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Shop Talk Her Way is where former shop owner and coach JeanAnn Saint Grace opens up the books on what it really takes to run a profitable, sustainable, and well-balanced auto repair business.
With decades of experience in bookkeeping, operations, and leadership, JeanAnn brings an honest, no-fluff approach to shop management — all from a woman’s perspective. From financial systems and staffing to communication and culture, she shares insights that help shop owners (and especially women in the industry) take control, build better businesses, and enjoy the ride.
Whether you’re turning wrenches, balancing the books, or scaling to your next location, you’ll find encouragement, strategy, and a healthy dose of “you’ve got this” in every episode.
Shop Talk Her Way is an AutoFix Auto Shop Coaching production — helping shops thrive, her way.
Thanks to WorldPac and the WorldPac Training Institute (WTI) for sponsoring Shop Talk Her Way. Visit worldpac.com for the latest in auto parts distribution and wtitraining.com to explore training programs that can take your career to the next level.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:00:00]:
Reducing our car count to like 10ish cars a day was much more profitable, manageable, less stressful than close to 20 cars a day. And then it became more meaningful, right? You have more time to talk to your clients. You have more time to get to know your customers, build rapport, review work orders, review DVIs, answer their questions. The rush kind of went out of it. This is Shop Talk Her Way with Jean and St. Grace. Do you ever feel like you're playing some version of the blame game every day? Do you feel like there's people looking for answers? There aren't any solutions. And unfortunately, as a shop owner, you're the one holding the bag.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:00:49]:
Let's talk about the blame game. Let's talk about accountability and responsibility and whose job is whose. Welcome to this episode of Shop Talk Her Way with Jane. Grace. I'm so excited to be here with you again. I try to pull my topics from things that are happening with clients. Usually when something's happening for one person, it's probably happening for more than one. So this week, one of the big conversations I was having was around technician productivity and how do we fix that? It was also wrapped up in a team member not meeting the expectations set by the management team.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:01:35]:
And it was also wrapped up in their pay rate. So there's this magic soup, right, that hopefully as a shop owner, you know, what numbers do you need to make the profit margin needed to pay your team to cover your fixed costs to have profit on the bott. Bottom line, when that's all said and done and we should also have goals for our team members to figure to get us to those, those goals. And for each team member, the goals might be a little different because they all have different roles, they have control over different things, and it kind of becomes murky of whose job is whose. And then when the goals don't get met, there's a lot of finger, you know, oh, it's this person. Oh, it's that person. It might be the front versus the back, the top, you know, the shop owner versus the team, the team versus a shop owner, whatever that looks like. There's, there's blame going around when the goals don't get met.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:02:48]:
And there are consequences when goals don't get met. Right? If depending on your pay plan, I hope you're not on flat rate, but if you are, that directly affects the pay for your technicians. If your advisors are working on base plus commission, it hurts them. If you are the owner and you of course would like to get paid and there's not enough money to go around. You're going to be the one who's not getting paid. So it's important that we know who's, who's who at the zoo, right? Whose job is it and whose goals are what. So while you might have one overarching goal for weekly sales or, or car count or average repair order, whatever that looks like, we have to put it in different terms for each of our layer of our team, right? So before we jump into that, let's talk about one of our partners. WorldPAC and the WorldPAC Training Institute.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:03:48]:
They have graciously agreed to be the sponsor for this podcast and I'm so incredibly grateful to them for that. Worldpac was an amazing partner for us when we had our shop and they continue to be not only in excellent supplier, but also investing in training for our team. I just had the honor of being asked to be an instructor this last week and I felt like I got to really get in there and play with the, the big boys, you know, giving a class on, you know, how to, how to load out your tech cost, your, your team payroll costs. And so we had a great attendance and look forward to hopeful that in the future they offer training that is, you know, some of their training is free, it's open to anybody. And all you have to do is go to the WorldPAC Training Institute website and look at the classes that are available. So I encourage you both to do business with worldpac and to check out what's available at the worldpac Training Institute. So to continue, you know, this conversation was evolving of we hired a technician at a specific rate. We've had him for about two months and he has not once hit his production goal.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:05:09]:
And the question asked is, what do we do? What do we do? Do we adjust his pay? Do we give him kind of some kind of an ultimatum? Or say, hey, either you've got to do this or else. And I asked shop owner to fall back a little bit. I asked the shop owner to ask them, are we creating an environment in the shop that is conducive to this technician making his production hours? That's a good question. Are we doing that? And when we started to drill down on that, we found that there were some, some problems in the workflow process that were not conducive to this technician being able to produce like they're wanting him to. So before we start talking to a technician about pay cuts or anything like that or any team member, we need to make sure as the owner that we have got processes in place that they understand the process, that they've been trained on the process, and that they know what's expected of them. Now there's also a conversation to be had around compensation plans. We need to create compensation plans where the their goal, in order for us to have the profit margin that we need on labor is actually attainable. Because if we as the owner are grinding our teeth every time we're writing a payroll check, not only is that not good for us, it's not good for the culture of the company, and it's not good for the team member to constantly feel like they're failing.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:06:49]:
So there are a few things I would have done differently during this hire, but that's probably a conversation for another day. But let's talk about whose responsibility is what. So if you think about kind of the layers of your business, of course the shop owner would be the top layer of responsibility. Ultimately, they're the ones responsible for everything that goes on in the shop. Your service advisor has a next layer of responsibility. They're responsible for bringing in the customers that through marketing, the owner has got to pick up the phone or come in or whatever that might look like. So the shop owner's big goals as far as, like, daily work is for the standard operating procedures to be in place, for the marketing to be working and, and manageable and held accountable, whatever marketing, and that it's actually working, that the phones ringing, there's people coming in. Then the next layer is that the advisors are answering the phones, greeting people, encouraging them to come in, making appointments, offering what we can in order to entice them to come in, building that relationship.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:08:15]:
Then the technician's job is to execute whatever work is being put in front of them and in a timely manner, complete with quality, and also to report back to the advisor whatever the concerns might be. So there's a lot of communication, of course, throughout the shop, but the communication between the advisors and the technicians, I think is really key. And we all know from personal life experience, right, if you don't have a good relationship with the person you're trying to communicate with, that communication is challenging. There might be undercurrents in the conversation. There might be challenges with tone, with languaging. Sometimes something that's meant innocently can be taken the wrong way. So there's all this static in, in the atmosphere when a. A relationship is not clearly delineated and the communication is bad.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:09:20]:
So if we look at these three layers of responsibility in the shop, the owner really always needs to take a look at their Role first. So my question to my shop owner this week, when they said he's not hitting their production, I asked, do we have cars to work on? Yes. Okay. Does the technician know what he's doing right now and what he's doing next and what he's doing after that? And that's where we had a challenge. They've been working on their standard operating procedures to try to smooth out their workflow, but they have not yet put into place the piece where every technician knows exactly what they're doing next. And if, if the techs don't know that, then they're either going to the advisor saying, hey, what do I do next? They might be wandering around the shop not knowing what to do. And that can be super frustrating. Right? That can be, you know, not knowing where you're going next is, is one of the fundamental challenges of a human being.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:10:32]:
Human beings need to know, how am I doing and what's next? So what I encourage my shop owner to was to get this, this workflow process into alignment so that we had a clear way of dispatching work to the technicians, which would then just allow them to pull a ticket, go do the work on that, do whatever documentation was necessary, give it back to the advisor, and then move on to the next and the next and the next and the next. And we can't really fault the technician if they're wandering around wondering what's next. If the person they're reporting to either is busy on the phone, can't help them, then how are they being directed? And they might have to stand around, they might have downtime. And the key to productivity, of course, is keeping them moving, keeping them engaged in the work that they're doing. There's enough places where time can be lost between diag, between moving cars in and out, between waiting for parts or, you know, getting wrong parts and not knowing it until the car's apart in the bay and then now there's a mad scramble to get the right part, or now we've completely put them into stasis on that project until the new parts get there and they have to move on again. Do they know what's next? So I was trying to impart and I hopeful, hopefully I did it more eloquently than I think I did, that this is a key part of the business. Right? But we all know that it's not just the technicians challenge, right. When we look at the service advisor piece of our organization, in my opinion, and it's my opinion, so, you know, forgive me if I'M rubbing anybody the wrong way.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:12:25]:
But the service advisor has one of the most challenging positions in the shop environment. And the reason is, is that everything kind of falls towards them. In reality, your service advisor or advisors, the advising department is the hub of the business, right? And so the owner's looking at the Advisors for certain KPIs, the technicians are looking to the advisors to tell them how are they doing and what's next. And then you've got this other pressure on them because they are the ones who are having to translate everything in shop to the customer. And so there's kind of this weird pinch point around your advising group if you have more than one or your advisor because they're the ones that keep everything moving. They are, you know, dispatching to text, they're scheduling customers, they're doubling down on their KPIs, making sure their gross profit margins are correct. Their, they have a lot of responsibility. And unfortunately, according to one of my gurus at WorldPAC Training Institute, they are the least trained group of employees in the shop environment.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:13:53]:
And I would argue that not only do your advisors need to be trained in sales, be trained in customer relations, be trained in the psychology of, of buying, of being service first, of being hospitable, of, you know, approaching every, every client as though they're a fresh experience and they have to leave anything that just happened, you know, whatever it might be, whatever engagement they just had, they have to come to this next engagement with the client or the customer fresh. So it's challenging, right? And I've done this job so I, I know how it is. I know how it is to spend your whole day moving from one project to the next project to the next project and then doubling back and then moving forward and having to constantly assess and reassess exactly where you're at in order to move forward. Because you get interrupted because the phone rings, you get interrupted because the tech needs a clarification, you get interrupted because your vendor shows up, you have, you know, interruption because you got the wrong part, whatever the interruption is, it's like the, the advisor has to, to stop, assess and reassess their position every time something happens. And in a fast paced environment like a shop when there's so many moving parts, it's exhausting. Like, let's be frank. And there were days when I would, I would look around my office and be like, I know from the time I open the door till the time we close the door, I moved my, I did all the things, but I have no idea what I Did. And the only measure of my daily experience was the stack of invoices that was sitting on my desk at the end of the day because they'd gone from estimate to invoice, estimate to invoice.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:15:44]:
Right. And that's sometimes a hard thing to do because that's basically wash, rinse, and repeat. It doesn't really matter how many cars we moved, how much, you know, what kind of car it was. None of that really matters because all we had at the end of the day was a stack of invoices that are complete. And is there accomplishment in that? Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. The accomplishment is in not only the cars that we moved. And it's not always the number of cars that we moved.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:16:20]:
It's the quality of the jobs that we completed. Did we hit our average repair order? Did we hit our hours per ticket? Did everything run smoothly? Did we have all the parts we needed? Did we keep the customers informed? Did we do all those things? And sometimes it's easy to lose sight of everything you did right when a couple of things went wrong. So, you know, there were often times, and I'm. I'm extra bad at this, but I kick myself on a regular basis of did I do everything I could? Did I. Should I have made that phone call two minutes sooner or two minutes later? Should I have ordered those parts before I made that phone call? And, you know, there are shops, some of them, and ours was one of them, where our parts supply was a long way away from us. Our primary supplier was over an hour away from us, and they delivered to us four times a day. But you had to hit those trucks or you were behind. And so it was a constant again, where am I and what am I doing? How am I doing and what's next? So, you know, ordering parts to in timing and getting authorizations and having your work scheduled properly.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:17:39]:
You know, these are all the moving parts that the advisor has to handle. Now, am I saying a technician's job is easy? I am not. I don't think there's a quote unquote easy job in the shop unless you've got somebody whose job is to clean. Then, you know, for the most part, if the floors are clean, the benches are clean, the parts are in order, whatever, that might be an easier job than the rest of it. But if you're one of the main players, there's really no easy role in the shop. And I don't say that to dissuade anybody. It's the toughest job you'll ever love, right? Because if you love working on cars and you're the person who gets a thrill out of finishing a puzzle and you've taken it apart and put it back together and at the end it was better than it was before, that's where your approval comes from. That's where your payoff is.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:18:40]:
If you're an advisor, what's your payoff? You know, my payoff was I got through the day. Maybe nobody was upset with me, Nobody yelled at me. We got all the cars done on time, and everybody's gone and paid for that was supposed to be gone and paid for. That in a lot of ways was my accomplishment. Some of it was just that maybe I got to eat lunch that day. And everything else was an S show. Right. And so there's this place where when we start to point fingers, that's where the challenges come.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:19:18]:
And I talked a little bit about, you know, KPIs, and those are key performance indicators. Sorry, I need to be careful about my Alphabet soup. But our key performance indicators. And like I said, every layer of the shop has a different set of KPIs. So just to back up a little bit, as I said, the owner's KPI really is car count. The owner needs to put enough marketing out there or have a good enough marketing plan that we have enough cars every week for the team to work on. Now the advisor has a little bit of that also because they need to know what the car count goal is, and then they need to be able to schedule appropriately. And depending on your work mix, this can be challenging.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:20:07]:
Right. How many oil changes are we going to do? How many state inspections are we going to do? How many diags do we bring in a day? You know, how many check engine lights is too many? And I would argue that if you're a shop trying to do five cars a day, one diag is enough. The rest should be straightforward mechanical stuff. If you're a bigger shop and it's 10 cars a day and you've got two really good Diag techs, maybe it's two, but we have to be really careful of our workflow and our work mix. And helping as an owner, helping our advisors or working with our advisors and our team to sit down and be like, okay, how many of this kind of job can we handle a day? How many of this job can we handle a day? And I'll tell you, one of the biggest epiphanies I had when I started with my coach, when we owned our shop was this. And this sounds absolutely nutty to Me so, but this is what we did. We had, we, we tried to schedule between four and six waiter oil changes a day. We scheduled between eight and 12.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:21:24]:
We were in California smog inspections a day. And then we filled in with the bigger stuff. Now if you start to do that math, we're looking at 15, 16 cars a day. And me service advising, my husband being shop foreman, lead tech, and him doing service advising. That was a lot of writing. That was a lot of writing. And there was no room to grow. Those jobs, everything pretty much had to be rescheduled.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:21:55]:
If we did an oil change and found brakes metal to metal, unless the customer could leave it overnight, we were rescheduling that. And that it was, it was lunacy. So when I start. We started with coaching and they started to talk to us about our average reporter repair order. Because you can imagine what our average repair order looked like with that many cars moving through. It was trash. I'm just going to tell you. It was probably under $100 and, and that was absolute chaos.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:22:30]:
So we, we pulled back and we set it down to, you know, one waiter in the morning, one waiter in the afternoon, basically when the, when our loop guy first came in and when he came back from lunch. And then we started scheduling like two smogs in the morning and two in the afternoon. So that was like four to six standalone cars. And then we would fill in with the other stuff. We would do drop off oil changes because those could grow. We started getting into really having a maintenance mindset and selling maintenance. And it included adding a DVI to our process. Reducing our car count to like 10ish cars a day was much more profitable, manageable, less stressful than close to 20 cars a day.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:23:25]:
And then it became more meaningful. Right? You have more time to talk to your clients. You have more time to get to know your customers, build rapport, review work orders, review DVIs, answer their questions. The, the rush kind of went out of it. So if you're a shop that's struggling with building customer relations, you might be looking at how many cars are you trying to move through there every day and should we start looking for quality repair orders over quantity. But it is the the shop owner's job through marketing to drive cars into the bays. Then what is the responsibility as far as key performance indicators or goals for the advisors? For the advisors, again, car count, they need to know how to schedule. They also have a responsibility to for gross profit margin because they're the ones writing the service and bidding the jobs.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:24:27]:
And it's nice now that most of your shop management systems have either a per job or per ticket gross profit margin. And if you have everything set up right, and if you have, hear me clearly, the loaded tech costs in your shop management system, you can get a much better idea of growth gross profit per job there. And having your matrix set right, which again is your owner's responsibility. The owner should set the matrixing and then allow the advisor to execute it. The the advisor's job is also to drive hours per ticket and then that that should lead to sales. What is your technician's responsibility? Your technician team would be your DVI completion rate. And again, the advisor is also part of that because he should be assigning. If you're doing DVIs, my goal is 100% and that's a conversation for another day.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:25:38]:
But I feel like every car that comes through should get some level of insp. And I have some caveats to that. I think we should have kind of mini inspections if we're not lifting the vehicle or if we're bringing a car in that's just been in. But let's face it, a fluid leak can start anytime. A tire can go low anytime, A bulb can go out anytime. So anytime a vehicle's been out of our custody, I think it's inherent that we do another DVI or a courtesy check. If you're doing it on paper. Same, same.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:26:13]:
But you know, executing those DVIs properly, good notes, good recommendations, good thorough inspections. Informing, you know, inspect and inform. Not going on field field trips or fishing trips when you're doing the dvi, the purpose of the DVI is just to inspect and inform. If there's something that needs more investigation, then that is given back to the advisor to sell more time for investigation, not to do the during the DVI, then that helps. If the DVIs are good and we're recommending maintenance and we're recommending timely repairs, then that helps. Drive hours per ticket and production hours. The most control that a technician has is in their production hours. If the workflow is proper, if the workflow process, the dispatching is all good and there's a solid system that's reliable and they know what they're doing right now and what they're doing next and hopefully what they're doing after that.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:27:14]:
And a way also to communicate that, oh, hey, we moved this car out of your queue into somebody else's queue. And there are all kinds of schemes that work for that, whether it's an internal slack channel. Notes within the shop management system. Hey, Bob, we move that car out of your queue and put it over into Joe's, whatever that looks like. That kind of communication is what's necessary to keep the work flowing through the shop so the techs really have the control over their production hours if that is the case. So again, everybody needs to know what they're responsible for. And their KPIs need to be fluid with the work that they're doing. Telling a technician, we need X amount of hours per ticket or we need an average repair order of this much.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:28:15]:
They don't have control over pricing, they don't have control over markup. They only have control over how quickly and efficiently they can get work done. And they're going to get stuck sometimes, right? It's going to happen. And we have to also know, you know, who's, again, whose responsibility is it if we get into a job and a bolt breaks? Okay, was that on us or is that the condition the vehicle came in and we have to figure that out. And if we, if we have a problem like that, the most important thing is communication. The most important thing is for the tech to go to the advisor and say, hey, I've got a problem. This is going to tie this car up. We might need it overnight.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:29:01]:
We need to let the customer know. We also might need to let the customer know if there's more expense involved, more cost to them. And we got to be in our integrity. We need to be transparent. We need to tell them either, yeah, we broke it or no, it was seized. We're, you know, we're in bad weather conditions where things rust. Whatever the situation might be, we either we need to take responsibility for it or we need to explain why it's not, you know, it wasn't our fault and go forward with it. So, so you all know as shop owners, as technicians, as advisors, there's so many ways that things can go sideways, but we need to all, every single one of us, take responsibility for our actions.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:29:48]:
So in my case earlier, where we have a technician who isn't making his production hours, the question is, do we have enough cars, yes or no? If the answer is yes, then advisor, are we using the workflow process that we've set out and are we dispatching to this technician by his skill level? And those are all incumbent on, on us before it gets to the technician, if Joe is maybe taking too many smoke breaks or if he's, you know, on his cell phone or he's distracted because there's something going on at home or, or his toolbox is on the opposite end of the world from where he's working. Maybe our shop isn't laid out efficiently and we need to reevaluate how our shop is laid out to give them more efficiency. So before we start blaming texts, have we done all the things to give them the keys to success? And before we start blaming advisors, have we given them what they need? And there's all kinds of ways to hold people accountable and it should always be done with respect, with clear communication. And as, as anything else, they need to have something written in front of them or somewhere they can see it where they can see their progress. So if you need to have a progress board, if you need a whiteboard with a thermometer on it, and the total hours of the shop are updated every day and it's reviewed in a morning HUD or the. The techs have a way to look into the shop management system and see how many hours they've produced that week, the advisor should have access to all of that information and be able to look on a regular basis and see what's my gross profit margin, how many cars have we done this week? What's my average repair order? And we also have to remember as owners when we start parsing this information, you know, so the information that we get out of our shop management systems is only as good as the information that goes into it. And looking at advisor performance, sometimes the way our shop management systems are registering information doesn't give them a chance. If they're writing estimates for vehicles that aren't even in the shop yet and those estimates don't get sold, and we're checking track tracking, average repair order and average written repair order.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:32:34]:
