would do it. And when, when the customers were not upset with him, oh, he was the golden goose. Yeah. When he didn't have authorization and they had to stroke the customer a rebate or a check or whatever. Then of course he got a little slap on the hand,
01:18:54 Chris Craig but I mean, he never anything, never anything that held anything to a standard, of course. No, no. So that's what I say. It's not, when I see that go on, then I'm not a team player. I'm not. Well, it's interesting you bring up team players because I'll give you some insights at the service advisors side of the house and why, why service advisors are typically not team players. I'll start with a story and then I'll tell you what, what I think is going on. So I left for military training, a two week training rotation. I have to do that every single year in the summertime. So I leave for my two week training rotation. I set up everything. All my tickets were in order notes and everything were documented. I had a stack of invoices. Like I didn't have much left in the shop. All you had to do is charge the customer, give them their keys. The stack, right? I do my two weeks of training. I come back. The stack is gone. Great. I pull up my gross state, generally the same. That's weird. I look at the service advisor that closed out the tickets gross raised exponentially. That service advisor took all those tickets, put it in that service advisor's name and close those tickets while I was away on military training. Mind you, and there was, there was nothing to be said about it. It was very clear and plain day when it happened. So service advisors are not in the same team. That's part of that is training. That's that. It's that. It is that service advisor stole from me. Absolutely. 100% stole from me. But the reason why service advisors most times are not team players and not on the same page is it goes back to leadership and management and then training. So we're not training service advisors. So service advisors are getting hired. They're giving me a clipboard, iPad or whatever, a firm kick to the rear. Hopefully you float out there in the service lane. And they figured out themselves and they figured out by talking to other people that figured it out by themselves. And they all develop a way, right? They figure out a way to write service. They figure out a way to flow, but they don't all float the same way. And I'll give you an example. Some of the old school guys use the notebook things. You can order those notebooks that have the customer name number. They like to do it that way. I didn't like that. I had an Excel spreadsheet I use. Other customers didn't do either one. They just use a DMS. Other customers use the notebook that was on there. Or other service advisors use the notebook that was on their desk. We all had a way of doing it. It wasn't particularly wrong because from perception wise, we were all succeeding in our positions. The issue was is when somebody needed a day off to take their kid to the dentist or I needed to go to the military service, nobody knew how to do my job. It's funny I say that because we're all service advisors, but I did not know how to step into that office and do that other advisor's job because they do it so foreign to the way I do it. It'd be like a German, a French person, someone that speaks Spanish and then English all together trying to make it work. It doesn't. It takes a manager to train all those people with a standard operating procedure. We're all on the same
01:21:39 Jeff Compton sheet of music. Now we can operate as a team. Excellent. Excellent point. And I totally agree. And I think that that's shady, right? So when he goes and closes up your ROs and says, well, I'm going to take that and put it all in my column because I closed it off. Closing it off is not where the work is. Closing it off is where the work was done when you sold the work. I mean, you're the one that made the pitch. You're the one that made the sale. You got the whatever you know. Closing it off is still okay. Yes. You have to be shake the customer's hand, walk them over to the service desk where they pay, whatever. It's worth something. But to say that they're going to take the full value of the ticket? No. I think sometimes as we text, because you hear us talk all the time and I've seen you talk about it in your videos, how when we get right aggressive about being short at time and why does it keep happening to text, you just include me into the
01:22:38 Chris Craig reality that sometimes it's happening to you guys too. It's happening to us at a massive rate. And I'll give you another example. The manager in the first Nightmare Store was, like I said, he was kind of weak in the face of an angry customer. And what he would do to fix a lot of things is he would internalize everything right then and there. Technicians still got paid. Mind you, this is where me and technicians start to kind of dissipate or like kind of come apart on TikTok because it's hard to get this message across in a very short video. So I'm going to say here, what happens when we internal a ticket, depending on service advisors' pay plan, is it gets internal, which means as a technician, like if you're my technician, you get your three hours on this job. But when that internal happens, it's charged to store policy. And depending on your pay plan, you just might see a negative number on your paycheck when you're a service advisor because you gave something away for free. Now you didn't. Your manager did. But you did on your ticket. So to pay, so this is where technicians like we dissipate because they'll complain about losing time and stuff like that. They're like, oh, they're just giving it away. Well, what happens is I technically, what happens is your hourly rate, three hours worth came out of my check when they internalized that ticket. And it depends on pay plan. That's not every store, but that happened to me in some of the
