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My name is Jeff, and I'd like to welcome you on a journey of reflection and insight into the tolls and triumphs of a career in automotive repair.
After more than 20 years of skinned knuckles and tool debt, I want to share my perspective and hear other people's thoughts about our industry.
So pour yourself a strong coffee or grab a cold Canadian beer and get ready for some great conversation.
Eric Sprague [00:00:00]:
I don't think tech should be working for less than 100 a year.
Jeff Compton [00:00:09]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:00:10]:
The way, you know, between inflation, just cost of living in general, even before inflation.
Jeff Compton [00:00:15]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:00:16]:
You know, I know guys that are still working for 10, 12 bucks an hour, and it makes me want to punch their boss in the face.
Jeff Compton [00:00:28]:
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another exciting episode of the Jada Mechanic Pocket podcast. We're all kind of feeling the turkey famine fest thing that's making everybody a little groggy. So if we have a few slip ups, it's not the booze, it's. We're blame the turkey.
Eric Sprague [00:00:45]:
Now we're going to turkey.
Jeff Compton [00:00:47]:
I'm sleeping with my brother, the rambling mechanic, Mr. Eric Sprague from LNN Performance. See, I'm doing it L and N performance at a beautiful Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Brother Eric, how are you, man?
Eric Sprague [00:01:00]:
Very good, man. It's awesome. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a while.
Jeff Compton [00:01:04]:
Yeah, it's fun, isn't it? Yeah. You and I don't touch base as much as we should. I mean, it's. It's little, little bits here and there and then the occasional phone call or something like that. But I mean, I've just been, you know, you were kind of joking about your last recording and it was like I said you messed it. Like I couldn't hear a damn thing you were saying. So you're closer to the microphone today. That's good.
Jeff Compton [00:01:25]:
So, yeah, no, we.
Eric Sprague [00:01:27]:
I think we got some of those issues worked out. Working with unfamiliar equipment definitely did not help.
Jeff Compton [00:01:33]:
Yeah, it's tough. Everybody thinks like this just is, you know, all I got to do is like, comb the beard out and then get on and it just happens. But I mean, you know, I have to thank Braxton, Braxton for all the, the magic that he, you know, makes everything work good. And, you know, it's. Yeah, we're lucky to have him, so. Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:01:54]:
It was good. It was very quiet this year. You know, the kids have all aged out. They're doing their thing, so it was just a very low key, quiet day. It was really. It was really nice. It was relaxing for once.
Jeff Compton [00:02:05]:
Yeah. How was it at the shop leading up to it?
Eric Sprague [00:02:09]:
Chaotic. It always is. Yeah, it's always. We're full throttle. I mean, we don't. We don't really have a slow period, so that's, That's a blessing. You know, it's. It's the problem you want to have, but it's trying to balance getting everything out, getting everything through.
Jeff Compton [00:02:25]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:02:25]:
And trying to, trying to fight off that, you know, holiday sluggishness that always invariably comes.
Jeff Compton [00:02:31]:
Well and that's the thing, like it doesn't seem to matter how many times I've been doing this for, you know, working in shops on the 24th for 25 years, right? And there's always either somebody shows up with a tire problem or brake problem on the 24th, it doesn't seem to matter. And you know, I always chalked it up to weather, but I mean, what's your guys been like the weather right before Christmas up there? You sitting in a bunch of snow or.
Eric Sprague [00:02:52]:
We were right around Thanksgiving, early December. We got drilled pretty hard and then we were up. It's in the 60s right now, 50 60s. So it's. It's pretty, pretty nice right now.
Jeff Compton [00:03:04]:
Yeah. See, we had a. We had a bunch of snow right up until like say the 18th. And then we got. Not a warm spell. We got a bunch of rain, which I guess is kind of like a warm. So and it literally like washed all the snow away and then it got cold again. So we had a bunch of ice, no snow, and then it just rained.
Jeff Compton [00:03:23]:
It snowed on the 27th and we got a bunch of snow. But we had a green Christmas, which everybody is like, you know, the old people up here think that's a real bad omen, right? They say that used to say green Christmas led to a fat graveyard in the spring. So, you know, I don't know if there's truth to that or not, but. But that's my. You know, I had my post there on the 24th or 23rd where I was talking about the tire blowout and that young girl and I was, you know, disabling the tpms on the car. I wasn't disabling. It was disabled. And the.
Jeff Compton [00:03:56]:
Of all the threads to do for the jada mechanic in 2025, that sucker blew up at a rate that was unbelievable. Like it had a hot. It had 100 comments and I think in two hours, Eric, like it was nuts. Oh wow. Like it was ridiculous. But on all three program, you know, profiles linked together, it was, it was nuts. It was like 100 comments. And.
Jeff Compton [00:04:19]:
Being in multi geographical, you know, we've gone international here. People are talking about, well listen, in Canada, like you can pass the car as a safety with the tire light on. I go, I realize that I don't personally somebody else can sign that safety for that. I don't because it's to me, I don't care what our Canadian government But you all know how I love and respect the Canadian government. You know, it's another thing that they've gotten wrong. So for me, like, I don't. If I have to sign a car for safety and it has a TPMS light on, it has to be fixed. And I've had to put four sensors in a car because we sold it with an aftermarket set of rims on and the TPMS was disabled because there's no sensors.
Jeff Compton [00:04:58]:
I'm not kidding when everybody says, when it's like, we can buy those sensors for $27 apiece.
Eric Sprague [00:05:04]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:05:04]:
You know, so to me, the idea that we're disabling a system and then you get into the whole thing, Eric, of like, well, it's not really disabled. What do you think about that?
Eric Sprague [00:05:14]:
Bypass disabled. I mean, is there a difference?
Jeff Compton [00:05:17]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:05:18]:
You know, something's designed to work a certain way. If you're altering that, you're bypassing, you're disabling its intent.
Jeff Compton [00:05:23]:
Yeah. For me, if the system's designed to give you four pictures on this cluster with four pressure readings, and all of a sudden you have four lines through where the pressure reading should be, that's disabled. It's not enabled. It's not doing. Somebody says, well, now it's doing what it's supposed to do because it's telling the customer that the tires. Low. No, it's not. It doesn't tell them it's low.
Jeff Compton [00:05:45]:
Tells them that that sensor doesn't work.
Eric Sprague [00:05:50]:
Yeah, it's. Well, is that any different than putting an O2 spacer in to kill a cat code?
Jeff Compton [00:05:55]:
Exactly. Right.
Eric Sprague [00:05:56]:
I mean, there's no difference. It's just, you know, potato, tomato. Yeah, there's. There's no. You're disabling something that's there to give the driver information.
Jeff Compton [00:06:07]:
Yeah. And I try to make customers cry at Christmas. And, you know, she did get a little teary, but I don't think she cried because it's like, you've heard me talk. When I start talking, it just sounds like I'm lecturing. I'm not. It's just blunt, to the point. So you understand. You don't have to ask me a million questions to understand.
Jeff Compton [00:06:23]:
You're going to. And I said to her, I said, well, where did you get these tires? Oh, we bought them on Facebook. Marketplace, you know. Okay, cool. Well, they're a 2013 build date tire. So firstly, like, I'm sorry, you paid money for essentially scrap tires, but that's what you got. Secondly, because, you know, your rims that you got with the tires, which, hey, I applaud you for getting a winter tire package, rim and everything, because that's better than ripping the tire on and off twice a year. I said, somebody, for the sake of saving $100, disabled your safety system because she had a blowout at almost 70 miles an hour in the left hand lane.
Eric Sprague [00:06:56]:
Oh.
Jeff Compton [00:06:58]:
So on the left front, left front, left hand lane, 100, you know, almost 70 miles an hour. She panicked, didn't try to get over to the right shoulder. She stayed in the left shoulder and went over even more, which is like. So you know, you know where I'm going with this. You're jacking the car up on the left side shoulder, on the left hand embankment to get the tire off. You're lucky the fucking thing didn't roll over into the embankment. Right. For somebody that's never the car up in their life, you know.
Eric Sprague [00:07:24]:
Well, lucky it didn't come off. Lucky you didn't get hit. I mean, it's, you know, left lane is mock. Jesus. That's as fast as the car is going to go.
Jeff Compton [00:07:31]:
Realistically. Yeah. Up here, especially in that stretch that happened that they're, they're well known to drive like I'll drive 80 miles an hour down through that stretch all the time. Because there's never a cop in that stretch between those kind of. Some of the exits in this my area now, the weather probably has got some people slowing down, but she was not kidding when she said she was doing. She was doing 105, which is like 64 miles an hour. Right. Assuming she's being honest, she's probably lying a little bit.
