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Confessions of a Shop Owner is hosted by Mike Allen, a third-generation shop owner, perpetual pot-stirrer, and brutally honest opinion sharer. In this weekly podcast, Mike shares his missteps so you don’t have to repeat them. Along the way, he chats with other industry personalities who’ve messed up, too, pulling back the curtain on the realities of running an independent auto repair shop. But this podcast isn’t just about Mike’s journey. It’s about confronting the divisive and questionable tactics many shop owners and managers use. Mike is here to stir the pot and address the painful truths while offering a way forward. Together, we’ll tackle the frustrations, shake things up, and help create a better future for the auto repair industry.
Aniz Lavji [00:00:00]:
Oh, here's the tow truck for it.
Mike Allen [00:00:02]:
Yeah, they're like $400 if you want to buy that set now. It's crazy.
Aniz Lavji [00:00:05]:
You know how much I got it for? Say, about 12 bucks. I was searching for it and everyone wanted about 300, 350 bucks. Owning a tire shop, I was like, I'm going to leverage this. So I messaged every single post and I was like, hey, do you need tires? You want to trade? You want to trade? You want to trade? Guy showed up at the shop. I put two used tires on. And yes, the guy was.
Bryan Pollock [00:00:26]:
So, yes, two used tires that he had already charged somebody else disposal on.
Mike Allen [00:00:32]:
You, sir, have earned your evil shop owner badge.
Bryan Pollock [00:00:35]:
Yep, he freaking charged him disposal. He disposed those two tires right onto the front end of a Chevy Malibu.
Mike Allen [00:00:43]:
The following program features a bunch of doofuses talking about the automotive aftermarket. The stuff we or our guests may say do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of our peers, our sponsors, or any other associations we may have. There may be some spicy language in this show, so if you get your feelings hurt easily, you should probably just move along. So without further ado, it's time for Confessions of a Shop Owner with your host, Mike Allen.
Mike Allen [00:01:16]:
So so many you guys happen to listen to the episode that I recorded at Asta Expo with Tanika and Mindy Dowd, and I told the story about my. My most embarrassing moment ever.
Aniz Lavji [00:01:30]:
Yeah, I. I definitely heard that one.
Bryan Pollock [00:01:32]:
Oh, I think I heard about the story where you had your pants down or something like that. What was the deal?
Mike Allen [00:01:36]:
Pants were not down.
Aniz Lavji [00:01:38]:
Oh.
Mike Allen [00:01:38]:
But anyway, so I guess some of my guys listened to that episode yesterday or last night or something. So every morning at 7:30, we have all the front, front of house teams have a meeting and we all get together on Google Meet and you know, talk about the day, planning systems, processes, you know, practice, whatever. And I wasn't able to attend in person this morning because my wife's under the weather. And so I was taking the kids to school at 7:30, but I logged in on my phone, total ESO, connected to. Connected to Bluetooth right in the van. And I log in and it's immediately Mike Allen, the great and wonderful one who shows his balls to his customers.
Bryan Pollock [00:02:25]:
Oh my gosh.
Mike Allen [00:02:26]:
And I was like, guys, I'm in the car with my children. And so then obviously the meeting was over and we were in carpool line and my son's like, I need to know why you showed your balls to your customer.
Bryan Pollock [00:02:42]:
You know, it's, it is a fair question.
Mike Allen [00:02:45]:
It is a reasonable question. But I, I told him that that's a story for later. It's going to require at least 5, 6 minutes to tell the story in all its glory. And so we would discuss it as a family over dinner this weekend. Because I'm not telling it multiple times to multiple children. I'm just going to tell them all one time about the time.
Bryan Pollock [00:03:07]:
That's terrible.
Mike Allen [00:03:09]:
Amanda's heard the story because it was her dog, so.
Bryan Pollock [00:03:13]:
Oh, gosh.
Mike Allen [00:03:14]:
Yeah. Yeah. What are you gonna do?
Aniz Lavji [00:03:16]:
Yeah, I was, I was on my way to work when I heard that podcast. And I'm not kidding, I, I, I actually spit out my Tim's coffee all over my steering wheel. So I, I get to the shop and, you know, I, I stop in the back where the garages are, and one of my texts was finishing up a set of tires. I'm like, look, do you have a, do you have a rag I can borrow? He's like, what, what happened? He's like, I got coffee all over. He's like, do you not, do you not know how to drive? What happened? It's like listening to this podcast and the guy was talking about his little mishap here, but literally, I've got probably about a half a double double all over the dash and. But you know what? It's fine. It's worth it. It was good.
Aniz Lavji [00:03:59]:
It was one of the best stories I've heard in a long time.
Bryan Pollock [00:04:01]:
I haven't. I, I will go listen to the story for this.
Aniz Lavji [00:04:07]:
That was a good one. You missed if you haven't heard it.
Mike Allen [00:04:09]:
Yeah, that was the day he was teaching. He and Jim Kakones were teaching. So that was.
Bryan Pollock [00:04:13]:
So that was the longest day ever.
Mike Allen [00:04:15]:
Eight hours of teaching in the same day.
Bryan Pollock [00:04:17]:
Eight hours of teaching with a blowed out back. That was a long day.
Mike Allen [00:04:22]:
Well, and you had to carry Jim the whole way because he won't talk.
Bryan Pollock [00:04:29]:
There was no problem with that.
Aniz Lavji [00:04:31]:
I wish I could have made Vegas. Looks like it was a great time.
Mike Allen [00:04:36]:
So. Not for me, thank you, Jesus. But for both of you, winter has arrived, right?
Bryan Pollock [00:04:47]:
Yeah, baby.
Aniz Lavji [00:04:48]:
Love it.
Mike Allen [00:04:49]:
Snow tire season.
Bryan Pollock [00:04:51]:
Oh, my gosh. I was so happy yesterday. I was driving by, I was out test driving a car and we had ordered. We had like over 100 tires that we sold show up.
Aniz Lavji [00:05:03]:
Oh, geez.
Bryan Pollock [00:05:04]:
Yesterday. Oh, so great. It was so great.
Mike Allen [00:05:08]:
Do you guys store winter tire or store tires for customers?
Bryan Pollock [00:05:13]:
Yes. For. Not for John Q. One hit wonder if we have people like, like, you know, if you get like a, like an older lady and you know, we're not going to make her go home to her garage and handle her tires. We'll, we'll store it for, you know what I mean? But like will, when able bodied people come in. No, they can take their tires with them.
Aniz Lavji [00:05:34]:
We got close to 397 sets in storage.
Mike Allen [00:05:40]:
Close to 397 seems very specific because if it was close, I feel like you would say close to 400.
Aniz Lavji [00:05:46]:
It probably is close to 400. Well, it's probably about 410 if you include all the family freebie sets that I've got stored.
Bryan Pollock [00:05:52]:
But we've got, it's a big thing in Canada storing the tires for the people because. Well, in the city, anywhere. Because. Right. Because they don't have anywhere to put them. Right.
Aniz Lavji [00:06:00]:
I've got five 40 foot, 9 foot 6 inch containers on the property. So I got everything, you know, about 10ft away from me. So yeah, for us storage is huge. Most people, a lot of people come to us specifically because we can store it.
Bryan Pollock [00:06:16]:
Because you'll store their snows. Right.
Mike Allen [00:06:18]:
How, how much do you charge them to storm for the season?
Aniz Lavji [00:06:23]:
I charge 100 bucks a season, so 200 bucks a year.
Mike Allen [00:06:27]:
That's great.
Aniz Lavji [00:06:28]:
And the best thing is you get to touch the car twice a year minimum. Right. Even if they, you know, don't come to you for their oil changes or whatever it is, you still get that chance twice a year to hopefully find some work if there is any to do.
Mike Allen [00:06:43]:
So I don't remember who it was. It was somebody in my elite 20 group years ago was up in the Great White north and they have a warehouse and they do big business on tire storage. But they have this whole shtick that they do. They send love letters from the customer's tires to the customer via email. And it's like a picture of their tires on the shelf saying, you know, hey, we miss you, I can't wait to see you again, yada, yada yada. But they document the build dates on the tires too. And they go through in the middle of the season and, and they get the tires that are aging out and they pre sell them.
Aniz Lavji [00:07:23]:
Oh yeah.
Mike Allen [00:07:24]:
And so I thought that's, that's genius. And it's funny and it's endearing. Right? Yeah. So I just one, one other thing. And cold weather breaks cars too, which we don't get, we don't get cars cold down here.
Bryan Pollock [00:07:40]:
You know what I miss? I miss the days when cold weather broke. Fuel pumps. Those were the days.
Mike Allen [00:07:47]:
Let me guess, General Motors fuel Pumps.
Bryan Pollock [00:07:49]:
Oh, all of them.
Mike Allen [00:07:50]:
All of them.
Bryan Pollock [00:07:51]:
As far as the eye can see. Towed in S10 Blazers. As far as the eye can see. It was Tahoe Suburban.
Aniz Lavji [00:07:59]:
Sorry about that.
Mike Allen [00:07:59]:
Things, guys.
Aniz Lavji [00:08:00]:
I'm just trying to disable all that.
Mike Allen [00:08:01]:
Oh, I don't care.
Aniz Lavji [00:08:03]:
You know, funny thing is, I know, Mike, you're a huge tech metric fan. So am I, obviously. But one thing I've been trying to get to Mr. Sunil is about tire storage. Like, that's a huge thing, especially for us Canadians over here. A lot of the bigger shops, like we all do tire storage and some people actually have a separate program that they use just to manage all the storage. So I've actually sent him a message and talked to their team, which is great about. That's something that would be great if it was implemented in the software.
Aniz Lavji [00:08:36]:
Imagine if you've got like 400 sets of tires and you've got 80 sets that they're at the wear bars. You can inform them three months before winter. Hey, you know, you're not going to last this winter.
Bryan Pollock [00:08:47]:
That's right.
Aniz Lavji [00:08:48]:
80 sets of tires you could sell, you know, instantly. If they're storing with you, you got 80, 90% chance they're going to buy a set from you. So that could be huge. Right?
Mike Allen [00:08:57]:
Do they, do they have winter tires and wheels or like, is it like a tire wheel package or is it just the tires and you transfer them from the wheel to wheel?
Aniz Lavji [00:09:04]:
For. For us, it depends on the customer. I mean, some of them will, will invest in the rims. Like if they're leasing the vehicle for two years, I usually tell them just to do the swaps because after two years, if they're not going to have the vehicle anymore, like it might be.
Bryan Pollock [00:09:17]:
Yeah, the rim investment, the wheel investment.
Aniz Lavji [00:09:21]:
A lot of people that we have, we don't mark up our rims a whole lot. And we try and get them to get them on rims with sensors if they need them. Just saves them time. Saves us time as well.
Mike Allen [00:09:34]:
Well, you can charge for the mounting and proper road force balancing as we've been discussing of late.
Aniz Lavji [00:09:39]:
I think somebody, somebody here has one or two of those. Right?
Mike Allen [00:09:43]:
I hear that.
Bryan Pollock [00:09:45]:
Hey, my new Coats ADX tire machine showed up this past week. So I have a brand new Coats tire machine next to my brand new Hunter Road Force. Oh, they're just.
Aniz Lavji [00:09:56]:
Are they fighting yet or they're okay next to each other?
Bryan Pollock [00:09:59]:
They're okay. I do. Oh, my God. So I had to run a. We got our In Sanborn. Our tire machine was 110. And this is a funny story. I had to run a 220 run, you know, and I wait till I last minute everything, right? So yesterday afternoon, the coach guy is coming at 8 this morning.
Bryan Pollock [00:10:16]:
I can't be at the shop at 8 this morning. Yesterday afternoon at 4 in the afternoon, I'm running 220 to the spot where this tire machine is. And I have Jim's son William is helping me. He's feeding me the, the wire. You know, it's pretty thick wire. It's a 220 circuit and it's got, it's running a balancer and a tire machine, right? So you know, it's 10, 2 and through conduit. We're, we're really pulling in. Our building's old and the breaker panel's full.