01:23:52 Jeff Compton stores I worked in. And that's not right. That's not right. It shouldn't, it should never happen that way. Period. Me as a technician, though, I'm always like, for me, it's very cut and dried. Okay, well, the customer's still left with a fixed car, right? Or a service car. Right. The tech performed that repair, performed that service. Of course. Tech has to get paid. Yeah. You know, it just sucks that, you know, and this is what is a really slippery slope and why I would never go back to a dealer ever again is because I see when I see the traditional, traditional, the typical, how some consumers are now where, you know what I mean? It's like, we've taken the squeaky wheel gets the grease analogy to a volume of 12. They're looking to
01:24:38 Chris Craig come in there and rant and rave until they get free. Yeah. And so yes, the leader has to stand firm and say, no, I'm not internalizing that. So why, where does it, who's telling him that he should internalize this? Because he's the service manager. It's his call. In that particular scenario, it's his call. He just, he was the type of person, this is a very specific scenario, but he was the type of person when a customer began to, I mean, the phone calls were recorded, the stuff was legitimate. I'm not saying now without fault in certain situations, I love to own my situations, but there were times where just customers were just like, I didn't agree to pay that. And I mean, and they'll come in like, I didn't agree to pay that diagnostic. It's like, well, you signed right here and I have a recorded phone call and a text message verification that you did indeed agree to this. So I bring it to my manager. I'm like, hey, they're not willing to pay for this, but I have proof that they were willing to pay for this. So
01:25:32 Jeff Compton well, just give it away. I don't want to deal with it. Okay. Did you find you got muscled a lot by sales department? Not really. I had pretty good relationships with all my salespeople. I found a lot of time our service advisors got muscled a lot in terms of, Oh, they try. They didn't muscle me though. No, but I found out a lot of it was like the mirror smashed right off the truck. And you slide the mirror through under warranty.
01:25:56 Chris Craig I never did anything like that. I, of course I had salespeople approach me with that. Even some sales managers after I told the salesperson, no, but I stood so strongly firm on those situations that they used to stop bringing it to me. Cause I wasn't, I had a great relationship with most of my technicians. I wasn't going to do a technician like that. I wasn't going to mess up shop flow like that. And I certainly wasn't going to take one of my fellow service advisors, customers and say, wait till tomorrow, because this car is more important. It's, you know, it's just, that was me personally. I had some integrity there, but I can see where other service advisors, novice service advisors in particular would fall victim to that very quickly. Can some of that be tracked to the fact that you had been a tech? So you appreciated more maybe than an advisor that has never been a tech. I think so. I think so because, you know, I always kind of thought to myself, like, you know, I've done wheel bearings and I've done engines and I've done axles and leaf springs and I've done electrical repairs and, and it sucks so bad when you're working on, say you're doing timing on whatever engine you choose. Let's say we're working on a Subaru, we're doing a timing belt because we do those all the time. Right. And you're working on timing and you're focusing and you got bolts in this pan and bolts in that pan, somewhat labeled, but you're trying to get it done. It's got to go today. Oh, hey, can you go fix this mirror real quick? Yeah. Let me drop everything I'm doing. Also, let me take some of the tools from this particular job. Let me walk all the way over there. Let's do something that's not on a repair order or something like that. I'm not going to get paid for this, but have a great day. I'm going to go back to what I was doing. Now, what was I doing over here? I don't remember where I was. Yeah. Let me pull you off this engine job so you can do a weight or oil change. No, thank you. I'm not going to do that today. Yeah. I could put myself very easily in their shoes because I got it. I've done that kind of work before. I got it. I know how irritating it can be and I know how annoying it can be to work on two cars simultaneously and one of them not
01:27:41 Jeff Compton even be a car that you're responsible for. So I get it. Walk me through, Chris, how did you get out of writing service and get into the ebook and the… Because am I right to say that right