Jeff Compton [00:07:58]:
She was probably doing close to 70. And I'm just like. And I said to her, so I said so because somebody and I kind of took over the conversation. The service advisor standing right there. And Mike's a great guy, but he doesn't really get involved too much when I start talking because, you know, there's really no point. And kind of. So what I'd done by the time I was done, I said, listen, so, you know, we'll call her April. I said, for our.
Jeff Compton [00:08:21]:
Charlotte's her name. Charlotte. For the sake of argument, here's the reality of what you now need to be budgeting for is you need to be budgeting for four new snow tires and four tire pressure sensors. Well, how much is that going to cost by a thousand bucks probably by the time you're done, you know, like now it depends on the quality of tire you want to buy. Right. Like we're talking a 2018 Nissan Rogue here. So, you know, not, they're not super expensive. But I mean a good snow tire up here is well over 100 bucks an hour per tire.
Jeff Compton [00:08:48]:
Which, you know, you're buying them for $50 a tire. Right.
Eric Sprague [00:08:52]:
Like, you know, I have, honestly, I have no idea anymore. I don't, I don't deal with that side of it. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, you know, you get what you pay for. Definitely. If you get crap tires, they're not going to last. They're not, you know, EVS, we're seeing that a ton. You know, even EV rated tires, if they get 10, 15,000 miles out of them, it's. You want to give them a metal.
Eric Sprague [00:09:11]:
Yeah, it's, it's just, it's, it's insane. You know, when you start putting 10 plies on, you know, model threes.
Jeff Compton [00:09:21]:
Yeah. So if a Christopher comes into L N you guys don't like and they want to buy, you know, a snow tire package, which you guys do. Do some snow tires in Blowing Rock because you guys get some snow.
Eric Sprague [00:09:33]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:09:34]:
What's, what's the policy there? Like, will you go ahead and just put them in without sensors or do you kind of just let that, you.
Eric Sprague [00:09:40]:
Know, so we'll, we'll go, we'll. If they have a sensor problem, you know, we don't do a lot of tire wheel packages. We'll do the rubber. But if they have sensor issues, we sell them with the sensors. If we, with the rebuild kits with the stems and the components.
Jeff Compton [00:09:56]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:09:57]:
If they're not serviceable, if the batteries are testing out weak, then we're, we're putting sensors on there.
Jeff Compton [00:10:02]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:10:02]:
Well, but we'll generally include them if there are system faults. Obviously if we have working sensors and a system fault, then we're going to go into the system itself and let them know, look, we need to look into this. But we're, you know, we're never going to ignore it being on. Yeah, we'll give, we'll give them the opportunity to say they don't want to do X, but we're always going to let them know about it. I mean, we're going to disclose everything we find about the car.
Jeff Compton [00:10:26]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:10:27]:
You know, you've seen our, our inspection process. It's, it's thorough.
Jeff Compton [00:10:32]:
Yeah. There's no miscommunication by the time you guys are done about what the customer is expecting and what they want and what's actually being performed.
Eric Sprague [00:10:39]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:10:39]:
Like, and that's where a lot of the Conversation for me is because it's like sometimes you've got somebody speaking to the customer about just as an example again, TPMs and sometimes they don't even really know what they're like enough about how the system works and what it actually means to the car to be able to have the conversation. Somebody left me a message and a mutual friend of ours and he's like, they don't understand. You're gonna see cars that now when the TPMS lights on or the system is in some kind of fault, you're gonna see where they're gonna limit road speed, gonna limit throttle, gonna limit all kinds of stuff to where now they're gonna tie it in so you won't be able to drive the car. And everybody's like, it's getting to be such a nanny state thing. And of course, like, you know, as a Canadian, I can certainly relate to the idea that I don't want any more nanny state. But to me it was just the whole conversation of like, you couldn't sell, you know, four Autel Universal sensors for under 100 bucks and put them in a car and make it work. All that fee. I'm just like, you've got all got the wrong telling your shop if they can't find another hundred bucks.
Jeff Compton [00:11:44]:
So, you know, I caught some flack for that. So.
Eric Sprague [00:11:47]:
But it's true though, you know, these systems, I agree, I think some of them get abused by manufacturers. But at the end of the day, stuff like tpms, adas, the telematics, the connected vehicle stuff, it's about, at the end of the day, it's about safety.
Jeff Compton [00:12:02]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:12:03]:
You know, at the end of the day these systems are implemented because quite frankly, a lot of people on the road have proven they probably shouldn't be.
Jeff Compton [00:12:10]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:12:11]:
You know, you're driving around with your cell phone like this and you Rear end, somebody. Thank you. Automated emergency braking.
Jeff Compton [00:12:17]:
Yep.
Eric Sprague [00:12:18]:
Yeah, you know, it's, it makes me, it's frustrating because I'm in a lot of groups that are not directly tech related. A lot of Subaru groups, a lot of other, you know, things like that. Just, they're enthusiast groups. If I can help out, I do. But I, I, I'm an enthusiast.
Jeff Compton [00:12:34]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:12:35]:
You know, I drive a Subaru, I want to figure out what's going to break next aside from the head gaskets. But you know, I, I look at some of the comments in there and it's like, oh my God, are you people serious? Like you want bluetooth, you want CarPlay, you want this, you want that. That all takes technology getting dumped into the car.
Jeff Compton [00:12:54]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:12:55]:
And we just went from a thirty thousand dollar Impreza to a fifty thousand dollar Impreza. I mean, where do you think that comes from? We're not going to trim back.
Jeff Compton [00:13:03]:
No, no. And, and that's the thing. Now you could see it where. And you know, Lucas has talked about some of the cars that could hit, you know, necessarily in the North American market. Right. Being built and you know, foreign, that if they hit here, they would really turn the market upside down with how they could actually put a functioning car in room for such a low price. But then you see the other detractors in this thing that are going, listen, it won't matter, you know, if you can't, if you can't sell it with uconnect and everything else, the clientele is not going to buy it. And you know, they're not wrong either because some people, it's like, if it's really difficult to get my phone to link to this used car that I'm looking at buying, I'm not buying that used car.
Jeff Compton [00:13:39]:
And I'm like, oh my God. So you wouldn't buy a Toyota or a Honda. Right. But you're going to go buy that. I'll just throw words out. Kia. Because your phone links up to it. Really cool.
Jeff Compton [00:13:48]:
Like, come on.
Eric Sprague [00:13:50]:
Well, you got to have something to do while you're sitting there waiting for the tow truck.
Jeff Compton [00:13:53]:
That's right. Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:13:54]:
But, but I, I think companies like byd and I know that's a big one, if they. We saw a few of those when we were down in Texas for the F1 race. There were five or six BYD EVs running around.
Jeff Compton [00:14:05]:
Right.
Eric Sprague [00:14:05]:
Dude, they don't look like crap cars. They look really nice.
Jeff Compton [00:14:09]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:14:11]:
It made it at least six miles on a charge, so that's how far we had to go. Dakota. So, I mean, what more can you ask for? It's better than a Leaf.
Jeff Compton [00:14:18]:
Yeah. Well, that's. Oh man. We had a customer buy a Leaf from our, from our shop, from the lot and then like they had it a month and they want to bring it back. I was like, sorry, you know, like it, you know, because what, what do you. Well, you know, I had to immediately take it over the dealer and, and you know, the, the battery. Yeah. I don't understand.
Jeff Compton [00:14:39]:
That's why it was traded. Like, that's exactly. Let me reiterate that, that we don't know why it was traded, but it's probably why it was at the auction where it was Frank came from because if you drove up and said, I want to sell you this EV Leaf, you know, they would have went and got Jeff and be like, Jeff, what do you think of this? This customer wants to sell an Eevee Leaf. And I'm like, I wouldn't buy it, you know, like, you know, I wouldn't buy it because I know what Leafs are like. They're not as far as the. Just buy a Prius, you know, don't buy a Leaf, just buy a Prius or anything else. Just don't buy a Leaf, don't buy a Nissan ev, don't buy a Nissan period. But don't buy a Nissan ev, you know, please don't.
Jeff Compton [00:15:22]:
They're just, they have no range. They were so problematic.
Eric Sprague [00:15:26]:
You know, I think realistically, hybrid is where we're headed, you know, long term it's sustainable.
Jeff Compton [00:15:32]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:15:32]:
I have a friend in Colorado, he's cracking me up every time we talk because of some of the stuff they're trying to do out there. So Colorado is pushing really hard for ev.
