In the car business, there are lots of jobs that people do for around $10 per hour.
Washing cars, moving cars, sealing envelopes, writing on windows, blowing up balloons, putting paper in the copy machine, calling leads, greeting customers, setting appointments answering the phones, cutting grass, sweeping the lot, shoveling snow…
Now, be honest with yourself for a moment, have you performed any of these $10 hour jobs recently?
You are one of the most important people, if not the most important person, at your dealership. That means any second you waste on $10 hour jobs is detrimental to your dealership’s bottom line. Because time you spend doing these jobs is time that could be spent actually growing your business.
Now at your dealership, there are also jobs that pay more like $100 per hour. Desking deals, selling backend products, negotiating with banks, closing deals, training salespeople, buying cars, managing the service department.
Have you engaged in any of these activates lately? Most likely you have. So what?
Well, lets take a moment and talk about your goals. How much money would like to make this year? Let’s say (to make things easy) that you’d like to make $1 million per year, personal income. That’s about $80,000 per month. About $20,000 per week. About $500 per hour.
Uh-oh
If you’re stuck doing $100 per hour stuff, how can you expect to make $500 per hour? This is a very real problem in most dealerships. Understand that your role as a dealer or general manager is to captain the ship. Captains of ships, leaders of organizations—they make $500 per hour. Everything else can be hired out to someone else for less.
The reality is that you’re always going to do some $100 per hour stuff (let’s say about half your time). That means you have to fill the other half of your time with $1,000 per hour stuff in order to balance it out to the $500 you need to make to hit your goals.
So, what’s $1,000 per hour stuff?
Charting the course, setting goals, managing values, creating vision, designing systems that can be used many times over, being a leverageable asset to your business (like a marketing personality), planning marketing that will bring in lots of customers, inspiring and motivating others, deciding “what’s next” for the business, growing wealth, building equity and assets, meeting with advisors and other dealers with similar goals and values.
The key is to realize that every hour you spend on a $10 or $100 per hour job is an hour you don’t spend making the big money. It’s important to analyze your time and to consider the value of the activities you’re filling your time with. Consider filling out a time log each day.
Then ask yourself which of those lower value activities you can delegate to someone else. Be brutally honest with yourself about it. Don’t wimp out!
The biggest mistake you can make is to (falsely) believe that you’re so good that you have to keep doing (fill in the blank). First of all, even if you’re the best, you’re also the most expensive. So even if it takes someone else twice as long to do the same thing, it’s still worth them doing it instead of you. And even if you can do it a little bit better, someone else doing it “good” is always better than you doing it “perfectly.”
Not only that, but the harsh truth is there’s always somebody who can do it better than you can. The #1 skill you can learn in your role as captain is to delegate to a capable member of your staff and then get out of the way!
You’ll find that your dealership will make more money if you spend your time on $1,000 jobs because those are the jobs that have to do with developing or growing your business.
Need more examples of $1,000 hour jobs that’ll help accelerate your dealership and grow your business? Our eBook The Ultimate Guide To Supercharging Your Dealership has the steps you need to take in order to drive more traffic, sell more cars, increase CSI and profit and have more fun in the car business—these are the $1,000 jobs you should be doing.