Norman Reeves' fixed ops director outlines 9 standards driving staff confidence, higher earnings

Earlier this year, Norm Reeves Honda Superstore in North Richland Hills, Texas, unexpectedly lost its service advisor.

The sudden vacancy, according to the store’s Fixed Ops Director, Richard Meneely, revealed a gap in the shop’s overall structure and preparedness.

“We didn't have anybody prepped for the next level,” Meneely told Daily Dealer Live host Sam D’Arc on Oct. 2. “As a service director, I've never really had any kind of formal training. It's really been just on-the-job training. And, I think that's true for most of us in the chair. So I looked at that and said, ‘Hey, we have advisor training. We have salespeople training. We don't have manager training.’ And that's really what I wanted to focus 2026 on.”

With that in mind: Working alongside a learning and development team within the dealership, Meneely took to “building a curriculum that [could] be passed on store to store” across the group’s nearly 20 locations.

The curriculum is about 75% of the way done, available through an internal online portal, and is built around nine “standards” and modules. 

Those standards are as follows:

“Everything starts on the RO,” Meneely said. “If a manager can't read one and see where the money and the liability are, nothing else matters.”

Structurally speaking: The purpose of each module, Meneely said, centers on understanding the material and, in turn, coaching someone else on it if needed.

“It's easy to explain the definition of effective labor rate [ELR] to somebody,” he said. “But not everybody can take that definition and understand what it means. So a lot of it is, ‘What [does] the number mean? And what can you derive from the number?”

Take ELR, which is what Meneely used to illustrate his point.

“We kind of created - I don't wanna say homework, but essentially testing that breaks down each module,” he said. “For example, I'm gonna use ELR again. We take ELR and [confirm] first off, does the manager know how to pull that number? Where does the number come from? And then it breaks it down even further. Take a specific advisor. What is his ELR for the month? What percentage of that is maintenance versus repair business? What's causing the ELR to be low or high? So, we've kind of taken each module and broken it down into short tests and short homework.”

Navigating pushback: Meneely noted that some of his staff shared that the modules felt similar to a Performance Improvement Plan, or PIP, since they weren’t being monitored “on paper” before.

And to his credit, these “plays” seem to be working. 

Check out the advisor stats below, which Meneely shared with CDG News via email.

On top of that, Meneely said the store’s Customer Service Experience/Excellence score was “67.6, below the Honda Zone” in August. Since implementing the above guidance, he said that score has jumped to 82.9, above “the Zone.”

“None of that came from a new pay plan,” Meneely wrote via email. “It came from managers coaching to the fundamentals in monthly one-on-ones, every advisor, every month. Take care of the customer, sell what the car needs, and the numbers follow.”

Bottom line: Norman Reeves’ nine standards should help the shop avoid scrambling when a role opens up. But Meneely says the bigger takeaway, in his view, is that the three KPIs that matter most are employee engagement, customer satisfaction and gross per repair order, in that order.

“As long as you have happy employees that know how to do it and what to do [and] you have happy customers, I do think the gross will follow,” he said.