The 3 Things Every Parts Manager Needs to Learn
Learn what it takes to be a great Parts Manager and get a discount on a new training course.
Episode 338: We’ve been working hard at the Heavy Duty Consulting Corporation to create the only business development system of its kind that is exclusively dedicated to the heavy-duty parts industry. We are proud to announce that we have developed a training program specifically for Parts Managers.
In line with that new course offering, in this episode we are going to talk to Dan Larlee, Parts Director at Falcon Equipment, about:
- What it takes to be a successful parts manager.
- What some of the common areas parts managers struggle with.
- Why being a great parts technician doesn’t automatically make you a great parts manager.
Listen to the end for a discount on our new Parts Management course!
Links
Sponsors of this Episode
Heavy Duty Consulting Corporation: Find out how many “fault codes” your heavy-duty parts business has. Meet with us today. Visit HeavyDutyConsulting.com
Hengst Filtration: There’s a new premium filter option for fleets. If you’re responsible for a fleet, you won’t believe how much using Hengst filters will save you. But you’ve got to go to HeavyDutyPartsReport.com/Hengst to find out how much.
Diesel Laptops: Diesel Laptops is so much more than just a provider of diagnostic tools. They’re your shop efficiency solution company. Learn more about everything Diesel Laptops can do for you today by visiting DieselLaptops.com today.
HDA Truck Pride: They’re the heart of the independent parts and service channel. They have 750 parts stores and 450 service centers conveniently located across the US and Canada. Visit HeavyDutyPartsReport.com/HDATruckPride today to find a location near you.
Disclaimer: This content and description may contain affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, The Heavy Duty Parts Report may receive a commission.
Transcript of Episode
Jamie Irvine:
You are listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine, and this is the place where we have conversations that empower heavy-duty people.
Welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine. In this episode, we’re going to talk about what it takes to be a successful parts manager, what some of the common areas, parts managers struggle with and what we can do about it and why being a great parts technician does not automatically make you a great parts manager.
Let’s get into it. Now we’ve been working at the Heavy Duty Consulting Corporation to create the only business development system of its kind that is exclusively dedicated to the heavy-duty parts and service industry.
And really what we’re trying to do is help empower heavy-duty people and the companies they work for to thrive. Now, education is a big part of this initiative and the podcast really The Heavy Duty Parts Report was the first step in putting this initiative together.
We produce these episodes, we have created a platform for industry experts and heavy-duty parts people to really share their expertise with the entire industry. So that part we’ve been doing for a long time. Our consulting business came next and we’ve been consulting with dozens of heavy-duty companies.
We’ve developed an entire consulting program that can take you from starting a business from scratch all the way to selling the business right through the natural arc of a business, starting it, growing it, scaling it, and selling it. And we’ve developed a specific program that is exclusively dedicated to heavy-duty parts and service companies.
And like I said, we’ve worked with dozens of companies in that capacity. Now, one of the things that I’ve been working on with some clients to develop some training programs that are on their learning management systems and also a training program that we would be able to then bring to our clients.
And we’ve been working on several different approaches to this for a few years, and we decided recently that we were going to take all of this work that we’ve done and we were going to put it into a unique format that really I think is going to make us stand out as different. So over time we’ve developed an Executive Leadership Training Program.
We developed an Outside Sales Training Program. We developed a program for hiring people for recruitment and retaining people. And we really looked at and said what’s needed now is a Parts Management Program. And so we have now developed that as well.
So I’m really excited to talk to you about these training programs that are available and more specifically about this parts management training program. What makes our training programs unique? Well, unlike some online training programs that are kind of a self-paced learning and people can do it on demand, there’s definitely a time and place for that.
Our programs are a little different though because what we observed that a lot of times people don’t just need knowledge, they need coaching, they need help to put the knowledge into some format where they can actually go and try it. Then they can ask questions, they can practice, they can get better, and then they can implement what they’re learning immediately to try to improve their overall performance. And so that is exactly how we have structured our training programs.