01:27:56 Chris Craig now you're not an employee for a dealership? I have not been a traditional employee in two years. Okay. So tell us how that came about. So I became really good friends with a client of mine in my dealership and I decided to take a chance and a gamble with him on some other avenues outside of the automotive industry. We are still exploring those things, but I basically kind of spread my wings and just tried to fly on my own. I don't own a business or anything like that. I partner on a couple of different projects and stuff and I got the social media thing going and stuff like that. So I've been just kind of spreading my wings and figuring it out and it's been rough. It's not been easy. I certainly lost plenty of money, but my lifestyle hasn't changed one bit. Never miss one bill. I still live here. Our lifestyle hasn't changed one bit. It didn't change my fiance's lifestyle or anything. We're actually very, very happy and things are going really great. Yeah. So I'm involved in a lot of different projects there outside of the automotive industry that are all kind of blossoming in their own way. And it's very awesome and exciting, but I am still part of the automotive industry indirectly through social media, through things like the ebook, through my connections and through a company named Rocked that I partnered with recently about six months ago in January. I've done some work with them contracted in the past, but I partnered with them full time essentially since January. And what we create is app-based educational content for employees of the automotive industry. My specific niche there is I'm a fixed ops content specialist. So anything that's fixed ops content, I write training material. I perform as on-screen talent. And these are short one to three minute videos, micro learning that service advisors over their lunch break can watch one or two videos, learn a little snippet of their job, go right back to work. Micro learning has been proven scientifically to be highly effective. That's how a lot of people learn. I mean, think about how many people are on TikTok all day, YouTube shorts all day. Nobody's really doing the other kind of forms of learning anymore, especially these younger generations. So it's extremely powerful platform. And I have been so grateful to be able to be a part of that team and essentially provide legitimate real training material, intentional actionable training material to these automotive employees in the dealerships. Because I know that most of the dealerships I've worked with with this company, they've been great. I mean, actually all of them, the ones I've visited, the ones I've gotten to know, like all great people. But the fact that I've been able to take part in training service advisors in the industry, not only on social media, but through an actual app based educational content platform, it's been incredibly beneficial for me. I've been so grateful for that opportunity. So how much you're like, you say it's dealerships, could your content, your teachings, could it be applied to guys in the aftermarket that are not in the dealerships? It could. It could. So right now it's, you know, Rockhead is primarily, well, not primarily, is all for dealerships. So they started out, it's a very young company, two years, I think, about two and a half. They make a lot of content for the sales department, sales associates, sales BDC, sales managers. And they broke into the fix-off side and then they found me on social media. So social media did this for me. They found me on social media, pulled me into the fold. And I've been with them pretty much ever since. And so we, yeah, right now it's dealership based sales and service. We're not done making content. There's so many more things that teach these people, but absolutely the stuff that I particularly write for them and perform on screen is topics that a service advisor could utilize in an independent shop for sure. Because at the end
01:31:48 Jeff Compton of the day, we're fixing cars. You know what I mean? We're handling customers, we're fixing cars. And the ebook, that was like, had you, was that your first
01:31:58 Chris Craig stepping off into writing something like that? Or you just… Yeah. It's the first completed project that I actually ever did writing was the ebook. And the inspiration for the ebook, it's called the Service Advisor Starter Guide. It's a very short 15 minute read. It just encompasses a few of the things that I think a new service advisor can benefit from just reading and digesting before their first day of being a service advisor. Even if it's their third, 10th, 100th, whatever day, it's a good refresher. It's good information to digest, but it's really effective if somebody is new to being a service advisor. Like what should I… Because this is what inspired is. I would get DMs, emails all the time, nine times out of 10, it's, hey, Chris, I just got a job as a service advisor. What do I expect? What do I do? So I wrote this ebook as an easy way to like, hey, check this out, good luck, etc. It's an easy free access tool. And then at the end of the ebook, and you said you looked down through it, but at the end of the ebook, it had terms and definitions to know like what is a repair order, what is hours per hour, what is the hour, all the stuff I didn't know coming into the industry. And then the last two pages is a check-in sheet that I actually use in store that I would make sure I get all my customers' concerns down with, signature link, and an extended warranty check-in sheet to make sure that I have all the information I need to make a successful call to the extended warranty company, not only make that process work smoothly, but get my technician paid in the
