The service department has some of the highest gross margin potential in a powersports dealership. It can also be one of the most difficult departments to make consistently profitable.
At first, that seems contradictory.
If the margins are so attractive, why is profitability so difficult?
Because unlike almost everything else in your dealership, service is selling time.
If a set of exhaust pipes sits on the shelf today and you do not sell it, you still have an opportunity to sell it tomorrow. The inventory remains.
Technician time does not.
If you have six technicians working eight hours today, you have 48 hours of available technician capacity. When today ends, those 48 hours are gone. Whatever portion you failed to convert into productive, billable work cannot be put back into inventory and sold tomorrow.
Once you understand that concept, the way you operate a service department begins to change.
Start at Ground Zero
I have always considered the technician Ground Zero.
That does not mean every service problem begins with the technician. In fact, quite often the opposite is true.
It means the service operation should be designed around protecting the technician's ability to perform skilled, billable work.
I have often compared a good technician operation to a dentist's office.
Think about what happens when you sit in the dentist's chair. The dental assistant has prepared the room. The necessary instruments are ready. The X rays have been taken and are available. The supplies required for the procedure are within reach.
The dentist walks into a prepared environment, speaks with the patient and gets to work.
There is a reason for that.
You would never build a dental practice where the dentist spent a significant portion of the day looking for instruments, retrieving supplies, preparing rooms and searching for the next patient.
Yet dealerships routinely allow highly skilled technicians to spend valuable time looking for motorcycles, chasing parts, waiting for approvals, finding keys, clarifying repair orders or figuring out what they are supposed to work on next.
Then we look at the technician's productivity numbers and ask why they are low.
The technician may be the last place we should be looking.
Build the System Around the Technician
Immediately surrounding Ground Zero should be three critical functions: the service writer, the parts to service person and the lot attendant or apprentice.
Each exists, in part, to protect technician capacity.
The service writer is the quarterback.
A strong service writer should know what is happening on every technician's bench, but more importantly, what is going to happen next.
They should understand the strengths of every technician. Who is particularly efficient with electrical diagnosis? Who excels at engine work? Who can complete exhaust installations quickly and consistently? Who is strongest with complicated diagnostic work?
Scheduling should not simply be about finding an empty spot on the calendar. It should be about matching the right work with the right technician while keeping the entire shop moving.
The service writer should also be working closely with the parts to service function, not simply on the jobs currently sitting on technicians' benches, but on the jobs coming next.
What is scheduled this afternoon? What is scheduled tomorrow morning? Are the required parts here? If they are not available from the OEM, can they be sourced elsewhere? When will they arrive? Is there anything that could prevent that motorcycle from moving onto the technician's bench when scheduled?
If your parts to service person is primarily reacting to what technicians need right now, the department is already behind.
The objective should be to work two or three jobs ahead whenever possible.
The Most Underrated Position in the Shop
Then there is the lot attendant.
Too many dealerships treat this as a summer job for a student whose primary responsibilities are moving motorcycles and keeping the parking lot organized.
I think that is a missed opportunity.
In the right operation, this can be an excellent position for an aspiring apprentice.
This person can move and stage motorcycles, perform appropriate basic work, conduct test rides when qualified and permitted, help verify customer concerns, retrieve parts and prepare the technician's next job.
If a technician has a second bench available, the next motorcycle can already be positioned there. If the technician leaves for a test ride, that creates another opportunity to prepare the next job.
The motorcycle is ready. The repair order is ready. The required parts are ready. The workspace is ready.
When the technician finishes the previous job, returns from a test ride, comes back from lunch or simply starts the next assignment, there should be as little friction as possible between them and productive work.
Just like the dentist.
Efficiency Cannot Come at the Expense of Culture
There is another side to this that should not be ignored.
A highly organized service operation can sound robotic if it is described purely in terms of productivity.
Technicians have a different work environment than many other dealership employees.
A salesperson can walk across the showroom and have a conversation. Someone in administration can get a coffee and interact with coworkers along the way. Other employees naturally encounter people throughout their day.
Technicians spend much of theirs at a bench, and when they are on a job, the clock matters.
That makes human interaction more important, not less.
Talk to them. Ask about their weekend. Tell them a joke. Include them in what is happening throughout the dealership. Recognize good work. Make sure they understand what the department and dealership are trying to accomplish.
Timing matters because you do not want to interrupt productive work, but efficiency should never become an excuse to isolate people.
The objective is not to turn technicians into machines.
It is to remove the obstacles that prevent skilled people from doing skilled work.
You Are Selling Time
That is ultimately the principle behind a profitable service department.
You are selling technician time.
Every unnecessary trip to the parts department consumes some of it. Every motorcycle that cannot be found consumes some of it. Every missing part consumes some of it. Every poorly written repair order consumes some of it. Every gap between jobs consumes some of it.
Individually, those moments may seem insignificant.
Across several technicians, five or six days a week, for an entire season, they become enormously expensive.
The high margins available in service are real, but gross margin percentage alone does not create profitability. The dealership must build an operating system capable of converting available technician capacity into productive, billable work.
Start at Ground Zero.
Then look outward.
Before asking your technicians to work faster, make sure the dealership has built an environment that allows them to work efficiently.
Because when today is over, you cannot sell today's time tomorrow.