Bryan Pollock [00:10:40]:
Like that's how many wires there are in this breaker panel. It's insane, dude. Like you just look at it, you're like oh my gosh. So I'm like pulling, I got the face off the breaker panel, I'm carefully pulling and all of a sudden the lights start to flicker. I'm like oh my gosh. But actually when William was feeding the wire, he was against the wall and his elbow was hitting the light switch above us. So I thought like I'm getting ready to get electrocuted. But he just elbowed the light switch.
Bryan Pollock [00:11:04]:
Anyway, sorry.
Mike Allen [00:11:05]:
About to meet Jesus.
Bryan Pollock [00:11:06]:
My ADHD took over. But anyways, yeah, we had a lot of conversation about road force balancing.
Aniz Lavji [00:11:13]:
Yeah, I've heard that.
Bryan Pollock [00:11:14]:
People that don't understand.
Mike Allen [00:11:16]:
I'm not sure that it's been really a conversation. I think it's mostly just been flat rate technicians bitching about not wanting to do it because they pay for it.
Bryan Pollock [00:11:23]:
It's embarrassing. We gotta, we gotta cover, we gotta cover something about this right now.
Mike Allen [00:11:29]:
Like real talk, how long does it take? What's the difference in time? Standard balance versus a.
Bryan Pollock [00:11:35]:
How many of these whiners that are acting like they're masters of this and know everything about it. How many of these whiners realize that, you know, one out of every 80 tires needs to be turned on the wheel? Like it's not some crazy.
Mike Allen [00:11:53]:
Well, maybe their shop only sells Chinese May pops.
Bryan Pollock [00:11:56]:
Well then you're probably gonna have to turn more of them. How many of these guys, how many did I have to hear that are doing tires for 12 and 15 acting like they couldn't turn a tire if they had to? I mean we got 18 year old kids knocking them out in 45 minutes. You got all this experience and you're super tech and you can't change an extra tire that's already off the car.
Mike Allen [00:12:14]:
Well, your kids that are 18 years old are busting tires all day every day and they're doing three sets of tires a month.
Bryan Pollock [00:12:21]:
Well, if it's only three sets a month, then why. What are the chances they're going to have to spend one?
Mike Allen [00:12:25]:
So if it's only three sets a month, are you saying that they should just take one for the team and the manager will get them next time?
Bryan Pollock [00:12:31]:
Here's what I'm saying. This is where the feelings are about to get hurt. Here's what I'm saying. What I'm saying is all this pissing and moaning they're doing, but they're still there. So it's either not that bad and they're just bitching like little pansies, or. Or it is that bad, but they're not actually skilled enough to go get a job at a professional shop. That's I'm going to say. And if it's not one of the one or two of those freaking hit the wheels with WD40, get the hell out of there.
Bryan Pollock [00:13:02]:
The toolboxes all have wheels.
Mike Allen [00:13:05]:
I think there's a fair amount of both. I think there's plenty of keyboard warrior technicians who can't do the job beyond a very basic level. And there's plenty of shitty owners that.
Bryan Pollock [00:13:18]:
Don'T pay people, obviously, if they're acting like Mother Teresa and they're donating all their time at 12 on a set of tires. I mean, jeepers creepers, Grow up. Freaking takes these kids 45 or 55 minutes. Oh, my gosh. I only get paid 1 2. What am I gonna do? I don't know. Freaking 1, 2, 1, 2. Line them up, boys.
Bryan Pollock [00:13:37]:
Let's go.
Aniz Lavji [00:13:39]:
I think the next machine I. I will get will be a Hunter Road Force. I don't have one right now. I got. Basically everything I have is a Corgi. So I've got. Okay, I have two Corgi tire machines. I got a.
Aniz Lavji [00:13:53]:
I have an Old coats. I call it Old Faithful because it's.
Bryan Pollock [00:13:57]:
It just works.
Aniz Lavji [00:13:58]:
It just. Exactly.
Bryan Pollock [00:13:59]:
They just work, man.
Aniz Lavji [00:14:01]:
Corgi wheel balancers as well. So we got one whole bay that we've literally just dedicated just for tires.
Bryan Pollock [00:14:09]:
So we've had all sorts of tire equipment over the years. And now I do have to preface this with I've never owned a Hunter tire changer.
Aniz Lavji [00:14:24]:
Same here.
Bryan Pollock [00:14:26]:
So I can't speak for those, but.
Mike Allen [00:14:28]:
The Revolution that was on display at Apex and sema. It's pretty badass, man.
Bryan Pollock [00:14:34]:
The walk away deal, that's a full everything.
Aniz Lavji [00:14:36]:
It does everything. You don't have to do nothing, just.
Mike Allen [00:14:39]:
Yeah, I mean, and if it notices when you're walking up to it that your shoe is untied, it'll tell you and retie your shoe for you.
Bryan Pollock [00:14:44]:
Oh, that's nice. Really?
Aniz Lavji [00:14:46]:
Well, you're paying it. You're paying for it. 35 something thousand bucks. So.
Bryan Pollock [00:14:51]:
That'S Canadian. That's Canadian.
Aniz Lavji [00:14:53]:
Oh, yeah. Never mind. So that's like 25 US.
Bryan Pollock [00:14:57]:
I'm so happy you got the joke. That's like 25 bucks. A couple toonies over here. Yeah. So I can't speak for that man. That. That combo we got now, I mean, guys, guys, we got young people that are excited about changing tires. Can you imagine that? You imagine be in the Lake Effect snow capital of the Northeast and you have young people excited about changing tires.
Bryan Pollock [00:15:22]:
And it only costs like $40,000 between a balance.
Mike Allen [00:15:26]:
These guys are hourly. How, Why, I mean, why are they excited?
Bryan Pollock [00:15:30]:
Just because the machine's cool, it's nice, everything's nice. They have nice new equipment that works, right? It's state of the art equipment. It's nice. They like it.
Aniz Lavji [00:15:39]:
That's one way to keep your employees though, too, right? Having good equipment.
Bryan Pollock [00:15:42]:
They love it.
Mike Allen [00:15:44]:
What made you choose the coats over the Hunter cost?
Bryan Pollock [00:15:47]:
You know, I guess you could say that I. I didn't even get a quote on the Hunter, to be quite honest. I would have got the. Not the Revolution, but the, the next one down. I can't remember what it.
Aniz Lavji [00:16:00]:
Maverick or no? The Maverick.
Bryan Pollock [00:16:02]:
Maverick, yeah.
Aniz Lavji [00:16:03]:
Was it Maverick?
Bryan Pollock [00:16:04]:
I think it's Maverick. And I think the difference is the machine's relatively the same. Just the Maverick's not automated. Where the revolution is, right? Yep. I didn't even get a quote. And the reason I didn't get a quote is because I have three coats. ADX machines that I was very happy with that work very well. So I just, I wasn't interested in.
Aniz Lavji [00:16:28]:
Same with me. Like, I corgis and they've been so good to me and their service is so good, it's hard to switch to something else. When you're like, I've. I've very limited issues with my equipment, right?
Bryan Pollock [00:16:40]:
Oh, yeah. When you're. When you put, when you get a tire machine like that and you put 10,000 units through it, you don't put any money into it. It's like, I mean, that's a no brainer. Like you just buy another one, you know?
Mike Allen [00:16:54]:
Well, I have all Hunter equipment and it all works, but I don't sell nearly enough tires nearly as effectively as I should.
Bryan Pollock [00:17:06]:
I don't think your guys use the roller function on the road force balancer.
Mike Allen [00:17:11]:
You don't think my guys do?
Bryan Pollock [00:17:12]:
Yeah, I think the white Chevy, based.
Mike Allen [00:17:14]:
On your experience riding in my truck that one time.
Bryan Pollock [00:17:16]:
Yeah, pretty sure they don't.
Mike Allen [00:17:19]:
The Hunter. My Hunter rep called me and was like, bro, do you want me to come balance your tires for you? I was like, what are you talking about? I was listening to the podcast and this is unacceptable.
Bryan Pollock [00:17:31]:
It was terrible.
Aniz Lavji [00:17:33]:
Oh, man.
Mike Allen [00:17:35]:
I honestly. So two things I have not done since ASC Expo. I have not balanced the tires on the truck and I have not replaced the brake light bulb in the Miata. And I feel like both of these, both of these issues are now canon for the podcast and they have to be left unaddressed.
Bryan Pollock [00:17:52]:
It's like the Wilco bathroom door, the bath. The bathroom door can never be corrected now, now that somebody said something about it, it's going to stay forever.
Mike Allen [00:18:02]:
I was talking Anise. Do you know what his bathroom door is like at Wilco?
Aniz Lavji [00:18:07]:
So. So I just heard on the podcast. I went back and apparently it's held together with tire.
Bryan Pollock [00:18:14]:
Yes, it's. It's laminated with tire stickers now. So it quit falling apart and there's so many tire stickers on it, it actually doubled in weight. You're recycling, you know, that's what I'm saying. All that would go in the trash.
Aniz Lavji [00:18:26]:
And I mean, you're using your head.
Bryan Pollock [00:18:28]:
That's fine, right?
Aniz Lavji [00:18:32]:
No, it's okay.
Mike Allen [00:18:35]:
All right, so we're 20 minutes in. Should we introduce our guest?
Bryan Pollock [00:18:39]:
Probably.
Mike Allen [00:18:41]:
Anise, introduce yourself, sir.
Aniz Lavji [00:18:43]:
My name is Anise. I own Dial Attire in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It's a family business. Me, mom and dad, we've been in business together. It'll be 20 years next year, actually.
Mike Allen [00:19:02]:
So at what point do mom and dad retire and ride off into the sunset to go vacationing and let you take this thing and turn it into an empire?
Aniz Lavji [00:19:10]:
So they're still with me every single day, six days a week. And. But the only difference is I. They are. I would say they're semi retired because I make sure they take at least three to five vacations a year. So after the winter rush, they're gone for like two months, and then they'll take another month or two vacation. I told them, you guys have done your job, you guys have worked hard there's no sense in, you know, hanging out here while you're healthy, your feet are able to walk. There's no sense in you hanging out at the tire shop.
Aniz Lavji [00:19:43]:
Go and enjoy life, travel the world. So I'd say they're more semi retired at this point.
Mike Allen [00:19:49]:
So if you're willing, I'd love for you to recount kind of the business history of your family and kind of your history moving around. Because it was pretty interesting learning about that at the Expo this year when we were riding around in the Miata.
Aniz Lavji [00:20:04]:
One of the best rides ever. Other than I was wasn't sure if we're gonna get pulled over because of break ball, but that's.
Mike Allen [00:20:11]:
We do have to tell the story about the ride in the Miata. So I had a. I had a group chat going on Facebook messenger for the outing to the Go kart track, right? And Anise and I've never met before, but he's like, hey, you know, the uber is like 30 minutes away. Is there anybody driving that's got space? And I was like, I've got space for one person, but you're going to have to ride the Miata with the top down. And he's like, sweet. So I pick him up at the hotel and, you know, he's. He's not from the area. He comes down to the south.
Mike Allen [00:20:50]:
He's expecting Southern hospitality and. And everybody's gonna be super nice and sweet.
Aniz Lavji [00:20:54]:
Didn't even last 25 seconds.
Mike Allen [00:20:56]:
We're a block south of the hotel at a red light downtown, and we start getting heckled by this group of people on the sidewalk, like, hey, nice car. You got a brake light out. And I'm just engaging. I'm like, hey, thanks so much. I was like, yeah, I know a guy who can work on that. And they're like, is that gonna pass inspection? And. And I knew that they were all people at the Expo and most of them were people.
Aniz Lavji [00:21:22]:
That guy's a douchebag.
Mike Allen [00:21:26]:
He just thought that there were on the sidewalk in Raleigh, North Carolina, heckling us for being just a couple of really manly dudes riding around in a Miata.
Aniz Lavji [00:21:34]:
Last time I come to Raleigh, it is a.
Bryan Pollock [00:21:35]:
It is a pretty masculine automobile.
