Transcript
WEBVTT
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Hey, it's Kathleen and Shannon here, and this is Get In Her Lane.
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We are two automotive professionals diving deep into why women are so underrepresented in this industry and trying to make a positive change.
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So right along with us as we discuss ideas and takeaways that can help everyone further this effort in the automotive world and beyond.
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Hello Shannon.
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How are we doing?
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Hey Kathleen, another episode.
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We are back.
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This is going to be so much fun.
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Back in biz.
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How are you?
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I'm good.
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I'm actually doing one of our favorite activities.
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Can you guess what it is?
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No, what might that be?
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It is working from home, baby.
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I love that for you, for both of us actually, because I am doing the same thing, which is good, because I look like a crazy person when I record in remote places.
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I am thankful it's audio only.
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You know, I have actually seen Kathleen record this podcast in public and the hand motions that she somehow makes while we're recording it is, let's just say it's good that we're both recording from home today.
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We're really into the conversation.
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We are really into the conversation we do it for the listeners.
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But speaking of working from home, what do we got going on today for this episode?
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Yes, so I'm so, so excited we're going to speak with a special guest, Michael Alf from St Charles Toyota, who is not only a personal mentor of mine, but who also has been a remote work advocate and trailblazer long before it became popular in recent years.
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And as a special little bonus surprise, we're also talking to a couple of his team members.
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We're going to be hearing from Nikki, who is his BDC manager, and she works from home sometimes and manages employees who works from home sometimes, so she gets to see both sides of that and Christine, who actually lives in a different state, so she's going to talk to us a little bit about her experience too.
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Yes, we are so, so excited to hear from the St Charles team and I know what our listeners might be thinking and before you roll your eyes or maybe think you're going to skip this episode, we know that the idea of remote work in a retail automotive space can sometimes be a little scary Maybe something we haven't ventured into yet.
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But just trust us, michael and his team, you can do it Exactly.
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Michael and his team are going to take us through how they got started with this, the highs and the lows and kind of where they're at today, and I think it's going to be really informative, but also a little bit inspiring, if you let it be.
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Let's get into it.
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Hey, michael, we are so excited to have you and the team here today to discuss the value of remote work.
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So, to start, would you tell us a little bit about your journey in automotive and maybe how that's shaped your philosophy on remote work and how you manage your dealership?
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Yeah, I'd love to Thank you so much for having us on here.
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This is a great experience we're going to have.
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I kind of started out more of a technology person.
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I was always going to get in the computer field, is what I thought, and when I started with the dealerships, I always looked at technology as a way to solve problems.
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Everything I did was like how can we make this easier, faster, better for my employees and for my customers?
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So that's really more of you.
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That's really where I started things out, because I always looked at why do it the way we've always done it?
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So come up with different ways to handle things.
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And when it came to remote work, I looked at like we're spending a lot of time in the dealerships.
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All of us are spending hours and hours, and I would hear these horror stories of 80 hours a week and seven days a week, even though we were closed on Sundays.
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People are coming in to just do some final paperwork or something like that.
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So I realized quickly how do you create that quality life balance with working?
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So, instead of just coming in for something quick and simple, I wanted people to be able to do it when they could and not when they had to.
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It was really what it came down to.
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Like Kathleen said, we need more of you and it's just so interesting how saying you wanted to go in technology but landing an automotive and then seeing technology is still a solution somehow in our space is just something like we said more people should think about.
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So with the remote work piece, I guess can you share the journey of what that looked with implementing that actually in the dealership and kind of the steps and I'm sure some trials and tribulations you had to go through there?
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We really started the process I'll start with, that is, back in the late 90s.
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Early on I always tried to figure out ways to connect to the dealership and just kind of check up what was going on.
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I wasn't in the beginning, I was working every single day.
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I was working bell to bell.
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I check in and just felt uncomfortable even it was my day off so I just show up at the store here and there.
