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SHOP ADVICE

Book Review

Industry leaders share their favorite leadership reads

In need of a new read? Four industry leaders known for their leadership and shop culture have a couple of books in mind. Bill Greeno, owner of Quality Automotive Servicing in Truckee, Calif., is known as a “management guru” in the industry when it comes to leading his staff (Read about how he works to internally motivate his staff everyday at ratchetandwrench.com/MotivateEmployees).

Like Greeno, Al Pridemore, co-owner of Pride Auto Care in central Colorado, is always striving to be a servant leader in his shops, providing the best training possible for his staff, even going as far as to hire their very own director of training for their operations (Read more at ratchetandwrench.com/DirectorOfTraining).

And when it comes to creating an ideal shop culture, John Beebe, owner of Bellingham Automotive in Bellingham, Wash., and Chris Cozad, owner of Alternative Auto Care in Columbus, Ohio, are no strangers to the topic. In fact, Beebe was featured in last November’s Ratchet+Wrench culture feature discussing his approach to shop culture (Read more at ratchetandwrench.com/CultureCode), while Cozad discussed her leadership tactics used every day in her shop (Read more at ratchetandwrench.com/LeadershipBootCamp).

Here’s what these successful shop owners have been reading recently, with some of their key leadership takeaways from each title.

AS TOLD TO ABBY PATTERSON

Bill Greeno’s Pick: Now, Discover Your Strengths

By Donald O. Clifton and Marcus Buckingham

Focus: Finding Strengths

This book brings the reader into a paradigm when it comes to hiring. Instead of focusing on one’s weaknesses or failings, this book alters that thought, putting the sole focus on others’ strengths instead. It allows the leader to understand the tools at his or her disposal within their team. After all, if you hire a hammer and expect them to turn screws all day, you just might be disappointed with the results.

The book is written to provide guidance for leaders, but could also be used to help your team members better understand each other. The book gives some examples of folks who have focused upon their own strengths to see to their own success. I mostly use this book for bringing new employees on board. I like to know what their strengths are before I interview so I know who I'm meeting with. As a team, we use it every day to help us focus on one another's strengths. This has improved our company culture because there are not as many misunderstandings with one another, and we can put ourselves in one another’s shoes.

Al Pridemore’s Pick: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

By Stephen Covey

Focus: Effective Leadership Techniques

This book focuses on improving yourself, your communication style, leadership abilities, and having the proper mindset before attempting to lead others.

A lot of Dr. Covey's teachings are more focused on fine-tuning your own ideals, investing in and understanding your perception of yourself and the world first, then utilizing his tactics for dealing with people, communication with those you can impact, and the impact you can make, which is critical in any leadership role. These have served me well, in my honest opinion. I have found these to be incredibly helpful in my career development, in my ownership of our company, and in my own personal life with my family.

If someone reads through the Seven Habits, some of [the concepts are] very selfexplanatory in terms of usable leadership tactics that can be used on a daily basis. But until you buy into the tactical piece of each habit it's hard to understand perhaps how it can profoundly impact your life, personally and professionally. For the record, to this day I read over my Seven Habits study guide on a weekly basis just as a reminder of how to stay balanced, on task , and live a more fulfilling life with better leadership effectiveness.

John Beebe’s Pick: Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

By Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown

Focus: Growing Your Team

I first heard Liz speak at the Global Leadership Summit, where she proposed the question, “If you don’t know what you as a leader should work on to get better, guess who does? Everyone else.” So to me, it now became OK to ask my team what I needed to get better at, and I did. It was a revolutionary win-win.

The focus is to make leaders aware of the vast opportunity of treasured genius that’s already within their workforce. It won’t work if we need to be the smartest one in the room—they’re known as a Diminisher. Wiseman helps us see the difference between this type of leader and the Multiplier, who everyone wants to work for, providing examples and clear steps to becoming this ideal leader.

The beauty of this concept is there are no losers. If you already know or discover that you’re a controlling-, my-way-or-the-highway-type, there’s still hope for you. Wiseman has created a roadmap to the promised land of making everyone around you better.