Mike Allen [00:21:38]:
I mean, it is. I mean, yeah. I mean, women look at me in that corner, they go, he's not compensating for anything.
Aniz Lavji [00:21:49]:
It's. It's a nice, safe vehicle. You gotta. I think you have a roll cage.
Bryan Pollock [00:21:53]:
I don't know about.
Mike Allen [00:21:54]:
You have a roll bar.
Bryan Pollock [00:21:55]:
I was, I was a little afraid that the Door was gonna bust open when Mike was going around the corner and I didn't have my seatbelt on.
Mike Allen [00:22:01]:
Well, I mean, the roll bar also would have done no good for you. It just would have protected your body from the shoulders down.
Bryan Pollock [00:22:08]:
Yeah, it would have, yeah, protected my shoulder blade, but.
Mike Allen [00:22:12]:
So we had a very pleasant conversation all the way from downtown to the go kart track, which is probably a 20 minute drive. And never. I never brought up the fact that we were heckled at the stoplight downtown. And then two and a half hours later, we're finishing up dinner, we're about to leave the track, you know, and it comes up in conversation. And half of the people that were in that crowd heckling us were at the go kart track with us. And he didn't realize it. Oh, that's funny. It's pretty, pretty good stuff.
Mike Allen [00:22:41]:
So we're a rowdy crowd, but no break. So I actually took the. I took the crispy fried Miata and checked it into its winter housing. Today I parked it in the lobby of one of the stores because we have a, an area behind a curtain that is about the size of the closet.
Bryan Pollock [00:22:59]:
So you got your, you got your race car parked inside the shop, huh?
Aniz Lavji [00:23:03]:
You have. Oh, yeah, Separated, right. So no one can actually touch it. Just to make sure you don't get any greasy fingerprints on it. Right.
Mike Allen [00:23:09]:
Velvet rope around it.
Bryan Pollock [00:23:10]:
I was just gonna say you need to get the velvet rope or the little seat belt things like the bank has.
Aniz Lavji [00:23:16]:
Is there at least a sign saying no touching?
Mike Allen [00:23:19]:
Ooh, I do have some sign stands.
Bryan Pollock [00:23:21]:
You need to get one of them corny freaking car show signs. Look, but don't touch or whatever.
Mike Allen [00:23:28]:
No, I'm going to get a slippery one wet sign.
Aniz Lavji [00:23:35]:
And then you should just hang a spray bottle off something right there just to see if anyone actually starts spraying it.
Bryan Pollock [00:23:40]:
Oh my gosh. What in the world?
Mike Allen [00:23:45]:
So Expo this year was your first ever conference training event. Right.
Aniz Lavji [00:23:51]:
So that was the first, first event ever. Like, if I going back story a bit, I actually would never have known about any of it. And I'll have to give some credit to Jeff Compton from Jada Mechanic. So I was randomly driving to work one day and I never really listened to podcasts, period. So I was like, you know what? I, I can, I can't listen to the, you know, the same song over and over again. Let me hit up a podcast. So I started, I just searched on under podcast search mechanic and then Jada Mechanic was there. So I started listening.
Aniz Lavji [00:24:26]:
And that's basically Where I got introduced to a lot, learned a ton. I found out about Asta, found out about TechMetric and different companies. I had no idea all this was out there because I've been using, you know, kind of embarrassed to say, but I've been using QuickBooks for 10 to something years and been using software that people sell flower pots with, trying to run auto repair business and it wasn't really doing what it needed to do. And you know, kudos to Jeff for really changed my whole business around, you know, like a 180. And this is going back in June, so I heard about the expo and I, I messaged him directly and he was nice enough to respond back, gave you some pointers and booked it and yeah, I mean, the rest is history is probably one of the best things I've done, period. Because it's changed my whole life in business. Really.
Mike Allen [00:25:22]:
That's awesome. Braxton timestamp, 25 minutes. You need to edit out the part where he says nice things, nice things about Jeff, please.
Aniz Lavji [00:25:31]:
I like how you say timestamp and then I listen to the podcast and nothing is ever edited out.
Bryan Pollock [00:25:40]:
I just, I just want to point out that I am like, even though you're in Canada, I am like two and a half hours closer to you than Jeff is.
Aniz Lavji [00:25:48]:
We actually like a separate story, but we were. I was actually technically one of your neighbors. I used to live in Rochester.
Bryan Pollock [00:25:55]:
Oh, wow, that is close.
Aniz Lavji [00:25:57]:
That is close.
Bryan Pollock [00:25:58]:
Rochester is like probably about an hour drive, so.
Aniz Lavji [00:26:02]:
My dad owned all the Dunkin Donuts in Rochester.
Mike Allen [00:26:06]:
Oh, nice.
Aniz Lavji [00:26:07]:
Way back when.
Bryan Pollock [00:26:08]:
Yes, way back before Timmy's came south of the border.
Mike Allen [00:26:11]:
I was gonna say. Did you still go to Timmy house? Sorry, does your dad go to Tim Hortons for coffee?
Aniz Lavji [00:26:17]:
Oh, yeah. There's no Duncan over here.
Mike Allen [00:26:21]:
Okay. All right.
Bryan Pollock [00:26:22]:
Dunkin. The rule about Dunkin Donuts is no Dunkin can survive within eyes sight of a Tim Hortons.
Mike Allen [00:26:31]:
Really? They just don't hold a candle.
Aniz Lavji [00:26:34]:
Yeah, there's no point in even trying. Yeah, Tim Hortons.
Bryan Pollock [00:26:39]:
I've watched Tim Hortons shut down more than one Duncan.
Mike Allen [00:26:43]:
So neither of them hold a candle to Krispy Kreme, let's be honest. But that's more of a Southern.
Bryan Pollock [00:26:48]:
I'm sorry. Tim Hortons puts cocaine in their coffee. You don't get a choice to whether it's good or not.
Aniz Lavji [00:26:54]:
That's a good coffee.
Bryan Pollock [00:26:55]:
That's a good coffee. He says good coffee. Every morning I go, every morning I pay them $3. So good.
Aniz Lavji [00:27:05]:
Three us. That's like, oh my God, that's like what nine or twelve dollars.
Bryan Pollock [00:27:09]:
They fixed your guys sizes over there though. They had the sizes all jacked around. I remember I was over and large is.
Aniz Lavji [00:27:15]:
That's no.
Bryan Pollock [00:27:16]:
Yeah, I was over the border for something and I went and got a large. I'm like this is a medium. She's like, no it's not, it's a large. I'm like what are you talking about, lady?
Aniz Lavji [00:27:25]:
Did she at least say sorry?
Bryan Pollock [00:27:27]:
She did 100. She apologized sorry or sorry sorry. But they're small as like a shot glass.
Aniz Lavji [00:27:35]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:27:38]:
Shrinkflation. Don't raise the price, just reduce the size.
Aniz Lavji [00:27:41]:
But you know, going back to, to asta, like going there for the first time, went to some great classes and one thing like I, you know how to say it for you, Mike, like the hospitality not. I didn't know anyone. Right. I knew Mike from, from basically a chat group. I knew Jeff from listening to him and Brian, I've seen your videos and briefly might have chatted with you back and forth on a, on a message or something. But like going there as a one man person, one guy from Canada, which I think it was just me, Mike and apparently there was, oh sorry me, Jeff and one other person from Canada. So for me that was huge. Like actually coming into a place where you know, you feel welcome, you don't feel like an outsider.
Aniz Lavji [00:28:31]:
And I felt like I fit right in here with, with everybody. So you know, thank you. That was really nice to, nice to see. And the hospitality room, you didn't know.
Mike Allen [00:28:41]:
Okay job, I mean we'll get, we'll do better next year. I'll try harder.
Aniz Lavji [00:28:45]:
I don't think there was enough poker tables. But I mean, you know, you can have, you have room to improve. That's okay.
Mike Allen [00:28:50]:
Well, I bought another poker table and so now I have two, I have two sets of chips. So all of that furniture that was in there and all the arcade games and the poker tables and everything else, I have an entire second floor at one of the stores that's unused.
Bryan Pollock [00:29:07]:
Oh.
Mike Allen [00:29:08]:
Uh, and so I've created a company lounge and we have our team meetings up there now. Um, and my buddies are trying to get me to do a monthly poker night with the boys. And ironically my doctor also has an interior design business and she's designing it into be like a speakeasy bar set. So we're slowly in the process of getting that done. Um, so we're going to start doing ASTA chapter meetings in 2026. So the triangle chapter, the Raleigh chapter will be meeting at Mike's upstairs. Bar slash speakeasy slash poker hole slash.
Aniz Lavji [00:29:45]:
Underground illegal gambling ring.
Mike Allen [00:29:48]:
Yeah. And arcade.
Aniz Lavji [00:29:50]:
Okay.
Bryan Pollock [00:29:50]:
So, yeah, hair care and tire center.
Mike Allen [00:29:53]:
Yeah, yeah, There you go. That was a good time, man. And I think that's one of the things that has helped ASTA Expo kind of differentiate itself from some of the other events that are out there, because they've all gotten. Most of them have really good training. Right. And they all have some level of trade show. But the social events and the hospitality that surround Asta. ASTA Expo, I think, are unlike anything that's out there.
Mike Allen [00:30:23]:
And it, you know, Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, there's something awesome to do with other people from the industry every night. And it's not like I'm going to go off to the, you know, this company party or I'm going to go off to, you know, this suite where it's just people who have, you know, X million dollars in revenue and more, only it's. Everybody has an opportunity together every night. So. And the vendors who do really well at. At the Expo are involved at the. So at the social events also, which makes a huge difference. So it's cool.
Mike Allen [00:30:58]:
But that's pretty brave of you to go to your first ever event effectively by yourself and kind of knowing one or two people from the Internet and that's it.
Aniz Lavji [00:31:09]:
Yeah, I mean, it. It was a little. I'll be honest, I was a bit nervous when I, when I got there because I didn't really know what to expect, you know?
Mike Allen [00:31:17]:
Hey, it's me, Mike's kid. Want to tell us your wild shop stories? Or maybe you just think my dad's totally wrong. Call us at 7:04 confess and leave a message. You can tell us we're awesome or you can tell us we're idiots. We're cool either way. That's 704 confess. Just don't make it too weird.
Aniz Lavji [00:31:36]:
But. No, it was, it was great. And now it's. It's like a drug. Like, I can't wait to go to the next one. Right. I'm. I'm hopefully trying to make it to Tectonic Tools and definitely ASTA again, for sure.
Aniz Lavji [00:31:53]:
But yeah, like, I'm, I'm completely. I'm in the zone now. Like, I'm. I feel like I'm trying to understand the industry a bit more classes and trying to correct some. Some challenges I'm having at the shops. And again, listening to your podcast and some of the other ones, you know, it definitely helps, right, because you don't Know what you don't know.
Mike Allen [00:32:19]:
There's a lot of good information out there for free. You know, there are obviously some incredible coaching organizations out there. I'm obviously biased towards elite just because I've been with them for 20 years. But there's good information to be had out there from podcasts and from Facebook groups. I would tell you and all of our listeners, though, that you have to be careful, because while there's a lot of great information out there, there's also some really sketchy information out there, and sometimes it can be challenging to discern one from the other.
Bryan Pollock [00:32:48]:
Well, you can just watch for what not to do.
Mike Allen [00:32:52]:
Well, so I would say that, you know, just sometimes you have to tiptoe around the topics and be very careful about what you say and naming names. But, yeah, specifically, if there was one to avoid, I would say anything to do with Lucas Underwood, just. No, avoid it entirely.
Bryan Pollock [00:33:10]:
Oh, man.
Mike Allen [00:33:11]:
What's wrong, Brian? You look like you're in pain. Sorry. Anything? That's walkie talkie. Hey, y'. All. I'm walking around out in the woods. Sam, really?
Bryan Pollock [00:33:26]:
I think in his defense, he switched to a chair. I think the last one, I think he. Yeah, I think he might have had a heel spur or something like that. And he had to.