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So I wanted a way that I could do that without having that drive back and forth from work to home or I wasn't taking vacations so it made it really hard for me to get away from the store.
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So I figured there's got to be a way for me to look at what's going on, interact with my people, and this is before really email took off.
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We had our website back in the early 90s.
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We had some email, but not everyone was really into that.
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So this was a way I could just kind of check on what was happening in the store from a remote situation.
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So that's where we really started out.
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And then, as I started to do it, a few other employees wanted to join in and we started implementing it more, just so people could check in on their day off or check in when they were on vacation, just to make sure they felt comfortable.
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As a progress, then we realized you can actually do more work from home.
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So we started allowing a few of the managers and people to work from home remotely, and then we even allowed them to start taking a day or so a week to where they could work from home, because they might have a project they need to get done.
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So it was easier to do that from home.
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So they weren't bothered and had people coming in out of your office Every time.
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You've got to switch modes from just working on a project to someone has a quick question.
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Oh, I just got a quick question.
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I got a quick question and then you're disturbed.
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You got to restart over again.
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So that was really why we started implementing this.
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And then we had situations as things progressed where people had health situations or they had other things in their lives where they were either going to have to take a leave of absence or it was going to be really inconvenient.
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So I started to add that to their remote working situation and we really was.
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Before it was called remote work, it was just here's how you can get your job done while you're not at the store.
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That was really what it stemmed from.
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And then, as we continued to move forward, we had one of our employees who we'll talk to, christine.
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Her husband at the time was offered a position multiple states away up in Minnesota and she was looking at me like I'm going to have to quit.
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And she came into my office with my office manager and said oh, my husband's moving, I'm going to quit, I don't want to.
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You know they're all upset and everything.
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And I was like well, I'm not going to let you quit, you don't have a choice, you got to stay working for me.
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And they're looking at me like I'm completely a weirdo and I'm like, no, you're just going to work for both.
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She's like.
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I thought I was done with you.
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Yes, I thought I was free of you, michael, you are not getting away from us that easy.
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We are keeping you until forever.
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And she actually was completely shocked and I said, no, we'll figure this out.
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We'll just adjust some of your duties and we'll figure out how you can work from home.
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And she'd done it a little bit before when she was in our BDC, so I didn't think this was going to be a problem.
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And the key to remote work, especially with employees, is you've got to trust your employees and if you don't have that trust with your employees, it's never going to work.
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You know, this is somebody who's been working for me a while.
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I knew she would get the job done, whether she had been in the office or away from the office.
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So that made it really easy.
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Since I trusted her, she trusted us, we transitioned her right into remote work and we didn't really have any hiccups or any missteps.
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It was ready to go.
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We adjusted some of our processes allowed for.
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We were a big dealership on going paperless, so that really helped out.
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Since everything was digitally archived, she never problem.
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We need to move a few other things that we normally didn't keep in archiving so she would have access to it more digital.
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So we continue to Improve upon that paperless aspect of our dealership.
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But once we got that smooth out there was no issue.
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She was like working right at the store when she was states away.
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I have so many thoughts on Christine's journey, which is really great that you are able to retain her before we go there.
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So you were talking about, you know, just the ability to do your work at home.
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What does that look like?
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I know we had heard you created your own VPN box.
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Will you tell us a little bit about the details of the legend?
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of what that?
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looks like, which is For the average person to understand yes, so I'm.
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The key to working remotely is having a secure connection to the store that you're connecting to.
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You don't want to just Open things up and not have it encrypted and not having Everything secure, because you're dealing with customer information, you're dealing with financial information, so you need to make sure that you have a secure connection.
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Plus, it's a consistent connection.
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Back when I started this VPN, which is a virtual private network, no one really knew that was.
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Now, with remote work, we're starting to understand that.
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But we actually had to create tools that allowed you to build a VPN, because you could just buy it off the shelf product.
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Nowadays you can find some VPNs built into routers and other devices, but there was nothing available, so we had to come up with a way to do this, and we started just with a small computer building a VPN that created a connection.
