You think you’re dangling an enticing lure in front of your customers’ eyes. You plan to set the hook and reel them in. But what you don’t know is that the lure you’re using is completely ineffective!

Yes, that’s a nebulous analogy but you’ll see where it’s going very soon. It includes a challenge for everyone reading this to take a look at what you’re presenting to your customers.

From My Experience…

I’ve just completed a major purchase, one that’s very similar to that of buying a car: a travel trailer. I spent hours browsing online, searching for just the right layout and configuration for my family’s needs. I visited probably 10 to 15 dealer sites – maybe more – looking for the elusive ‘white whale’ of travel trailers.

And then I did. I found the right floor plan and the right equipment. But what was extremely tough to find was a list price. What I wanted to know is approximately what I should expect to spend for my desired trailer. And time after time, I was frustrated by the lack of pricing available. What was on more than 90 percent of the VLPs was a statement that makes my innards burn: “CALL FOR PRICE”.

You Haven’t Earned a Call Yet

Think of it as it applies to your online shopping and research experiences. When you come across a listing that demands you “CALL FOR PRICE”, how do you respond? I can tell you, my initial response is to find another dealer who will give me a price online. When you require your potential customer to ‘take the bait’ on a bare hook, you aren’t going to land many fish.

It’s because you haven’t earned a response yet. The goal for vehicle listing should be to create warm leads; to generate true potential sales. If someone is contacting you to find out a price, they’re already irked that you haven’t given them information they want and, for all intents and purposes, should already have from you.

You Don’t Want Their Call

And if you’re a salesperson who gets that phone call, you’re already behind. The conversation is no longer about the product or the experience – it’s all about price. No matter how much better your dealership performs, there’s very little chance you’ll sway the customer on any other metric than the price. Can you say “Mini”?

Take a look at your website today. Are there vehicle listings, parts specials, or service menu items that tell the customer to ‘CALL FOR PRICE”? If there are, think about how you’d respond if you were in the customers’ shoes. Then consider why your listing is like that. Is it because you don’t have a price available for the unit yet? Or, are you fishing for price-based leads that whittle your gross profit down to a nub?

If you’re fishing, you need a worm on your hook to get a bite. If you want customers to respond to your vehicle listings, give them a full, juicy, tantalizing description complete with a price.

Take a minute right now to browse your website’s home page. Just open a new browser window on your phone or your computer, check it out, then come back. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

What did you see? Did anything catch your attention? There’s probably a slider at the top, scrolling through your current offers. You have a sharp-looking logo up in the corner, maybe a bunch of your top-of-the-line inventory flashing across the screen.

If this sounds what you just saw on your website, you’re missing the mark completely. The Car Buyer of the Future study by Autotrader gives you a glimpse into what customers value most in their dealership of choice. If they’ve come to your website, that says you at least have a shot at being their car dealer, but you’ll have to get their attention.

What Customers DON’T Want

What a customer doesn’t want on your website is to be ‘sold’ on something. The typical sales advertising tactics are old hat and have no place on your site. We’re talking about the “$77 per week” ad or the “9,999 plus $3,000 down, PDI, Freight, dealer fees, and sales tax” banner. That’s not helping anyone!

Actually, your website is hardly about the vehicles at all, except for your in-stock inventory. Better, more accurate and complete information is on the manufacturer’s site. Unless you’re doing something special with the vehicle listing on your website, it shouldn’t be the focus.

It’s not the time to close the customer, and unless you’re selling cars online, the vehicles aren’t the most important part of your site.

What Customers Want in an Online Experience

What your customers respond to most when they visit your website is a unique experience. This can’t be stated strongly enough:

Anyone with the same franchise as you can get the same vehicles as you, if they don’t already have them. Your customer experience is what you should give your customers a taste of online, not just the cars and trucks you sell.

Please don’t get the message mixed up – the vehicles are important to have listed, just not as important as your team members and the environment.

