Bob Clements International

Bob Clements International Bob Clements International is the industry leader in helping OPE, Ag and Powersports dealers. http://www.bobclements.com.

Bob is considered one of the top speakers in North American focused on dealership issues.

08/26/2026

I told the guy I'd bet money on what their Google reviews said. I'd never seen them. He pulled them up to prove me wrong. He didn't.

I was working with a software company, going through a dealership's numbers, and the service department's revenue was way out of whack. Way under where it should've been compared to the rest of the store.

So I said, "I'll bet you money that if we pull up their Google reviews right now, they say something like this. Sales was incredible. They took care of me. But service? Comebacks. They never called me back when they said they would."

The guy I was with kind of grinned, like, sure Sara, let's test that. He pulled up the dealership right there. And it said, almost word for word, exactly that. "Amazing experience with sales. Service was tough. Comebacks, and nobody got back to me when they said they would."

I didn't have a crystal ball. I had the revenue split. Because here's the thing nobody connects: your service department's reputation and your service department's revenue are the same number wearing two outfits. When comebacks are high and follow-up is low, customers feel it, they say it out loud on Google, and they stop coming back. The revenue tells the story before you ever read a single review.

And that's actually good news, because it means the fastest way to change what people say about your service department isn't a marketing campaign or a reputation-management tool. It's reducing comebacks. Fix the work so it doesn't bounce, call people back when you said you would, and the reviews and the revenue both turn around together.

Go read your own service reviews right now. Then look at what service is bringing in. Bet you see the same correlation I did.

Do it. Go pull your service reviews and tell me what the pattern is. I want to know if it holds. Tell me below.

08/19/2026

A paramedic doesn't perform surgery at the crash site. So why is your intake process trying to?
When a unit rolls into your shop, here's where a lot of service departments go wrong. They either glance at it and guess, or they tear the whole tractor apart trying to find every possible thing that could be wrong before they've even scheduled the job. Both of those cost you.

Think like a paramedic instead. A paramedic shows up to the accident, and their job isn't to operate on the side of the road. Their job is to look fast and call it. "Looks like a broken arm, we're five minutes out, have the room ready."

They figure out enough to make sure everything's prepped before the patient ever hits the table.

That's your triage. Day the unit comes in, you do a quick diagnostic. Not a deep dive, not pulling it down to the frame. You're looking to know about 85% of what's going on and, more important, what parts this job is going to need. That's it. Get to 85% and get the parts ordered.
Because here's what triage actually buys you.

By the time that tech starts the job, the parts are already sitting on the shelf next to him. No walking to the counter. No waiting on an order. No job stalled out at 60% done because the one part you needed is three days away.

And one more thing if you came up as a tech yourself. You're probably the best diagnostic person in the building. So when you've got a B-level tech who might miss something on intake, do the triage with them. Don't just take it off their plate, teach them what to look for. That's how a B-level tech slowly becomes an A-level one.

Triage isn't extra work. It's the five minutes up front that saves the three days on the back end.
How does a unit get diagnosed in your shop right now?

Quick glance, full teardown, or somewhere in between? Tell me below.

08/12/2026

Every time your technician walks to the parts counter, it's costing you. We ran the math. It's over $18,000 a year. Per tech. You've watched it happen a hundred times and never put a price on it.

Your tech finishes a step, needs a part, and instead of staying on the job, he gets up and walks to the parts counter himself. And you know exactly what happens next. The parts guys are slammed.

So your tech stands there. And while he's waiting, he strikes up a conversation, because hey, he's already off the clock in his head anyway.

That whole trip looks like nothing. Five minutes here, ten there. But we ran the numbers years ago, and even at a labor rate of $85 an hour, a tech pulling his own parts bleeds over $18,000 a year out of your service department. Per technician. And $85 is conservative. If your labor rate's still sitting at $85, that's a whole separate conversation, and you should call us, because it needs to be over $100.Here's where it hurts. That $18,000 doesn't show up as a line item anywhere. There's no invoice that says "tech walked to the counter."

It hides inside your recovery rate, quietly dragging it down while everyone swears the shop's running fine.A technician's job is to turn wrenches, not run errands. The second he leaves the bay to go chase a part, you stop selling the one thing only he can do.

So count it this week. How many times does your best tech leave his bay to go get parts? Multiply that by every tech you've got. That's the number.

How many trips to the parts counter does your shop run a day? Ballpark it below, I want to see these numbers.