Instead of an online program, we are going to still do it remotely through video calls, but we are going to meet with your people for 13 weeks in a row an entire quarter. Once a week they’re going to spend an hour with our instructor. They’re going to receive training, and then in addition to that training, they’re going to be given assignments so that they can put into practice what they’re learning, immediately try it out, they run into any problems.
There’s a coaching component in that weekly meeting. And in addition to that, we offer unlimited support for all of the attendees via email. So this is a very in-depth comprehensive training program, and we’re so excited to announce today that the parts management course is now available in addition to those other programs. I talked about pricing ranges depending on how many people you have enrolled in the program.
But if you want to get access to an early bird discount, listen to the entire interview because I’m very excited to offer a very special offer in today’s program. It’s time to hear from our sponsors and after our break to hear from our sponsors, we’re going to have our interview with one of the individuals that was instrumental in the development of our parts management course. We’ll be right back.
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We’re back from the break. Before the break, I was talking to you about the dedication that we’ve had at our company to try to build this business development system exclusively for heavy-duty parts, people why training and education is such a big component of that. And we announced our new parts management course. We could not have built this course without the help of our guest today that we are going to interview.
So I’m really looking forward to sharing my conversation with Dan Larlee. My guest today is Dan Larlee, Parts Director at Falcon Equipment. Now Dan has worked his entire 20 plus year career in heavy-duty parts.
He has worked in the warehouse, he’s worked on the parts counter. He’s been an assistant manager, a ranch manager, and now a parts director. His management experience is extensive and we are very happy to have him on the podcast. Dan, welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. So glad to have you here.
Dan Larlee:
Hey Jamie, thanks for having me. It’s good to see you.
Jamie Irvine:
Good to see you as well. Now for some of you, you already know this, but for most they won’t know this, Dan and I are actually brothers and it only took 330 plus episodes to get you on the podcast.
Dan Larlee:
Yeah, thanks for that.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, you should have been like episode one, right?
Dan Larlee:
You’d think so, but no favoritism, right?
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, that’s right. We had to show no favoritism. Exactly. I’m really happy to have you here. Today we’re talking about parts management and I wanted to start our conversation off today talking about parts management specifically the key areas that are critical to success in that role.
So let’s kick it off with this, Dan, how important is it for a parts manager to have parts knowledge? Sounds like a pretty obvious question, but I think that’s where we have to start.
Dan Larlee:
Yeah, I mean, of course it’s an obvious question, obvious answer because you have to have that technical knowledge. You need to know what you’re talking about. You need to have the confidence to portray that you know what you’re talking about to your customer, but also to your staff so that you can train and coach and mentor, but you can also fulfill the customer’s needs.
Jamie Irvine:
So when you have that base of knowledge in the parts department, that gives you I guess one of the foundational pieces to be a good parts manager. Now, customer satisfaction is something that is an important part of being a counter person.
When you’re working on the counter, your job is to take care of the customer, whether that’s at the counter in the store, they phoned in an order or maybe you’re just doing email or text at any rate, if you’re a counter person, you’re responsible for the people who you serve directly. How is it different when you become the parts manager?
Dan Larlee:
So customer satisfaction is very important and it depends on the interaction that you’re having. So when we’re talking about that individual counter person, they’re responsible for that one-on-one conversation with the customer.
They’re looking at that customer satisfaction to the person they’re talking to or to the person that they have directly in front of them. But when you’re a parts manager, now you’re involved in customer satisfaction for your entire department and you have to look at more things as an overall scope.
Jamie Irvine:
And you’re not just responsible for yourself. So when you’re on the counter, it’s just you. You’re responsible for your actions, you’re responsible for helping that one customer in front of you.
You become a parts manager and all of a sudden it’s less about what you do as an individual person and now it becomes about what your team is doing, and you’re also responsible for customer satisfaction at a business level, which really does change the game, but it doesn’t just stop there.
Speaking of being responsible for a team, how important is it for the parts manager to be able to build a team, people in organization, how is that different from the regular counter position that maybe that person came from?