Jeff Compton [00:15:41]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:15:42]:
They do not have safety inspections in Colorado. They will put every car on the dyno, but they don't have a safety inspection. But they're trying to push every. All new construction, fully electric, no natural gas furnaces, no gas anything. It's like, what the hell do you. I grew up in Georgetown, Colorado. That's 70 miles into the Rockies. What the hell are you doing? How much electric are you running out there that's going to survive winter up there?
Jeff Compton [00:16:08]:
Yeah. Look out over the mountainside and see. Do you see a bunch of power lines running up there?
Eric Sprague [00:16:12]:
No. You know, it's insane. But they want to. They're pushing for EVs. It's like, what the hell are you going to do? Can't see. You already. Can't keep the grid alive in summer with AC. What are you going to do when it's 30 below in winter with all electric heating?
Jeff Compton [00:16:28]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:16:29]:
Plus EV charging, plus all this other crap. Wow. Really? Get real.
Jeff Compton [00:16:34]:
Yeah, yeah. And. And it's. Oh, solar or wind, you know, I don't. I mean, I guess you get some wind in Colorado, but I mean like not that much.
Eric Sprague [00:16:43]:
Yeah. I mean you not. Yeah, no, it's. It's laughable.
Jeff Compton [00:16:50]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:16:51]:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:16:53]:
Well, my God, my government by 2035 wants to have no. No ice being sold. You know what I mean? In Canada, that's their long term goal now they keep pushing it back and it could be, you know, now they're saying 20, 40, and that's all. But I mean, right down the road for me, I say like right down the road, three miles from my house, they took a whole bunch of essentially natural green space, bulldozed it, bunched, trucked in, I don't know how many, 30 tons of gravel and fill to level all up because they were going to build an EV battery factory. And then once our prime minister changed up here, which didn't change the party, just changed the prime minister, all of a sudden all the funding for that project just went away. And now it's sitting there, it's just this giant field with a layer of gravel on it. Nothing, nothing there, nothing being done, brand new fence built around it, the whole thing. And everybody's just like, what happened? You know, I thought, well, let's think about this, right? If, if the project can't fund itself without government funding financially, it's not that fiscally responsible.
Eric Sprague [00:17:59]:
How's the ice road gonna work? With EV semis?
Jeff Compton [00:18:02]:
Yeah, yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:18:03]:
I mean, I seem to recall there's some range limitations once you get super cold like that. How are they? How's the ice road gonna work? I mean, that's critical up there to the northern infrastructure as I understand it.
Jeff Compton [00:18:14]:
Yeah, 100, 100. And everybody thinks, well, it's just delivering groceries. Yes, it's delivering groceries. But the main thing is like if those trucks can't get the ore, the diamonds, the oil out of the north down into the, you know, spots where we can use all shuts down like you. It's not that the community doesn't have groceries to eat. There is no community. Like those are communities that are literally up there only for mining. And you know, they go across the ice, they deliver whatever needs to be done.
Jeff Compton [00:18:46]:
But it's all that stuff coming back. Yes, the infrastructure, it's the same as out in Fort Mac, you know, Alberta. It's the same thing. It's almost the same kind of climate, except that they're not crossing giant lakes to get there, but they are going out of Fort Mac, going north, up to Yukon, Nunavut, all these, you know, ecolog, all that kind of stuff. If those infrastructure shuts down, because all of a sudden everybody says it has to be and you know, an electronic truck that delivers it, everybody's like, nah, shut down that industry, then we're not happening. And you've seen Edison Motors, like if you really delve into what's happening in Edison motors, those are the guys that are retrofitting all those older, well, they were older trucks into Full EV trucks? Well, not, no, they're not full ev. They're full hybrid. Right.
Jeff Compton [00:19:37]:
Well, they're getting every pushback that they can from our government. They're getting almost no funding from our government. Every kind of obstacle in the world about trying to make them legal for sale right now in Canada. It's disgusting what our own government's doing to them. So it's got zero to do with, you know, environmental and do with money. Everything to do with it.
Eric Sprague [00:19:57]:
So wind turbines are nothing but scrap after they end their life cycle. They're not recyclable. You can't reclaim crap out of those.
Jeff Compton [00:20:04]:
I live in the, in one of the most populated areas for wind generation right now in, in Canada, right along my corridor, the St. Lawrence river on Lake Ontario. And you wouldn't believe the amount of them that are sitting there spinning right now, the blades turning around and there's no power being produced off of them because after about 20 years when the armature starts to go, nobody goes up in there and restores it because it fiscally just doesn't. It doesn't make sense to, you know, it's. They're all built with funding. They go up and after the 20, 25 year life cycle of them, they're just standing there making noise. That's all they're doing. They're not creating any power for the grid, so.
Eric Sprague [00:20:39]:
Such a waste. It is a waste.
Jeff Compton [00:20:43]:
Everybody thinks it's awesome. You know, I'm going to get on the ferry with my, my Prius and I'm going to go over there and plug in and I'm going to feel like I'm in my own little world because, you know, I' I'm living on Amherst island or Wolf island, and I plug my Prius in and, you know, my generator, you know, the wind chime charges my electric car and you're like, you are a loser.
Eric Sprague [00:21:02]:
Yeah. From the nuke down the street. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:21:09]:
What's. How's your, how's your. Can I say you're dipping your toe into the online content creation. How's that been going for you?
Eric Sprague [00:21:19]:
It's been fun, it's been challenging. There's a. I never appreciated how much goes into it.
Jeff Compton [00:21:26]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:21:27]:
You know, I've had the benefit of watching Lucas kind of build the podcast. It was very young when I came down to, to work for him, so I've kind of watched that grow. But, oh, my God, the amount of. I got my first piece, my first hate message that made me really happy. I guess that means I made it now.
Jeff Compton [00:21:43]:
Yes, you have.
Eric Sprague [00:21:44]:
But, you know, it's, it's. It's a lot of fun. I really enjoy it. You know, getting to do stuff like this. The solo videos are fun. This is so much more engaging. It's a lot more. It's a lot more fun to do from this side of it.
Eric Sprague [00:21:59]:
I love the fact that I do get a lot of positive feedback. That's. It's really nice to hear. There are people that actually get something out of it, which is. Is the whole point. You know, that's.
Jeff Compton [00:22:10]:
That's the thing for me, right? Like, it's. You get those messages where, like, you can have. You. I know you do. You have them and you have an ass kicker of a day, right? And you feel like everything you touched went sideways or didn't get done or, you know, didn't go the way you wanted. And then somebody reaches out to you in a message and says, thanks, dude. Like, I don't feel like I'm on an island after I hear, you know, your weekly rant or your podcast. Right? And that's, that's a heavy a dude.
Jeff Compton [00:22:35]:
Like, it's really cool to be able to, like, uplift that. Those, the younger people especially. But I get, I get people older than me, you know, our age, that say, like, I've been doing this 20 years and I've hated it for the last, you know, 15. And now I kind of understand what I need to do to, you know, go into the next. The, the next portion of my career, how I can do it with a better attitude and a better outlook. And, you know, they thank you for that. And it's like, I'm not doing anything special. I'm just having a conversation, you know, like, I don't think I'm.
Jeff Compton [00:23:06]:
I'm not. We're not bringing the magic, you know, secret sauce to this by any stretch, are we?
Eric Sprague [00:23:12]:
We're just, we're bringing it to the surface. You know, I mean, I was there. Lucas got me reinvigorated in this. I was ready to throw in the towel.
Jeff Compton [00:23:20]:
Y.
Eric Sprague [00:23:21]:
But yeah, it, it, you know, there's so much that is unspoken in this. There's so many things that are just so taboo. You can't talk about him, you can't bring them up. No, that needs to stop. We need, you know, we have a tech shortage because we don't acknowledge these things and we don't do anything about them.
Jeff Compton [00:23:38]:
Yeah. You know, examples of that because, like, I kind of know some of them, but, like, share some of that with me. You Know what you think is a real. Where we really need to delve in further between, you know, in the industry to get some of it brought to the surface.
Eric Sprague [00:23:54]:
Oh, man. So culture, I think, is probably the single biggest killer. You know, we don't. When I came into this, and I'm sure it was the same when you came into this, you know, it was hard knocks. Everything was mess around, find out.
Jeff Compton [00:24:08]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:24:09]:
And that, that was everything that we did was. You figured out if, you know, I mean, service info wasn't really a big thing. You know, you kind of look at it, you figure out how it comes apart. I mean, I wasn't diagnosing it. I was being told what parts to change. But you figure out how it comes apart, you figure out what went flying. You go find the stuff that flew out of it because you didn't know how it was put together. You put it back together and you kind of work your way through it.