08/05/2026

If your shop opens at 8:00, you should hear an impact wrench going at 8:00. Not at 8:40, after everybody's had their coffee and their meeting.

Here's the difference between a shop that recovers and one that doesn't, and it costs you about five minutes a night.

Most mornings look like this. Techs roll in, wander to your office, you all stand around figuring out who's doing what, somebody's hunting for parts, and the first real wrench turn happens forty minutes after the doors opened. Forty minutes times every tech times every day. That's not a vibe problem. That's recovery rate walking out the door before the job even starts.

So here's what I have my service managers do. Every night before you close, you go to each tech, one at a time. Not a group huddle. Everybody else keeps working. You walk up to Bob and you say, "Tomorrow, soon as you finish what you're on, here's your next work order. I've set aside six hours for it. Any questions?" The parts are already pulled, because you triaged.

They're sitting on the shelf right next to him, everything the job needs.

Now picture his morning. He walks in at 8:00 knowing exactly what he's doing, with the parts already there. The job he's finishing wraps at 10:00. At 10:01 he's already into the next one you set up the night before. No wandering. No waiting. No kumbaya moment in your office.
That's it. That's the whole thing. You do it with every tech, every night.

The reason your mornings feel slow isn't your people. It's that nobody told them what 8:00 a.m. is for.

Do this for one week and watch what happens to your recovery rate.

What does the first 30 minutes after open actually look like in your shop? Be honest. Tell me below.

07/29/2026

Your B-level tech should be billing six of every eight hours you pay for. If he's not, you're losing money on him and probably don't know it.

Quick gut check on one technician.

Not your A-level guy, the one who can chase down an electrical gremlin or diagnose a hydraulic problem in his sleep. The other one. The solid B-level tech. He's not your diagnostics ace, but give him a part to pull and replace and he'll do it clean every time. Every shop has him. Every shop needs him.

Here's the standard nobody told you. You're buying eight hours of that tech's day. He should be billing out six of them. Maybe two hours a day don't get billed, and that's fine, that's normal. Six of eight billed is an 85% recovery rate. And at 85%, that technician makes you money.
That's the number. Not "is he busy." Not "is he a good guy." Recovery rate. How many of the hours you're paying for are you actually selling back out.

Most service managers have never run this for a single tech on their floor. They feel busy, the bays are full, so it must be working. But "the shop feels slammed" and "every tech is recovering 85%" are not the same sentence, and the gap between them is profit walking out the door.
Pick one tech. Pull his billed hours against his paid hours for one week. See where he actually lands. That one number will tell you more than a month of gut feel.

What's your shop's recovery rate? And no fair saying "I don't track it," because that's kind of the point. Tell me below.

07/22/2026

Imagine your surgeon stops mid-operation to go run your insurance card.

You're on the table. He's got his hands where they need to be. And he pauses, peels off a glove, and says, "Real quick, let me check your blood pressure and verify your coverage."

You'd lose your mind. You'd never let that person cut you again.

That's your technician. That's exactly what you're doing to them.

We like to think of techs as surgeons, because that's what they are. The one person in the building who can actually do the thing the customer is paying for. The diagnosis. The repair. The work nobody else on your floor is trained to touch.

So why is he the one walking to the parts counter? Why's he chasing down the customer for a signature, hunting for the unit in the back lot, fielding the phone call about a job that isn't his? Every one of those is you handing your surgeon a clipboard and asking him to work the front desk.

A surgeon has a nurse. The nurse takes the blood pressure, runs the paperwork, preps everything, so the surgeon does the one thing only the surgeon can do. In your shop that nurse is a service coordinator. Same job. Clear the deck so the person with the irreplaceable skill spends their time on the irreplaceable work.

You didn't hire a master tech to make them a runner. Stop scrubbing them out of surgery to go work the desk.

What's the last thing you watched your best tech get pulled off a job to go handle? Tell me below.

Then send this to whoever still thinks a busy tech and a productive tech are the same thing.

07/15/2026

A dealer told me he's in the building 60 hours a week. He said it like it was a flex.

"That's just what you've gotta do," he said.

Really? Because I wouldn't do it. And I told him so.

Sixty hours doesn't mean you're committed. It usually means you're drowning in noise. Noise is all the chaos that screams for your attention and produces nothing. The fires, the interruptions, the same five problems you put out every single day and somehow get to fight again tomorrow.
Signal is the other thing. The actual reason you're there. The work that moves the dealership forward instead of just keeping it from burning down.