How You Can Tweak Your Website

What you see when you first view a website, before you scroll down at all, is known as ‘above the fold’. It’s a term from physical ads where there is a literal fold in the paper. It should always contain the most important message you want to convey; a briefing of what your store is all about.

• Make your staff a feature. If you have a slider across the top of your screen, include brief profiles of your sales and service staff. These are the people who make your dealership the success that it is.
• Give your customers a glimpse into your store. Photos of your showroom and your service drive make it less foreign, helping a customer decide to walk through your door physically.
• Be transparent with pricing. Forget about the ‘sticker price PLUS’ and instead, show all-inclusive pricing. At minimum, show a pricing breakdown with the total price displayed somewhere.
• For your vehicle listing pages (VLPs), be current! Don’t keep old listings up online and put new arrivals online immediately. Anyone shopping for a car doesn’t want to hear that the vehicle they’re inquiring about has already sold – that’s a turnoff.

Want to Make Your Website Truly Individual?

If you’re serious about being different in your website presentation than everyone else, get personal. Add a brief video of the president or GM explaining why their store benefits the shopper. Add video clips of friendly interactions such as a salesperson greeting a customer at the door with a handshake. Include a 360-degree showroom view and service drive view.

Give customers a reason to feel that they know you. It’s the personal connection that’s going to set you apart from the other dealers around you who all focus on price, not personality, as their selling point.

Parts departments, the service drive, the sales floor – everyone has a sales target every month of every year. There’s a clear expectation from upper management, which is a good thing. But that pressure to perform can cause good staff to run off the rails.

It isn’t always realistic to hit monthly goals, and some years it’s simply impossible. The economy affects how customers shop for cars and how tight they are with their parts and service dollars. And after a fantastic year or two of growth, the bubble is almost guaranteed to burst. It seems like a slump, but it’s just a correction, much like what happens in the stock market or the recent Bitcoin correction.

As a general manager, dealer principal, or department manager, you know this to be true in your head. But since everyone’s paycheck depends on sales, there’s a push to hit those elusive targets. When the pressure is on, now far will you go to make the sale?

Maintain Integrity…

It’s what everyone would like to believe they would do. When a customer shouldn’t be bought in the F&I office, the salesperson knows it’s not the right fit for the customer, or the fuel injector service isn’t really due but shows up on the recommended services, you’d like to think you’d have the integrity to take the high road.

Sometimes, it’s in everyone’s best interest to let a deal go. Despite the pressure to roll a unit or make a service upsell, the best way to serve some customers is to let the sale pass by and keep a loyal client.

For example, I have a rough older truck. It needed new tires, and the shop I chose to buy tires from knew it. I explained it was only a workhorse, yet the advisor had the option to try to upsell me services that weren’t of benefit. Had he pushed for fluid flushes, a transmission service, and brake services, I might’ve bought the tires but certainly would’ve gone elsewhere afterward. Instead, he knew my interests and made recommendations in passing, because he is a man of integrity.

…Or Get Greasy

The other option is to make the sale, no matter what the cost. It’s about the here and now – hitting this month’s target with no forethought of the damage it will do down the road. A few examples:

• Slamming a subprime customer into a car with payments you know they can’t afford at an obscene interest rate.
• Selling a trusting customer a brake job when a cleaning or adjustment would do instead.
• Playing a customer’s emotions, making them feel guilty, or causing undue worry about their current vehicle.
• Selling a part above retail list simply because you want to make up gross profit.

Especially at the end of the month when the pressure is on to hit the target, there’s a tendency to get greasy with sales. Instead of bowing to the pressure, maintain your integrity and only make the sales you know are honest. Your customers will love you for it.

As this new year starts, get back to the basics with your team. Make sure everyone is doing what they should be with every customer interaction. Ensure your team maintains their integrity with your customers and does right by them, and the sales growth will follow.

Overall, 2017 has been a success in the sales and fixed operations departments. We’ve seen a broader recognition of the service department’s importance, solid sales, and a surge in EV sales and developments. The new year, 2018, promises to offer incredible opportunities for success going forward.