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It opens up a port on your network and connects to their and you know, can I?
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Just your home, and allows for that traffic to be secure, whether you're at your home network or in a coffee shop or something like that.
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And I wanted to build a device that was portable, not something server rack, which is what you need.
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It you need like a big Cisco rack that costs ten thousand dollars to make this happen, and I made it out of a basically started as, even before it started as a small little Mac computer that I built a VPN, and later on I made it more portable.
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When Raspberry Pis, these little thirty five dollars computers, came out, and that was the VPN in a box that I was able to hand out to customers, which Was great because we had these were giving my employees just if they needed to work home.
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But when the pandemic hit, it was great because you can get a hold of some of this hardware and I had a dozen boxes under my desk that I could just hand out to an employee and say here, take this home, plug in your network and it doesn't matter what network you're on, this will traverse the network, it will figure everything out.
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You just connect to the wifi in the box or plug a ethernet cable in there and you're up and ready to go and it's like you're in your in the store with no configuration whatsoever.
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That was the key to designing something that was simply plug and play.
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And then another company in the area took that as a product they were selling during the during the pandemic, as they call the bill, that executive box and they were able to hand it to executives for companies that could just plug this in, just work.
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You know it wasn't complicated to set up.
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There was nothing set up.
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You can hand the box out, just just work.
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So that's kind of where we started our network like you said for coven nineteen, you guys were pretty primed for the shift that so many us had to go into thrown into happens happened Exactly, but a lot of ways you were pretty set up for that.
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But even then, do you feel like there were any learnings that you had in the remote workspace during coven nineteen that, just even though you were kind of already there, you were able to enhance or grow?
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I really wanted to have more of a remote workforce.
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Even before coven this before coven most people thought I was crazy about wanting my people not to be in the store.
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I thought to be easier.
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More work like balance.
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Like I said, you're more productive, I feel, especially in certain positions.
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Now I still figured out how to do a tech from home, but I can get some time that.
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That yeah little star trek technology, some transport industry can find out, but you know.
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So I think it's great that you can wake up in the morning, roll out of bed and start your day without having an hour commute and wasted time truly.
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Exactly and where you can have time during your day.
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It's like I can go run those errands, I can make sure my kids get off to school, I can show up for school for the kid to have lunch with them or something.
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Where would be possible if you had to go back and forth and commute.
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And that's the way I looked at this.
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I wanted that even before when the pandemic hit, that all of a sudden everyone had to remote the kind of scrambling ok, we can do this.
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And then the culture in the dealership also shifted towards like, oh it's, we can work from home and it's easier.
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And they didn't feel like there was a little stigma behind that yeah, that was some of the things when I when I love people to work for home like, oh well, they're special or they get extra treatment and I'm like, well, I'm offering that to anyone.
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If they can figure out how their job can be handled from home, you're more than welcome to work from home.
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I don't Require you to come into the store, I just require you to get your job done, and that's the real different mindset we have.
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It's as long as you can do your job, I don't care if it's At home, if it's in the store or if it's on a desert island in the middle of the specific or something you know.
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That's whatever you want to do.
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That's great for you.
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When you look at the scope of your dealership right now, how many individuals are taking advantage of some piece of remote work and what?
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Obviously not techs?
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What positions are they?
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I assume some BDC members.
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Is there anyone specifically in the sales staff and what does that look like?
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Yeah, so we have.
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We're smaller dealerships so our numbers that work remote are pretty low, but percentage-wise it's high.
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The people who are currently working remotely, either full-time or part-time I have BDC people, some which are full-time, a couple are part-time.
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My office manager works remote, part-time, although she really only comes in two days a week and the other days she's working remotely.
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Christine, who's one of my office employees, she's been remote for almost, I think, a decade or so.
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It's been quite a while that she's been gone from us and that's completely full-time.