Dan Larlee:
So in order to build a team, you’ve got to look at what fits with the entire department. You need to know the different personalities that you’re working with and how they’re going to work together or not work together. So we have to take a look at personality profiles. We have to take a look at their traits.
We also need to know how to get the best out of our people. So everyone has areas that they’re really great at. Some have areas where they need a little bit of work, a little bit of fine tuning, a little bit of coaching. So we need to be able to identify those areas and know where and how we can build upon them to get the most out of our people.
Jamie Irvine:
Why is financials an important thing for a parts manager to understand and really be able to master in order to be successful in their position?
Dan Larlee:
So if we keep going back and forth with the example we’re using as just a counter person, you’re involved in that interaction. You obviously want to make the sale, you want to try to make as much money as possible, but you want to make the sale.
So you’re willing to take a little bit of an eroded margin or maybe cut a little bit off the top in order to get that sale, but you’re happy about that because you just made that sale. But now, as a parts manager, now we’re looking at the whole department. Now all of a sudden we need to understand financials. We need to understand how by taking a little bit of a margin cut, you’re affecting the entire branch and the operation.
You need to understand assets and how they play a part. You need to understand all your fixed costs when it comes to even things like rent and utilities and how it’s all playing a part, even when it comes down to delivery vehicles, gas, all the little tiny costs that come into running a department. All of these things play a huge and crucial role, and as a manager, you need to be able to read financials and understand how you’re affecting this.
Jamie Irvine:
And being able to understand the implications of the choices your people are making on a day-to-day basis. Like you said, it’s usually a thousand little decisions that add up to something that could be really good or not so good at all.
In addition to that, I know as a parts person, at least once a year, you’ve got to do inventory. I know as an outside sales guy, I used to hate that, but still they’d bring me in and I had to do it. Inventory management is a whole different kind of animal when you are the manager. So talk to me a little bit about inventory management.
Dan Larlee:
Again, inventory management is a beast. When you’re just a counter guy, you’re focused on what you have on hand that you can sell or deliver to a customer. But when you’re the parts manager, now all of a sudden you have things like a balance sheet where inventory is part of an asset.
Now you have to understand what that asset is doing for you and how you’re making money off of it. Now you need to think about things like fill rates, lost sale ratios. You need to understand where you’re putting inventory in the store to have it flow properly.
You need to think about things like loss prevention. There’s all kinds of avenues when it comes to inventory management that you need to be aware of, and we’re just kind of scratching the surface here. There’s a lot more that we can talk about.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, absolutely. We’re going to talk a little bit more about how we are preparing something very special for our audience today. In addition to the whole concept of a person with adequate parts knowledge, we talked about that earlier in our conversation, that that’s really one of the foundational pieces to being successful.
If we’re talking about somebody like yourself with 20 plus years experience in parts, how is acquiring parts knowledge different today than it was perhaps in the past? Why is it maybe more difficult despite there being more technology?
Dan Larlee:
So there’s definitely more technology that helps. I mean, Google’s a wonderful thing. I use it every single day. When I first started out, it wasn’t necessarily that easy, but also when I first started out, we had a lot of paper catalogs. We were able to have a lot of mentoring and coaching by older and professional parts people who have been in the business for 30, 40 years.
We don’t often see that anymore. It’s kind of a dying trend. So we’ve lost a lot of industry knowledge with a lot of the people that have retired over the last five to 10 years, and we don’t see a lot of that gap being filled in the new parts people of today. So sure, we have technology, we have great things like serial numbers.
We can go online, we can check different parts, but there’s still a lot of things, especially in the heavy-duty trucking industry that we can’t check online that you either need to know or have a base knowledge of or at least know where to go and find the answer as opposed to just being able to ask somebody that’s right next to you that we used to.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, that unfortunately has been a trend that has just gotten worse every year in the last 20 plus years. So when you’re a parts manager now you’ve got this added responsibility of being able to help your people with perhaps less resources available to you parts managers of the past.