So average estimates written, those estimates, if the car is not in the shop, have zero chance of being sold that week. Or if we're so busy that that that vehicle can't come until next week, we're holding them accountable for estimates. They wrote that there was no way we could have gotten done this week because of the workload that we had had. So, yeah, if a tech, if an advisor writes $1,000 worth of estimates for a vehicle that's not coming into the shop until next week, it's going to hurt his conversion rate if we're tracking that. And I'm a little on the fence about conversion rate, I think that's one we've got to take with a big grain of salt because of challenges like this. And if we have a comeback or if we have a warranty issue that wasn't our fault. Right. We're going to be looking at that, that that advisor's going to be writing a certain amount of estimate that's going to have a zero dollar value at the end of the week.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:33:31]:
And so we've got to really parse the numbers. We have to look at how many $0 tickets, we have to look at how the shop management system is calculating average repair order conversion rate, average written repair order. Because I think sometimes, although you know, I'm sure that the, the manufacturers or the programmers are doing their very best, they're not taking into account these kinds of real world situations. And then owners, shop owners are holding their people accountable to numbers that might not be a hundred percent correct. And that concerns me because then there's all this down pressure on the advisors, on the tech teams to do better. But the problem is, is that the numbers in the shop management system aren't as good as they should be be. And I'm not going to call out one, one software over another because not one of them is perfect, not one of them gives you all the information you need all the time. And we've got to find ways to work around it to make the KPIs that we get out of our systems better.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:34:41]:
And sometimes we're using vocabulary and they're using different vocabulary. I found one system that what I call productivity, they call efficiency. And I was continuingly like frustrated with what the heck are we talking about and why are we so far off? And it was because we were talking about two different things or we talked about the same thing and calling it two different things. And I was looking at the wrong number, but it still wasn't the correct number. So what I'm saying is, is before we go pointing fingers, we need to know whose responsibility is and what accountability we have in place and that our processes are working for the people who are under those processes. And I encourage you also that not one of your processes should be written in stone. I think it's valuable if you're doing team huddles or team meetings, team lunch and learns, whatever that looks like, that on occasion you review your standard operating procedures to make sure that they're correct. Something could have changed in the shop.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:35:50]:
You could have gotten a new piece of equipment or you could have changed your shop management system. And now that SOP doesn't work or you know, something in the vehicle realm has changed and now we need to change our SOP to match that, all of these things come into play and anytime our KPIs start to drift away from where they are. We can't just immediately go to someone and point the finger. We need to investigate the cause and then accountability comes next. And definitely not blame. Right. I think when we start to throw blame around, it creates a lot of static in the field. And like I said before, communication is hard enough when you have a clear field, when everybody's working in the same direction, everybody's on the same page and everybody's working as a team.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:36:36]:
Communication is still probably the number one challenge in any shop. And then we start to add the static of drama or blame or feeling like one person's getting this and not getting that or vice versa or this part of the team's hurting this part of the team and there's all this static in the field that just makes it that much harder. So also as an owner, creating an open space and I'm a big fan of one on ones and I will continue to be a big fan on one on ones so that when you bring a team member into the envelope or container of a one on one meeting, they feel safe, they feel able and they feel empowered to say, hey, boss, this isn't working and we need to fix it. And not like blame, blame, blame. But honestly, I've looked at this, I'm concerned, I don't think this is working. And encourage them to come to you with a solution. Ask them, if you had a magic wand, how would you fix this, this? Because chances are that they've thought it out to that point. If they hadn't haven't, then the subject of the next one on one is bring me some solutions or do you think we need a team meeting on this and empower them to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:38:04]:
So when it all comes down to it, it, we need to remove as many of these hiccups to production and movement and momentum that we can. Because we all know as hard as we try, there's going to be outside forces working on us as far as, you know, getting the right parts, getting the right parts on time, getting bad parts, having parts break and having to do warranty boxed wrong, whatever it might be. We've all been there, we've all seen that, right? I had a service advisor in a collision shop tell me they got a brand new grill from their GM dealer and when they opened it up, it was cracked literally in half. And now they've got to reorder it and wait to get the customer in until they get a new one. So was that the shop's fault? Absolutely not. Should they Be clear and transparent with their customer. Hey, we ordered the part. It got here today.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:39:05]:
It's damaged. We can't put it on on. We need to reschedule you. Absolutely. And on the customer side, that might be frustrating, that might be challenging. They may have already made all these arrangements and we have to be understanding that they might be frustrated, even angry, even though they know it's not our fault, we're the messenger, and we might get the be the one who takes the shot for it. And then that advisor's got to shake that off and step back into the flow and be like, okay, that was mess, a mess, and I've got it fixed. But that interaction with the customer was not great and I'm not happy about it.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:39:41]:
So they have to shake that off and move forward. And an owner has to do the same thing as does a tech. You know, if a tech gets their butt kicked around the shop by a vehicle, they've got to take a deep breath, reset, and take the next one clean in clean energy and temperament so that they're not carrying some kind of static into that engagement with that vehicle, with them. So, you know, finding ways to refresh, showing your team how to, you know, let things go, how to reset their, their experience so that the next thing they touch isn't with baggage drug into this experience. So again, shop owners have a lot of responsibility to be leaders in their for their team and to give them these tools to overcome their challenges. We can't just as owners put our hands over our eyes and be like, well, they're grown adults. They just need to figure it out. We need to be observant, we need to be watching them.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:40:48]:
We need to have them in these one on ones and be like, hey, Joe. Hey, Bob. I saw this happen in the shop. Talk to me about this. You know, what was going on. Here's here. You know, how can we help you? You not have this problem, or can we help you find a coping mechanism to. To let the challenge of this previous job go and come into the next one clean? And a lot of people aren't there.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:41:19]:
Even as shop owners. Sometimes it's hard. Maybe we're having a bad day. Maybe something happened out outside of the shop and we bring it into the shop with us. And in that case, then we need a coach, we need a friend, we need somebody that we can offload that to so we're not bringing the static into the shop environment. And we all know it's no fun to listen to a radio when they're static. It's breaking up. Or on your cell phone when you're, like, in a bad service area and you're getting every third word and it's like.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:41:52]:
And you're like, I don't know what you're talking about, right? So we need to take the static out so we can do that by having clear delineations of whose responsibility is what, what holding those people accountable, even if it's ourselves. And we've got to be honest with ourselves, right? Have I been keeping up with my marketing people? Have I looked at, you know, our calls? Have I listened to calls that my advisors are making? Have I been responding to our Google reviews? Am I engaging with Google to keep our Google rating up? There's all kinds of ways that we as owners have to be responsible and look in the mirror and be like, yep, I just. I messed that one up. And it's okay to tell your team, you know, come here, guys, I gotta talk to you. Hey, this is on me. I screwed up. My bad. This is what I'm gonna do to fix it.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:42:47]:
And in the meantime, this is what you guys can do to help. Those. Those moments where you show your vulnerability as a leader will help them understand a you're not perfect, that you are taking responsibility and accountability for your role, for things in the shop. And that way, when you ask them for accountability and responsibility, you've modeled that as a leader. So please, as you're moving through your day, through your week, through your month, be there for your people, be there for yourself and understand how this whole system works together. Other. But because we can't ask a technician to fix car count, we can't ask ourselves, you know, as owners, to fix that car faster or better or with more quality. We have to let the responsibility land where it needs to and then hold that layer accountable.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:43:48]:
So just to wrap up, I want to thank you all. This industry is not easy, but there's ways that we can make it easier, where we can guide our people, where we can give them good processes, where we can include them in. In revising those processes to make it better, take some of the stress off, keep things moving right, keep things rolling, keep things in an orderly fashion. And as always, it's your shot, shop. It should be your way, right? So. But your way should be with more ease, hopefully less static, more signal, and a team that's moving together in a unified way. So I wish you all the best. I wish you all to enjoy the work that we do and find ways to make it more fun.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:44:40]:
So that's my Shop Talk Her Way and you guys can go out and make your shop shop your way. Thank you again so much for listening. Please like subscribe and share as much as you possibly can. Your loyalty listing, watching however you engage with us is really means the world to me. If you have any questions, have any feedback, please don't hesitate to comment. Wherever you see the the podcast, I love to see your comments and hear what you're thinking, and it helps me to find more topics for later conversation. And we might even get you on to talk about something that you do in your shop. So as always, thank you so much.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:45:23]:
Go out there and love your people till it's weird. And until next time, this is Jean Ann St Grace with Shop Talk Her Way.