Edition 11: The Slow Leak Sitting on Your Parts Shelves

Every dealership tracks its cars closely, where they are, how long they've been there, what's holding them up.
Parts inventory rarely gets the same scrutiny, even though it's the same basic problem: money sitting somewhere, quietly losing value the longer nobody looks at it.
A special order part that sits unclaimed for two or three days after arrival needs a phone call, not a shelf assignment. Catch it at 48 hours and it's a quick reminder call. Catch it at six weeks and it's an inventory problem with no easy fix left.

This outstanding parts inventory article is a 5-minute read! Enjoy!

-Steve

Ask most fixed ops departments how they set their pricing, and the honest answer is usually some version of "we set it a while ago, and we adjust it when someone complains."

That's not a strategy. It's a decision made once and left alone while the market around it keeps moving.

This article is a 5-minute read.

Most fixed ops departments can recite their retention percentage without looking it up.
Far fewer could tell you, within a thousand vehicles, how many units of their brand actually exist in their market right now.
That gap matters more than it sounds like, because a retention number measured against the wrong population is a number that's confidently wrong.

Retention isn't really one number. It's at least three, and most departments only ever look at one of them.

This awesome article on your UIO is about a 5-minute read.

The Eight-Step Guest Journey

This is a 5-minute read, and it breaks down the guest service journey from start to finish.

Every RO that comes through your service drive travels through the same eight steps, whether anyone's tracking them or not.
From the appointment that gets set to the follow-up call weeks later, revenue either survives that trip intact or leaks out somewhere along the way.

Most departments only watch two or three of those steps closely, usually the ones tied to whatever number got flagged last month. The elite ones treat all eight as one connected system, because the guest doesn't experience your department in silos.

Cheers!

This article is one of my favorites; it’s about a 6-minute read.

Here is where you stand out as a service team and make a guest for life.

The follow-up is by far one of the most critical steps in guest relations and departmental success.

The objective isn't to contact the customer as many times as possible.
The objective is to contact them at the right time, with the right message, for the right reason.
That's the difference between follow-up and relationship management.

Because our goal isn't to become the dealership that calls the most.
Our goal is to become the dealership the customer trusts the most.

Cheers!

This is where we are going as an ever-evolving industry.

This outstanding article is a 9-minute read.

Average stores will keep chasing units and wondering why days-to-turn keeps swinging under them.
Elite stores will stop treating fixed ops as the department that keeps the lights on between sales pushes and start treating it as the growth engine it already is on paper.

The next five years won't belong to the dealerships that sell the most cars.
They'll belong to the ones that know their customers best, who retain longer, capture more of the maintenance lifecycle, and use service data to generate the next sale instead of waiting for a shopper to walk back in.

Cheers!

The Revenue Already Sitting in Your CRM - Fact.

We have to look and make time to review every deferred opportunity.

It’s still out there and you will only know when you look for it.

This article is a 7-minute read.

Cheers!

Leading a Fixed Ops Turnaround: The Belief, The First Day, and The First 90

Edition 4 is a great article that ‍is a 5-minute read.

The belief sets the destination. Day one earns the right to lead the team there. The 90 days is the actual walk.

Cheers

Small Steps Create Big Shifts

Edition 3 is an amazing 8-minute read on overcoming objections in any service department.

Here's the complete framework, objection by objection, plus the math that tells you where to spend your energy after the conversation ends.

None of these four objections get solved by a better script in the moment.

-Price gets solved by leading with value before the number.
-Time gets solved by removing uncertainty before it forms.
-Trust gets solved by proof the guest actually saw, not persuasion.
-Convenience gets solved by actually asking.

Cheers.

Turn Intention into Action

This edition of SSFO is a 4 minute read.

The secret isn't in asking the questions. It's in what you do with the answers. Great questions surface the truth. Great leaders act on it.
If you're an advisor reading this, bring the honest answer to your next 1:1, not the safe one.
If you're a service manager or director, pick five, one from each pillar plus a bonus, and run them in your next team meeting this week.
Don't ask all twenty at once. Start small and actually listen.

It All Begins Here - KPI Command Center

This is about an 11-minute read. It is long but it will be worth it.

Most service departments track outcomes instead of levers.
Gross profit is an outcome. Hours per RO is a lever. CSI is an outcome. First-time-fix rate is a lever.

If you only watch outcomes, you find out you had a bad month after it already happened.
If you watch the levers, you can catch a problem mid-week, sometimes mid-day, while there's still time to fix it before it shows up on next month's financial statement.

Cheers!!