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We have a number of my service manager works remote on at least, yeah, he works remote one day a week.
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My parts manager does the same.
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He works remote one day a week.
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Gives him an opportunity to work on warranty.
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It gives him an opportunity to work on parts and things.
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It's administrative stuff done.
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Exactly, and that's typically on those management positions.
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What they're doing is getting that administrative work done Figuring out new pay plans, doing employee reviews as far as getting them set up.
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So they're not there being bothered as people come in and out of the office and if you're working on an employee review, you don't want someone walking in your office while you're writing up on another employee and having to cover up the paperwork or something like that.
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It just gives them a free space to work remotely.
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All of my sales managers have access to working remote and they pretty much check in, especially on their day off or something One of the things that we do at the stores.
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We have four-day work weeks, which is a huge benefit, but a lot of people, when you're gone three days a week, you kind of feel a little anxious are things getting done or how do you follow up on something?
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Yeah, you feel more behind, yeah.
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Yes, and that's exactly why working remotely, even though it's their day off, and people are like, well then, you really don't have a four-day work week.
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They're only checking in, is what it comes down to.
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They just feel comfortable.
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It's like if we knew we had a customer coming in.
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They can check in and see what's going on and make sure something was handed off properly to the other manager, or they can reach out to the salespeople and have a video conference call with them, or just go into the computer system and check up on a few things that it's nagging them in the back of their mind.
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That's why we have it, for pretty much the only people who aren't working remotely are my tax and I seldom figure that one out and the porters, that's the other one.
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Keep us updated.
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Yeah, I think that'll be great, but, yeah, everyone has access to it.
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More people take advantage than others, and some people my service manager specifically I might have to look at putting some screen time on his remote because he tends to work more than he should, so I might have to cut that off a little bit.
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That is the disadvantages.
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If you are that type of person who can't disconnect, that can be a problem.
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You need to set some definite boundaries with one that you should connect and not and I monitor that and I have some conversations with them.
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Everyone's in a while saying hey, Sean, you're checking in on Sunday afternoon.
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You really shouldn't be doing that.
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It's coming too often is what it breaks out to be.
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So when did you make the decision to kind of go from just like you said it sounded like it started as a case by case basis where people could come do with their situation or their desire to do it, but primarily existing employees, to when you are seeking out new employees, presenting, hey, anyone who does this job can work remote.
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And then have you seen any differences in how you recruit for people?
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Because I know this industry we sometimes have difficulties hiring and retaining, so with the hiring piece have you seen any differences for your store.
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It opens up your talent pool dramatically.
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That's one thing I would say we haven't taken advantage of is using that as part of our recruiting process.
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A lot of that stems from like is that you have to trust the employee before you go on, get to know their work ethic.
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And also so they.
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I think the most difficult thing with hiring people and starting out remotely is they don't understand your culture.
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You know, I really feel you have to bring somebody in and make sure they understand why we do things, how we do things.
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So they're going to be the ones especially in like a BDC situation.
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They're going to be talking to my customers.
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So you know, we really need to get that training period in and as we start to go through the process, then we can offer that up as a remote position to this employee.
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So all of the BDC people who have transitioned to a remote working situation, they really started in the BDC and then, yeah, and then job or life situations have allowed them to work remote.
00:18:48.439 --> 00:18:50.941
So we're not recruiting people doing that way.
00:18:50.941 --> 00:18:54.721
That's something as the sales process starts to get there.
00:18:54.721 --> 00:18:58.701
We're doing quite a bit with online transactions.
00:18:58.701 --> 00:19:12.724
I could see that having our sales staff hiring people all across the country to just work remotely and handle that but it's not something we've been able to kind of accomplish right away.
00:19:13.315 --> 00:19:15.472
As I mentioned, it's changing your culture to.
00:19:15.472 --> 00:19:15.897
You know.
00:19:15.897 --> 00:19:18.458
It's like well, why do these people not come into work?
00:19:18.458 --> 00:19:20.200
Are these people really working?
