Pay gets your team hired. Benefits get them to stay. The survey data finally caught up to what GMs have been telling us for years.
Every dealer we talk to has the same story. A tech quits for a dollar more an hour up the road. Six weeks later he is back asking for his bay. The other store had a bigger hourly. It also had no real benefits, no telemedicine, no pre-tax premium on the paycheck. The dollar was real. The cost of getting sick on that dollar was bigger.
That is not a hunch anymore. The 2024 Global Benefits Attitudes Survey put a number on it: 65% of employees now rate benefits as a top reason they stay with an employer, up from 45% in 2017. In seven years, benefits moved from a tiebreaker into a top retention lever. If you are still running the retention conversation purely on pay, you are fighting the last war.
Pay is a hiring tool. Advertise the right number and the right people walk in. That part is real and we are not going to tell you to underpay your service team. But pay is elastic. Another store can always match it or beat it. Once the offer is out there, the dealer with the deeper bench of benefits wins the stay conversation without having to chase every raise.
Pay also gets taxed. A $1-an-hour raise to a service advisor costs you roughly $1.08 all-in once you layer in FICA and workers’ comp loading. The employee sees maybe 70 cents of that dollar land in their checking account. The math is not great for either side.
Benefits people use are different. A $0 co-pay telemedicine visit is not a line on a recruiting flyer — it is the difference between a tech calling out Monday morning or logging into an app on Sunday night and getting a prescription called in. It is the difference between an advisor’s spouse putting off a nagging symptom for six months or catching it in week two. That is where retention actually lives.
Dealers on an Elysian plan see participation rates around 94%. That is not an opt-in rate on a paperwork form. That is employees actually using the benefit. When 9 out of 10 people on your floor are getting preventive visits, behavioral-health support, and routine care at no out-of-pocket cost, you are not selling them on the benefit anymore. They already know what it is worth to them. They wrote down the phone number.
Layer a Section 125 pre-tax premium on top and the benefit starts paying the employee directly. Typical take-home lift is 2–5%. The dealership pays less in FICA on the same dollar. Nobody had to negotiate a new medical renewal. Nobody had to change brokers. The paycheck just got heavier.
Ask any tech which he values more: a $40 pay bump before taxes, or an extra $40 in the Friday check plus a benefit his wife and kids can actually use. You know the answer. His old store is about to learn it too.
A service tech who walks out the door costs you real money once you count recruiting, onboarding, ramp time, and the productivity hole you cover with overtime. Keep a handful more techs per year and you have funded the entire benefits program and then some. This is not soft ROI. This is the P&L you already run.
If turnover is your biggest operational tax, stop treating it like a wage problem and start treating it like a benefits problem. The survey data, the participation data, and your own Saturday schedule are all telling you the same thing.
If you want to see the retention math for your dealership, send us your headcount and we will run it.
We will model the participation lift and the retention impact for your store.
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