training programs

Service Advisor Training Programs

Shaw Dealer Training Group trains your people where the money is made — on the drive, in the lane, and in the manager’s office. Live on-site training, seminars that launch the new way of doing business, a leadership program built on the FOiS approach, and your own custom-branded university. Proven across more than 1,000 rooftops in North America. One advisor, trained right, is worth a million dollars a year.

Dealership Training Programs for Service Advisors, Managers, Technicians, and BDC Teams

Shaw Training isn’t built for one seat on the drive — it’s built for everyone who touches the customer or the numbers. Service advisors learn to present the need instead of guessing at it. Technicians learn to inspect and advise with the same authority that used to belong only to the desk. Managers learn to lead the department instead of just running it. And BDC teams learn how the conversation that starts on the phone sets up everything that happens once the customer’s in the drive. One standard, taught to every role that shapes the RO — because a store only moves when the whole team moves together.

On-Site Training — Live, on Your Drive

RO MARKETING

Your finance department has done it for decades — every deal, a professional presentation. Now your service department does it too. Pre-printed menus. Pre-printed maintenance items. Pre-printed previously failed items. Every repair order becomes a presentation, and every advisor becomes a million-dollar advisor — $1,000,000 in added sales per advisor, per year. Nothing gets pitched from memory and nothing gets skipped: the need is revealed on paper, in front of the customer, and customers buy when the need is revealed. Immediate improvement on your drive — measurable on this month’s statement, not next year’s.

SERVICE LANE TECH

The approach behind 200–400% gains in commodity sales. We took the play from the sales department — they prime the customer for finance, and now Shaw Dealer Training Group runs the same play on your drive. One technician in the lane, performing an underhood inspection on every vehicle — the work your advisor was supposed to do and has refused to do for a lifetime. We changed the paradigm: we put the technical expert in charge. When the expert — badge on his shirt — advises the customer of the failed items, the customer believes him, and the customer buys, right there in the drive. Belts, fluids, filters, batteries: the commodity work multiplies. It’s working across the country right now. Exactly what you’re looking for.

SIDE-BY-SIDE TRAINING

This is the difference between a trainer and a consultant. A Steve Shaw Certified Trainer stands side by side with your service advisor, on your drive, car after car — demonstrating the proper, highest-impact way to write service. We don’t point and click. We demonstrate it, we show them, we do it with them, and we guide them to the Shaw approach until it’s theirs: the welcome, the customer interaction process, the multi-point inspection, the factory maintenance and driveway sales presentation, the multi-point video, and the multi-point with your technicians. Your advisors gain the knowledge on live customers — and your store gains the advantage, because they didn’t watch it. They did it.

EXPRESS LANE DEVELOPMENT — ¼ TIME

Your customer will allow you thirty minutes for an oil change, a tire rotation, and a multi-point inspection — and to have the greatest impact on any additional sales item, the multi-point inspection must be presented to the customer within fifteen minutes. The longer you wait, the less likely the customer buys. The express lane is a quarter of the time and all of the opportunity: the inspection, the presentation, and the decision, all before the vehicle comes off the rack. Shaw Dealer Training Group will help you structure your express lane — staffing, dispatch, and the presentation — so you maximize customer engagement on every visit.

SHOP FOREMAN PRODUCTION MANAGER DEVELOPMENT

Technician retention starts and ends with your technician’s paycheck. Your technicians are demanding daily performance reviews — and in your shop, that is done every single day. Built alongside the Shop Foreman workbook, this program teaches your shop foreman the fundamentals of production management: how to set production objectives for the team, how to build a real-world, production-based fixed operations forecast, and how to coach the daily, weekly, and monthly meetings. Shaw Dealer Training Group will teach your team production management and technician retention — because the shop that manages production keeps its technicians, and the shop that doesn’t trains them for a competitor.

MOBILE BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Thinking about going mobile? Just went mobile? Shaw Dealer Training Group has an innovative approach to growing your mobile service business. Mobile is not a van and a wish — it is a route, a schedule, and a staff that carries your store’s standard to the customer’s driveway. Learn how to build a staff that is competent and can service your area, how to load the schedule so every trip pays, and how to present the multi-point at the customer’s home the same way you present it on your drive. We teach the fundamentals of growing, building, and sustaining a highly profitable mobile service business.

HIGH-IMPACT ¼-TIME VIDEOS

Details are not what win the race — speed is what wins. Shaw Dealer Training Group will teach your technicians, on site, the four best behavior steps for producing high-quality, high-impact TikTok-style multi-point inspection videos: 90 seconds or less, shot in the bay, straight to the customer’s phone. Swipe right or swipe left — today’s customer decides in seconds, so the video is high impact and straight to the point: the failed item, on camera, on their own vehicle, with the consequence of waiting. The need is revealed by the expert — and your customer buys the job. Every technician, every vehicle, every day.