01:33:22 Jeff Compton meantime, because that's very important. Yeah. So when we talk to you, you heard me talk earlier about the kiosk thing. Yeah. Does that scare you? The fact that it's coming in and can you see a lot of people in your exact, not in your exact shoes, but can you see that actually,
01:33:40 Chris Craig you know, we people talk about AI and all this, you know, chat of being able to push some of you people out of a job? So, you know, a particular thing comes to mind that I've heard several times over and I don't know who coined this or who said it, but if it can be repeated, it can be automated, right? So, you know, checking out groceries, it can be repeated, it's now automated. We're all cashiers now. We all do that job. You know, McDonald's, you know, you go down there and you order, you know, burger and fries or Big Mac or whatever they sell, and you know, it can be repeated, therefore it's automated. So, basically, if you're buying goods, it can be repeated, but when you're purchasing service, it can't necessarily be repeated because every customer is different. Every customer has a different situation, a different timeframe, a different need. They have a, you know, a different problem, if you will, or several problems. And, you know, technology can do a lot, but I don't think that it can actually scale those particular things. I think about shop volume and capacity. I think about the automated dispatching systems that we spoke about earlier, because I assume that they would probably rely on that in some sort of a way, because you'd have to walk into the kiosk. I have a check engine light. Well, here's a great example. I have a check engine light and I have a whooping noise. When do you have a whooping noise? Where do you have a whooping noise? Is it all the time? Is it intermittent? Is it first thing in the morning? Oh, does it clunk when you go into reverse or drive? All these questions that need to be asked, you can automate those questions, but how effective is that customer going to be in answering those questions if a human isn't getting the correct information out of that person? So I particularly am not too afraid of that. Maintenance side, it's more menu. I think it could happen maintenance side, but as far as actual real
01:35:25 Jeff Compton service where you need to talk to a rep, I don't think that's going away. See, what scares me, and I'll play the devil's advocate in this, is I think what they're being trained is it's just like when you go to the kiosk, for instance, and you want to order like, say you will go to McDonald's and make this joke, you want a Big Mac and fries and you want an ice cream sundae. And of course, the run a joke McDonald's, the ice cream machine never works, right? Never. Well, so you get there and you just you walk up to pick up your food, there's no sundae there because the machine told you it's out of order, you can't get it. You still may have went through the purchase, you still went through and got something. I think the kiosk, unfortunately, as crazy as this is going to sound is when we condition all the clients to just accept that you're only going to maybe have four options to pick from, and then you go to the next and the next and the next, you're not necessarily going to be able to get that, that, you know, intermittent squeaky whatever resolved because there's just no way. Now, if you go to pick it up and you speak to somebody in person, maybe then there'll be a secondary way of being able to book in and actually talk to people. But I think the OEs, this is me going down a rabbit hole. I think that they're going to embrace this technology and they're going to really push it because I think at the end of the day, it's going to save them a lot of time in terms of trying to get more volume through without having to spend all that time like you and I have done in the past, playing telephone. Okay, so Chris, you know, you wrote this Mrs. Smith up for this noise and you know, you've got it down as it happens first thing in the morning and happens, but I went for a drive and I didn't hear, I think the noise that you said, now we have to play back and forth of more information, right? Where you might have to talk to Mrs. Smith. I think when we get to the kiosk thing, they're going to eliminate a lot of that, right? And it's just going to be like, I'm going to put it on the rack or whatever, and I'm going to see that the sway bar links are shot and I'm going to put links in it and it's going to go out the door. Mrs. Smith is going to pick it up and the links are fixed, but there's still that noise that she was hearing is still there. There's no option for Mrs. Smith to be able to convey. You know what I mean? I think Chris, and I'm a conspiracy theorist, propaganda kind of guy, I think that's ultimately what's going to happen because I think that as we look at how, where I think this industry is going, I think that that's just the way it is. And for the record, I don't use self-checkout, I don't use kiosks, I deal with people. I don't, when I go to the grocery store and I have the option to use a self-checkout, I will not use it because I want to keep that person in a job. That's fair, that's noble actually. Why would I pay the money, the same money, and do the work myself when somebody who traditionally always had a job, now if you gave me a discount for running my groceries through the self-checkout and bagging myself, listen, I'll be employee of the month next month, I'll pay. Yeah, there you go. That's