Eric Sprague [00:24:33]:
Yeah, we didn't have the levels of integration and complexity that we do now. They were mechanical systems. They were doing electrical or electronic things, but they were mechanical systems.
Jeff Compton [00:24:44]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:24:45]:
You know, we're not evolving with, you know, the next generation coming in. They're not getting the nurturing that they need. And I'm not talking touchy feely, no huggy stuff, but you have young, absorbent minds coming into this. They need to be nurtured, that needs to be fed. It's a sponge. Treat it like an attorney. Throw at the wall and see what sticks and then run with it.
Jeff Compton [00:25:09]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:25:10]:
You know, I mean, you've got.
Jeff Compton [00:25:11]:
And I've talked so many times, like, I mean, it's. Everybody says the young people don't want to try anything, but I mean, like, I quit a lot. Like, people have heard me talk about like trying to pull a door panel off or a liftgate panel off. Right. Like, there's so many things that if you don't like and the service information is not always really clear and people are knowing like, well, where, what, what more do you need to know? I want like a diagram that shows me where the screws are. I'm that way. Show me so that I know how many there are and I get them.
Eric Sprague [00:25:40]:
All out before I put. Rip the panel off.
Jeff Compton [00:25:43]:
Right. Because then it's, hey, you know, I'm going towards this door latch, you know, switch that I need to test power and ground at. Right. And I'm trying to pull this panel off. And we just broke a $300 panel. There's not $300 profit there, right. But these people that write the service information, they're not getting to that next level. I feel in detail that the young people, the way their brains work, they need.
Jeff Compton [00:26:07]:
So everybody laughs. If they pull their phone out and they start looking at a YouTube video of somebody showing it to them, we immediately laugh at them and tell them that's ridiculous and it's crazy and how dare they sit there on their phone. And I'm going, he's trying to prevent. From breaking something. And then he's trying to, you know, understand better how to do this.
Eric Sprague [00:26:26]:
You know, like my, my process with the new guys with. When I have a trainee or even the guys I have in the shop now. I mean, I mentor, to varying degrees, all of them.
Jeff Compton [00:26:36]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:26:37]:
I mean, my first thing is check service info. If you can't find it there, Google it.
Jeff Compton [00:26:40]:
Yep.
Eric Sprague [00:26:41]:
I mean, I don't care if it's YouTube, Instagram, as long as it doesn't involve panorite removing the panel, I don't care.
Jeff Compton [00:26:48]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:26:49]:
In some cases that's fine too. But yeah, I mean, the, the service info. Now I will say I get a good mix of OE and aftermarket service info. I have been very burned by that one line at a page break. That doesn't make it over to all data or identifix.
Jeff Compton [00:27:06]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:27:06]:
Oh, I had a. I think I talked to you on it. A Cadillac eating up brakes. There was one step in the reset for the EHCU that was not an all data. That was in tis.
Jeff Compton [00:27:18]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:27:18]:
Which is shocking because I, I mean, you've used gmt. That is not a. That can be challenging. It's easy to find stuff once you know it, but it, like everything else, once you're familiar with it, it's easy.
Jeff Compton [00:27:31]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:27:32]:
I love Vista. It's easy as hell to use. There are some guys in this industry that you put them in front of Vista, they're going to drool. And it's not intuitive. It's not meant to be user friendly. But once you know how to use it, it's an insanely powerful tool. But it gives you all of those things. It gives you all the teardown steps, literally, page by page.
Eric Sprague [00:27:55]:
It gives you very detailed parts diagrams that all data simply does not have.
Jeff Compton [00:28:00]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:28:01]:
You know, and the, the. I get really pissed off with all that. I think I actually did a video about, you know, providing proper info and support.
Jeff Compton [00:28:09]:
Yep.
Eric Sprague [00:28:11]:
Ista, the actual scan tool. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff in it. Air is the service info.
Jeff Compton [00:28:16]:
Okay.
Eric Sprague [00:28:17]:
Does not require you to be connected to the Car. Yeah, Everything is there. So it's like. Don't tell me that it's not available without the scan tool. That's B.S. like, I'm paying you for service info. Give me accurate information. Yeah, but you know that there's so much of it.
Eric Sprague [00:28:35]:
There's so much raw information. We need to fix a vehicle now. It's insane. Yeah, I started in it. That was my path after the military didn't work out. I feel like that is more useful now than it would be if I was still working in it.
Jeff Compton [00:28:50]:
And you make an interesting point when you talk about the military, because I. I know some techs that have worked in the milit. A good friend of mine, actually. And the way they approach the job, like, you don't walk out to the machine without the service manual under your arm under any situation, under any circumstance, ever. Unless you're probably being shot at, where they allow you to actually put a tool at it without. Because it is just. It's part of it. They treat like it's aviation, and it doesn't matter whether it's a Chevy truck that they're putting brakes on.
Jeff Compton [00:29:17]:
You walk out there with your service manual. You know what I mean? And they're doing it. It's just so. There's no speed thought, you know, got to get this done fast and hurry up. It's all about following the process. And I think that, like, Sherwood Cook and I had a conversation just the other day, and, you know, Eric the car guy and I kind of talked about the same thing. We have to get back to this idea of craftsmanship. You know what I mean? Like, you're an actual craftsman and what you're trying to do, not just a.
Jeff Compton [00:29:44]:
An installer, but an actual craftsman. Somebody who. Because I hate that old age of. It's like being a doctor. It's not. It's not like being a doctor at all. You know, it is.
Eric Sprague [00:29:54]:
No, we can turn ours off.
Jeff Compton [00:29:57]:
Yeah, the patient's not as fun to talk to. Like, you know, you can't. You don't have as good a stories when it's all done. Like, you just don't. And, you know, when we. When we keep saying it's. You got to go back to, like, this is the way they used to build, you know, cabinetry or mason work or. So we have to approach it to that level of detail.
Jeff Compton [00:30:17]:
Now. I think if we want the young people to get it. Because they're not getting it. They're not. We're. We're running them out of them. So Fast, you know, and they show this little bit of glimmer and then it's like, I don't know if it's to get handed a paycheck or they get handed a tool belt or what. And it's just like they go, man, I, I really enjoy this, but it's just like I can't see a future in it, you know.
Jeff Compton [00:30:40]:
And you and I came through that tougher time. I think when you said it was like it was sink or swim or figure it out, you know, but. And we managed to. Not because we were tougher, but because it was just simpler stuff. It was simpler tech. I can remember. Like I could take a lot of a, of a Dodge product apart. I could take a lot of it apart trying something or checking something real quick without having to go to the service information.
Jeff Compton [00:31:04]:
It was just almost like it seemed more intuitive and more natural now. Like, look at how you do a window regulator in some of these modern cars. Like it's just, it's nuts, you know, it's absolutely ridiculous. Like it just, I feel for these kids because door latch recalls, you know, like you see what it takes to put a door latch in a modern car and you're like, this is friggin stupid.
Eric Sprague [00:31:28]:
You know, and that's, that's the other thing where I think a lot of us older guys are failing. If they show interest in something. Run with it. Yeah, run with it and segue it into other stuff. You know, I had a guy, I had a kid, great kid. I really miss him. Really interested in Dodge diesels because he drove one.
Jeff Compton [00:31:47]:
Right.
Eric Sprague [00:31:47]:
Like, okay, so we'll start there because I'm learning with you because I know, I know it's, it's six cylinders and they're in line and there's a turbo on the right side of it. Yeah, that's about as much as I know about them. So we're going to learn it together. And we did, we went through a lot of stuff. We learned. I mean I taught him how to program on that after he bricked it, bricked his pcm. But you know, there, there's, we have the old school thought where you start with bus and rubber. You start with lube, oil change.
Eric Sprague [00:32:18]:
Yeah, that needs to go. Yeah, we start with electrical. We start, I mean I start every one of my shop. They all start with standard enter. Yeah, they get the book, they get a sub and they are assigned videos to watch and then we talk about the videos. You know, that's, I mean we have to start with electricity because if you don't start with electrical. You're not going to get anywhere even with brakes.
Jeff Compton [00:32:40]:
I know, I know. I talked to so many guys now and, and it's just like the electronic parking brake thing just as like. Or you know, and it's the one of my threads, somebody's like, oh, what? You know, like all the old days we used to say that, you know, the big argument was you crack the bleeder when you push the piston back or not. You know, And I'm like, it's got nothing to do anymore with whether you're pushing dirt up into there or not. It's got everything to do with what's it going to do to the module if you don't take the cap off. You what? I mean, we used to laugh at people that said, oh, you got to take the cap off or else you're gonna. No, you're gonna take the cap off now or you are gonna cause a problem with the module. It's just a given.
