Ryan Carlstedt, EVP of fixed operations at Willis Automotive Group in Des Moines, Iowa, closed out 2025 with the group's best CSI scores ever across all nine franchises, and says the results trace directly back to a culture shift he deliberately engineered.
Driving the news: Carlstedt appeared on Daily Dealer Live on March 20, 2026, to walk through the two-year culture arc that produced those CSI results, and the tactical systems he's built around it heading into the rest of 2026.
For context, Carlstedt oversees all service, parts, collision, detail, and business development operations across Willis's nine-brand, nine-rooftop group, a footprint that includes Lexus, Infiniti, Volvo, Land Rover, Jaguar, Mini, Chevrolet, and Nissan.
And of the group's roughly 500 employees, more than 300 sit on the fixed ops side.
"Fixed operations can be stressful at times, and you know, whether it's techs, advisers, managers, people buttheads," he told Daily Dealer Live host Sam D'Arc. "And I said, when I started in the business 25 years ago, we were out there having fun every day. So, let's just do that."
Knowing that: Carlstedt has built a named theme, a deployed system, and measurable early outcomes around taking that culture further in 2026.
"We got tens last year. Let's turn it up. Let's turn everything up to 11. whether it's the fun that we're having in the shops, on the drives with our guests, and let's just turn that guest care number up from a 10 to an 11," he said.
How this works operationally:
Carlstedt said he’s allocated a budget to every department and given managers full autonomy to deploy it, with one requirement: come back and tell the story to the group.
Some departments are using it to hand out Starbucks gift cards at vehicle pickup.
The Lexus service manager, meanwhile, had custom Lexus-branded wrapping paper printed and gave guests gifts at delivery.
And at a high level, when the store drops the ball, funds are allocated to ramp up responsiveness there, too, like sending flowers to a customer's workplace, timed to arrive when their coworkers are around.
"You know darn well that if we screw up, people are at their job and they're saying how bad a job we did,” Carlstedt shared. “But what better than two days later, we screwed up, and now all of a sudden they receive flowers at their job. Everybody goes up, and they say, 'Where'd the flowers come from?' And they have to say, 'Well, that Willis service team sent me flowers and you know, they made it right.'"
Regarding management: Carlstedt says the strongest fixed ops culture in the group's history starts with what he describes as his strongest management team ever, built through promotion from within and what he calls addition by subtraction.
"When we have our fixed operations meetings every Thursday, we've got a couple of managers who are former technicians. We've got a couple of managers who are younger. We've got female managers. There's not anybody in that room that's not represented," he said.
"When we bring our minds together on a Thursday just to bounce ideas off of each other, I feel like we just do a great job of covering it from every single angle possible."
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On video MPI: Carlstedt has tracked customer pay dollars against video MPI penetration going back to 2016 on a single trending report, adding that the “stores that are the best at videos have the biggest CP increases.”
He says the group uses Autopoint, a Solera company, to shoot and send video MPIs via text through Numa.
Training on delivery comes from monthly 6:30 a.m. sessions run by the management staff and supplemented by NCM training.
Speaking to used inventory: Carlstedt's group runs two dedicated employees whose job is to work an equity mining tool against the daily appointment list, reaching out to customers before they arrive to prime them on a potential appraisal.
That said, at the Nissan store, he said the approach is slightly different.
A younger salesperson was repositioned onto the service drive full-time, greeting customers, getting them a drink, and offering appraisals while vehicles are in the shop.
"He was kind of too young to know any better, and he went in just with the super positive attitude and made it work because he didn't have the bad habits, he didn't have the negative connotation," Carlstedt said.
The program launched in December. And by the end of that month, he said the salesperson in question was climbing the leaderboard, working half the hours of his peers on the phones.
Building the tech pipeline: The same long-term thinking Carlstedt applies to the service lane extends to the talent side.
With NADA data showing 6,000 open service bays nationwide and no technicians to fill them, he has spent five years building a pipeline rather than competing for existing talent.
Case in point: Willis runs a 10-week summer apprenticeship program, currently in its fifth year, that has put 16 young technicians through the process.
Roughly half are still with the group, with two more expected to join full-time once they finish school.
The application flyer even adds, "If you graduate in the 10 weeks and you meet our company's core values, I will guarantee you employment."
Bottom line: Carlstedt's CSI results, the customer-pay revenue trend, the service lane sourcing program, and the tech pipeline all run through the same foundation, aka a management team that's bought in, a training cadence that reinforces the why, and a hospitality standard borrowed from what they see as the best brand in the building and then applied across all nine.
"We teach culture more than anything. We teach hospitality. We're a Lexus dealer, so we steal a lot of their stuff. Lexus, when it comes to hospitality, is number one. So we cascade that Lexus message and make it a Willis message."
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