To your point, there might be three, four or five people on the counter all with 10, 20, 30, 40 years experience, and you might’ve only had one or two junior people you were training. Now it’s flipped.
You might have a majority of junior people with not a lot of experience and only one or two really knowledgeable people. And guess what? Those people are so busy because the customers know they’re the only two on the counter who actually know what they’re doing. It must be an absolute nightmare for parts managers training people right now.
Dan Larlee:
Yeah, you’re right, because oftentimes the parts manager is the one with that 20, 30 years of experience. So they are busy, they’re fielding all the calls. They have that loyal customer base that’s been following them for years and only want to talk to them. So they’re still trying to talk to customers while at the same time trying to train and mentor and coach they’re junior people so that they can get to that position themselves.
Jamie Irvine:
That means that there’s going to be an added load on parts managers in the modern age to have the skills necessary to build a team. This involves retaining good people, but it also involves recruiting.
Now obviously if you work for a larger organization, there are some resources there available to you, but generally speaking, in your opinion, Dan, do you think most parts managers have the education experience and skills to both recruit and retain a great team?
Dan Larlee:
That’s a great question, and I would have to say the answer is no. If we take a look at it a little bit, a lot of parts managers, yes, they have technical knowledge. Yes, they’ve been doing the job for a very long time, and yes, they have the confidence to know what they’re talking about, but at the same time, do they necessarily have the right people skills to train, to mentor, to coach, to bring about this new generation?
A lot of them don’t. A lot of ’em don’t have the right people skills to hire, to recruit, to train and to coach. They need a lot of help in that respect themselves. Yes, they have technical knowledge, but again, it’s the people skills that they are lacking.
Jamie Irvine:
And even if they do have some of that core ability naturally, maybe they haven’t been trained on things like psychometric assessments, how to use them. I know a lot of companies use them in the hiring process, and then nobody ever talks about it afterwards. That happened to me a couple times.
So even if there are some tools in place, they aren’t always trained on how to use them the most effectively. And to your point, they’re so busy just trying to keep their head above water on a day-to-day basis, that this can be a real uphill battle for the modern parts manager. Going back to that thing where we were talking about things like financials and inventory, can you go into greater depth?
Why would a parts manager who isn’t maybe the CEO, isn’t part of the financial department, why do they need a good understanding of things like income statements, balance sheets? Why do they need to know about return on assets, sales mix and other financial metrics like that?
Dan Larlee:
Well, when you become a manager, you have to start taking a look at the financials and how you’re affecting them because while you may not be either in the accounting department or one of the leaders like a branch manager, but you’re still responsible for that, and you still need to have those answers when the question is being asked of you because you directly involve the outcome on a day-to-day basis. So when you’re asked why sales are down and inventory is up, you need to have an answer for that.
If there’s a specific marketing program or a seasonal program that you’re putting in place and you brought in extra inventory to accommodate for this seasonality, you need to be able to explain how that’s going to affect how much interest and flooring rate that’s going to take on for the branch, how much extra income you’re putting out into that asset and what your plan is in order to get that proper ROI based on what that marketing initiative is.
So all of these things come into effect and you really need to know the numbers and how it affects the bottom line each and every month. So all of those things play a part in it.
Jamie Irvine:
One thing I’ve seen a lot is the frontline employees don’t seem to have a good grasp on the why behind certain strategic objectives.
And so I think if you’re in that middle management position, like parts managers and branch managers often are having that ability to say, look, we have to make these decisions to be consistent with the overall strategic initiatives laid out by our leadership this year. And just having that understanding, it helps you to communicate to your frontline people why you need them to do certain things at certain times why they can’t, to your point cut margins to certain levels.
And if you’ve got that base knowledge and you can work in those financials and be proficient in it, you don’t have to be an accountant or a CFO, but you have to have that base knowledge to be able to kind of make sure that your management decisions and your frontline employees who report to you are able to do things that are consistent with the overall strategic objectives. I’m sure you’ve encountered that yourself.
