Your dealership is one big happy family and everyone gets along famously. Unless you’re a dysfunctional family with screaming, hair-pulling, and slamming doors whenever you have to deal with each other. Yeah, that’s more like dealership life.

I’ve spent 15 years working in several different dealerships, mostly in the service department. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that each one has the exact same interdepartmental relationship – rocky and tense. I have yet to experience a service department that doesn’t hold grudges against the sales team. The parts guys think everyone else in the dealership is stupid. The rest of the building questions why the parts department can’t stock common parts. It’s the same everywhere.

In my experience, the problem starts when each person feels they are worth more than the next. That extends to whole departments, and it becomes a situation of in-fighting that can seriously dampen profits and production. It becomes a toxic environment, all because the family can’t play nice.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

I love that phrase. It’s so commonly mistaken to think that we’ve all got to be buddies. That’s not the spirit of the phrase and it’s simply never going to happen. It takes a different person to sell cars than it does to work the service desk. An analytical mind is necessary for the parts department, and seldom do the personalities have much common ground.

But we can get along. At the heart of the phrase, you can sense that there’s a battle going on. There are hurt feelings and grudges held. But the idea is to look past the emotion and achieve a common goal. In the dealership, that’s serving the customer well and increasing sales.

How Do Fixed Ops Factor In?

I constantly found myself looking down on certain salespeople, and eventually I painted them all with the same brush. What happens at that point is you now have disdain for every salesperson, even if you share a common goal. The sales team is no longer Steve, Matt, Jordan, and Andrew. They’ve lost their individuality in your mind. In that way, it’s you that needs to change.

If you’re in fixed operations, your role is unwaveringly based on customer service. The best customer service happens when you work well as a team. To be absolutely clear, you don’t have to be friends with everyone in the dealership, but you do have to work with them.

Integrate Fixed Operations for Everyone’s Benefit

Seek out ways that you can work closely with your dealerships other departments. It may be as simple as teaming up with one salesperson and one parts person that you get along with already. You can achieve great things if you work together, whether it’s the parts person helping sell accessories on a new car purchase or a service advisor walking a new car buyer through the dealership for a tour.

Fixed operations provide a foundation for the dealership; a steady and solid support system. Without fixed operations your store couldn’t build and it would struggle to exist at all. Fixed operations is an absolutely critical part of the dealership puzzle, but without the other departments, it’s just another repair shop on the corner.