Jeff Compton [00:33:19]:
And if you think you're not, you know, it's like shop. I know he does not use any of the service steps. When I last talked to him to put any of the ebb EPB into service mode. He grabs his power probe and he goes back there and he's like, listen, it's worked for me for five years. I've done on every car and I.
Eric Sprague [00:33:36]:
Go, until it doesn't.
Jeff Compton [00:33:38]:
Until it doesn't. That scares the hell out of me. You know, I'll do it on the, on the Euro. Like I was gonna say, I'll do it on everything but the Euro stuff.
Eric Sprague [00:33:49]:
I just about had a reaction. No, I think there's a, you know, I mean you get away with it till you don't. It's like anything else. You know, I, I have a power probe. I use it very sparingly. Yeah, I have other ways to test that don't require it. But you know, all it takes is one press in the wrong place. I think I've.
Eric Sprague [00:34:10]:
In the past couple of years, I think I've probably replaced 15 modules because a power probe was used where it shouldn't have been.
Jeff Compton [00:34:15]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:34:17]:
Even just simple screw ups, you know, you're going to check a ground circuit, you load it up with a light bulb on it and whoops, touch the wrong pin and let all the magic smoke out and I can't. I haven't figured out how to put it back in yet.
Jeff Compton [00:34:28]:
No, it's.
Eric Sprague [00:34:31]:
You know, I think. Oh, go ahead.
Jeff Compton [00:34:33]:
It, it's something that I think is like you know, you would want to teach them how to do it with the safety, with the service information first and then be able to show them, you know, the shortcut or the alternative method, I guess you could say, right. If somebody was like, hey, you know, if you want to do this real quick and, you know, you only had one tool, and the tool is being used for something, and, you know, you had to get it done, here's how you could do it. But always with that caveat of, but really we shouldn't do it that way if we can avoid it. You know, do it that way.
Eric Sprague [00:35:07]:
Always, always start the proper way. Always start it. It does two things. It shows them the correct way to do it. It also builds the habit of checking service info every time and learning the correct way to do it and learning what the caveats are.
Jeff Compton [00:35:21]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:35:22]:
You know, filling up brake fluid. I want to fire people when I see them fill up brake fluid. It's like you're disabling a safety system. Right back to that, Right?
Jeff Compton [00:35:31]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:35:31]:
If the light's on, it's not because the fluid evaporated. There is a problem. Something's worn out, something's leaking.
Jeff Compton [00:35:38]:
Yeah. It used to be every couple days in the quick lube, the advisor would come back and there'd be. The car would be on the quick lube out in the front next to the advisors desks. Right. There was a drive on quickly bay, and he'd say, I need some brake fluid to put in this car. The lights on. And the customer's like, here for oil change. I'm like, no, you need to send that to the back.
Jeff Compton [00:35:54]:
Well, no, they don't have time to do it today. Oh, my God. Are you even having a conversation with the customer what this really means right now? Right. Because you. You and I know there. There's more than 50 wear there. If the light's on. Like, it's.
Jeff Compton [00:36:08]:
That's. A substantial amount of fluid has now gone, you know, into the outer realm with a caliper. Like we probably should have at least.
Eric Sprague [00:36:16]:
Or something heated itself. And it's all over the road, Right?
Jeff Compton [00:36:19]:
Yeah. And, you know, some customers like the way they drive. My mother could roll a brake blind, and I bet you she wouldn't even know because she's so light on the brake. She's a type, Eric. Like, you know, when she sees the car way off in the distance, slowing down, she's getting off the gas. You know what I mean? Like, she can. She coasts up most of the time just not putting the brake on.
Eric Sprague [00:36:38]:
Yeah. Do you follow NASCAR at all? That's kind of how my mom drives. That's how I love my mom, but that woman is hard on vehicles.
Jeff Compton [00:36:46]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:36:48]:
I think every accident I've been involved in, I was in the car and she was driving. Oh. On the bright side, though, I gotta say, Mom, I know you're gonna watch this. It wasn't your fault. I promise. It wasn't your fault. Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, it's little stupid things like that.
Eric Sprague [00:37:04]:
Those little things that we were always told were okay. I mean, I was encouraged to fill up every fluid.
Jeff Compton [00:37:10]:
Yeah, yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:37:12]:
Not, you know, and it never registered that, hey, if the fluid's low, oil doesn't evaporate, you know, it. There's a problem there, there's a reason to flow.
Jeff Compton [00:37:22]:
What drives me nuts is when I work for some people sometimes and they say, like the car's in for an oil change and it's got a transmission that doesn't use a dipstick. And checking the fluid levels are rather, you know, involved process. Right. Involving a scan tool and a temperature and a test drive and all that kind of stuff. And the customer will say, well, what's the transmission fluid like? And I'm like, yeah, it drove in here. It's not shifting. You know, funny like, oh, did you check it? Nope. Well, why didn't you check it? Because it doesn't have a dipstick.
Jeff Compton [00:37:51]:
And to check it is about a 30 minute process. Did you want to pay extra for that? And that's just the way I talk. And then this is the advisor or the, you know, shop owner. Look at me like I'm crazy. Okay, we'll go out and check that fluid level.
Eric Sprague [00:38:06]:
See, in an hour.
Jeff Compton [00:38:07]:
Yeah. And see, in an hour is fine. I don't mind doing that. But it was like when somebody would say, okay, well what are we charging for that? Well, why do we have to charge them? Because it's an actual process and a procedure and you know, has a timestamp related to that. Let's show the, you know, efficiency in production where it's supposed to be. Everybody goes, I'll just, just, just do it this time. Like, same as, just add the brake fluid to it this time. Like, no, let's.
Jeff Compton [00:38:35]:
The process, you know, let's do it the right way.
Eric Sprague [00:38:38]:
You look at a 10R or a 6R, you're 190 to 215. You are going to remove all of the hair off your forearms. Getting the dipstick tube out because it's right up against the bank. Duke Bank One Cat.
Jeff Compton [00:38:49]:
Oh, yes.
Eric Sprague [00:38:50]:
It's, you know, and you've got such a narrow window. The dipstick is 50, 50 gonna pop. Because they're made of, you know, some sort of really, we'll call it low quality plastic. Yeah, I'm sorry, it's a composite. I'm sorry, I, I misspoke.
Jeff Compton [00:39:07]:
Yeah, we can't see.
Eric Sprague [00:39:11]:
But yeah, it's. You know, there's such a lack of understanding about so many things. And then we bring, you know, some shops will bring these kids in and throw them to the wolves and wonder why they get so disgusted.
Jeff Compton [00:39:23]:
Yeah. Or they'll freak out because that customer waited now an hour and 20 minutes for what we told them was only gonna be half an hour. Oil change. Right. As we didn't convey the expectation, the customer. It's like, sure, we can check that for you. But it now is going to add, you know, double the time to your. And I know somebody's going to go double the time.
Jeff Compton [00:39:43]:
We're talking round numbers here. People like, I know you probably checked in seven minutes and you're the best tech ever. But, you know, we're being realistic with the young people here. Like, if there's now a process that takes a mentor to go out, show them, okay, this is what the scan tool is going to have to read. This is the process. Here's your two pages that we're going to print off. It's like, you remember Brian's video where he made. Where he talked about actually, like servicing the fluid in the CVT and a Nissan.
Jeff Compton [00:40:08]:
It's a lot more involved than everybody thinks. Like it's, it's fill it, drain it out, fill it again. That's the right way to do it. And I remember seeing that from the dealer and it was this. That's the right way to do it. But Ryan's like, 95 of the people get that wrong. You know, they do, they do. They don't read the second half.
Jeff Compton [00:40:27]:
It's like that. You've seen that bulletin from Ford. It's in somebody. Brian's class. He talks about when the, when it's got catalyst faults on the trucks. And you know, you've seen this, you're nodding your head, you're going, yeah, I know. Because you read that bullet and it says like, okay, Art, you're thinking, I gotta order all these parts. I'm putting cats in it.
Jeff Compton [00:40:46]:
No, there's a whole process to that that's supposed to be done, you know, and then you have to essentially, you know, interrogate the truck. To a level to know whether it's going to come back or not. And then maybe you order parts. You know, like it's. I saw so many shop owners. It's like you print the TSB off and you show them the bulletin and they go, oh, so I got to order all those parts? No, no, you got to read through the bullets and understand what the next steps. This is going to be two, three hour process with this truck. Like, is the customer.
Jeff Compton [00:41:14]:
What do they want to do? Oh, they just were wondering if it was going to take to get the light out. Well, you know, first step is this. You know, that's your first step in your diagnosis. Well, it's three hours. Yeah, yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:41:26]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [00:41:26]:
It's a lot of driving.