Mike Allen [00:33:33]:
You know, if he's gonna. If he's gonna be in, like, an old timey rocking chair on the front.
Bryan Pollock [00:33:37]:
Porch, we got to send him a corn cob pipe.
Mike Allen [00:33:40]:
I'm going to send him a spittoon, and I want to hear when he spits into it. Right. I think that's the next step in the evolution of Lucas.
Bryan Pollock [00:33:49]:
He's just. It's just going to be like random life facts. It's not going to be automotive anymore. It's like, you don't have to stick your head up a cow's ass to figure out what a T bone looks like.
Mike Allen [00:34:00]:
But you could if you wanted to, right? Maybe.
Bryan Pollock [00:34:06]:
Oh, gosh.
Mike Allen [00:34:06]:
So we talked earlier a little bit about adhd, and I want to talk further about it in a second. But before that, my ADHD has another tangent for me to go on. Which Pokemon is that up on the printer next to you? You've got an ease.
Aniz Lavji [00:34:22]:
Oh, yeah, that is. Oh, geez. So this is my office that we don't use. We moved into this house, like, I'd say, three years ago.
Mike Allen [00:34:32]:
I got office storage.
Aniz Lavji [00:34:34]:
Yeah, office storage.
Bryan Pollock [00:34:35]:
This.
Aniz Lavji [00:34:35]:
I think we bought it here. I don't even know.
Mike Allen [00:34:40]:
Are you a Pokemon person?
Aniz Lavji [00:34:42]:
I. When I was younger, I used to play. I used to play Game Boy. And it definitely was a Pokemon.
Bryan Pollock [00:34:49]:
Oh, they had different colors, right? They had like blue and crystal and something else.
Aniz Lavji [00:34:53]:
Yeah, I, I had all that stuff. My, my kids are really into it now, so.
Bryan Pollock [00:34:58]:
Mike was too cool for the Pokemans, but he was playing Dungeons and Dragons. Don't let him fool you.
Mike Allen [00:35:03]:
I was not a DND guy, thank you very much. But I am 100 a Pokemon guy now because like tomorrow I will be out with my 13 year old and we will be trying to catch them all. Evidently there's some kind of special event tomorrow. We're gonna have to go to the mall and go around and find other nerds and team up with other nerds and battle things. It's gonna be awesome.
Bryan Pollock [00:35:22]:
It's gonna be the best.
Aniz Lavji [00:35:23]:
I was at Costco and with having three kids or so many birthday parties, so I, I think I bought like nine of these packages. So for going for birthday gifts, I mean, it's just an easy birthday gift and all.
Bryan Pollock [00:35:36]:
Right. I do that sometimes too. When you see like boy gifts on sale, you know, and you got two boys in the house and they're going to all the birthday parties, you figured, go ahead and load up.
Mike Allen [00:35:46]:
That's smart. Yeah, that's nice.
Bryan Pollock [00:35:48]:
I had.
Mike Allen [00:35:49]:
That's the pro tip of the episode discount. Buy lots of future birthday presents for your kids that are going to parties.
Bryan Pollock [00:35:56]:
In the, in the laundry room. I have like some shelves across from the washer and dryer where I keep all that stuff. And it was loaded up with like Minecraft figurines for like a year.
Mike Allen [00:36:05]:
Genius.
Bryan Pollock [00:36:06]:
Yeah, it was all loaded up with like $9 on sale Minecraft sets.
Mike Allen [00:36:12]:
Like a chicken jockey. Fun Funko Pop one right there, man. Sorry. Right.
Aniz Lavji [00:36:19]:
My kids are into Lego and Pokemon.
Mike Allen [00:36:23]:
We've got, yeah, we've got, we've moved through the Lego phase and now it's, it's Pokemon and it's the oldest one. It's video games. And then the youngest one is everything karate and go karts. So. Yeah. What are you gonna do?
Bryan Pollock [00:36:43]:
Nice.
Aniz Lavji [00:36:43]:
So working on this right now.
Mike Allen [00:36:46]:
Is that the corner garage? That's discontinued. You can't buy it.
Aniz Lavji [00:36:49]:
I know, and I want one. We have a story of how I got this.
Bryan Pollock [00:36:54]:
What?
Mike Allen [00:36:54]:
And it has a lift inside and a car that you can go up on the lift. It has a tire machine.
Aniz Lavji [00:36:58]:
Tire machine and everything. So my 8 year old and I are in the middle of working on this. So you know how I got this? I. Oh, here's the, the tow truck for it.
Mike Allen [00:37:11]:
Yeah, they're like $400 if you want to buy that set now. It's crazy.
Aniz Lavji [00:37:15]:
You know how much I got it for?
Mike Allen [00:37:18]:
Not that, not 400.
Aniz Lavji [00:37:19]:
I'd say about 12 bucks.
Bryan Pollock [00:37:22]:
It was on the clearance rack at Canadian Tire.
Aniz Lavji [00:37:25]:
No, if it was that Canadian Tire would be at least 13.
Bryan Pollock [00:37:28]:
Oh.
Aniz Lavji [00:37:30]:
So I had, I was searching for it and everyone wanted about 300, 350 bucks. So owning a tire shop, I was like, I'm gonna leverage this. So I messaged every single post and I was like, hey, do you need tires? You wanna trade? You wanna trade? You on, trade? So about the 30th person that I messaged, the guy's like, actually, I need two front tires. And yeah, we can do a. You can do an even trade. Guy showed up at the shop, I put two used tires on. And yes. The guy was, yes.
Aniz Lavji [00:38:08]:
And he's like, dude, I'm supposed to be driving to. I don't know where, but yeah, dude, you saved the day. And here you go. And I'm like, no, thank you. So I got it for, I would say about two used tires.
Bryan Pollock [00:38:20]:
Two used tires that he had already charged somebody else disposal on.
Aniz Lavji [00:38:24]:
I. I got it for the cost of shop supplies.
Mike Allen [00:38:27]:
You, sir, you forgive? You, sir, have earned your evil shop owner badge.
Bryan Pollock [00:38:31]:
Yep, he freaking charged him disposal. He disposed those two tires right under the front end of a Chevy Malibu.
Aniz Lavji [00:38:37]:
I mean, they were, they were 18 inch. Okay? So there's a little.
Mike Allen [00:38:47]:
I totally want your crown over of.
Bryan Pollock [00:38:50]:
Being the ultimate eso because you just got your ass beat into the floor.
Aniz Lavji [00:38:54]:
Well, the freaking box. Look how big this damn box is.
Mike Allen [00:38:57]:
Like, that's because they want you to buy the entire city street. And it's like $2,000 worth of Legos if you buy the whole set. No thanks.
Bryan Pollock [00:39:03]:
He could get the entire set for like $23.
Aniz Lavji [00:39:07]:
You got to find the right person that needs tires. So just trade, trade, trade. You know, I'm hoping under 50 bucks to get the whole street. So let's see what happens.
Bryan Pollock [00:39:15]:
They just took all my used tires away on two 24 foot box trucks. They had to send two trucks.
Aniz Lavji [00:39:21]:
So I just.
Mike Allen [00:39:23]:
We caught our used tire scrap guy this week dumping household supplies in our dumpster like, like a bunch of, like a, Some yard waste, a bunch of trash bags, and then some TVs. Sounds like, bro, what the.
Bryan Pollock [00:39:39]:
Something. Mike, is there different levels of tire scrap scrap tire people in your area? Are there different spending options?
Mike Allen [00:39:48]:
Well, I think they're all Hispanic gentlemen driving box trucks, right? Isn't that what they all Are.
Bryan Pollock [00:39:55]:
No, there's different levels of you can pay a dollar a tire to get rid of them or three bucks a tire to get rid of them.
Aniz Lavji [00:40:02]:
You have to pay to get rid of the tires?
Mike Allen [00:40:04]:
Yeah, we pay two dollars a tire.
Aniz Lavji [00:40:05]:
We pay two bucks a tire, we pay nothing.
Mike Allen [00:40:09]:
Scrap tire disposal is a whole thing in North Carolina. It's. Yeah, it's like a big thing in the legislature.
Bryan Pollock [00:40:15]:
They all unionized here. We used to, they used to come get them for free and turn them into rubber mulch. And they're like, you know, it'd be way cooler than not paying anything for our raw material. Charging people to go pick up the raw material. We could make way more money. So that's what they do. Now.
Aniz Lavji [00:40:30]:
That's brutal.
Mike Allen [00:40:31]:
To be fair, the tires that are resellable, they give me $5 a piece towards the balance.
Aniz Lavji [00:40:38]:
I should just throw away 550 actually sellable tires. But they were sitting there, they weren't selling for about a year. So I dumped them and I ended up putting a hoist in there. So I figured the hoist is going to make me money. The tires are just sitting there taking up space. So ended up.
Mike Allen [00:40:56]:
Please tell me that when, when you say threw away, you mean you just pulled off on the side of the road.
Aniz Lavji [00:41:04]:
I, I ethically recycled them.
Mike Allen [00:41:09]:
Oh, you went to the, you went to the edge of the lake and you're like, beep, beep.
Bryan Pollock [00:41:16]:
So many moons ago, many moons ago, it was free scrap down at the town hall. It was the free scrap tire disposal day. And there may have been a tri axle dump truck that showed up with a dump bed full of tires.
Mike Allen [00:41:32]:
So my, my grandfather opened his shop in 1937 and he was auto repair, grocery store, feed lot, social hub of the.
Bryan Pollock [00:41:40]:
That's what I'm talking about. Sold refrigerators and lawnmowers. Right. Whole deal.
Mike Allen [00:41:44]:
60 years. 60 years, right.
Bryan Pollock [00:41:45]:
I love it. I love those stories.
Mike Allen [00:41:48]:
Well, he, after he passed away and the business closed down and everything, my dad had a shop in the neighboring town at that point. Well, there was a gulch on the back of the property that I had always seen a couple of tires in there. And I just figured that somebody threw a couple. Now that's where he dumped tires for 60 years.
Bryan Pollock [00:42:06]:
Oh my God.
Mike Allen [00:42:07]:
And the gulch was significantly larger than I realized it was because it was covered in dirt and leaves. Right. And so it was a major undertaking for my dad for months to take truckload after truckload after truckload of tires out of there to clean it out. I Don't know why dad actually did that. I mean, we own the land and just leave it there. Whatever.
Bryan Pollock [00:42:27]:
Yeah, he should have rented a bulldozer and just pushed some dirt over it and called it a day.
Mike Allen [00:42:31]:
But. But I guess my dad's a way better person than me and so he cleaned it all out and disposed of the tires properly.
Aniz Lavji [00:42:36]:
What would you have done?
Bryan Pollock [00:42:38]:
Push rented?
Mike Allen [00:42:39]:
No, no, I would not. I wouldn't even mend that. I just would have fucking left it there.
Bryan Pollock [00:42:47]:
I'm not even going to pay for the Mike's. Like, I had a rented a D6 and. Yeah, I would have rented a D6 and just shoved a bunch of dirt over it and called it a day.
Mike Allen [00:42:55]:
You would have rented a D6 just because it's fun to drive a D6 around?
Bryan Pollock [00:42:58]:
Hell, yeah. I wouldn't have rented one. We would have just borrowed one. It's farm country. But either way, you can't. You can't rent things that your customers own. That's silly.
Mike Allen [00:43:12]:
Anyway, so back to the earlier conversation about adhd. We record. Actually, this episode will never be released. Not this episode, but the one I'm talking about will never be released. We recorded with someone recently who accused Brian and I of having severe adhd, because evidently we were on lots of tangents during the course of the episode. Brian, do you remember that episode?
Bryan Pollock [00:43:39]:
Which one? Oh, yeah, yeah. Can we tell? Like, we're gonna. I mean, obviously no names to protect the innocent. I mean, other than yours and mine. The most amazing thing that we did not catch that we were unable to record ever, that that could ever happen. We recorded with a person who I reckon has their own podcast.
Aniz Lavji [00:44:05]:
Yeah.
Bryan Pollock [00:44:06]:
And they. At the end, you know, we get. We get going or whatever, and we're talking and it's like, you know, it's.