Dan Larlee:
Yes, absolutely. I’ve had lots of those experiences myself where we’ve had to been able to communicate properly to our teams what’s being asked of us.
So all of branch managers and assistant managers, parts managers, everybody has their own metric, has their own KPIs that they need to be able to hit every single month, every single quarter and year. So we need to be able to communicate that to our teams properly, but we also have to get their buy-in of it, so we have to be able to explain it to them.
We have to be able to understand what those metrics are through the financials. So if you don’t understand it, how are you properly going to communicate that to your team? So that’s a big thing of why this based knowledge is very important.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. So when it comes to inventory management, what are some of the hurdles that parts managers are experiencing today that make it particularly difficult to keep their inventory in line with strategic objectives?
Dan Larlee:
So I mean, we don’t necessarily like to keep talking about the pandemic, but it did kind of have a cascading effect a couple of years ago when it came to lead times. It absolutely decimated the market. So we’re still recovering in certain different areas for long lead times for parts when it comes to bringing stuff in overseas. So when it comes to freight and couriers, so we’re still trying to take a look at this in a lot of different facets.
So we have to look at proper bulk purchasing from our different vendors and suppliers so that we can leverage the best cost that we can oftentimes taking into account for discounts and other things that we can get, whether it’s free freight, but we have to take a look at how much inventory we can handle if we’re doing these larger orders.
So we have to look at fill rates, we have to look at lead times, we have to look at seasonality when things can come in and how long it’s going to take for ’em to come in. And then we have to look at our customer base and what their needs are.
So there’s a lot of individual components that go into it to have the proper mix of inventory in place, and that’s just scratching the surface of what we have to do when it comes to larger warehouses, larger departments, not just an individual store.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, I agree a hundred percent, and not only are we still dealing with the hangover, if you will, or the after effects of the pandemic, but we also have these geopolitical things that are happening that are causing policymakers in the United States to make significant changes to things like tariffs that are going to have an adverse effect on pricing.
So we’ve had the pandemic and the supply chain collapse followed by inflation, and now we’ve got these policies that are being influenced by geopolitical moves, by different countries that are really radically changing the landscape of your inventory costs, and you can quite easily get stuck with a container load of product at the wrong price, which is devastating to your numbers.
Dan Larlee:
It really is. Absolutely. There’s a lot of times where we’re quoted a certain price, but based on lead times, it doesn’t come in for six or eight months and then all of a sudden you’re being charged what that today’s rate is not where you were quoted back then that along with extra freight costs, fuel surcharges, all kinds of extra terrorists depending on which country you’re bringing it in from.
It all really is affecting our bottom lines, especially when it comes to inventory management.
Jamie Irvine:
It’s now time for us to talk about a special offer for our listeners. So Dan, when we started the podcast, we always wanted to provide that educational content and have subject matter experts like yourself on the show. But now that we are operating the Heavy Duty Consulting Corporation, we have started to develop very specific training programs that take it to a whole other level.
And we are so excited to announce that we have developed a Parts Management Training Program in collaboration with none other than yourself, Dan, and we are very excited to offer our listeners an early bird special. So the first 10 companies that sign up to this training program are going to receive a 20% discount over the regular price pricing is based on the number of employees you enroll. So if you want to talk to us about that, I want you to head over to heavydutypartsreport.com/pmt.
Now, PMT stands for parts management training. That’s heavydutypartsreport.com/pmt. You’re going to be able to book a meeting with myself and we will talk through the details and get you your quote and get you that 20% discount. Now, this is a 13 week training program where I’m going to meet with you once a week and I’m going to provide you with one hour of training and coaching to your parts managers.
We’re also going to offer you unlimited email support during the duration of the course, and your parts managers are going to receive weekly assignments to ensure that they’re grasping the concepts and to give them an opportunity to put what they’re learning into action right away so you can start getting a positive return on investment for investing in this training program. I also would like to just let people know that Dan’s a subject matter expert.
He contributed to this program, and without him we wouldn’t have been able to really build it. And I have a funny feeling he might be available from time to time to help parts managers, but you’re going to have to sign up to find out. So again, head over to heavydutypartsreport.com/pmt that stands for parts management training, heavydutypartsreport.com/pmt.