Eric Sprague [00:41:27]:
Three hours.
Jeff Compton [00:41:28]:
Yeah. Yeah. That's the, that's the frustrating thing for me is we're not. And you know, people talk about Eric like it's. It's leadership. Leadership. Leadership. Leadership and culture.
Jeff Compton [00:41:40]:
Right. Those are the two buzzwords. But it's, it's so much of this is like, how do we become more effective at communicating? Because I know, like, you're good at it. I'm not so much good at communicating with my advisor. Right. Like, I'm not. I'm not good at it.
Eric Sprague [00:41:55]:
You're better now. I use AI now. So our counter is very unique. The ladies we have up there are excellent at what they do, but they are not tech minded people.
Jeff Compton [00:42:09]:
Right.
Eric Sprague [00:42:10]:
We didn't necessarily want tech minded people up there.
Jeff Compton [00:42:13]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:42:14]:
My Jade, she. She is definitely very upfront. If she doesn't understand a write up, she's out there asking me about it. And when they come out and ask me about it, all that tells me I need to do better job on the write up. Lucas, in his infinite brilliance, came out and said, hey, dude, why don't you try using AI to write that and simplify it. I'm like, maybe that could work. And it's worked out phenomenally well.
Jeff Compton [00:42:39]:
Excellent.
Eric Sprague [00:42:41]:
You've seen my writeups. They are heavy meds. I mean, they're Valium. They're all there is much for me. So if something comes back six months later or I'm wrong, I can a. I can go back and analyze where I screwed up. I am very willing to rip my estimates to pieces to figure out where I screwed up.
Jeff Compton [00:43:00]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:43:01]:
But I know it was done. I know it was tested. I know where to start looking if I created a problem and it happens. You stick something in a little too far and you open it up too much and now it's not making good contact where you didn't have. Where you had. Didn't have an issue before. Yeah, but being able to communicate that, you know. Yeah, absolutely.
Eric Sprague [00:43:19]:
Communication is critical. We've. And it's got to go. It's got to be an open. An open door. It's got to go both ways. But there has the other big part of communication. There has to be trust.
Jeff Compton [00:43:31]:
Right.
Eric Sprague [00:43:32]:
You know, my writers have to trust that if they come out and they ask me about something, I'm not going to fly off the handle. If. If I'm laying over a car setting a chain on and they're asking me about write up from three days ago, I'm probably going to look at them chuckle and yeah, when I get there, I'll get there. Yeah, I'm going to prioritize it, but I'm not going to stop a critical process to go look at something. But there has to be trust that they know I'm going to get back to it. I'm going to get them the answers they need or whatever. Whatever it is, you know, there's got to be trust that it's not going to be a pissing contest of you don't understand it. That's not my problem.
Eric Sprague [00:44:08]:
You know, and that's having, you know, we joke about safe spaces and all that, but it's got to be real. I mean, it's got to be completely real. You know, not in the sense that I'm going to hold your hand through this, but, you know, if you have a question, just ask it. It's cheaper if you ask the question now than you ask it later.
Jeff Compton [00:44:28]:
Now, I don't want to get too personal, but lnn kind of for the last year, like, you guys had some obstacles, right? Kind of some changes went through and, and can you. Did you feel comfortable talking about that or.
Eric Sprague [00:44:41]:
Yeah, of course.
Jeff Compton [00:44:42]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:44:43]:
Yeah. So we, we expanded. We moved into a new shop about two years ago. We've had some expansion. Growing pains, I guess would be the right way to say it. The biggest thing that, you know, the biggest thing we've always struggled with. I've been here six years now.
Jeff Compton [00:45:01]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:45:02]:
The biggest thing we've always struggled with has been people that fit the culture. Our culture is just, I think unique is a fair word for it.
Jeff Compton [00:45:10]:
Not like nothing. Not even close. Not even close.
Eric Sprague [00:45:14]:
You know, so we're, we're. Everybody says it's like a family. We legitimately are. Lucas is one of my best friends on the planet.
Jeff Compton [00:45:23]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:45:25]:
And it goes both ways. If I need something he's there. If he needs something, I'm there. It's. And it's the entire crew. You know, everybody. We've gone through a lot of struggles together. We are incredibly close.
Eric Sprague [00:45:36]:
Finding people that fit, that is challenging.
Jeff Compton [00:45:39]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:45:41]:
You know, everybody says they're like a family, but 99 of the shops, they're promising the moon and they're going to give you a pile of sand off some shitty radiated beach somewhere.
Jeff Compton [00:45:49]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:45:51]:
So we. We brought in an operations manager at the beginning of the year. That was. That was not great, though. He came out of a dealer, and he did not see a reason to do things differently than he had at the dealer. One of our. I'm not going to call him a tech trainee because I think that's kind of. He's.
Eric Sprague [00:46:15]:
It's not what it is, but he's a younger tech. He's learning, he's growing. Threw a check engine light at him on a Beamer or bends, and it's like, no, that's. That needs to come to me. Oh, no, give it to him. He'll figure it out.
Jeff Compton [00:46:29]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:46:30]:
I went and grabbed a scan tool, set it down in front of him. I'm like, why don't you go take a look at it? You'll figure it out. Well, I don't know how to do that. Neither does he. It's no different. Yeah, but there was a lot of. A lot of things that weren't being done the way they should be done as far as internal procedures, procedures with clients. And it really kind of woke us all up to some of the shortcomings that.
Eric Sprague [00:46:56]:
Not shortcomings, but some of the shortfalls that we made when we moved. We didn't scale very effectively, and I don't think any of us anticipated some of the challenges.
Jeff Compton [00:47:04]:
Right.
Eric Sprague [00:47:05]:
And it was the same thing when I moved down. You know, Lucas and I talked about a lot of the differences, a lot of the things that were going to be different coming from New York City down here. The really important ones we didn't even think about. And it was the same thing when we moved. We didn't. We didn't anticipate a lot of the challenges we were going to come up with, you know, and the. The personnel's part of it. Scaling overall operations, you know, going from two and a half bays to ten bays is.
Eric Sprague [00:47:35]:
Well, it changes things.
Jeff Compton [00:47:36]:
Yeah, yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:47:37]:
It. You know, it's a lot more. There's a lot more. Obviously a lot more capacity. There's a lot more balls that have the potential to get dropped and I. I'm pretty good at managing, but I. I struggle to balance between tracking everything and working on what I have in front of me. That's probably my single biggest thing that I struggle with that impacts the overall shop.
Eric Sprague [00:48:04]:
I am. Our testing now, with some of the personnel changes we've made, we're working towards it, but right Now, I do 90 of the testing.
Jeff Compton [00:48:11]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:48:13]:
So that I become a massive bottleneck for the shop.
Jeff Compton [00:48:16]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:48:18]:
So it's. You know, there's a lot of moving parts, especially once you get to the size we're at. It's. And going from where we were to what we have become. It's really challenging to scale that and do it smoothly without, you know, really upsetting the balance and everything and managing to keep stuff moving still.
Jeff Compton [00:48:37]:
Yeah. And. And I think, like, you know, you and I talked about a lot behind the scenes. When you started with. With Lucas, it was a lot of. You both were in a much smaller scale still triaging cars. Right. Like, you could go and check out a car, he could go check out a car.
Jeff Compton [00:48:54]:
You know, problems off of each other, feeling ideas off of each other, and you were getting stuff done with him being removed from the shop. And, you know, he talks all the time, and he jokes about, like, you know, you don't want me fixing cars, but really, like, the guy is very, very, very, very good at fixing cars and diagnosing cars, and he doesn't. You know, he just sloughs it off. But, I mean, when you remove him from the. Completely out of the building most days, and then it falls to somebody else, and we're still trying to run at this increased pace. I. I can't. I joke all the time.
Jeff Compton [00:49:26]:
I was like, you couldn't. If I was to come down and put on an LNN shirt, like, I'd be doing George's job. We'd have to promote George. And I'm just gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna run the detail bay because, like, I don't. I don't think I could step in and hit the ground at the pace that he would need me to. Right.
Jeff Compton [00:49:42]:
And I just think it's. Because. Not that you guys say yes to everything, but, I mean, you have such a high standard of what you're trying to give the customer in terms of an experience and professionalism and everything else, that the bottleneck is a. Is a great way. Is a very polite way to put it. It is a. I. I picture this, like, bag of snow or something hanging right over your head, and it's like, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip.
Jeff Compton [00:50:12]:
Any minute, you know, that that bag's gonna.