Professionally, you might find yourself at a high point in your career. Things could be going really well – your staffing situation is perfect, you have customers flowing into your store, and you love what you do. Or, it could feel like it’s all unraveling. In-fighting or high turnover can be beyond stressful, you aren’t getting the leads or traffic you expected, and it’s a grind going to work every day.

Moving Forward Isn’t Always Easy

Whether you’re coming from a high point or you’re struggling with what to do next in your career, it’s important to keep taking strides. Staying still is the best way to grenade your career. You know how it works:

• If you’re doing well and are happy with the way both you and your department are doing, it won’t last. Your higher-ups expect growth – personal growth and sales increases. Without a growth strategy going forward, you’ll be at risk of being replaced with someone more driven than you.
• If you’re struggling and want to give up, don’t. Whether you get through the rough waters and into smooth sailing or you seek a change in your career, demonstrating a ‘never-say-die’ attitude will help you in the future.

With both trains of thought, there’s a sure-fire way to ignite your passion for what you do and to discover new or better ways of doing things.

Get Out from Behind Your Desk

If there is one thing you should do in the new year, it’s to get out from behind your desk. Your office is holding you back. It makes you inaccessible and unapproachable. It blocks you from seeing what’s going on around you in your department. It turns your eyes downward to the reports you’re reading or the screen you’re scrolling.

If You’re a Sales Manager…

You need to be present with your sales team. There are slow times when you can get your reports completed, and you’ll need to set time aside to watch the auctions and replenish stock. But your greatest impact is when you’re walking the showroom floor.

Customers appreciate when the sales manager is approachable. It feels like they care about the customer, not just about making the numbers work and closing a deal. Your salespeople will learn more from you and feel like they can trust you better when you talk with them in their space, not yours. Spend as little time as you can at the podium or in your office chair.

If You’re a Service Manager…

I’d encourage you to abandon your office. Use it only when you need a closed-door meeting with a customer or staff member, or for a short time each day when you complete the required documents. Instead, spend as much time as you can in the service drive and the shop.

You’ll see an immediate improvement in your staff morale – you’re showing that you care about what they’re doing. You’re helping when you can, you spend face time with the customers, and you’re seeing the problems and bottlenecks in real time, which means you can get them addressed sooner. A service manager out of their office can be much more effective.

If You’re a Dealer Principal or GSM…

The business side of a dealership gets in the way. Get back to what you love – the customer satisfaction business. When you spend less time at your desk, you’ll develop stronger relationships with your managers and employees, which improves staff loyalty and morale. Customers who see the owners, DPs, and GSMs enjoying time with customers and staff in their store feel like it’s a place they want to do business. And being outside of the office will certainly help top management to understand necessary changes and discover what their customers want.

Less time at your desk will absolutely have a positive impact on you, your department, and your store as a whole. If there’s just one change you can make for the new year, this should be it.

I can’t help but sense that most of the retail automotive world feels threatened by the push toward an online sales experience. It’s been coming for well over a decade in a mainstream fashion, not just as a flash-in-the-pan trend. It’s not a Tickle Me Elmo or a Slap Chop. Buying online is going to stay, and it’s going to become the crux of the retail automotive business. It didn’t come up out of thin air, so it shouldn’t be taking any manufacturers or dealers by surprise.

What it should have done by now is triggered opportunities in your head. There should be a list on your desk of ways your dealership or department can capitalize on the online automotive marketplace. It should be an ever-present thought in mind because it’s not ten years or even five years away. It could very well be the biggest news story of 2018.

If you’re stuck in the mindset that online sales and out-of-dealership sales experiences are doom and gloom, it will be. But for dealers who welcome a better customer experience, it offers ample opportunities to thrive and grow.

It Expands Your Sales Radius

It makes sense with a brick-and-mortar sales process to target the prospects closest to your home base. With online sales, you can advertise and extend your range effectively, so long as your inventory and staffing are sufficient.

Three-quarters of online car shoppers still want to drive before they buy. Extending your store’s sales range requires putting cars near them. It can be as easy as renting a secure compound or storefront as a satellite location, stocking it with common vehicles, then sending a product advisor to meet interested clients off-site.