MENU DEVELOPMENT

Just like finance, your dealership must have a maintenance menu — a menu of offerings for the customer to buy. In today’s day and age, the menu must be a basic and a premium style menu: two tiers that give your customer the option to purchase the factory requirements and the dealership’s best care. Our proprietary menu system allows you to maximize your profitability by presenting the factory maintenance and dealer best care menus to every customer, every time, on the service drive. No menu, no presentation — no presentation, no purchase. Shaw Dealer Training Group builds the menu with you, on site.

CUSTOM TRAINING — BUILT FOR YOUR STORE

Shaw Dealer Training knows what works, and we know the fundamentals of new car dealership fixed operations — but every store has its own unique set of challenges. While we are on site, we will customize your training program: our trainers will not only train your team while we are there, we will develop a custom plan and execute it on the days we are in training. We follow up monthly and help you improve your performance. Whether it’s the items above — the factory maintenance, the multi-point — or items specific to your dealership: we can get it done.

LIVE SEMINARS

Large dealer groups bring Steve Shaw in personally to kick off training for the entire organization with a live seminar. Steve is well known as a motivational speaker, and this is the launch event for the new way of doing business in your dealership — your whole team, fired up, pointed in one direction, on one standard. You will see immediate success. The seminar is a working session, not a pep rally. In the classroom, Steve teaches your advisors the correct way to present the multi-point, factory maintenance and driveway sales, how to overcome objections, and the exact words that work — and then your advisors walk back out to the drive and run it. The seminar is followed by the on-site training described above, so the fire lit in the room becomes the behavior on the drive.

Custom Branded Dealer University Websites

ONLINE TRAINING

A Shaw Dealer University is a custom-branded training website built for your dealership — your name, your logo, your web address, powered by Steve Shaw. Instead of training that walks out the door with the trainer, your dealer group gets a platform that stays: every class ever taught, live at your store or online, available to every associate, 24/7.

Here’s how it works: three days a month of live training, taught by Steve Shaw and Shaw Certified Trainers, on your drive. Every session is recorded and posted straight to your website, so the class your advisor takes live on Tuesday is the same class your new hire watches on day one, six months from now. The library runs 36 live classes a year across 9 training tracks and 41 courses, plus a video library of 70-plus lessons — all sitting on your own site, under your own name.

Give your dealer group the head start. Give your onboarding, your new hires, and your veterans the advantage in the marketplace: a service department where everyone trained the same way, to the same standard, from day one — on a training website that’s yours to keep. Your name on the sign. Powered by Steve Shaw.

FOiS Leadership Development Program
Three Days That Change How Your Store Is Run

THE FiOS SYSTEM

Sales training fixes this month. Leadership training fixes the next decade. The Shaw Dealer Training Group Leadership Development Program is three days of personal training with a Steve Shaw-certified trainer, built on FOiS: The Behavior Behind the Numbers — guiding your managers down the path to becoming leaders in your organization, and implementing the sales processes and the sustainment the book lays out.

Day One — Volume One · Leadership: The Leader. Training for the dealer, the dealer principal, the general manager, and your dealership champion — who you are before you touch a single number. Your leaders work Volume One of FOiS on their own store: the vision and values the department runs on, the coaching rhythm and the one-on-ones, the First-90, and the ladder. Every leader scores where they actually stand — pass or fail, because nobody gets points for doing it halfway — and leaves day one with dated 30/60/90 commitments carrying a name on every line.

Day Two — Volume Two · Sales: The Drive. The customer conversation, installed and inspected. Your managers learn to lead the sales process from Volume Two: the welcome, the pass/fail multi-point inspection, the factory maintenance and driveway sales presentation, the menu, the video, and the recovery plays. This is not advisor training — it is training the leaders who must inspect it, coach it, and hold the standard on the drive every day, so the behavior survives long after the trainer drives away.

Day Three — Volume Three · Process: The Numbers. The statement finally reads like a story. Your leaders work Volume Three: break-even, effective labor rate and the three rates, shop loading, the technician’s objective as a signed two-way contract, the obstacle checklist that runs before one word about effort, and the Fixed Ops Scorecard — the whole store on one page, pass or fail. Day three is the sustainment day: the review rhythm that keeps score after we’re gone, and the culture you, the dealer, want in your organization.

Everything included: Three days on-site with a Steve Shaw Certified Trainer — one time, or quarterly as requested by the dealership. The three FOiS Companion Workbooks for every participant. The Dealer’s Guide — the dealer manual, with weekly discussion topics between the dealer and the fixed operations manager. The Facilitator’s Guide for in-house follow-up. Quarterly training includes monthly follow-up Zoom calls with your trainer. Commit to quarterly training and we add a fourth day each quarter at no cost — four days for the price of three. Or take up to $5,000 of your FOiS Leadership Training purchase as credit toward the development of your custom-branded university. One or the other — your choice. We put our money where our mouth is.

Every day without training is money left on the drive.

Let’s talk about what Shaw Dealer Training Group can do for your team — no obligation, just a real conversation about your numbers.