Eric Sprague [00:50:15]:
And have you been to the Hoover Dam? That's what it feels like. And it's not. You know, I. I said it before. You know, Lucas really invigorate. Reinvigorated my interest in the industry. And it's the approach.
Jeff Compton [00:50:29]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:50:30]:
But, yeah, the thoroughness we provide, we definitely will say no to vehicles.
Jeff Compton [00:50:34]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:50:35]:
In some cases, we probably should be more aggressive with that, but, you know, it is what it is. There are vehicles on the road. We need to provide a safe, reliable, repaired vehicle at the end of the day.
Jeff Compton [00:50:47]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:50:48]:
But we also, with that, have that obligation to tell somebody if they have a vehicle that is not safely repairable. We got to tell them that.
Jeff Compton [00:50:55]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:50:56]:
You know, and we know that pretty quick. You know, we. We get it up on the lift. If half of the car is still on the ground. That's a clue.
Jeff Compton [00:51:02]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:51:03]:
Or we put it up and, you know, there's 70 pounds of rust under the car, and the lift is hitting bodywork now where it wasn't. Doesn't happen often, but, you know, usually we know pretty quick. It's like, look, we need to make phone call. We just make phone call and tell them, hey, dude.
Jeff Compton [00:51:21]:
Yeah. And because you and I both were familiar with that northern climate kind of car. Right. We see a lot of that. We've seen more of it than. Than Lucas, I think, saw before you came down. Right.
Eric Sprague [00:51:30]:
Like, it's worse here. It's worse here than it was in New York City. They're old down here. New York people turn cars over, I guess, three to five years. The roads destroy them.
Jeff Compton [00:51:41]:
Right.
Eric Sprague [00:51:42]:
I mean, we still have people calling us with stuff out of the 90s, but the way they salt the roads down here. Oh, my God. I mean, they're curing the roads like a country ham down here. It's insane.
Jeff Compton [00:51:53]:
Yeah. Because, I mean, like, people joke, but up here, like, if somebody hands you keys for a 13 equinox and says, here, go put it on, like, you just kind of laugh because you're like, the drive on. We don't have a drive on. So, like, what am I doing here? Like, you know, so you're getting really creative with how you're. Where you're grabbing because there is no rocker panel left. You know, my mom drives a 14 Equinox, but I mean, we've been undercoating that thing since it was brand new for. So, I mean, it's been. It's been.
Jeff Compton [00:52:20]:
It's a different Thing, you know, like. But people just laugh. But then I see like, you guys like it. Luke was walking through the yard and I'm seeing like a mid-90s Ford truck and I'm seeing like an early 2000s, you know, 450. And I'm like, good God, man. Like that's up here. Like he wouldn't be able to even open the driver's door on the Ford because there'd be no floor pan for the door to shut against. Right.
Jeff Compton [00:52:45]:
And I say door pan, but that's because they're floor pan. Because the sill is pushed in. Sills pushed in there.
Eric Sprague [00:52:52]:
They don't need doors. They're optional at that point. No, we've got, we've had. Well, look at the one we did the video on on that super duty. That came from the dealer. Yeah, the. I think I spent probably an hour and a half trying to get those knock sensors out just to inspect the dpf.
Jeff Compton [00:53:11]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:53:11]:
I was doing pull ups off the wrench. I mean I am, I'm trimming down, but I'm not a little guy. I'm short, but I'm wide.
Jeff Compton [00:53:20]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:53:22]:
You know, but it's like. Yeah, I, I spent. I ended up spending two hours to get that particulate matter sensor out and the bung came out with it. So we're waiting on a bung now.
Jeff Compton [00:53:31]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:53:33]:
But yeah, it's, you know, it. There's a whole different scale of things down here. You know, the, the rust is definitely a thing, but there's also a lot of. I tried it first. That I in no way anticipated.
Jeff Compton [00:53:48]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:53:49]:
It's not as bad on newer stuff, thankfully.
Jeff Compton [00:53:52]:
Right.
Eric Sprague [00:53:55]:
But it's, you know, it's an element of the simplicity that people perceive out of vehicles that. That's checked. That's left the chat a long time ago.
Jeff Compton [00:54:05]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:54:06]:
So it's. Yeah. I mean, there, there. It's definitely, you know, the shortage and what we need to do to fix it is a multifaceted problem. We could spend the next six weeks talking about it.
Jeff Compton [00:54:19]:
Yeah. The shortage is a real thing. Like up here. Especially like people, you know, I say it all the time. People don't really believe me, but like every shop in the city is trying to hire a mechanic right now. Every shop. And I'm not. It used to be like every dealer was always trying to hire a tech.
Jeff Compton [00:54:35]:
Now is. Every shop is trying to hire. It is retail ridiculous. And it's, you know, and, and there's a. I find the young people that, you know and you and I can relate to this, because we both have dealer backgrounds, right. And I find that when you get some of the young people to come in and they leave the dealer network and they say they try their hand at the, at an LNN or kind of shop that I'm at or been at, like, they, we immediately come in and go like, wow, there's such a culture change and a reprogramming almost because, you know what I mean, right? Like, oh, yeah, you get the guys that have been in the dealer and the pattern failure thing is a real thing. And it was like, I never knew how much I relied on it until I stepped out of the dealer world. And then I was like, wow.
Jeff Compton [00:55:20]:
And it wasn't that I didn't fix the car, but it was like the diag. That used to take me 10 minutes. It now took me an hour to finally flesh it out and prove it. Whereas I just knew in 10 minutes at the dealer that, yes, it's that again. But I would have to go and be like an oxygen sensor code in a gm. I better actually go and do my due diligence and like, you know, unpin the pcm. And back in the day with Krauser, I never, you know, I didn't, I didn't unpin it. You know, I went down to it.
Jeff Compton [00:55:46]:
I did my test there. Now with the way this other stuff fails, you're damn right I'm unpinning and I'm, you know, doing my checks properly the way I'm supposed to. I'm, I'm pulling out my lab scope and calling Brian to say, how do I, you know, what does this mean? Like, I do all that kind of stuff now? Because you have to, you have to. Because the safety net of like, well, isn't there with, with, with, you know, in the independent side. And that's what I find when the young people come out of the dealer. Thing is they go, they're not dumb. They know very common things. You can hand them a car and they can go out to it and they're going to come in and go, yeah, it's exactly what I thought it would be.
Jeff Compton [00:56:24]:
Right. But if you try to get them to slow down, that's when I find I have the really hard problem of trying to get them to slow down and learn the process. I think you, you guys ran into that too, with some of your people that you've had. Yeah, but you know what? I'm. You know where I'm going with this, right? Like, it's. Oh, yeah, it really is.
Eric Sprague [00:56:49]:
Well, and the you know, the dealer culture from my experiences with it is all about volume. It's all about rotating bays as quickly as you possibly can.
Jeff Compton [00:56:58]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:56:58]:
You know, the dealer environment gives you a huge advantage in line familiarity. You can have 50 different badges on the back of a car. You know, Ford Lincoln Mercury. When I was there, it was all three. You know, you got 50 different nameplates, you have 10 different vehicles. If that many, you know, you have three or four powertrains, you might have four different chassis. If you're at VW you have one chassis of varying sizes, but you know, you have, there's very little variation between them. So you have, you know, you can take, whether it's a Flex or an mkx, you can look at it and say, okay, well you know, it's this.
Jeff Compton [00:57:36]:
Yep.
Eric Sprague [00:57:37]:
You have a database of stuff, it's all under warranty. So you still have great engineering support. TSBs are still going to apply. And not to say they don't apply in what we do, but software tsbs, those are up there because they exist, but by the time we see it, they've already been done.
Jeff Compton [00:57:56]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:57:57]:
You know, TSBs rarely, they can give us some headway or some direction, but they're rarely going to be the be all end all cause of an issue.
Jeff Compton [00:58:07]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [00:58:08]:
Cooling, DSP.
Jeff Compton [00:58:09]:
Yeah. You're not going to fix a 420 DTC on an eight year old car with a software flash. You know what I mean? Like you and I saw that the car was three months old and there was an update for 420. They're just changing this, you know, they're changing the window. Right. Of what? We look at it, we ignore it at this temperature. Right. Because otherwise it's going to flag it.
Jeff Compton [00:58:26]:
You know how it goes. But you would see those cars now, eight, nine years later. I can remember seeing in the aftermarket and I'm like, well, there's a bulletin. Crap. That bulletin was written like two years after the thing was built. Like this is now 10 years old. It's probably not gonna need that software flash. Like it's, it's a good thing to put down on the work order and say as per bulletin, blah, blah blah would recommend.