It Minimizes Tire-Kickers

Every online lead is a serious sales opportunity that is only a click away. What previously needed to be filtered for quality leads is chock full of prospects who want you to help them finish their car buying experience on the spot (their spot, not yours).

It Provides More Opportunity for Your Service Department

Selling cars online is a starting point – soon, all your products will need to be offered remotely. The service department can begin offering at-home basic services to secure customer loyalty, and pick-up and delivery valet services obviously keep your customers’ attention and all but eliminate a wandering eye for service providers.

It sounds like more of an annoyance, more trouble than it’s worth, but it’s what the coming trend demands. It’s this or a steep drop-off in service traffic.

Prepare for It!

If you have a traditional store currently, it doesn’t take much at the store level to develop an online car buying experience. Only a few items need to be done to get your building and staffing in place:

• You’ll need more staff. Valets, product advisors, and service staff, specifically. Because you need to be increasingly mobile, you need to add personnel that can handle the influx of outbound traffic.
• Mobile service units. It’s quite basic, really, requiring a mobile lift, a set of mechanic’s tools, a mobile air compressor, and a parts department that can quickly equip the service unit with the right parts they need for the job they are going to.

The harder part isn’t at your store level. You need to implement changes that go beyond your four walls.

• Make online sales part of your brand image. You’ll want to consult an advertising expert for the best way to do so.
• Develop your online content. Your website must offer a seamless experience for the sale or the frustrated customer will simply click over to another dealer. Create valuable content, evergreen blogs, new model descriptions, and in-dealership product videos. Make it so the shopper doesn’t need to go elsewhere for information.
• Get your F&I department ready for the road. Armed with videos showing the benefits of the products they offer, a connected tablet or computer to serve the customer remotely, and a customer-centric focus, the F&I staff will need to become mobile to round out the complete out-of-dealership selling experience.

You might’ve had cause to be a skeptic at the beginning of 2017, but no longer. 2017 is the year Volkswagen committed to building an electric option in all 300 of their worldwide models by 2030. Volvo says every new model launched from 2019 onward will have an electric motor in some capacity. The Chevrolet Bolt is the 2017 North American Car of the Year, and the Tesla Model 3 finally (and slowly) began production.

Electric car technology is here to stay, and it’s going to change the way dealerships do business. That incudes the service department from tip to tail.

How Your Service Department Needs to Handle EVs

On average, your electric car customers will be much the same clientele; perhaps a little more environmentally conscious. How your staff relate to EV customers should remain constant with your other patrons. But how you deal with their vehicles will affect your service department structure.

You need a charging platform.

What you need will depend on the products your store sells, as well as the volume of EV sales. Have a minimum of one fast charging station outside your dealership to add a quick charge to depleted customer cars and inventory. Inside your store, have one Level 2 charging system per 4 to 6 service bays.

If this sounds like more of an investment than you’re ready to make, think about the repercussions. If a gas-powered car runs out of fuel in the shop, it only takes a moment to put gas in from a jerry can. If an electric car depletes its charge, how do you plan to ‘jump start’ it to move it? Besides, with electric car model releases ramping up, it’s better to be prepared ahead of time.

You’ll need EV techs.

The immense amount of electrical discharge from an EV can kill someone. It’s fundamental that the people working on electric cars know how to do so safely. All of your staff – from lot attendants and detailers to master technicians – should know how to be safe around an electric car.

Technicians, though, will need more thorough training. Begin the process of certifying your techs to work on not just your brand’s EVs but others that come through for service or used car reconditioning. Have at least two certified in short order; then add other techs consistently as time allows.

You’ll need dealer certification.

Get ahead of the dealers around you. Be the first to get EV certified in your area. Manufacturers will only sell their EV products through their certified dealers – the Chevrolet Bolt is one example and the Ford Focus Electric is another.

