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dealership spotlight / service
more work sells more parts," he said.
"It's not rocket science, but it's amazing what it takes to get everybody to do it and do it consistently," Brummond observed. To help with that, he set the service advisors up on a pay plan that is sales-ori- ented. "It's a bonus structure," he explained. "They gain a bigger percentage the more that they present and sell." If the technician does not perform the inspection, the service advisor loses that opportunity to sell, so of course the advisor is going to make certain the technician completes the inspection.
Brummond also tracks individ- ual's performance daily. "I track basically everything. I have a daily spreadsheet I use," he said. He looks at tech- nicians' performance and their percentage of efficiency, while tracking advisors' performance gets a little more complex and
follows things like total labor sales, total parts sales, total ROs, menu and inspection upsells, and more. He provides employees with a daily report on their performance and usu- ally does a monthly analysis on ROs that he goes over with each advisor. "There's never a question. If you ask any of my guys how they're doing, they could tell you the dollar to the month, hours per RO, every- thing right down the list."
Brummond said their pricing structure has also helped boost service profits. They keep some of the more com- petitive service and repairs at lower prices, while more technical repairs that require a more skilled technician are charged accordingly. The dealership also has a body shop on site, so when an advisor encounters a cosmetic issue during an inspection, he can get an estimate and some- times the cosmetic issue can be taken care of at the same
time the car is in for repair or maintenance. "Convenience, convenience, convenience, all the time," he stressed, and said the idea is to "make sure that they're coming here and only here for everything … It's our ultimate goal."
He wants to eventually transi- tion service advisors to using tablet computers for vehicle walk-arounds and electronic maintenance menu and pricing presentation. Brummond favors taking small steps toward a long-term goal, rather than introducing a radical change. "If you're not prepared for it, it's almost always a disaster. So we're trying to make sure we do the little things one at a time."
Schmitz said the biggest goals for the dealership when it comes to building on its serv- ice business are to increase new vehicle sales and convert the 25 to 30 percent of service customers who are orphaned Saturn owners into Chevrolet
owners. "What we're trying to do is sell more Chevys in order to build up that service busi- ness again," said Schmitz. "It takes sometimes two or three years of ownership to get them to the point where they're buying maintenance again … This was the whole reason, going back to that wind-down, why we felt it was so important to be selling as many [nearly] new Chevrolets as we could so that when we came out of the wind-down we wouldn't be so far behind the eight-ball."
Brummond said Schmitz, the GM, is "exceptional" at man- aging used cars and knows the business well. "He basically turned the new cars into the used-car business [during the wind-down] … and was able to turn sales and … retained a lot of customers in doing so." In 2011, the dealership sold 985 new Chevrolets, which Brummond said will "obviously help us back here."
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