Mike Allen [00:44:14]:
A little bit forced. It's not super easy.
Bryan Pollock [00:44:16]:
Yeah, it's not super easy to do and everything else. And anyhow, we get to the end of this thing and the guy was having technical difficulties earlier in the episode. So I think he might have been using the camera on one computer but the microphone on another or something like that. I don't. I don't know. It was something weird like that. So anyways, we get to the end and he shuts the laptop with the microphone still going and he goes, what an effing waste of time that was. Thank God.
Bryan Pollock [00:44:45]:
That's like, well, how did the quote go?
Mike Allen [00:44:48]:
God, that's over with. It's the biggest fucking waste of time.
Bryan Pollock [00:44:52]:
We had it. Mike and I are Staring at each other and we're freaking dying. I'm like, this is gold. But Mike actually thought fast enough. He hit the record button again to try to catch it. But when you double record in Zencaster, I guess it just closes the window. So we didn't get it. It closed the window.
Bryan Pollock [00:45:10]:
Oh, my gosh.
Mike Allen [00:45:11]:
It was the rest of his rant.
Bryan Pollock [00:45:13]:
Oh, it was so amazing.
Aniz Lavji [00:45:15]:
I'm assuming that lives rent free in both of your heads for life.
Bryan Pollock [00:45:19]:
I was in a good mood for five days straight. There was nothing you could do to irritate me for five days. I was like, this is the funniest shit I've ever seen.
Aniz Lavji [00:45:26]:
I would just want to recreate it just so I could record it and listen to it over and over again.
Bryan Pollock [00:45:33]:
We would have caught it if we would have recorded that. It would have been the outro to every episode we ever did ever again. Waste of time. It would have been the outro to every episode.
Aniz Lavji [00:45:46]:
You need to find someone that sounds like that person to recreate it. And just like right after. Right after, and he does his whole tech metric and elite thing, and all of a sudden it says, what a waste of time.
Bryan Pollock [00:46:03]:
Oh, it was so great.
Aniz Lavji [00:46:05]:
That's great.
Bryan Pollock [00:46:06]:
We. We immediately, Mike and I went to the group chat with Braxton, and we're like, the most amazing thing ever just happened. It was like we won the lotto, but it was just some guy MF and us with his laptop closed.
Aniz Lavji [00:46:18]:
Did Mike immediately, immediately blame Braxton for not catching it?
Bryan Pollock [00:46:23]:
Oh, yes.
Mike Allen [00:46:25]:
It was 100% Braxton's fault. So the funny thing is he closed the laptop and we didn't realize that it was still on a hot mic, but. But I didn't say anything because his name was still up there. It didn't show that he had logged out of the meeting, and so I looked into the camera because we were.
Bryan Pollock [00:46:39]:
Probably going to talk. Shit. Yeah. He gave the camera the thumbs down, and as he's given the thumbs down, this guy starts grumble us on the way out.
Aniz Lavji [00:46:53]:
I mean, you could really just call the guy back on for a podcast.
Bryan Pollock [00:46:59]:
I don't think he's interested.
Mike Allen [00:47:02]:
I get that. I get the distinct impression that he's not a fan.
Bryan Pollock [00:47:05]:
He doesn't. Yeah. I get the distinct impression that he's just not into our shenanigans.
Mike Allen [00:47:09]:
I suspect he's not going to reach.
Bryan Pollock [00:47:11]:
Out, which I reckon that's okay.
Mike Allen [00:47:14]:
Yeah. After. I don't think he's going to hear this clip and be like, oh, they're talking about me.
Bryan Pollock [00:47:21]:
Imagine. You imagine listening to this every week if he thought that was a waste of time. I didn't even think that was much of a waste of time. I put a solid 30% effort into being serious for that one.
Aniz Lavji [00:47:33]:
A whole 30.
Mike Allen [00:47:37]:
It was. I mean, we. We had to pull 45 minutes out of that episode. It was not an easy episode.
Bryan Pollock [00:47:42]:
It was not.
Aniz Lavji [00:47:44]:
What are you drinking there, Mike?
Mike Allen [00:47:47]:
Well, first I'll say what I'm drinking. You can say what you're drinking, and then Brian's gonna say what he's drinking. Okay. I'm having four rows of single barrel. It's a reliable standard, you know, sub $50 bottle. You can always find it. And it always tastes pretty good.
Bryan Pollock [00:48:02]:
Right?
Mike Allen [00:48:03]:
Nice and easy drinking. And he's. What are you having?
Aniz Lavji [00:48:07]:
Well, I was having a. Finish this Waterloo Dark.
Mike Allen [00:48:11]:
Nice.
Bryan Pollock [00:48:12]:
Okay.
Aniz Lavji [00:48:13]:
A Cronenberg 1664 right now.
Mike Allen [00:48:16]:
So you drink that.
Bryan Pollock [00:48:17]:
That fancy beer that's like a sandwich.
Aniz Lavji [00:48:21]:
I only drink fancy beer during tire season when I can afford it. Otherwise, you know, cheap stuff's fine.
Bryan Pollock [00:48:27]:
Do you like the most export? The Molson Export from Canada is fantastic.
Mike Allen [00:48:31]:
Yeah.
Aniz Lavji [00:48:32]:
Yeah. Well, as long as it's not Canadian. I can't drink that beer, right?
Mike Allen [00:48:37]:
Brian, tell us what you're drinking.
Bryan Pollock [00:48:38]:
Well, I'm gonna hold my bottle up, so. But nobody watches YouTube, so I'm just. It's just gonna be a terrible sound bite. I am drinking one of my favorite One Foot. Yeah, it's Buffalo. Buffalo.
Mike Allen [00:48:52]:
There's nothing you love having in your mouth more than some. One Foot.
Bryan Pollock [00:48:55]:
Yes.
Mike Allen [00:48:55]:
Right.
Bryan Pollock [00:48:56]:
It's very. It's a very good local bourbon and I really like it.
Aniz Lavji [00:49:03]:
You just. You found your sound bite, Mike, for the end of every single episode. Oh, my God.
Mike Allen [00:49:16]:
You know, he. He messaged me today. Scundrich did. And said he wanted my address. He didn't show me the front of the hat. All he showed me was the back with our logo. So I don't know what's going to be on the front, but I don't know. So we'll see.
Bryan Pollock [00:49:31]:
He's a good dude. He's funny.
Aniz Lavji [00:49:32]:
You know, Mike, I was. I was actually trying. It didn't work out, though. I was trying to get a shirt made that said, you know. Remember that picture I sent you for the free diag?
Mike Allen [00:49:42]:
I do, actually.
Aniz Lavji [00:49:44]:
I. I was. I was trying to get someone to print it on a shirt and I was gonna wear it for the podcast. It just. It wasn't working out on time.
Mike Allen [00:49:53]:
Josh Coombs gave me a Valley Forge automotive shirt.
Bryan Pollock [00:49:57]:
I have One too. It's amazing.
Mike Allen [00:49:59]:
On the back of it it says guaranteed correct diag or your money back.
Aniz Lavji [00:50:08]:
He was in one of my classes. Nice, funny guy.
Bryan Pollock [00:50:11]:
He. I like Josh. He's a good, He's a good guy. He's got a heck of a sense of humor. He's a nice guy and he's got.
Mike Allen [00:50:18]:
A heart of gold, man.
Bryan Pollock [00:50:18]:
Yep, he's. He's a really nice guy.
Mike Allen [00:50:20]:
He loves helping people. So.
Bryan Pollock [00:50:22]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:50:24]:
Anyway, so I keep trying to get to this and I, I mean, and we keep getting distracted and going off on tangents back to adhd. Has anyone ever been, what's it like to be adult, diagnosed with adhd and the only way to treat it is with drugs. Right. And does it affect your health insurance or your life insurance at renewal? It's probably not a question for the Canadians since they get free insurance.
Aniz Lavji [00:50:53]:
No, trust me, we pay. We pay. Only when we're breathing, we pay.
Bryan Pollock [00:50:58]:
I was, I was diagnosed ADHD when I was a child and had to take medication. I don't know. So. And you know how that goes. Like every ADHD child, they're like, this sucks. So you just kind of like when mom's not looking, you start throwing the pills in the garbage and over the course of time you just take yourself off your Ritalin and you just keep on trucking with life.
Mike Allen [00:51:19]:
What's like Ritalin or Adderall, right? One of them.
Bryan Pollock [00:51:22]:
And then the other one I remember specifically. It was. Well, I say I remember it specifically, but I get mixed up sometimes. But I swear it was named Silert Cy L E R T. I think. How's that for that would prove that I had ADHD if I could remember that from being 8 years old.
Mike Allen [00:51:40]:
Let me Google that for you. A central nervous system stimulant medication previously used to treat ADHD and narcolepsy.
Bryan Pollock [00:51:50]:
Well, I don't have voluntarily withdrawn from.
Mike Allen [00:51:52]:
The US and most other markets in 2005 due to its association with life threatening liver failure.
Bryan Pollock [00:51:59]:
Oh, well, it's just you in the Siler Bourbon.
Mike Allen [00:52:05]:
Allow me to abuse my liver some.
Aniz Lavji [00:52:09]:
Oh, gosh.
Bryan Pollock [00:52:11]:
So my mom always gives me shit that I quit taking my medication and I'm. I didn't know that it had been pulled from the market in 05. So I'm going to make sure that next time I'm on the phone with her, I let her know that.
Mike Allen [00:52:26]:
You think your mom was trying to off you?
Bryan Pollock [00:52:29]:
I, I don't think that she was actively trying to. I mean, you have to remember I was, I Was. I was a little. I.
Mike Allen [00:52:37]:
Were you a handful?
Bryan Pollock [00:52:39]:
My mom was put on a heart monitor because I stressed her out so much.
Mike Allen [00:52:44]:
Yeah.
Bryan Pollock [00:52:45]:
And I wasn't even trying. I was just being me. It's freaking great.
Mike Allen [00:52:50]:
It just comes naturally.
Bryan Pollock [00:52:52]:
It just comes naturally.
Mike Allen [00:52:54]:
All right, Anise, we should talk about something shop related, I imagine, at this point. Yeah.
Bryan Pollock [00:53:00]:
So I'd love to talk tires right now.
Aniz Lavji [00:53:03]:
So I can kind of give you a little bit of a rundown. When we started, basically, I started off as a car dealership. First, completely different name. And it's kind of funny how I got into tires. We were. We sold the vehicle and ended up needing two front tires. So I ended up buying two used ones from a local scrapyard and my dad ended up buying new ones and got them put on already. I had no idea.
Aniz Lavji [00:53:32]:
So basically I told him, like, what the hell do we do with these two tires? And we have 150 bucks in them. So over here, I think you guys have Craigslist, right? In the States.
Bryan Pollock [00:53:42]:
Yeah. You guys have Kijiji?
Aniz Lavji [00:53:44]:
Yeah, we have Kijiji. So I threw them on Kijiji. And I'd say 45 minutes later, some random guy shows up in Pontiac Sunfire. I remember it was Pontiac Sunfire. And he was here. I'm here to buy the two tires. I'm like, the hell are you talking about? We don't, we don't sell tires. He's like, no, you could post an ad like 40 minutes ago.
Aniz Lavji [00:54:06]:
The guy handed me 250 bucks cash, took the tires and left. I'm like, oh, this could be good.
Bryan Pollock [00:54:12]:
Wait a minute, Wait a second.
Aniz Lavji [00:54:14]:
I was like, I just, I just made 100 bucks for doing nothing.
Bryan Pollock [00:54:19]:
He goes, I'm. Do it again.
Aniz Lavji [00:54:21]:
Do it again.
Bryan Pollock [00:54:22]:
I'll do that again.
Mike Allen [00:54:24]:
So rinse and repeat a few hundred thousand times.
Bryan Pollock [00:54:26]:
Oh, my gosh, I love tires.
Aniz Lavji [00:54:28]:
So we stopped selling. Well, we still have some used tires now, but we, we stopped mainly selling used tire, I'd say, five or six years ago. We're mostly new tires now.