I watch service managers do the exact same thing. Buried to the eyeballs in noise, convinced the answer is one more tech. But if you drop a new person into a broken process, what did you actually buy? Now you've got somebody to hire, train, and babysit, on top of the 60 hours you're already swallowing. The body didn't fix the problem. It gave the problem a roommate.
The tech is almost never the issue. The process is. And no number of hours, yours or theirs, fixes a process you haven't sat down and fixed on purpose.

So before you brag about the 60, ask what you're spending it on. Noise, or signal?

Be honest, how many hours were you in the building last week, and how many of them actually moved anything? Tell me below.

Then send this to the owner who wears his 60 like a trophy.

If being busy automatically meant customers were happy, every service department in the country would have perfect reten...
07/13/2026

If being busy automatically meant customers were happy, every service department in the country would have perfect retention

Spoiler alert. They don't.

The bays are full. The phones are ringing. The schedule's packed. And customers keep disappearing like socks in a dryer. No blowups, no dramatic walkouts. Just fewer repeat customers and a few more "I took it somewhere else this time."

Bad service experiences don't announce themselves. They don't show up as shouting matches or angry emails. They show up as silence. Customers leave when they feel uninformed, forgotten, uncertain, or slightly annoyed one too many times. And they rarely tell you why.

Here's what that silence costs. Lose just one good service customer a week and it adds up fast. That's 52 a year. If that customer spends about $1,200 a year in parts and service and would've stayed with you for 10 years, that's $12,000 each.

Do the math. That's over $600,000 gone over the next decade. Not because the work was bad. Because the experience was.The bays being full next year won't save you if the experience during the wait keeps quietly sending people down the road.

💰 What's one good customer worth to your dealership over ten years? Drop your number.

Want to see where your service experience is leaking? The Service Self-Assessment will show you. Link in bio.

07/08/2026

Your technician shouldn't be the busboy.

Here's the position in your shop you're not paying for, and it's quietly costing you money.

Think about a restaurant. Tables, cooks in the back, and waiters whose whole job is turning those tables as fast as they can. More turns, more money.

So what does a good restaurant never do? Make the waiter bus the table. They've got a busboy for that. One job: free the waiter up so people keep moving.

Your shop has tables too. We call them bays. Every time your tech walks away to grab the unit, sweep the floor, or stand in line at the parts counter, that bay's sitting empty and you're paying your highest dollar person to do work that doesn't need a technician.

That's a service coordinator. Your busboy. They get the unit, pull the parts, take it back out. Anything a tech doesn't need to touch, they touch instead.

"I can't afford another body." Sure you can. You're already paying for one. You're just calling him your master tech and handing him a broom.

Build it in instead. Add fifteen minutes to every work order and that coordinator pays for themselves, same way the busboy's baked into your eighteen dollar burger. Nobody asks why there's a charge for the kid clearing tables. It's just in there.

What's the dumbest thing you've watched your highest paid tech get pulled away to go do? Tell me below.

Then send this to whoever runs your service department. They need to see the math.

07/01/2026

Half a percent sounds like nothing. For one dealership, it came out to $25,000.

There's a line on your P&L you've probably never once questioned. Your payment processing rate.

You negotiate everything else. Floor plan, freight, what you pay for a unit, what your techs make. Then the merchant statement shows up every month and you just pay it. Same rate you signed up for back when whoever sold it to you bought you lunch.

So last week I ran the numbers. Take a dealership doing about $3 million in sales. Not all of that runs through a card, so this is only on the piece that does, the credit card payments going through their processor. Shave half a percent off the rate on that volume. That's it. Half a percent.

Over five years it came out to more than $25,000 that stayed in their pocket instead of going out the door.

I know it's season. I know auditing your processor is sitting at the very bottom of a to-do list that's already on fire. But $25,000 is $25,000. That's real payroll you're handing to a vendor you haven't looked at in years.

Pull your last merchant statement. Find your effective rate on your card volume. Just look at the number. That's the whole ask.

And if you do go looking, the company we use and recommend is Gravity Payments. They're built for dealerships, they integrate with the DMSs, and their support actually picks up. They help sponsor what we do, and I send dealers their way because the one I talked to in California last week was getting wrecked by his current processor.

What's your effective rate? Bet half of you have no idea. Tell me below.

Then send this to whoever opens the merchant statement every month.

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P. O. Box 384
Liberty, MO
64089

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(800) 480-0737

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