Automotive State of The Union

Q4 Strategy Sessions: Joe Castelino on Fixed Ops Cycle Times, Tech Tools, and Holiday Chaos

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Episode #1178: We dive into Q4 service strategy with Joe Castelino, VP of Fixed Ops at American Motors Group. From holiday PTO and campus ebb-and-flow to tech-enabled check-ins and bay visibility, Joe shows how disciplined processes and smart tools keep throughput high and customers happy into year-end.


Show Notes with links:

  • Plan for dual PTO: your team and your customers. College-town stores see sharp holiday rushes from parents and students—staff and stock accordingly.
  • Stick with what works: sub-hour cycle times, ~30-minute LOFs, and rigorous FRFT targets keep lanes moving when volume spikes.
  • Streamline write-up: mobile/electronic check-in, photos/video, and voice-to-text (or customer noise recordings!) reduce ambiguity and speed technician diagnosis.
  • See the bottlenecks: SkaiVision plate recognition flags unattended vehicles, long waits, and even surface sales opportunities from the lane.
  • “Q4 tends to be a little more strategic—we hunker down and execute what we’ve practiced all year.” — Joe Castelino

Join Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier every morning for the Automotive State of the Union podcast as they connect the dots across car dealerships, retail trends, emerging tech like AI, and cultural shifts—bringing clarity, speed, and people-first insight to automotive leaders navigating a rapidly changing industry.

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Paul J Daly:

All right. Next up on our q4 strategy sessions, we have Joe Castellino, Vice President of fixed ops for American Motors group. We're going to talk about all things fixed stops. Heading in to the end of the year, let's get into it. You're gonna love Joe. We know it already. The

Kyle Mountsier:

people really want to know guaranteed you're gonna love Joe. I'm just pumped that one out of five of these sessions is on fixed stops. Well, yeah, it just has to be that we have to get fixed stops in the mix. And Joe's been, Joe's been like, arm wrestling us. He's like, You better get more fixed Well,

Paul J Daly:

ASOTU con he already agreed to speak. So if you like what you hear today, you can come here and speak in May circle the dates, and if you don't like them, they're gonna be a lot of other speakers too. There you go. Good Good, Joe. Thanks for joining us today. It's good to have you. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. Kyle. Okay, so we told you we'd make this really easy, no math questions, none of that stuff, but, but, but in reality, we're heading into q4 we're in q4 and heading into the end of the year, where we start see these holidays coming up. You know, the end of the year, books start to pile up. Things change. Employees take time off. You have a lot of special interests. A lot of times there's charitable things going on. People are getting their cars switched over for seasonal things. How do you generally approach q4 differently than the other quarters of the year? Or don't you?

Joe Castelino:

No, you absolutely have to q4 tends to be a little bit more strategic. You do have employee time off. You also have to consider that while your employees are taking time off, other people are taking times off. So the hard part becomes, while other people are off, how you are able to cater and manage to them and their needs, right? A lot of people take Thanksgiving week off and and try to get everything handled. A handful of our stores are near college campuses, and you'll have a lot of parents fly in and get their kids car ready, or kids are all of a sudden. Hey, I got to take off, and I got to go here and here, and we got to get them ready. So we absolutely have to plan for that. We manage all of it strategically.

Paul J Daly:

Can you tell? Give us a little bit of so people understand. Tell me. Tell us about the group. A little bit the types of stores, volume, etc.

Joe Castelino:

So American Motors group, we have a handful of Toyota stores, handful of Volkswagen stores, and Alfa Romeo store, Chevrolet Cadillac and all up and down California. So some are in really densely populated areas. Some are in more rural areas, but they're all with, I think all but one is near a heavy college campus, a big college campus.