Bryan Pollock [00:54:39]:
And there's. And there's so many options out there. There's so many different price points of tires. You're not backed into a corner selling.
Aniz Lavji [00:54:46]:
Used anymore for 80, 90 bucks each, right?
Bryan Pollock [00:54:51]:
Yeah. And the, you know, the, the offshore ones, while they're not great, they're not as bad as they used to be.
Aniz Lavji [00:54:59]:
Some of them are really good. Some of them are better than better than they used to be, for sure.
Bryan Pollock [00:55:04]:
Yep. Yeah, they're not. They're not as bad as like back in the early 2000, somebody would have a set of Gillette show silver bears and shake you out of a Chevy Caprice. You know what I mean? They're not, they're not that bad anymore.
Aniz Lavji [00:55:16]:
Look, nothing is worse than the tire. The brand name is Triangle. I don't know if they have it in your area. I'm not kidding.
Mike Allen [00:55:25]:
Terrible name for a tire.
Bryan Pollock [00:55:27]:
Accurate description. Description. We used to get these, these Chinese.
Aniz Lavji [00:55:32]:
And like, try to sell it to somebody, right? It's like, look, I've got these four tires. They're gonna be 129 bucks each. Oh, yeah?
Mike Allen [00:55:38]:
Yeah.
Bryan Pollock [00:55:38]:
Cool.
Aniz Lavji [00:55:39]:
Yeah. Okay. That sounds great. What, what brand are they?
Bryan Pollock [00:55:42]:
Triangle.
Aniz Lavji [00:55:45]:
What did you say? Triangle.
Bryan Pollock [00:55:48]:
So you guys, do you guys do any like medium duty truck tire or heavy truck tire like that, or just passenger car and light trucks?
Aniz Lavji [00:55:55]:
Mostly light trucks.
Bryan Pollock [00:55:57]:
Gotcha.
Aniz Lavji [00:55:58]:
So we passenger, passenger, and light truck.
Mike Allen [00:56:01]:
We don't get.
Bryan Pollock [00:56:01]:
We do some medium and heavy truck tires. And what's always amazed me is the, when you get an offshore tire, the little mascot they use for branding, one of them, it's called a good ride. Right. It's a play on good gear. It's a good ride. And the, The. The mascot's a clown face.
Aniz Lavji [00:56:22]:
Yes.
Bryan Pollock [00:56:22]:
Like your company tire. Yes. Yeah, the clown face tire. And then there's another one. I can't remember the name of the tire, but it's an elephant with a red hat and a set of blue overalls. I can't remember the name of the.
Aniz Lavji [00:56:34]:
Tire, but when you thought of that one, I, I don't know about this Elf. Elephant.
Bryan Pollock [00:56:40]:
What? The elephant and the clown. Oh, my gosh. So.
Mike Allen [00:56:44]:
And we don't.
Bryan Pollock [00:56:45]:
We don't do know. We used to have a lot of. We used to service some dump truck companies that used to haul in and out of the landfill. So they didn't have. They weren't wearing these things out. They were putting garbage and old pipes and this, that and the other thing through the sidewall before they wore the tire out. So it was, you know, the drives were always offshore cheap tires. Right.
Aniz Lavji [00:57:08]:
I'm trying to look up your elephant calm face tire, and I can't remember.
Bryan Pollock [00:57:13]:
I bet you Jim would know.
Mike Allen [00:57:15]:
Was it GD Tire? Giti?
Bryan Pollock [00:57:18]:
It might have been. I mean, that company's probably been stripped out and sold six times since then. That was years ago.
Aniz Lavji [00:57:28]:
We don't buy Triangle.
Bryan Pollock [00:57:34]:
We don't do a ton of medium and heavy. We do a fair amount of medium duty truck tires, but not a lot of heavy duty. We have like, we have one of the oldest dairies in the US that still delivers milk here. We do their trucks. So we do all their trucks. But how do you heavy duty tires anymore?
Aniz Lavji [00:57:52]:
How do you find like customer? Are they like, are they only buying if their tires are slicks or are they actually trying to do like preventative maintenance?
Bryan Pollock [00:58:02]:
They run them down pretty good.
Aniz Lavji [00:58:05]:
But then when it comes time, do they argue or on the price or they want something?
Bryan Pollock [00:58:09]:
No, no, they're just like, hey, they just. The guy who kind of runs that deal on that family will text Jim and be like, hey, I gotta drop a truck off. I need, you know, I need 4, 22, 5 drives across the back and order them in. And he goes, you got a bill for me? And we're always like, no, we don't have a bill yet. And they're like, well, send me a, send Judy a bill. That's his mouth. Send Judy a bill.
Mike Allen [00:58:34]:
Okay, so coming from a place of extreme ignorance on tires, right. Because I've never been an effective tire dealer. It seems like all the tires that we do are tires that are customers in for other things. And we just see that they need tires. We ask them, yes, right. If a customer calls in and says, hey, I need a price on tires, we have a very low closing rate. Right. Because that's a little bit of a commodity.
Mike Allen [00:58:59]:
Um, or my advisors just don't know how to sell tires because it's a different skill set. A high level tire salesman is different than a high level mechanical advisor. They're, they're not the same skills, but our listeners, for the most part, our, our mechanical shop owners and, and they operate in that world. And I hear over and over and over, I hate tires. Can't make money on tires.
Aniz Lavji [00:59:25]:
Can't believe it.
Mike Allen [00:59:27]:
I'm here to tell you, tires are easier to make money on than anything else that we do.
Aniz Lavji [00:59:31]:
It is, period.
Mike Allen [00:59:34]:
It's a low skill task with the hot. Not the, maybe not the highest, but one of the highest gross profit dollars per hour. If you can keep a bay busy all day changing tires, it will make way more money.
Bryan Pollock [00:59:48]:
And the thing is, they do a mechanical repair is you can train somebody to do the tires. Although we call it a low skill task, I think that there's some nuance to it that once you train somebody, all the stuff that people that aren't familiar with doing tires don't think about, like making sure this surface is clean, making sure that surface is clean. Massage the beads, blah, blah, blah. Right? There's a whole. I have a PowerPoint on how to properly mount and balance a tire. I have a PowerPoint on it. You can provide the customer. They'll be like, what's that?
Mike Allen [01:00:23]:
I said, that doesn't surprise me that you have a PowerPoint on tire install.
Bryan Pollock [01:00:26]:
It's called the smooth ride policy. Anyways, you can. It's not all mine. It's stolen from somebody. But anyways, you can put tires on somebody's car and you can literally do it better than the last guy. I think be like, huh, this car rides really smooth now.
Mike Allen [01:00:48]:
Their tires are shitty. Any new tire is gonna ride better than shitty old tires.
Aniz Lavji [01:00:52]:
Well, not just be done right.
Bryan Pollock [01:00:54]:
Yeah, they still got to be done right. You gotta get the air out of the beads.
Aniz Lavji [01:00:57]:
The amount of times I get tires coming in that they've got, you know, 7 ounces of weights on both sides.
Bryan Pollock [01:01:06]:
Because they got air trapped in the bead or they never got it squared up on the balancer.
Aniz Lavji [01:01:11]:
The guy went to Mr. Lube over here to get them bolted on and they broke a stud. So then he shows up to me, then I have to burn the stud off. And then they're like, yeah, you can just bolt them right on because Mr. Lube rebalanced them. And you look at the wheels, they've got all the old weight still on it.
Bryan Pollock [01:01:28]:
It's all crusty on the hub flange. Right. Like, they didn't clean the hub flanges. Oh, yeah, Tires. It's so funny because tires are. I agree that they're low skill, but they're not low effort. If you're going to do that service properly.
Mike Allen [01:01:42]:
They're low skill compared to high level mechanical work.
Bryan Pollock [01:01:46]:
And I agree, 100 a skill. It's still a skill that has to be trained properly. You can't just be like, this is how you get the beads on. This is how the balancer turns on. Go at it, kid. Right, Like.
Aniz Lavji [01:01:57]:
Like if you got, like we have.
Mike Allen [01:01:58]:
$100,000 on Hunter equipment and then you roll them up and hit the button.
Aniz Lavji [01:02:02]:
Like if you have a, like a. We have a leverless Corgi machine that we just got and you're doing like a 275, 35, 21, like those new Chevy Blazer EVs, one today. Like, if you don't know what you're doing, you're going to screw that rim up and you're gonna get a pissed off customer.
Bryan Pollock [01:02:19]:
Yeah.
Aniz Lavji [01:02:20]:
So yes, there's a little bit of a higher skill required for something like that. But somebody coming in for a Toyota Corolla, I mean, I could probably teach my 8 year old how to do it.
Mike Allen [01:02:29]:
So how did you end up having so many EVS in your shop? Because you've got a ton of EVS coming through your shop for tires.
Bryan Pollock [01:02:36]:
Because he's in Ontario.
Aniz Lavji [01:02:38]:
I think on average right now, I think last week I counted we did about 4, 40 Teslas last week.
Mike Allen [01:02:47]:
As a percentage of overall car count, what does that look like?
Aniz Lavji [01:02:52]:
15, 20. Like, honestly, right now, what's today is the 14th. My car count right now is 234 for, for this month.
Mike Allen [01:03:01]:
That's just 20%.
Aniz Lavji [01:03:02]:
Yeah. So I'd say about 20%. And we get direct referral straight from Tesla. So if anyone comes in there that wants tires, they're. They're going to be referred to the website. They can order. Or they actually take my business card out of their drawer and hand it to the customer.
Mike Allen [01:03:20]:
Wow, how did you make that happen?
Bryan Pollock [01:03:23]:
Tesla doesn't want to do tires.
Aniz Lavji [01:03:24]:
I had a Model S before and I needed some front end work. I went in there, spent 2,600 bucks and was really good friends with the service advisor. And ever since then, everybody there sends me customers. I think I'd get three or four calls a day. There's, they're saying, yeah, I just got your card from Tesla. I got your card from Tesla.
Mike Allen [01:03:45]:
That's amazing, man.
Aniz Lavji [01:03:46]:
And we do repairs.
Mike Allen [01:03:48]:
Krispy Kreme a week.
Aniz Lavji [01:03:49]:
Oh, I, I drop off donuts once a week. Coffee.
Bryan Pollock [01:03:53]:
So you guys do mechanical repairs also?
Aniz Lavji [01:03:55]:
Yeah, yeah. So we have a licensed mechanic.
Bryan Pollock [01:03:58]:
So you're doing a bunch of control arms on all them Teslas that come in?
Aniz Lavji [01:04:01]:
Yeah, yeah. My mechanics, he's been with us 15 years now. Same mechanic, we got two apprentices and a couple tire guys as well. And we're doing rear knuckles, bearings, front.
Bryan Pollock [01:04:13]:
Lateral links, control arms are like crazy.
Aniz Lavji [01:04:17]:
I got great supplies suppliers I can get the parts from. So yeah, like it's, it's great. We love it. And we do alignments on them too. So a lot of customers want alignments done every few years or they. Tesla recommends a brake service every year, so without me even offering it.
Bryan Pollock [01:04:36]:
And tires, tires on Teslas are the gifts to keep on giving because they scream through tires too, especially the rear tires.
Aniz Lavji [01:04:45]:
Yeah, you get a Model Y performance.
Bryan Pollock [01:04:47]:
Yeah. It is not uncommon for people to eat tires in 10,000 miles.
Aniz Lavji [01:04:51]:
Yep. And as long as you.
Mike Allen [01:04:55]:
And as he's got a, he's got a show that he does. Matt Fonzle, I think it was. He does a lot of Tesla stuff, right. I think I Heard him say that everybody who gets their first Tesla drives like an for the first year. Because it's so much fun, right, to drive them.
Bryan Pollock [01:05:18]:
Because they do wheels for sure.
Mike Allen [01:05:19]:
Yeah, they just grind through tires. It's amazing.