Links are in the show notes. So Dan, that’s an exciting announcement and thank you so much for your participation not only in our conversation today, but also in the development of our parts management course. We would not have been able to do it without your support.
Dan, I’d like the listeners to have an opportunity to get to know you a little better and really I’d like an opportunity to share a little more about your personal story, how you got into the industry, what was your pathway to being in a director role?
Dan Larlee:
Yeah, absolutely. We can break it down a little bit because when I was younger, since you brought up the fact that I’m your brother.
Jamie Irvine:
Oh, the truth is going to come out.
Dan Larlee:
I had a fun introduction into heavy duty because it was summertime. I’d come to visit you and you’d put me to work. We were relining brake shoes at the time. We’re rebuilding air valves, and there was even some fun when I was making too much noise and you put me outside in the rain.
Jamie Irvine:
You always bring that up. I also made you use an outdoor sand blaster, which was, yeah, that was fun.
Dan Larlee:
But it was fun.
Jamie Irvine:
Listen, when I started at Contech, they put me on a sand blaster for what was at least three days just to see if they could break me. So I had to pass on the introduction to heavy-duty the same way I learned how else was I going to do it and you were my brother. I had to do it.
Dan Larlee:
To a teenager outside in the rain. That was great.
Jamie Irvine:
You haven’t let it go.
Dan Larlee:
But no, it was good because it honestly did give me an introduction into the heavy-duty trucking industry and something that I’ve appreciated and something that stuck with me obviously throughout my entire career. It gave me that kind of first taste of it, and I did actually enjoy it. So when I turned 18, I started in the industry myself.
I started doing outside sales. I did that for a few years. Then I transitioned inside, so I was inside sales or parts technician, and then I became a assistant branch manager. I was actually the youngest in the company for all of Canada, and then I was able to move into a branch manager role, and I was a branch manager by the time I was 30 as well.
So I’ve had a lot of ambition. I’ve had a lot of running through the ropes and doing all the different roles when it comes to warehouse, parts, sales management, and now that’s led me to my position where I’m a director of parts.
Jamie Irvine:
And I think both of us got the distinct advantage of being able to do all the different jobs on our way up through our career in heavy-duty.
We also benefited from mentoring from certain people, so Dan and I, we benefited from some of the same mentors. I’ll throw it a few names. Alan Felling, General Manager of Contech Products. I think about Grant Taylor, Director of Sales at Traction Heavy Duty. We both reported to him at one time. Ron Cain, he was an operations manager, although I worked for him at a later date at a different company.
We both benefited. And even your brief time visiting me where I live now when I worked at Arctic Truck, you got to meet Hank Fisher with 50 years of parts experience, and I know yourself. You also had some mentors that helped you directly and specifically kind of stepped up at just the right time to help you move through your career.
How important was it to have those mentors and do you think that’s one of the reasons that you were able to achieve so much at such a young age?
Dan Larlee:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s very important to have those mentors because you think about things and you get their knowledge in a completely different perspective. You get to have their years of industry experience passed down to you in a few short sentences. There’s some things where I had one of my mentors just sit me down and say, hey, listen, as a manager, you have to understand people’s limitations and then be able to work around them and with them because a lot of people can’t do what you can do.
So that was one of the very first things that I learned as an assistant manager, and it stuck with me all these years because he was absolutely right. Just because I could do something quicker or faster than most people doesn’t mean I can hold everyone else to the same standard and vice versa when it comes to a lot of different things.
So we have to look at it and we have to take all of those experiences from all of those different mentors, and it’s really helped shape the person you are. It carries with you, and then you all of a sudden end up teaching that to those people who are inexperienced and who you’re trying to help mentor and coach.
Jamie Irvine:
Let me ask you something. I know personally some of the challenges you’ve had, I think you might not want to admit it, but I’ve probably been a mentor to you as well over the years. I know there was many times when we were both selling parts at the same time. We had a lot of windshield time. That was awesome.