right, because I want that, if you give me 5% off, a hundred bucks for groceries, five bucks every time, the end of the year, that's a, you know, I've saved some money. But to just walk up and say, no, I'm going to do it myself because I will not accept it. So I hope that for everybody that's listening, I think if we're going to avoid that potential future, we need to be more respectful of each person's role. I need to be a lot more respectful of the advisor's role in the future and I'm better than I was. Because I just changed the environments. I changed, you know, I went to, I got out of the dealerships, right? I got out of the dealerships. And we need to be more respectful of, you know, what the techs do for the advisors, the advisors do for the techs. And then we all need to be a lot more respectful for what the customers are doing for all of us. I think so at the end of the day, whether it's a dealership or an aftermarket shop, whatever you want to call it, chain store, without them, we don't have anything. And what's really scaring me and Chris, so not like I'm talking to the enemy here, but like give us some insight on, do you think that the OEs, their long-term goal is to see 100% customer retention at their facilities? Like as a, you know, I'm been a former dealership employee, you've been a former dealership employee. I always wanted to see if I could keep that customer in the dealer for the life of that car, for the lot. That's what I always wanted, right? As soon as I stepped into that dealership role, I want to see them always be in my shop, not at the store. How do you think that we navigate and we get along and we just, you know, there's enough, cause there's enough money for all of us, right? There's enough, there's more business that we can probably get done. So how do we
01:39:56 Chris Craig navigate that together? Well, you know, I'll start with like, as far as customer retention goes for the OEM, for the manufacturer of the vehicle, they want you to remain a customer of Lincoln, Volkswagen, Subaru, whoever. They don't particularly care if you remain a customer of one specific dealership. They're separately owned and operated as you know. So the stores are going to care that you stay at that one particular location. And going back to the kiosk thing, I don't see the buy-in for an OEM to allow kiosks to be installed in these dealerships, because it is going to cause these capacity issues. It is going to cause these customer retention issues. It is going to cause these, you know, customer service issues. So there's really no incentivization for the OEM to allow such a thing to be put in a dealership, because the incentivization is because labor is expensive. To pay that service advisor is expensive. You can cut that expense and put a kiosk in there. That's good. We'll deal with the bad because that's good, because money is king, right? Cash is king. So I don't see the OEM being super enticed by this yet. I see more of the individual dealerships, but they are also at the mercy of the OEM. So that's, you know, and I've been in the kiosk, but as far as like, you know, moving forward as one solid unit, it's, it's, I keep saying it, but it comes back to a lot of leadership, but also, you know, it's ownership too, you know, like a lot of the owners of a lot of dealerships, in my experience, not all of them, but some of them are too engaged to the point where it's aggressive and frankly offensive sometimes, stories. And then there's some owners that, story, there is an owner that never comes in. And the only time this owner comes in is to shove a camera in your face to wave and smile because we're happy here. We're not happy here. Story. You know, but, you know, it's a culture thing. It really, really, really is. And it's hard to get a positive culture when you're constantly hiring and firing and quitting and hiring and firing and quitting, and there's not the same people over and over. It's like, it's like, how do you develop a relationship with your neighbor? If the neighbor somebody knew every other day, you can't develop a culture in that community. If everybody's new every single day. So it, you know, it's, it's not a one night fit or one answer fits all. It's, you can't fix it. If I answer one question, you certainly can't fix it overnight. Didn't break overnight, but I really think it starts with ownership, taking ownership. I think it starts with managers actually becoming leaders and not just taking a title and thinking it's time to sit back with a pina colada on the beach. Like the reason why you want to become the managers, you make more money. The reason you make more money is because you have more responsibility. We seem to lose that bit right there. We seem to stop it to make more money. And then the more responsibility piece, well, it's actually less because now I don't have the right of service anymore. And that's a big part of the problem as well. So it's, it's really top down. It's really actually top down as far as getting the team together and getting moving in the right direction. Cause that's what leadership is. I think it's a leadership issue. I really feel that way. Training is part of leadership. So I'll
01:42:59 Jeff Compton say it's a training issue, but it derives from good leadership. So let me ask you one of our wrap up questions here. How responsible is the lack of leadership in the poor culture? How much of that can we put on the technician shortage that we're all have right now?