Aniz Lavji [01:05:22]:
Yeah, I, I got a Model Y right now and I mean I drive about an hour to work and back every day. So it's a 24 and I've got almost 67, 000 kilometers, which is, I can't do the math, but it's what, what 50, 000 miles on it?
Bryan Pollock [01:05:41]:
0.62 miles per kilometer.
Mike Allen [01:05:46]:
Yeah, that 174 miles.
Bryan Pollock [01:05:49]:
That's not it. You said 67, 000. I'll do the math right now. 48, 41,540.
Aniz Lavji [01:05:56]:
Yeah, that's what I said. Yeah, but, but yeah, for me it's great. Like I have one of them. So whenever I go in there, they've got shows, so they always invite me to the show. So I've got a booth set up with a tent and everything. So it's just free customers.
Bryan Pollock [01:06:11]:
Wow, that's awesome.
Aniz Lavji [01:06:13]:
Every Saturday they've got a meet and greet so they invite me. One of my other buddies that owns a glass shop that he does Tesla glass for everything. So it's me, him, and then there's an electrician. So three of us are there like every Saturday. We set up a tent, free customers.
Mike Allen [01:06:34]:
So sooner or later, if you're going to start running these circles with, you know, the crews of people that are on these groups with us and that come to these events with us, you're gonna have to realize and admit that Saturdays are the tool of the devil and you're not allowed to do business on Saturdays because it's bad for business.
Aniz Lavji [01:06:52]:
I've been doing Saturdays for 20 years. I can't help it.
Mike Allen [01:06:55]:
Can't help but make tons of money on Saturday. Right?
Aniz Lavji [01:06:59]:
Well, we, you know, it's funny, Saturday, we call it a Saturday special because either it's going to be slow or we're gonna get the most ridiculous stuff in. You know, like, I think three weeks ago I had a customer come in with a Barbie hand through the tire.
Bryan Pollock [01:07:16]:
I've, you know, we used to have.
Mike Allen [01:07:18]:
A big jar of the stuff that we pulled out of tires over the years.
Bryan Pollock [01:07:20]:
We do that.
Mike Allen [01:07:21]:
We keep it on rebar. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bryan Pollock [01:07:24]:
We only keep like the highlight reels like hammer, like claw hammer heads or whatever, you know, not for nothing, I haven't worked flat rate in many, many years. But the most hours I ever turn in A day was definitely on a Saturday. I definitely turned like 33 hours on a Saturday. One time thing.
Aniz Lavji [01:07:43]:
It's, it's always emergency stuff on a Saturday. Like we got regular stuff booked in. But then you'll get the emergency like, you know, I need to drive here and go visit this person. Throw on a set of tires. I got to go in an hour. So that's, that's usually a Saturday for us.
Mike Allen [01:07:58]:
I was, I was talking on the phone this afternoon. It was like 3 o' clock Eastern and I guess I was on the phone with Tanner Markham. So I guess it was 2 o' clock his time and a woman had walked in to his shop and he was. And he just put the phone down and I listened to his whole conversation with her. Right. And she was leaving to go on a road trip tomorrow morning at 6 and the AC had been out for a while and she wanted to know if he could fix it this afternoon. So Friday afternoon at 2 o' clock she needed her 1234 YF equipped vehicle to be diagnosed and repaired for a road trip.
Bryan Pollock [01:08:38]:
Hopefully she's got a condenser in the trunk.
Aniz Lavji [01:08:42]:
This is at your shop, Mike?
Mike Allen [01:08:44]:
No, it was at Tanner Markham and, and he's on the oil coast of Texas.
Aniz Lavji [01:08:51]:
It would have been nice if she was at your shop. She would at least got the free diag, right?
Mike Allen [01:08:55]:
Yeah, I would have had free diag in time to not repair her vehicle in the time that she needed so that she could drive until spring.
Bryan Pollock [01:09:02]:
To actually don't act like. And don't act like in the sprawling metropolis o' Raleigh you couldn't have produced a condenser in an hour. You're not like in no man's land like us.
Mike Allen [01:09:11]:
I could have got one anyway.
Aniz Lavji [01:09:16]:
Is it, is it tough to get parts, Brian, in your area?
Bryan Pollock [01:09:19]:
I wouldn't say tough, but not as easy as a major metropolitan area.
Aniz Lavji [01:09:24]:
Like if you needed a set of brake pads and rotors like 20 minutes half hour kind of thing or.
Bryan Pollock [01:09:29]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If the, if the local has it in stock, half hour. If the DC has it in stock a couple hours, it's not terrible.
Mike Allen [01:09:38]:
Oh yeah, that's reasonable.
Bryan Pollock [01:09:40]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [01:09:40]:
That's what we are.
Bryan Pollock [01:09:42]:
We buy a metric ton of parts. So our parts, our main supplier is pretty motivated to go put somebody in a car and go to the DC for us too. Like if I'm like between the three.
Mike Allen [01:09:54]:
Stores, how, how much are you buying from your primary supplier per month between the three stores?
Bryan Pollock [01:09:59]:
A lot.
Mike Allen [01:10:01]:
Like not comfortable sharing that on the air.
Bryan Pollock [01:10:03]:
That's a lot.
Mike Allen [01:10:04]:
Cool. Okay.
Bryan Pollock [01:10:05]:
That's a lot.
Mike Allen [01:10:06]:
Who's your primary supplier?
Bryan Pollock [01:10:08]:
Napa.
Aniz Lavji [01:10:09]:
Yeah, we do a lot with Napa as well.
Mike Allen [01:10:12]:
Napa is the best part supplier for the aftermarket job.
Aniz Lavji [01:10:18]:
And if you'd like to sponsor Mike, here's my Contact info at 7. Something, something confession.
Bryan Pollock [01:10:24]:
You know, it's, it's funny.
Mike Allen [01:10:25]:
I'm not saying, I'm just saying our.
Bryan Pollock [01:10:27]:
Our Napa relationship is because, honestly, because we really like our salesman. Not. And I'm not, I'm not kidding. Like, that's the dude's freaking awesome.
Mike Allen [01:10:39]:
The quality of the salesman and the quality of the store level service is 90% of a. Of a relationship.
Bryan Pollock [01:10:45]:
Yeah. And when there's an issue at the store level, the salesman's taking care of it. You know, there, there's, you know, they're, they're like any other company. They're not without issues. And when there's an issue, I can rely on the fact that I can bust our salesman's balls about something and he's like going to just make something happen. But Brian, I'm not that bad. It's Jim that's bad. I'm not that bad.
Mike Allen [01:11:09]:
You're auto care gold, right?
Bryan Pollock [01:11:10]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [01:11:12]:
Yeah.
Aniz Lavji [01:11:12]:
I'm just saying is if there's something that goes wrong, you know that like, this guy is going to take care of me. So if you think about it, it's kind of like in a way, you are their customer. So whenever you have customers come in, they, they know that, okay, my car's coming into Brian's shop. It needs something. Brian will take care of me. And they keep coming back.
Bryan Pollock [01:11:32]:
Yeah, it's the same thing. Our salesman is like that. And then he got us, you know, there's a couple stores around and he got us hooked up with a store that's got a management team that really, they're, they're just banging. We, we actually like the manager of the store that we deal with at our Sanborn shop so much. We invited him to lunch yesterday. He was too busy to make it, but we actually invited him. They were shorthanded, so he had to, he was hustling. But like, we invited him to lunch yesterday.
Bryan Pollock [01:12:01]:
Like, the dude just does awesome for us.
Mike Allen [01:12:03]:
You know, if you've got a relationship with your primary vendors such that your reps are invited to your company parties, that's a good thing.
Bryan Pollock [01:12:10]:
Yeah. Yeah. Everybody likes our sales rep. Our sales rep came to our employee Christmas party last year. Him and his wife came.
Mike Allen [01:12:18]:
What are you doing for your Christmas.
Bryan Pollock [01:12:19]:
Party this Year running event. Well, we do two things. We have like a shop party. We'll have that one Friday afternoon. I think it's. I can't remember the date. We'll have a shop party on a Friday afternoon. And that's more of a.
Bryan Pollock [01:12:33]:
That's more of a guys get together where you invite like, you know, a bunch of your customers that you really appreciate. Not necessarily based on how much they spend. Just, you know, you have people that only have a leased vehicle that just come for oil changes, but they're really pleasant people. And we'll have probably for that party. I mean, in the past, in and out throughout the night. We've had 150 people in and out throughout the night. And then we. We're renting a venue and we're having an employee.
Bryan Pollock [01:13:05]:
And the plus ones and probably are probably our Napa salesman and a couple other key people the day.
Mike Allen [01:13:12]:
What's your rule on pluses? Because I've got some dudes that like, want to bring their wife and their kid, their adult kid, and maybe a grandkid and maybe their buddy.
Bryan Pollock [01:13:21]:
Yeah, we had a service writer one year. We had a service writer one year, bring his wife and daughter. And he just asked, he was like. And they were like, yeah, sure. You know, I don't know. We don't. We're not very good on rules, Mike. We don't have a lot of set rules that will come out of.
Mike Allen [01:13:38]:
I think we're gonna. We're gonna rent a corporate. We're gonna have a corporate outing at an indoor shooting range and have like, get the whole place. So we have like 25 lanes and.
Bryan Pollock [01:13:49]:
Right.
Mike Allen [01:13:49]:
A bunch of different types of guns. Everybody can shoot. And then I think we'll probably have a contest and a few people will win drawings to shoot machine guns. And then we'll go out to dinner afterwards. So I think that's what we're gonna do.
Aniz Lavji [01:14:02]:
Never shot again before. One day I'd love to go to a shooting range.
Mike Allen [01:14:07]:
Dude, are you kidding me?
Bryan Pollock [01:14:10]:
You're only like an hour and 40 minutes from me. If you want to blow some up. It's not that communist here in New York. It's not that bad.
Mike Allen [01:14:17]:
All right, we're not going to the Go kart track next year for Astax, but we're going to the range. Done.
Aniz Lavji [01:14:23]:
You heard it. And we're.
Mike Allen [01:14:24]:
We're gonna. We're gonna shoot handguns, we're gonna shoot rifles, we're gonna shoot. Maybe RPGs, I don't know, whatever. It's just I mean, it's just buddies, you know?
Aniz Lavji [01:14:32]:
I think that'd be a lot of fun.
Bryan Pollock [01:14:34]:
Maybe. I've got a great idea. Maybe instead of going to a range necessarily, we find somebody with property, and you can tow your Infinity out there, and we'll put a five gallon pail of tannerite, and it just let it.
Mike Allen [01:14:47]:
Rip.5 gallons of tannerite would be heard from Canada. Maybe like 2 pounds of tannerite.
Bryan Pollock [01:14:54]:
5 gallon pal of tannerite. You know what we'll do? We'll park my Volkswagen next to it.
Mike Allen [01:15:00]:
You know what? You know what tannerite is? It's just dynamite, but you can buy it, and you shoot it with a. With a supersonic round, and it explodes. Subsonic. I don't. I think won't cause the reaction.
Bryan Pollock [01:15:14]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [01:15:14]:
Is that right?
Bryan Pollock [01:15:16]:
I don't. It may or may not. I don't know. It doesn't matter. It's still cool.
Mike Allen [01:15:20]:
You need to be more than 100. You need to be more than 100 yards away and behind a barrier when you shoot. Oh, my gosh.
Bryan Pollock [01:15:25]:
I saw. You ever see the video? The guy shoots the. The shoots the refrigerator with, like, a pound of janite, and it.
Mike Allen [01:15:30]:
Door fl. The refrigerator door almost kills them.
Bryan Pollock [01:15:34]:
Oh, my gosh.
Aniz Lavji [01:15:35]:
You let me know when you're blowing this up. I will fly to wherever this is, and I will be there. Done.
Mike Allen [01:15:43]:
All right, here's the deal. If we can raise enough money with the podcast to buy this customer's Infinity, and I haven't told the Infinity story yet. I'm not gonna. If we can buy this Infinity and blow it up, it'll be an open invitation to listeners to come to our blow up this goddamn Infinity event, and we'll tell the story one day after I've gotten over the trauma of this car.