There may be geographical restrictions they impose as well, like just one EV dealer within 100 miles. If you aren’t the first, you may be waiting years before you can get your foot in the door. You need to find out your manufacturer’s requirements and implement them as soon as you physically can.

These three things should be at the top of your 2018 checklist. 2018 promises to be another big year for mainstream electric cars with the Honda Clarity Electric coming out, the new Nissan LEAF recently released, and other models kicking up production. Be prepared for the wave of EVs you’ll soon see on the streets.

You expect a certain amount of respect, and along with that, you expect to be listened to. Yet, every manager finds themselves in a place at some point where their words have no effect. It’s like speaking into the void of space: absolutely nothing is getting through, no matter how vocal you are.

It can seem like your team isn’t paying any attention, and that feels like a direct blow to you as their leader. It rings of disrespect for your authority, doesn’t it? It stings, and the lasting effect is that you begin to doubt your ability to manage.

Look for Proof

Before you get too crazy about it, do a bit of recon. It’s important to know whether your team has actually heard your previous directions, and that’s best done by observing. Take stock of their actions – are the directions you’ve given been put into action? Is there a direct contradiction to what you’ve said?

In my view, there are three possibilities:

• Your staff are following your instructions – you just didn’t hear a verbal confirmation that you were heard.
• Your words have fallen on deaf ears. There has been no proof that your input has been put into action.
• There’s direct contradiction to your instructions. This is the worst – someone thinks they know better.

How You Respond

Just because you’re a manager doesn’t mean it’s easy to respond, but it’s a must. If you don’t, you’re not just allowing out-of-line behavior – you’re approving of it.

If you feel like you weren’t heard but your instructions ultimately were followed, it tells you that your communication needs some fine-tuning. This is easy. All that’s you need to do is ask for your instruction to be paraphrased or repeated back to you.

If you’re the manager whose instructions don’t meet resistance but aren’t put into action, you have a challenge on your hands. What’s happened is that, over time, your team has gotten into a rut. They run on autopilot, and that makes diverting from the routine difficult. Hands-on coaching may be necessary for implementation. More likely, it requires less managing and more leading. Simply telling your team which way to go is less effective than showing them the way. And remember that changing a routine takes consistent effort for at least 3 weeks before it becomes the new routine.

If you have someone on staff that goes completely against your instructions, there’s an obvious issue. It’s a case of someone thinking you don’t know what you are doing and undermining you, or it’s a person who really doesn’t like their job or where they work. But before you put the issue squarely on the employee, you need to evaluate the environment. Is your request unfounded? Are you micromanaging? Is the workplace becoming toxic? Or is there something personal standing between you two? Try to resolve issues that may be affecting performance before coming to the decision to terminate, even though that might need to be the end result.

Evaluate Your Instruction

You’ve already said it, so you have to ensure its compliance. But if you’re noticing that you are ‘losing the crowd’, it might be a professional development issue within yourself.

The tendency as a manager is to want control of every facet of operations. You know what that means in your own store. You may be getting tuned out by some if you start micromanaging every process instead of letting service happen organically and personally. If that’s the case, you should find someone in your team – your ‘number two’, for example – that you can trust to bounce ideas off before implementation. You want someone who is willing to tell you that an idea is dumb, redundant, or unsustainable.

Often, you’ll just find that people are being people. Change is difficult. Making something new routine takes a long time. There’s other stuff going on in each person’s life. You should strive to be sensitive and gracious to these things. Knowing someone is understanding can build strength as a team, and you’ll find you’re being heard more often.

As I sit in the customer lounge, waiting for my vehicle to be serviced once again, it’s evident that most dealerships have a hard time being in the customer’s shoes. Being three years distant from the role as a service advisor, I’ve become overwhelmingly aware of how bad the true customer experience can be – without the dealer even knowing it.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s all the little things that make a massive difference. What’s necessary is an honest, unfettered review of the complete service process FROM THE OUTSIDE. Allow me to give a few examples and ideas that are extremely fresh for me as I drink waiting room coffee and sit in a sterile lounge.