Chris Cozad’s Pick Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

By Simon Sinek

Focus: Communicating Like a Leader

This book really helped me focus on my purpose. You have to rise to the top in order to separate yourself from everybody else, especially as a woman in this industry. As a woman owner managing an all-female staff, it’s helped me realize the importance of achieving that next level in education, customer service, and communication.

I believe the biggest problem in this industry is the failure to communicate. What results from that is not meeting customer’s expectations, simply because we don’t know what expectations are there because we haven’t bothered to ask.

We have regular team meetings every month and talk about the “why” behind what we do, and I talk to my advisors about how a customer’s expectations set our timeline. … It’s putting the customer in the driver’s seat and in front of our desire to sell.

I believe our customers are a valuable diagnostic tool; they just don’t have the language to tell us. We strive to give customers the language to help us diagnose their vehicle, making sure to ask the right questions. So, if we ask the right questions, and listen to the answers, we’re accomplishing the “why” behind what we do.

Building Trust Through Technology

Kukui DVI adds a level of transparency to each repair

All great relationships, personal and professional, rely on

trust. Trust becomes even more important when one party is recommending large investments to the other.

In the automotive repair industry, a customer-shop relationship is just that. Customers who sometimes have no automotive knowledge are put in a vulnerable position when talking to a shop about the needed repairs for their vehicle. Big money can be involved in the discussion, and customers want to be sure that they are doing what they need to maintain their vehicle without feeling like they are being “ripped off”.

Mitch Moncur, owner of Denny’s Auto in Riverton, Utah, has been able to build trust with his customers by using Kukui DVI. The digital inspections have strengthened the relationship between customers and his shop, pushing Denny’s Auto to continue to grow.

ADDED TRANSPARENCY To build trust, Moncur ensures that there is a level of transparency with his customers, and digital vehicle inspections through Kukui provide that. By allowing technicians to take photos and videos of specific vehicle parts, a full digital report can then be sent directly to the customer’s phone or email. This photographic snapshot provides clients the evidence they need to better understand vehicle recommendations, and doesn’t leave any unanswered questions or doubt.

“Kukui DVI lets us be even more transparent than what we were previously capable of, and we always want to be as transparent as we possibly can,” he explains. “Our customers absolutely love it, and it builds that level of overall trust.”

Digital inspections become even more useful with customers who are newer to the shop, or may have had unfortunate experiences at a previous shop. In an instance like this, Moncur is able to show the cautious customer the progression of photos from one DVI report to another. This way, customers have visual proof of the part wearing down, and can feel confident about their choice of shop and purchasing decisions.

EASY TO USE FOR ALL With all new technology comes a learning curve. Luckily, for Moncur, the learning curve for Kukui DVI was less than a day with his team.

“Using Kukui DVI is easy on the service writer side and easy on the technician side,” he explains. “I have a technician who has been with us since 1993, he learned how to do it in like a day, it’s easy for all generations.”

On the owner side, Kukui has made it easy for Moncur to track how many DVIs his team has sent out, along with the conversion ratio and other key KPIs. He also has a 30 minute call once a month with someone from Kukui to help grow his business.

“It's amazing, I’ve learned so much more about my business,” he says.

The simple, easy-to-use format is also helpful to customers, and makes reading their digital inspection report quick and digestible, no matter how much previous vehicle knowledge they have.

“Our customers absolutely love it because all of our recommendations on the inspection are color-coded,” Moncur explains. “So they get their email, and it will show all the pictures and videos and technician comments.”

Within the report, customers will see a green section noting everything that looks good on their vehicle. Then there's a yellow section, these are the repairs that need to be looked at in the near future. Lastly, the red section, showcasing the items that need to be taken care of immediately.

“They like it because it acts as a built-in priority list for them,” he says.

EXPANDING TECHNOLOGY Moving digital is the best way to stay up-to-date in the industry and attract younger customers who rely more heavily on technology.

“If you want to stay relevant in the automotive industry, you have to be cutting edge,” Moncur says. “You have to be sending pictures and you have to be taking videos.”

As more and more customers from younger generations enter your shop, new challenges of trust arise.

“Our industry has a harder time earning the trust of younger generations,” he explains. “They've never really had experience at an automotive repair shop and they're scared they're gonna get screwed over. If you can visually show them what's going on with their car, you're going to have a customer for life.”