Any good baseball coach worth his salt will tell you that there is no deep, dark, mysterious formula in racking up impressive wins. They understand how important each pitch is and have a firm grasp on each player’s strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, they never miss a chance to do battle alongside their team. Winning coaches don’t stay in the locker room strategizing. Has your Service Manager discovered this simple formula? Without critical Service Manager training, he or she may never. If they continue to stay huddled up in his office all day doing paperwork and answering emails, it should not come as a surprise to you that his monthly numbers are headed, yet again, towards the red.

Let’s be blunt. Some auto service environments are poison. Talented front line mechanics have no trust in their managers and eventually jump ship to your competitors. Productivity is at risk for an all-time low. However, it’s a relatively easy fix. Service Managers and Advisors need to walk that shop, coaching every step of the way. Remember, if he’s not feeling, touching, smelling or talking it, he’s not doing it! Top Service Managers insist they get more paperwork done between the early morning hours of 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. anyway, before moving on to more urgent, productive duties and concerns.

Consistent walk-arounds and observing while coaching can’t help but result in increased repair sales, TAROs and AROs. They greatly impact both client interaction and satisfaction, thereby influencing that infamous bottom line. Service Manager Coaching teaches how to chart the staff’s progress and set up or establish daily goals for selling certain items, such as alignments. It teaches him how to talk to Bob, the tune-up guy and get a quick review on Bob’s agenda. He will know to dig for issues within the team, review numbers from yesterday and how to monitor the team’s professional development, communicating, if necessary, one-on-one. They will be able to help them seek out opportunities for self-improvement and encourage them throughout the process.

An incredible transformation comes with Service Manager Coaching. Fresh insight culminates into listening well. They will begin to see your business straight from the eyes of his crew, which gains him immeasurable, worthy respect from them. Previously insulated layers will break down. Together, them and the team will begin to realize the answers to the future direction your business needs to travel and grow, which is better trained, happy employees and of course, your total success.

For the last couple of months I have been discussing the importance of training the Service Advisor. They see more customers and they produce more profit than car sales, but get little or no training in comparison.

I have discussed types of training for the Service Advisor, like the “Interactive Walk Around” and how Volvo profited from its implementation. I have also discussed when to do the training without impacting productivity or profits with our “Real Time Service Advisor Training”

However, if you have had any type of sales training, everyone is fired up, you will hear “best training I ever had”, but after a couple of weeks most people go back to doing what they did before! So how do you make new training last and profit from the investment?

Training The Trainer

If you have ever been through dog training, they do not train the dog they train the owner. The same principal applies with Service Advisor training, you need to train the Service Manager to the new policies and teach them how they can manage and coach the Service Advisor. We spend 75% of the timing training the Service Manager and 25% with the Service Advisor. We teach goal setting, accountability and coaching techniques. We follow up weeks and months after the training is complete to assure that the new policies are still being used and work with Fixed Operations to see the profit!