Kyle Mountsier:

Yeah, that's a totally different dynamic, because there's college campuses kind of run towns a lot of times, and they ebb and flow, especially in holiday times when kids go back to home or anything like that. And so there's a lot of ebb and flow. There's probably big rushes and big pull aways. When it comes to fix ops, you're obviously a big tech guy too, when it comes to integrating it tech into the processes. What are is this? Is this a season where you're looking functionally a bit ahead? Or is this a good is this a season where you where you look to make changes in your operations? Or is it kind of a time where you get where you just lock and you're like, nope, what we're doing is what we're doing, and we'll look at it in q1 how do you approach that?

Joe Castelino:

So q4 we tend to just hunker down and stick to what's been working but q4 is typically the summary of everything that we've been working towards, right? So something that we've been working at, I've been preaching, is right, sizing your service departments right? So that's getting cycle times way down, right? One of our Toyota stores is less than 30 minutes for an oil change, so we can process more, more and more, while our average time is less than an hour for cycle times. So at this point, we've practiced everything. We've really got down our turnaround and our cycle times are, you know, 95 fives are fixed right the first times. That way, we're respective of people's time, and we're cognizant, and can understand, exactly like you said, Kyle, a handful of stores already actually in the Silicon Valley, and we have to be cognizant of all the time that they're taking off, and all of the techs and the engineers around us that you know rely on their car are going to take off for two three weeks and need their car serviced. So this point, it's just practicing what we are preaching what we've practiced the last nine months of the

Paul J Daly:

year. Can you tell us a little bit about your check in process? Do you have something that's universal across the stores, or what are you doing to make that process better, especially in consideration of the ebbs and flows in traffic, trying to make it efficient and trying to make it memorable, and all those

Joe Castelino:

things. So all of our stores have some variation of the base. Core. And in our group, we have a basic core process, and then every store can deviate or vary from that, but we do all of an electronic check in system where the advisor is able to come out there, have the advice, have the appointment pre populated on either their cell phone or their tablet. They sign electronically so customers don't have to come in, come out. You can use talk to text if you need to. You take photos of the car, videos of the car. So if something's going on, instead of trying to describe it, you can say, okay, hey, if there's an engine noise or something, let's, let's record that and streamline the process that way.

Kyle Mountsier:

So so like, record that, potentially customer or even the advisor recording it. So you get a lot longer, like, I mean, I see, you know, advisors, not all of them, but a lot of them it. They're not like, you know, 60 word per minute, type, type, you know, type first, right? So that ability to, kind of, like, reduce the the gap between advisor, or customer and technician understanding what's going on seems like that's like a that's a really interesting way to go. Like, no, we're gonna go voice to text, or we're gonna go voice memo to get that back to the technician. With the most context possible is that what you're

Joe Castelino:

constantly that's exactly what it does, because that way you hear it straight from the customer, and you can even, like, if there's a noise, record the noise on video, record it to our DMS and put it straight on there, so there's no ambiguity. If, is this the noise the customer is talking about, or is this what's going on? You actually get to hear and see it straight from the customer.

Paul J Daly:

But probably more entertaining is letting the customers mimic the noise, and then recording that

Joe Castelino:

some of the sounds people make, you're just like, wait,

Paul J Daly:

what? Yeah, see, that's a social media marketing campaign waiting to happen when your car makes that, and then just roll all the clips of the people making the noise.

Joe Castelino:

You know what? We were gonna do a social media campaign on that. I'll tag you guys. Please

Unknown:

do. Please do. That sounds like the best campaign. Everybody just making whatever, right?

Joe Castelino:

Didn't they make a television commercial? I could have swore.

Unknown:

Maybe they did, and if they did whatever they were, we're genius. That's exactly what's gonna happen.

Paul J Daly:

Joe, are you doing anything regarding hours? Some people have holiday hours. Are you doing anything regarding that? We

Joe Castelino:

are we're doing a couple of things, most, I shouldn't say most, but some of our stores are extending hours. One's going all the way up till 10. One's actually doing a 24 hour shift. And pardon, five days a week, five days a week, it's going, it's going 24 hours. Why? It will be extended hours, Saturday, Sunday. But 24 hours, what?