01:43:18 Chris Craig So I think you could attribute it pretty well. I think that if you actually did a study on this and survey people, so it's interesting because I made a TikTok post that it was by no means a real study. Like I didn't drive data, but I got thousands of comments and I just asked what's keeping you employed and what's making you leave dealerships. Give me three reasons. It was, you know, money, management, stuff like that. Money and management, crappy advisors, mostly money. Money was a big piece of it because it wasn't that they weren't making enough. It's that they were there buying tools. And as you know, tools are very expensive. It's crazy that you have so much overhead just to get a job. That's a whole nother thing, but it really is a whole nother thing. But here's the thing. I would probably still work in my last dealership if I didn't have a falling out with leadership due to poor management. I would probably still be at the first dealership, not the first Toyota one because I just wanted to move, but the first dealership I landed here, the nightmare store number one, I would probably still be there if they had solid management because I liked my coworkers. I love my fellow advisors. I got along great with the technicians. I still semi-sometimes speak with some of them to this day. That's been years since I've worked with them. Love the people. I mean, if I would have had a great manager, I'd probably still be there. They would have retained
01:44:40 Jeff Compton me. And I can say the same thing. The dealer that I was at for the longest tenure, the dealer that I'll always call kind of like home, where I learned to be a tech, whatever you want to call it. If it hadn't been the management change that came through, I'd still be there. And leaving there wasn't necessarily, I mean, I scoff sometimes and think, well, if I'd have stayed, where would I be there now? Right? I probably would have moved up pretty good rank. Although that being said, the manager that when I came in, when I left, he's still the manager there. Now we're talking 10 years past, that dealer has now been sold. And their numbers after I left, I'm not responsible for their numbers, but their numbers plummeted. And it's a culture thing at the very base of the thing. Now, I can't say that it's my service manager is the main focus and main responsibility for why that failure. Because they were bought by another dealership group in town that ultimately both of them suffered. They both, you know, it's just a situation of they bought one dealer, they had one, they bought a second Chrysler store. Turns out they don't know how to run a Chrysler store. So then the local dealer group, one of the, it's becoming one of the largest in Canada,
01:45:56 Chris Craig is going around sucking up, buying up all of these ones. Yeah, I'm seeing that too in this area. Yeah, because they bring-
01:46:02 Jeff Compton They bring similar things. What they bring with them though, is a management culture that works. Now, if you want to say works if it makes money or works if it, you know, I can't speak for what the turnover is like and all that kind of stuff, but I can tell you that they're bringing it to where we don't care that it's one is a Subaru store and one is a Chrysler store. We want all our stores to operate very similar. So that people can walk out of this. Just like you said, you know, your advisor, you go away for a day. They have no idea if you walked over and sat down at his desk, how any of his paperwork is done, how any of his RO's are closed, none of that. You wouldn't even be able to find his notes. They don't want that, right? They want, it doesn't matter if somebody's working on a different brand. They want to be, okay, I want you to be able to go over there. And other than maybe learning how to order parts through their OE side of it, we want everything done the same way. And I think that that's important because it helps people feel familiar with what's going on. And when you feel familiar, you feel comfortable, right? The hardest thing that's always been for me, and I've jumped around a lot in my career and I've been jumped from brand to brand. I see so many guys that stay and they'll, okay, I only want to work on this brand because I'm familiar with it. Or I don't even want to necessarily leave this dealership because I don't want to, what am I going to face? What's it going to be like? Yeah, it's fair that you're not. Yeah. I could tell you, everybody out here right now, there's never been a better time to get your feet wet and move around and try things. And I'm not trying to tell you, listen, if you're where you're somewhere and you're being treated well and you're happy, stay there. Yeah. Right now we talk in all the groups and everybody says, listen, if you're working for an employer that isn't treating you good, don't stay there because there's so much opportunity for people right now. Don't stay there. And when I hear your story and I don't hear your story and go, oh my God, he had four really bad crappy places to work. What I hear when I hear your story is you had four really challenging places and through your perseverance and your training off the job, your leadership training and all that kind of stuff, you took with it and really made yourself an opportunity. And I think that's awesome. And I think that everybody, there's more opportunities out there than we recognize. Familiarity, comfort, it oftentimes shackles you to what you don't need to be shackled to, I guess is what I'm trying to say. So take Chris's example, take my example. And if you're not happy, you're not being treated fairly, go find somebody else, man. There are out there, there are great shops to work for. There are great people to work for. There's great advisors, great techs that you will find right now. I think the culture is starting to change and you will find people that will treat you good. So go ahead, Chris, go ahead.