The Appointment Process

Look at your appointment process, and what it promises to do. Obviously, an online appointment schedule is much more common than it used to be, but there are many ways it can fall short.

For instance, in my appointment, there wasn’t an option for a basic oil change service, nor an option to simply enter the details of a concern I wanted addressed. And when I completed my appointment online, it told me I would receive a confirmation from the dealership shortly. That didn’t happen. The next contact I received was a text message an hour before the appointment. So, I enter the service visit already a little put off.

Check In

The flow to the service advisor must be logical. Is it obvious to a first-time customer, let alone a regular client, where they should go? I pulled into the service drive and found the check-in podiums unattended. Apparently, their check-in process has changed, and I needed to go through a door to see the advisor. There was no one to greet or direct me.

Write-Up

The details from my appointment did not translate from the online appointment to the in-dealership reservation. Where it falls short, I do not know. What I do know is, as a customer, I expect to need to input the details only once. If that doesn’t happen, why book anything other than the check-in time alone?

The advisor was warm and knowledgeable, which is a stark difference from the previous gentleman who held the role. And while he reviewed the required maintenance with me – something that didn’t happen before – it would be a nice touch if the benefits were reviewed as well.

The Wait…

There’s plain seating, newspapers, and a blank TV in the corner. I’m in for a wait that could take a few hours, and 30 minutes in I’m already fidgety. The waiting lounge has the ability to enhance or detract from the service visit, which I see now.

For tech-savvy dealers, an iPad station with apps, vehicle information, or simply browsers would be an inexpensive way to keep customer happy and occupied. A desk where I can use my computer would be wonderful, embracing the business-class customer. A TV screen that includes valuable vehicle information like the service from Ten Foot Wave would be an awesome touch. Anything to take the customer’s mind (aka. MY mind) off the wait.

Let’s Skip to the Cashier

If the past is any indication, there won’t be a description of the services performed today when I go to pay for my service. The customer absolutely must know what was done and if anything else requires attention next time. It provides reassurance that their vehicle is in good condition until the next service is required.

You’re Too Close

As a dealership employee, you’re most likely too close to see the customer’s POV. It’s your process, which you trust. It isn’t necessarily wrong, but it probably needs to be optimized.

Find someone to perform an audit of your service process, whether it’s a professional or a trusted layperson, to tell you where you can improve the customer experience.

Ratchet and Wrench released details of the 2017 Shop Performance Survey. There aren’t many reports that focus on the service industry instead of sales, so we pay attention to this one. In the 2017 Survey, there’s a marked decrease in respondents who claim to track KPIs consistently. Just two years ago in the 2015 survey, 82 percent of survey respondents claimed to track KPIs. This year, it’s just 68 percent.

We should all know what KPIs are at this point – Key Performance Indicators – and why they are so important. So then, why is there an alarming trend where KPIs are only watched by two-thirds of managers in the service industry? Is there something they know that we don’t?

Independent Versus Dealership

Personally, the first thing I checked was where the responses were generated from. Of the 200+ shops that completed the survey, 87 percent were independent repair shops, and 68 percent claim to be in the business of General Repair. This alone could be an interesting point to delve deeper into, as the remaining 13 percent are dealerships and franchised.

It would seem that independent repair shops are putting less stock into tracking KPIs, on average, yet they continue to steal away service customers from dealerships at an alarming rate. What are they doing that is more effective than the usual performance factors?

Even dealership service departments don’t track KPIs as reliably. The report shows that dealer-owned service departments dropped from 88 percent to 79 percent in KPI tracking. Even with the higher rate, their efficacy might still be lacking if they don’t fully understand how to implement them in the face of customer service.

Most Tracked KPIs

This provided some very interesting insight, in my opinion. In the summary, Ratchet and Wrench provides this list of KPIs and the percentage of shops that track them:

• Repair Sales Volume: 90%
• Gross Profit Margin on Parts Sales: 90%
• Maintenance Sales Volume: 89%
• Overall Gross Profit Margin: 86%
• Gross Profit Margin on Labor Sales: 83%
• Effective Labor Rate: 78%
• Technician Productivity: 76%
• Technician Efficiency: 75%
• Overall Net Profit Margin: 72%
• CSI: 43%

What seems to be the most important factors among repair shops of all kinds is still Gross Profit and Sales Volume. Only 43 percent of repair shops take CSI scores into consideration, and that could be because many independents have no way to track them at all.

