I firmly believe that people who are great at putting out fires are actually fire starters.
Good operators prevent fires from even happening in the first place by putting structures in place to prevent them from starting in the first place rather than just dampening them.
I coached up my sales and services managers on this today using this powerful phrase by my mentor and previous owner Dan Anderson:
“When everyone is in charge, no one is in charge.”
When I first came to Al West Nissan, I not only had FOUR separate people bringing me recon slips, but I had times where two people bought me recon slips on the same unit. Not only that, they didn’t just bring those to me. They were taking them to one of three people. So no one was really in charge of reconditioning on either the sales or service side.
The results of this reared it’s head today. We sold a truck and within a week the truck had issues. We had the guest bring the truck in for us to look at and we received a $4,200 recon bill from service.
I asked the service manager if they had diagnosed this problem in WIP and they did claiming that the work had been declined. We got that part right anyway. Unfortunately, no one knows who declined the work. The service department also couldn’t prove that the work was declined as there was no record kept and there was only proof that it was quoted. And as you might guess, that meant that at a maximum, only one person on the sales side that knew that there were known issues with the truck. The rest of the sales staff had no idea that there was important work declined; including the salesperson who sold the truck and more importantly the guest that purchased the truck.
Fortunately, shortly after coming here, I changed process and had it set up so that only the service manager can bring recon slips and only myself can approve or decline the work. I am also reviewing these with our sales manager as well so he knows how to better manage these decisions in the future so that he can handle this later (as you might recall from previous comments, he is very green). I believe important reconditioning items should rarely be declined and only in extreme cases (very old or very high mileage units). Additionally, in these rare cases, it must be communicated to the entire staff what these issues are so that they can inform the guest so that they can make an educated decision on whether to move forward with a purchase.
It was too late to prevent the problem, but we shouldn’t have this problem again. A lot of time was wasted reviewing what happened, who was at fault, deciding what to do now after the fact, and we inconvenienced a guest. And since we sold the customer the truck knowing that there was an issue without communicating that to them, it cost us $4,200. Here is another Dan Anderson quote of value: “Every lesson has a cost.” I am, of course, also continuing to work with our sales manager so that he also knows what to look for in the future so that we catch this issue in the appraisal process.
Do you agree that the customer should have been informed of the declined work? Being that the truck was sold as is, should we have paid for it?