We got to talk all the time and we got to kind of riff on each other and bounce different things we were running into off each other, and I know that was a big help to me as well as I’m sure it was to you. Now I’m specifically thinking of a time in your management career when you had a lot of opposition internally.
How did you overcome those challenges? What did you learn from that time in your management career and how would you do things differently today now that you have that knowledge?
Dan Larlee:
Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, there’s a lot of things that you might be told, and there’s a lot of things that someone might try to teach you or show you, but a lot of things that you just have to experience for yourself and kind of work through. So I had some hurdles to overcome because there was a lot of people that weren’t necessarily cooperative or that didn’t like the fact that I was kind of a young manager trying to tell them what to do.
So you have a lot of that kind of change management that takes into effect and people for better or worse or a little stubborn and don’t necessarily want to change or listen to somebody younger than them, but that is definitely all part and parcel when it comes to management.
You have to take those things into account, but there’s a lot of times that somebody can try to teach you that, but you have to live through those experiences in order to be able to come out on top.
Jamie Irvine:
So how are you doing things differently as a parts director now that you’ve gone through those types of experiences? Because now you’re not just responsible for change management at one branch, you are responsible for the entire department, which in your particular company spans many branches across Western Canada. So how did you change your approach when you got this job?
Dan Larlee:
So at first, you always kind of look at what’s wrong and how you’re going to fix the situation, but it’s not always necessarily that black or white. So now when I look at it, it’s human nature, it’s people, it’s how you’re going to affect that change, but be able to delegate it and have those people affect the change because it’s something that you can’t do just yourself.
It’s something that you have to be able to, like we were talking about before, get the most out of your people so that they have the buy-in and they’re willing and wanting to have that change themselves.
So like I said, it’s definitely more focused and what I would teach people now and what I go through now is definitely on those people skills, that human nature side.
Jamie Irvine:
How important was patience for you to learn and develop as you became progressively you got more responsibility? Assistant manager, branch manager, now parts director.
Dan Larlee:
Oh, patience is definitely key. One of the things that I learned early on as well was if there’s ever situation that arises where emotions run hot, then you have to stop. Take a minute. If you want to write an email, let it play out.
There’s a lot of times that patience really plays a critical role. You have to understand the situation, but there’s times when emotions run hot. You have a lot of different personalities and flareups, but you can’t act at the time. So intelligence in the workplace is actually inverse to emotions.
So when your emotions are flaring up, then intelligence is going down. So you have to take that time to cool off so that you can have the proper patience, answer things properly. You can respond in a better way because that’s the last thing you want to do is kind of jump the gun and answer in an emotional state.
Jamie Irvine:
Yep. Every time that I’ve sent an email too quickly, I’ve always regretted it. So thank you for your candid and open and honest answers on that. I really appreciate it. We’ve talked about a lot of different things today, Dan, if there’s one thing that you want our listeners to really remember from our conversation today, what’s that one thing?
Dan Larlee:
So definitely that one thing is there’s always more to every situation. There’s always things that we can be learning, we can be improving on, and we can be doing better in our day-to-day operations. Whether it’s understanding those financials, those KPIs and those metrics, whether it’s understanding people and human nature, there’s always something to be learned and there’s always more growth to be had.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, I think that’s so important. A little bit of humility goes a long way to help you be successful and hey, I have been in this for 26 years. I run a company that consults with other companies. I have people reporting to me and I’m learning something new every single day.
It’s one of the things actually that I like the most about the heavy-duty parts industry, regardless of whether I was in the shop on the floor, in the front lines, all the way up to being in an executive leadership position.
I feel like every single day I’ve learned something new and I really, really appreciate that about the industry. You’ve been listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine, and we’ve been speaking with Dan Larlee, parts director of Falcon Equipment. To learn more about their company, I’d want you to go to falconequip.com.
Links to their website is also in the show notes. They have a really fascinating company. They do truck cranes and they do a lot of interesting things in the heavy duty space.