00:19:20.200 --> 00:19:26.183
You know that's what you've got to get your other employees I mean management, understands they're working because they can see the productivity.
00:19:26.183 --> 00:19:28.520
It's making sure the other employees say well, so-and-so.
00:19:28.520 --> 00:19:29.605
I've been here for four days.
00:19:29.605 --> 00:19:30.954
It's like are they still working?
00:19:30.954 --> 00:19:32.682
It's like, oh yeah, they're working from home.
00:19:32.682 --> 00:19:39.642
So it's changing that culture within your dealership is the main thing, and that's a harder transition than just using technology.
00:19:41.455 --> 00:19:45.236
From the BDC perspective, obviously you have a high level of trust that they're getting done.
00:19:45.236 --> 00:19:46.260
What needs to get done?
00:19:46.260 --> 00:20:00.689
Do you guys have specific KPIs that you're tracking on a daily basis for your BDC or monthly, and is the expectation that they're checking in or they get done what needs to get done?
00:20:01.215 --> 00:20:10.384
Yeah, I would say the BDC is one of the easiest of the departments to monitor, because if the phones aren't being answered, then you pretty much know they're not doing their job.
00:20:10.384 --> 00:20:13.623
And the same thing with following up on emails.
00:20:13.623 --> 00:20:19.106
I mean, we have metrics in place to where they need to respond to leads in a certain amount of time.
00:20:19.106 --> 00:20:20.559
How are they following up?
00:20:20.559 --> 00:20:22.279
What are their closing ratios?
00:20:22.279 --> 00:20:26.585
We can monitor everything that they're doing.
00:20:26.585 --> 00:20:29.002
So that's the easiest one of any position.
00:20:29.002 --> 00:20:35.928
I would recommend moving your BDC first, because you can tell whether they're working or not.
00:20:35.928 --> 00:20:45.994
You can see the quality of work, and the reality is it's better to have a remote situation for most of the BDC because they don't have people coming in and bothering.
00:20:45.994 --> 00:20:53.742
If you're on the phone and someone walks in or another conversation is in a nearby cubicle, that might overlap with what's happening on the BDC.
00:20:53.742 --> 00:20:55.921
But if you're, in your own office.
00:20:56.402 --> 00:20:57.305
Nobody's interrupting you.
00:20:57.305 --> 00:21:01.707
You can have a great conversation with somebody and you can quickly chat on the background.
00:21:01.707 --> 00:21:09.497
If you've got questions you need from a manager or from another employee, or if you need to get a hold of a service writer or a tech, you can use.
00:21:09.497 --> 00:21:22.598
We use Microsoft Teams a lot for that and they can just quickly type in whether on phone conversation, say with the customer, and have that communication is actually easier than being there In the dealership because you know you have to use the chat.
00:21:22.598 --> 00:21:25.263
You can't just get up and go ask a question for somebody.
00:21:25.263 --> 00:21:33.122
So remote work works really well for the bdc and there's really no reason other than that making sure they understand the culture the dealership.
00:21:33.122 --> 00:21:46.797
How we got to put customers ahead of everything else is long as we got that Instilled into them, it works well like you said, I think bdc is the most natural position I think People could start with.
00:21:47.117 --> 00:21:48.099
I think it's so impressive.
00:21:48.099 --> 00:21:51.047
You have service and your parts manager doing it to you.
00:21:51.047 --> 00:21:51.807
That's awesome.
00:21:51.807 --> 00:22:12.223
Well, and even when listening to you talk about it immediately when you said someone popping into the service manager's office to ask a question, I mean I can picture how that happens all day long and just thinking about the ability of if they have that day dedicated to the admin piece Right then the other days when they're in the store, just how much more present and almost like proactive.
00:22:12.223 --> 00:22:15.568
And that's when I train and I have to be managing yes.
00:22:16.715 --> 00:22:17.817
Kind of freeing it up there.
