Fixed Ops Journal - August 2017 - 44

FIXED OPS JOURNAL

Interview by Dave Versical

minutes with ...

 Mike Yale, service and parts director, Porsche North Houston

ike Yale, 52, joined Porsche
North Houston in December.
He's been a service adviser,
service manager and parts and
service director throughout most of his 30-year
career, including 12 years at AutoNation
dealerships and a year with Asbury
Automotive.
In July, Porsche North Houston moved to a
new, 600,000-square-foot building along
Interstate 45. It's the flagship store for the
indiGO Auto Group.
On adopting a "tighter ship" mentality in
fixed ops as U.S. vehicle sales slow
I think you should feel that way every day.
Watching expenses all day, every day is important. Making sure you're staffed properly,
not overstaffed. It's really easy to hire and staff
up. But it's not as easy going the other way.
On being one of the few authorized Porsche
Classic repair centers
Classic is huge. We have so much opportunity
with Classic. I'm super jazzed about that. I
want them all. We can get the parts for them.
We've got technical support for it. The training's out there. It's adding a whole other revenue stream to this business, which is really exciting to me.
On Porsche customers
I have friends and colleagues who do the General Motors thing, and our experiences every
day are very different. The education level of
our customer, the income level of our customer is very, very different. But we're still a boutique kind of franchise. These customers are
willing to pay for service, but you have to deliver that service.
On what pleases customers
The small things like the steering wheel covers
(which are installed as each car enters the service lane). When they need to be cleaned, we
send them out to the dry cleaners, bring them
back and they're ready to go again.
Providing a place that's comfortable, that's
nice, where customers can sit and wait if they

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AUGUST 2017

want. Our loaner fleet is exclusively Porsche.
On his service advisers' compensation
They get a base, and then they get a percentage of gross profit - customer pay and warranty - and then they get a little bump for
CSI. It's a fairly simple pay plan.
On recommending service that customers
don't need
I make it clear that there's zero tolerance for
that. It's stealing, that's what it is. You're gone.
You're done. There's no question about what
happens next. You just don't work here.
On service shops that never fail to find something wrong with a car
What does that do to the brand? They (customers) think, "What a pile of crap I'm driving. Every time I go in there they've got a list of
stuff I need to fix."
On his toughest management challenges
It's not the customers; I know what they want.

It's the employees; that's always the most difficult part. Service advisers are different than
technicians. Parts people are different than all
of them. You have to understand how each
group thinks in order to serve them and remove the roadblocks that they see every day
that keep them from being successful.
On technician pay
We have a true, true team system here with
technicians. We pool the hours. Everybody is
paid eight hours a day. At the end of the
month, everything over and above, we give
them a third check. It works pretty good.
There's no more of this, "I've been working
on rattles and squeaks for two weeks now. I
ain't got an annual service [job] in a month,
but your boy over here, he's getting them all."
I haven't had that conversation since I started working here. It's so refreshing. There's no
excuse for not fixing that car right. Because if it
pays four hours under warranty and it takes
you six, you got six. You're going to get paid.
This is the way this industry is going to go. 

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Fixed Ops Journal - August 2017