Bryan Pollock [01:16:09]:
In Mike's defense, he has a very frustrating situation. Not just. Not just the whole situation, but, like, what's wrong now is super. If I was closer, I would just drive there.
Mike Allen [01:16:22]:
My customer has had my loaner car so long that it's overdue for an oil change.
Bryan Pollock [01:16:26]:
If I. If I were closer, you know what I would be doing tomorrow? I would just drive there and work on it all day just to. Just to do that.
Mike Allen [01:16:35]:
Like, what's your childcare situation like? I'll fly you to North Carolina tomorrow.
Bryan Pollock [01:16:40]:
I'm good tomorrow. But it's Sunday. I'm not good.
Mike Allen [01:16:44]:
I mean, can you get an out and back? I mean, it's so bad.
Bryan Pollock [01:16:49]:
It's just like. It's like all the other remote tech support. It's like, man, if I was there and I could touch this thing, I bet you I could get through it.
Mike Allen [01:16:57]:
Yeah, it's just.
Bryan Pollock [01:16:58]:
It's. It's hard. And Mike's guy is doing an amazing job. He's just like, richard.
Mike Allen [01:17:03]:
Richard's on top of it, man.
Bryan Pollock [01:17:04]:
He knows his doing an amazing job, and he's just.
Aniz Lavji [01:17:07]:
You just get that. That car that will literally drive you insane. It's just one of those things.
Bryan Pollock [01:17:12]:
It's. It is right now. It's. It's probably in my top 20 most bizarre things I've seen.
Aniz Lavji [01:17:20]:
We. We had a Ford escape that had a no start, and I think we were close to like, 17 or 18 hours into it.
Mike Allen [01:17:31]:
And.
Aniz Lavji [01:17:32]:
And we started following the wiring harness from the battery all the way down. We found a snipped wire tucked in under a floorboard God knows where, and fixed it. And then, voila, it starts.
Mike Allen [01:17:49]:
I'm not nightmare. You're not gonna suck me into this. I'm not gonna explain the infinity situation tonight. It. Yeah. Oh, I did have an interesting situation today.
Bryan Pollock [01:18:00]:
That man is not okay. You're not even working on it. Mike's not even working on it. He says, just take another drink.
Aniz Lavji [01:18:07]:
You'll be okay.
Bryan Pollock [01:18:08]:
Yeah, Start chugging.
Mike Allen [01:18:10]:
So Chrysler Pacifica hybrid and got some faults with the hybrid.
Bryan Pollock [01:18:16]:
B.
Mike Allen [01:18:17]:
Needs a hybrid battery. And it. Apparently it is a. A known problem. And there is a special program with Chrysler right now. You can buy a complete Pacifica hybrid battery for $450. There is a slight. I mean, you need to make sure that the core is good because the core charge is.
Mike Allen [01:18:40]:
Yes. You guys, guess what the core charge is.
Bryan Pollock [01:18:42]:
You already told me, so I'm going to refrain from guessing.5 grand.
Mike Allen [01:18:46]:
$20,000 for the court charge.
Bryan Pollock [01:18:52]:
American.
Aniz Lavji [01:18:54]:
That's just silent American.
Bryan Pollock [01:18:59]:
You could buy a whole. You could go buy a whole Chrysler dealership for that in Canadian. You could have your own franchise. Two. He says two.
Mike Allen [01:19:13]:
It reminds. It reminds me of during the cars for clunkers time just after that. What a disaster that was. Did you know was cash for clunkers a thing and that was just Canada?
Bryan Pollock [01:19:25]:
No, that was a us thing.
Mike Allen [01:19:26]:
Yeah, that was. That was.
Aniz Lavji [01:19:27]:
We had that. We had that here, too. Cash for clunkers.
Bryan Pollock [01:19:30]:
Oh, did you really?
Aniz Lavji [01:19:31]:
How long ago was that?
Bryan Pollock [01:19:33]:
2008.
Mike Allen [01:19:34]:
Yeah, it was 2008. It was the. I remember the mortgage bubble. When the mortgage bubble popped, right?
Bryan Pollock [01:19:40]:
Yep.
Mike Allen [01:19:42]:
But the Chrysler dealer near us had a deal going. If you buy a Dodge Ram at full sticker price, you get a free PT Cruiser.
Aniz Lavji [01:19:49]:
I remember this.
Mike Allen [01:19:50]:
Yeah.
Aniz Lavji [01:19:52]:
Were they, were they doing anybody a favor by giving them that PT Cruiser or I mean comes back for service at least.
Mike Allen [01:19:58]:
I always say service department profits for the next six years.
Bryan Pollock [01:20:02]:
People, people always talk about how great cars were in the 90s. And I think what happens is people.
Mike Allen [01:20:09]:
What cars were good in the 90s.
Bryan Pollock [01:20:11]:
So there's two cars that were good in the 90s.
Mike Allen [01:20:14]:
The Chevy Ranger.
Bryan Pollock [01:20:15]:
The Chevy.
Mike Allen [01:20:16]:
Ford Ranger.
Bryan Pollock [01:20:17]:
No, it wasn't. The Chevy C 1500 with a 5 7. That was a good vehicle. The Toyota camry with that 2.2 slant four cylinder that would run forever. Those are the only two good cars.
Mike Allen [01:20:28]:
Spider injection.
Aniz Lavji [01:20:30]:
The Pontiac Grand Prix 3800.
Bryan Pollock [01:20:33]:
Oh, yeah. That is the Lord's displacement forever.
Mike Allen [01:20:37]:
As long as he kept the intake leak from.
Aniz Lavji [01:20:39]:
No, no, we don't have to talk about the intake leak.
Bryan Pollock [01:20:41]:
I'm just saying it didn't matter if the intake leak to just keep running. But anyway, so let's say there was like four good cars. The rest of them were trash.
Aniz Lavji [01:20:48]:
Garbage.
Bryan Pollock [01:20:49]:
Like when's the last time you saw a Dodge Neon?
Mike Allen [01:20:53]:
Have you ever looked at any of the.
Bryan Pollock [01:20:55]:
Even the guy from the South. Can't answer that. Even the guy where they didn't rust out.
Mike Allen [01:20:59]:
Can't answer the Neon racing circuits where they would have neons like miatas, like neons on, on racing tracks they would have neon neons.
Bryan Pollock [01:21:08]:
Remember they were pink and orange and green.
Mike Allen [01:21:10]:
It was amazing. And they would wreck so spectacularly because.
Bryan Pollock [01:21:14]:
There wasn't, there wasn't anything to them.
Mike Allen [01:21:16]:
They were like, go to Utah. Go. Go to YouTube and search.
Bryan Pollock [01:21:20]:
They were like £2,400, fully dressed.
Mike Allen [01:21:23]:
Yeah.
Bryan Pollock [01:21:24]:
So when they stripped them out, there wasn't nothing there.
Aniz Lavji [01:21:26]:
I think I had a friend that had one of those turbo from factory Turbo Dodge Neons. And he was so like exciting.
Bryan Pollock [01:21:33]:
SRT4.
Aniz Lavji [01:21:34]:
SRT4.
Bryan Pollock [01:21:35]:
And yeah, yeah. What about the Turbo PT Cruiser? Now if they'd give me a Turbo PT Cruiser, they used to call it like the beat the PT Bruiser package. It was a hot rodded PT Cruiser.
Mike Allen [01:21:49]:
Is the PT Prowler the ugliest vehicle ever made in America?
Bryan Pollock [01:21:52]:
The Plymouth Prowler.
Aniz Lavji [01:21:53]:
Plymouth Prowler, yeah.
Mike Allen [01:21:55]:
Yeah.
Aniz Lavji [01:21:55]:
There's a few around my area.
Bryan Pollock [01:21:57]:
They weren't even V8s either. They were V6s. Right.
Mike Allen [01:22:01]:
The ugliest vehicle ever made in the United States is the Halle Berry Thunderbird Aztec.
Aniz Lavji [01:22:12]:
Aztec is the ugliest vehicle I've ever seen in my life.
Bryan Pollock [01:22:15]:
They also sold them, they delivered them at dealers with camping tent attachments.
Aniz Lavji [01:22:21]:
They should have sold them directly to the scrapyard. A jerry can fill so you can pour it all over and light that piece of junk on fire.
Mike Allen [01:22:35]:
It's. It's the Mitsubishi of American cars.
Aniz Lavji [01:22:38]:
I've had those cars come in back in the day and you go to lift that piece of and all you.
Bryan Pollock [01:22:45]:
Hear is caving up into it and you're freaking into the floor pan and the wheels still aren't off the ground. You're like, oh, I actually I've.
Aniz Lavji [01:22:57]:
I remember this is back when like video and stuff on phones is not too popular. I would record and I tell the customer, we're going to lift this vehicle, but it's going to crunch because it's rusted. Yeah.
Bryan Pollock [01:23:11]:
Those in those minivans, remember that you would, you'd go to lift them and they leave 5 pounds of rust on the floor in the bay that you were working on them in.
Aniz Lavji [01:23:19]:
Oh, that's. Yeah. I charge double shop supplies just to clean that crap up.
Bryan Pollock [01:23:23]:
Oh, my God.
Mike Allen [01:23:24]:
There was another brand that had a rebadged Aztec. Was it a Saturn? Was the other Aztec?
Bryan Pollock [01:23:30]:
The other Aztec was a Buick Rendezvous.
Aniz Lavji [01:23:33]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [01:23:34]:
No, it's not a rendezvous. It's a rendivious.
Bryan Pollock [01:23:37]:
Rendivious.
Mike Allen [01:23:38]:
I had a service advisor refer to a. Refer to their vehicle to the customer as a rendezvous one time.
Bryan Pollock [01:23:43]:
You're fired.
Aniz Lavji [01:23:44]:
I will never call it a rendezvous ever again. It's now a rendezvous Rendezvous from here on out. That's it. Anyone calls in, I'm gonna tell them, look, you need to get your vehicles figured out because you don't even know how to name your car to run. Divious. Okay.
Mike Allen [01:24:00]:
My daily driver. My daily driver is an accurate tl and because I'm an idiot, I always refer to it as the akura. And my 11 year old has only ever heard it referenced as an Akura. And she referenced it one day to her friends as an Akura and she is now mocked for calling an Acura an Akura.
Aniz Lavji [01:24:22]:
Sounds like some kind of anime channel or something.
Mike Allen [01:24:24]:
Well, I mean, hey, you know, don't judge me.
Bryan Pollock [01:24:27]:
Whatever. It's like, it's like when the people from overseas have to say Jaguar or J. Jaguar. Jaguar.
Mike Allen [01:24:35]:
Is it, is it a Porsche or a Porsche?
Bryan Pollock [01:24:37]:
I don't know. But when it's a Jaguar, Porsche is.
Mike Allen [01:24:39]:
Next up on stage two.
Bryan Pollock [01:24:41]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [01:24:42]:
And a Porsche is a high performance vehicle.
Bryan Pollock [01:24:46]:
Fair enough. Fair enough.
Mike Allen [01:24:48]:
No.
Bryan Pollock [01:24:48]:
All right, fair enough.
Mike Allen [01:24:49]:
On that note, I think we can wrap that up. Yeah. So thanks so much for coming. It was a good time. I feel like we could have gone for two hours, but evidently an hour and 24 minutes is entirely too long. Braxton cut out 24 minutes. Thanks for listening to Confessions of a Shop Owner where we lay it all out, the good, the bad, and sometimes the super messed up. I'm your host, Mike Allen, here to remind you that even the pros screw it up sometimes.
Mike Allen [01:25:15]:
So why not laugh a little bit, learn a little bit, and maybe have another drink? You got a confession of your own or a topic you'd like me to cover? Or do you just want to let me know what an idiot I am? Email Mike confessions of a shopowner.com or call and leave a message. The number 704-confess. That's 704-266-3377. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to, like, subscribe or follow. Join us on this crazy journey that is shop ownership. Let's see you on the next episode.
Aniz Lavji [01:26:12]:
You know I said just.