What also stands out to me is Effective Labor Rate, with only 78 percent of shops keeping track of it. It’s a critical component in maintaining a healthy profit margin and helps reduce instances of unauthorized discounting. Why any shop would leave money on the table by NOT tracking ELR is beyond me.

How Do 32 Percent of Repair Shops Track Success?

There are still 32 percent of repair shops that responded who do not track KPIs. Yet, because they are still in business as either an independent, a dealership service department, or a franchised shop, it must be assumed that there’s some level of success.

In many cases, they simply don’t track progress. It’s an extremely loose way to lead, but it must work for at least a few. The major implication is that it’s difficult to move forward and grow when you don’t know where you’ve been or where you want to go.

An Untracked KPI??

Perhaps it has something to do with a factor that isn’t commonly tracked. Independent shops have a reputation for speedy service, and that’s an area dealerships have been sorely lacking. It’s been widely publicized that customers don’t want to spend so much time at the dealership, but little has been done to correct the issue.

Do we need to begin tracking a new KPI called TIS, or ‘Time In Service’? Reducing the minutes or hours a customer spends with their vehicle in the dealership could have the power to improve CSI and increase retention, as well as overall RO counts and repair sales volume.

Think about tracking TIS, the total time from writeup to completion, not just the technician’s efficiency. Reducing the total Time In Service might be a difference-maker for your store.

A lot of times, we focus on how to fix things when it feels like your department is imploding around you. That’s often because running your service department is similar to riding on the edge of a knife blade. One slight variation to the left or right and you’re going to teeter off. But sometimes, things are truly moving in the right direction and there are no major fires to put out.

If you find yourself in a sweet spot, that’s awesome! Enjoy it while it lasts. Because everyone knows that it won’t be this way forever, no matter how good of a manager or leader you might be. It’s in these smooth times that you can work on another important facet: you.

Are You Well Equipped as a Leader?

If you feel like you have all the skills you need to all the problems you’ll encounter as a manager or a leader, you’re probably pulling the wool over your own eyes. There is always – always – room for improvement, and if your staff and processes are working well right now, you can make improvements in you.

Read a book

You could fill a dozen bookshelves with material from gurus and trainers from around the world, but it’s hard to find time to read them. Read a chapter a day in a leadership book to hone your skills.

Many of the books have the same topics, and that’s hard to avoid. You’ll connect better with some authors than others. Even if it feels like it’s something you already know, you might be able to apply it in a different way.

Most importantly, you need to keep honing your skills, and you can do that by always learning and applying the knowledge.

Train your understudy

In the military, you learn the position above yours and train the person below you for your role. It ensures a seamless transition in the chain of command should the need arise. When times are good at your store, you can develop the person below you into a leader who can take your place when the time comes. Don’t be intimidated by the thought that you’re training your replacement. The very fact that you take the time to do so helps solidify your value in the store.

Learn the position above yours

And on the other side of the coin, take the opportunity to shadow your superior. Begin to gain knowledge for your future, assuming you want to continue moving up the ladder in your career. Again, this shows initiative and drive, of which YOUR leadership takes notice.

Attend conferences

DSES was just last week, and it’s the perfect opportunity to improve yourself. Whether you’re a sales manager, general manager, parts manager, service manager, or a senior service advisor or salesperson, there’s fantastic information and inspiration given from the sessions and keynote speakers.

Some of the expenses may end up being out of pocket if your dealership doesn’t have the budget for it. It’s an incredible time and a valuable experience; think of it as an investment in your future.

If the seas are calm right now, know that the storms are coming. Take the opportunity to finetune your own leadership skills so you can manage the rough seas in the not-too-distant future.