Unknown:

What brand is that that is gonna be Chevrolet, and what are the current hours that you're

Paul J Daly:

extending to? 24 that must already be open

Joe Castelino:

kind of late. They're open till six o'clock right now. But it's just, it's one of those things that what we're doing for that particular thing is we're going to open for used cars and fleet, right? Because the fleet guys themselves, they need service, yeah? They're like, please do it overnight. Yeah, right. And so to accommodate for like, our premium hours, for our normal just retail customers, we're going to take our fleet customers and wholesale customers and move them to a 24 hour shift. So we can, you know, they can keep their stuff in business during the holiday season, and they can keep up with the work, and they can drop their cars off at night and come pick them up in the morning.

Paul J Daly:

I know, I know a friend of ours, Brian Ben stock, when they off open service 24 hours and did drop off and pick up their average ro went through the roof. So I bet you'll see some arrows going, Hey, why have it me back in the morning,

Joe Castelino:

right? Do it all, and it's for the it's, it's mainly going to be for fleet and wholesale. But obviously, if there was a retail customer that needed something in a pickle, we're not

Paul J Daly:

going to turn them away. Yeah, fleet too. It'll be curious. We'll ask you when once the holidays are gone, how it went.

Joe Castelino:

Absolutely, I'd look forward

Kyle Mountsier:

to that. Joe, are you using any other like video technology in the lane or in the technician Bay to kind of enhance the user experience? And what gains have you seen from doing something like that?

Joe Castelino:

So sky vision, we're using that. If you guys haven't heard of that, it reads license plates. It tells us, you know where, where potential bugs are in our our processes if a car sat here for too long, or if you know somebody's not if this, and you can program it if the car has been left unattended, and that's really been helping us really fine tune our cycle times. And it actually, you know, it also reports back to the sales department, which is kind of cool, and with through the plate, tells you, hey, this is what the car is. This is what this is. And you can send an offer. I think we've closed eight. Deals last month out of one store. Just like, this

Paul J Daly:

is a sponsored post, but is it s, k, a, i, is that, am I remembering that right? Yes. They're like, hey, that sales person you had at the point is smoking a cigarette behind license plate number j5, seven, yeah.

Joe Castelino:

It's more like, hey, this car has been left unattended, or this person's been sitting here for too long. So what it also does, it sees like, hey, this one person. And you can program it like, if I see anybody in my waiting room for more than, you know, 45 minutes, it'll say like, Hey, here is somebody who hasn't moved out of their seat for 45 minutes. And just ping us so nobody can go look and say, okay, hey. You know what's this person here for are they waiting for service or

Paul J Daly:

or we could get a Reynolds robot to bring them out, like some fresh lemonade on a train.

Joe Castelino:

Their parts, their parts, their parts. Robot. It is something to look at, for sure.

Paul J Daly:

It is I geek out over it. Every time I see it. I'm like, oh, make it. Bring water over. Oh, that's cool.

Unknown:

Yeah,

Joe Castelino:

bring lemonade that was at ASOTU con.

Paul J Daly:

Oh, so cool. So wait to see the one we have this year. It dances. Does tick tock videos, like a robot card? Does we get

Joe Castelino:

it to make sounds? Can we get it to make customer sounds?

Paul J Daly:

Yes, the answer is always yes.

Kyle Mountsier:

We'll train the robots. All right, Joe. Joe, it has been an absolute pleasure hanging out with you. Thank you for giving us a little insight into the way that you're thinking about q4 and more broadly, exactly about what you're doing in the stores. You're always pressing the boundaries. Thanks for giving us some time go

Paul J Daly:

serve someone today. Thanks guys. See you soon. See you. Con we'll be here before you know, right? You?

Contributor

Kyle Mountsier

Host
Contributor

Paul J Daly

Host