In addition to that, don’t forget that this parts management training program is available now, and if you want to take advantage of that early bird special, you have to do so and be one of the first 10 companies to take advantage of that. So don’t delay heavydutypartreport.com/pmt.
Dan, thank you so much for helping me build the course, and thank you so much for being on today’s episode.
Dan Larlee:
Yeah, thanks, Jamie. It was great being here and great spending some more time with you and building this course. I think it’s going to be great. I think you guys are going to really love it.
Jamie Irvine:
Well, it was really great to have Dan finally on the podcast, and like I said, he was an instrumental part of building this parts management course. I don’t think we could have done it without his expertise, so we are really, really excited to bring this to you. It’s now time for our segment That’s Not Heavy Duty.
In this segment of That’s Not Heavy Duty. I want to talk about something that unfortunately happens all too often. Let me lay out the situation. You have a amazing parts person. They have come up through the ranks. They started as a delivery driver, they became a junior counter person, then a senior counter person, and they are crushing it over time.
You have people leave the company, people retire, and a management position opens up. You look around and you say, who should I promote into that position? And you pick your star parts person or maybe you’re a parts person with the longest running tenure.
That intuitively seems like the right thing to do, but I’m telling you that can’t be the heavy-duty way any longer because it oftentimes leads to a major problem. Why is that? Well, as we talked about in the interview, doing the job of being a counter person is very different than managing a parts department or even a branch, which is even a bigger job.
These are completely different jobs and they take a different skillset to be truly successful. When you’re a counter person, you have people coming to you, they’re phoning you for help, they’re coming to your counter, they’re asking for help.
There is not as much of a need to be highly assertive in that role. You have to be social, but you don’t have to be that assertive. Everybody’s coming to you. You do need to be detail oriented and be able to process some detailed stuff and some complex things like parts schematics and things like that.
And you have to be able to understand how to identify parts true in the parts position. You also have to be extremely high paced, right? Because you’ve got one phone on hold, the other phone is ringing.
You’ve got maybe your cell phone in your hand, you’re texting, you’re responding to email, and you have three people at the counter, plus you have delivery drivers and warehouse people and other parts people. It’s a really dynamic job. Now, in the management part of the business, it also has some of those characteristics, but they’re in a different configuration. You need to be more assertive.
You need to be social, but not as social because you actually need to be more assertive to be able to push initiatives forward, and that forces your sociability down a little bit. You have to be fast paced as well, and you have to be detail oriented, but in a different way.
So just because you’re good at being a parts person doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at managing parts people and running a parts department. And so if you want to do this the heavy-duty way, you’ve got to identify the person who has the right traits, combination in personality. They have the right education experience to step into that management role. And it’s unlikely that it’s going to be your star parts person.
It’s probably going to be one of your other parts people that are pretty good at their job, but maybe they’re not excelling the way that your star parts person does. Well, that’s possibly because they don’t have the same personality type, and so they actually have more of what it takes to manage than to do. And so you’ve got to be able to identify that in a reliable way. We help people with that.
So if you’re interested in learning more, reach out to us. Thank you so much for listening to this edition of That’s Not Heavy Duty, and our episode today about parts management. If you want to take advantage of that early bird discount, you have to be one of the first 10 companies to sign up to the program. You’re going to get a 20% discount. Head over to heavydutypartsreport.com/pmt. That’s heavydutypartsreport.com/pmt.
PMT stands for parts management training and have a meeting with us, but you got to hurry up because only the first 10 will qualify for that discount. Thank you so much for listening to the entire episode today. I really appreciate it. If you don’t want to miss out on future content that we make, go to our website, sign up to our weekly email we never spam. You would just send one email a week with our new content. You’ll listen on your podcast player of choice.
Make sure that you hit that follow button for free. It gives you the option. Give us a five star rating and review. And lastly, if you are watching the video version on YouTube, make sure you hit the subscribe button and hit that bell notification so you never miss out. Thank you for listening, and as always, I want to encourage you to Be Heavy Duty.