01:49:06 Chris Craig As I said, you said it all right there. Adversity brings opportunity. It's a simple mind set, set shift. You've got to change the way you consider it, think of something. You said another word challenge and I love that. Because I will tell service advisors that when you run into a problem, don't think of it as a problem because that's bad. Think of it as a challenge because that's positive and things tend to go better when you think positively. So if you're running into a situation where you're having a bad time with your management, you're not getting along with your coworkers, first and foremost, talk to those people and see if you can bridge those gaps. See it as a challenge. Can I actually bridge this gap? Can I negotiate this? Can I work this out? If you find yourself at a point where you cannot, now you see the big adverse thing. It's the ocean, right? It's the desert out there. I don't even know where I'm going to go. Am I going to make similar money? I'm so scared. What if I don't like it? Well, it's a challenge. What if I don't like it? What if I make it work? What if I don't like it? What if I make it work and I do much better? What if I learn something new? What if I turn something around? What if I inspire other people to do better? What if I can become a manager at this next location? What if there's more opportunity? See the opportunity. Don't see the adversity and take the challenge every single time and don't see it as a problem. Just see it as an opportunity to grow yourself as a professional. Pete I love that. In closing, so will we ever see Chris as a service advisor again? Chris Probably not. Maybe. I mean, you know, honestly, it's funny. It's funny I just said no, but I think about it all the time. You know, I recently had the opportunity to visit a couple of dealerships and it was like, Whoa, like I kind of miss this atmosphere. I miss these people. I miss the hustle and bustle. But if I went back to a dealership, it would probably not. It would not be in the role of a service advisor. If I went to a service department, I would be aiming at least an assistant service manager or service manager position. Or honestly, I might because I haven't done it yet. Try my hand at sales because I've done parts. I've done technician work. I've done advising. Why not round it off with some car sales on top of that? Something like that. But I don't see myself writing service again. Now push came to shove and it's something I had to do. I'd absolutely jump right back into it because I do
01:51:07 Jeff Compton have a passion for the work. I just, I see myself doing more for the industry as a whole. Pete Well, I want to thank you. This has been absolutely awesome for me. I didn't know what to expect because, you know, for your little three minute videos on TikTok, I didn't know how to take it. Right. I was just like, well, this guy says a lot of stuff that sometimes really gets me fired up. And I want to say something in response. This has been awesome, Chris. This really has. I mean, you are a sharp guy. I love your story. And I mean, I hope that more people in your, you know, more of the guys that are on TikTok, more of the guys that are on social media, reach out to me. If you want to get some things off your chest, you want to tell your story, you want to say what you hate about it, what you love about it, get a hold of me, man. I want to hear that stuff. You know, this is how we all make this better. It doesn't matter whether we're a dealership, an independent, a chain store, whatever. If we're going to make this better, we have to have these tough conversations. And, you know, because the people that are listening have got to hear it. And, you know, and when they start to hear it more and more, they realize that it's not just squeaky wheel. It's, we're telling the truth. And if we're going to change it, we have to do that. And I, man, I appreciate you. This was awesome. This was way, way more enlightening than I thought it was going to be, honestly. Your story.
01:52:37 Chris Craig I really appreciate it, Jeff. I had a great time. If you ever want me back, I'll be right back here again for another two hour session with you, you know. I think that's where we can talk about, really, ideally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we scratched the surface tonight. You know what I mean? We scratched the surface. And then go back to your conversation piece without taking a bunch of time. That's why I do my TikToks the way I do it. That's why I leave it open ended, because I am not naive enough to think I have all the answers. But I think that collectively in that comment section, when there's a hundred voices, 200 voices, 300 voices with thousand voices, I think therein we can find some sort of an answer or at least find another friend out there in the industry or at least learn something new. And that's why, and Red Otto, who connected us, he's new to me on the app. He started interacting with my content and that's, he's so articulate and he wants to have that conversation. He stitches the videos and he sits down in a shop and he's like, let's talk about it. Here's what I experienced. Here's what I think. But, and I end all my videos. What are your thoughts every single time? What are your thoughts? I want to know what's going on out there in the industry. Let's talk about it. That's how
01:53:42 Jeff Compton we, that's how we solve that problem. Chris is a fantastic, and I would say young man, but he's not a young man, but I mean, you know, he is a fantastic example of where this industry needs to go. And I want to thank him. He'll be listening. I want to thank him for setting this up. And I mean, at some point, you know, we will have you back on because I think there's a big advisory role you can play, not just as a service advisors that might be listening to this, but as techs as well that want to navigate the dealership and be successful. And I think you've got a lot to offer there too, man. And I want to thank you again for being here and we will definitely do this again. Yeah, I appreciate it, Jeff. Anytime. Awesome, man. We'll talk to you again.