Jeff Compton [00:58:47]:
But you're still quoting the cat, right? Because it's gonna. Or not necessarily quoting. Let me back up. You're still interrogating the cat like you should be interrogating the top. Where back in the day at the dealer. Right. We wh. Sucker in here.
Jeff Compton [00:59:00]:
We did the software update, we kicked it out the door. We didn't do anything. Yeah. We didn't do QC on that after because we knew it's under warranty. That's the first step that they would want to be done anyway. But now when that car is like, you know, nobody's seen that car at a dealership in three years. It's a much different process. And that's where I struggle with some of these kids that I've seen come out of the dealer is like trying to get them to slow down, to go fast is really tough, you know.
Jeff Compton [00:59:26]:
And it's. And proper road test. Oh my crap. Like I wrote test. I'm same as you. I spend so much time in the seat driving cars just to get a familiar with what the data looks like or what the car feels like or operates. Because I'm driving everything now. I'm driving Mercedes, Volvo, like BMW, more Volkswagen than I ever wanted to ride in.
Jeff Compton [00:59:49]:
Is this normal or not? Right? And then it's like, okay, maybe I got another one. So I get another one off the lot and drive it it like back to the dealer thing. Right. Three chassis. You knew what they felt like drove, like, sounded like held the road. Like all of that stuff. You knew all of that by. By three months in now, if it took that long.
Jeff Compton [01:00:07]:
Yeah. Now it's like, my God. Like, I don't know what's normal. No, they just all ride like that. Like you get into some of this stuff and you're like, people drive these like, it drives like, like bumpy, clunky. Oh, yeah. It's like driving a Jeep, you know, like. Oh, yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:00:23]:
No. Well, last week it was funny. We. I was going through, you know, so I keep track of what I work on. Like every vehicle. I have a spreadsheet that I track just so I can keep track of where I'm at.
Jeff Compton [01:00:33]:
Right.
Eric Sprague [01:00:35]:
I had one day, I looked, I went from a Jeep Patriot to a BMW X5 to an S something S class Mercedes to an F450 to an F150. It's like, damn, we have just covered the ex. Just about the expanse of my kid's life in year spread. And it's like, yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:01:03]:
And the buzz, restraint. Do you know what I mean? That Patriot, way different than the S class and way different again than the 250, you know?
Eric Sprague [01:01:13]:
Yeah. Or any of them, I mean. But yeah, throwaway vehicles. It, you know, planned obsolescence. That's something that we get, we hear thrown around a lot. I don't necessarily subscribe to it wholesale.
Jeff Compton [01:01:27]:
No.
Eric Sprague [01:01:28]:
I think there are certainly cases like Nissan CVT's where that's probably a thing or just stubbornness. I tend to keep the fluid and just replace transmissions easier. But you know, you look at what, look at the impact that's had on CVT's in general. I have never seen a Ford 500 eat a CVT. I've very rarely seen a Subaru CVT fail without help.
Jeff Compton [01:01:55]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:01:55]:
If you're towing a 15 foot camper behind your outback, your transmission is not going to appreciate it.
Jeff Compton [01:02:02]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:02:03]:
You know we're in mountains but I'm.
Jeff Compton [01:02:06]:
The same age as you. I could, you can remember the first Saturn CVT's, the first CVT's that went into the. But you can remember the first ones that went into the Dodge Calibers and stuff. Like they were problem free for the most part. Like they didn't have issues back in.
Eric Sprague [01:02:19]:
The 80s, the Subarus back in the 80s, the old, what was it, the Brad or the Justy. That was the, that was a cvt.
Jeff Compton [01:02:25]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:02:25]:
And they were bulletproof.
Jeff Compton [01:02:27]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:02:27]:
Then Nissan got involved and screwed it up.
Jeff Compton [01:02:30]:
Well and that's the thing. Honda had CVT for years before. Nissan's got their reputation. You know like everybody's like, I can remember taking them to trade school and everybody's like, yeah, it's, it's used by a handful of people now. And then when the Nissan thing came along and every, it didn't matter as long as it wasn't a Frontier or a Titan, it was going to need a cvt.
Eric Sprague [01:02:50]:
Let's figure out how to push a rope.
Jeff Compton [01:02:52]:
Yeah. And then it was, all of a sudden it was like everybody, the whole industry was like asking, well does this type of car have a CVT transmit? Well sure it does. Yeah it does. But I mean it's, it's a GM and this particular one is not known for issues. Oh, because you know my aunt has a Nissan with a CV and she's had two transmissions put in. Yeah, yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:03:11]:
You know like it's, it's a seasonal maintenance item. Yeah. I mean now for this ptus but you know it's, it's such a, a spread but that, that hive mentality, you know that, that's something that I think a lot of the trade schools are not good at. They'll, they'll teach these kids. They're going to come in and they give them horribly unrealistic expectations. You're going to come into this and you're going to make 150,000 a year your first year. Where. Yeah, it doesn't say Koenigsegg on the side of the building.
Eric Sprague [01:03:42]:
I don't know if that's. That, that's realistic.
Jeff Compton [01:03:45]:
No, it's not. You know, and. And again, they can get all their certs that they want, you know, and they can get into, say in the. They can learn it really fast. The dealership, right. And they can kind of get in and fall in with the right. Maybe the right team at a dealer and they can make some good money. Their first year, their first couple years, they can, you know, tool debt completely doesn't really swallow them up.
Jeff Compton [01:04:10]:
But man, like, if you try to get them into the aftermarket and do the same thing, it's the. They're. The idea that they should expect, you know, to make six figures within five years working in an independent shop is ludicrous to me. It's just like you're only scratching the surface now of what you need to learn. And I mean, coming up through the dealer, man, I was. We were so lucky, you and I, because it was like we could fall on that pattern failure and we could learn, you know, what was problematic for the cars. And when we were writing our estimates, we knew how to do the inspection really well because we knew what to look for. Now.
Eric Sprague [01:04:43]:
We had the guys that supported us, you know, we had guys that actually cared. I mean, my team leader at my Ford store, Nick, was awesome. Yeah, I loved working with him because he was willing to take the time and invest the time in me. You know, ultimately it helped him, but he was willing to put the time in. And there's so many guys now that refuse to, you know. Well, I had. It took me forever to learn this. It's going to take you 10 years.
Eric Sprague [01:05:08]:
We don't have 10 years.
Jeff Compton [01:05:09]:
Years. No.
Eric Sprague [01:05:10]:
You know, take the hour or two a week. That's all it takes. It doesn't take a massive commitment out of the gate. It does. I mean, when these kids are green, you need them pretty much zip tied to you the whole day. Every job just became a two person job. As awkward as that can be at times. But you have to do it, you know, I mean, these kids today don't.
Eric Sprague [01:05:32]:
It's not that they're not resilient, you know, it's not that they're not not driven. Edit it's not that they're not driven. It's not that they're not resilient. It's that they've had a different upbringing than us. It's not even that it's been easier. It's just different. You know, we didn't have the resources at our fingertips to be able to look stuff up. We had to research it.
Eric Sprague [01:05:56]:
We had to go to the library. We had to use an encyclopedia, whatever it was.
Jeff Compton [01:05:59]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:06:00]:
You know, these kids learn differently, but it's. So we can't keep applying the old logic to the new kids coming in because they don't absorb knowledge the same way. They don't process knowledge the same way.
Jeff Compton [01:06:14]:
No, they don't.
Eric Sprague [01:06:15]:
We have to adapt to it.
Jeff Compton [01:06:16]:
They don't memorize anything anymore. Like, you and I memorize all kinds of stuff. They don't have to, man, because they just Google or Chat gtp, you know, what's the firing order for a small block? Shed 1-843-6572. You and I have that ingrained in our brains from when we were pops, but they don't have it anymore because they don't need to remember it. Right. Like, Chat GTP wears cylinder six on, you know, blah, blah, blah. Oh, it's the one under the intake. Cool.
Jeff Compton [01:06:42]:
Like, in the time that we would have had to go over and type that up and look it up, or pull our phone out and type it into Google. They're asking Google and then they're getting the answer right away. So to think that, like, they have so many more tools towards them and yet everybody says, oh, they're, They're. They're inefficient as. They're not inefficient. We're just trying to. To push a rope. It's like you said, we're essentially trying to do that.
Jeff Compton [01:07:05]:
We're trying to, like, shove them. And they don't want to be shoved. They want to be not led. But draw me the map of what you want this to look like when it's done, and I'll. I'll get there. I'm 100 convinced most of these young people can do it. I've seen them do it. It's, you know, the same thing.
Jeff Compton [01:07:23]:
Whether they have it in their hands or not, you can still physically identify that. But these kids where it's like, you can tell that their problem solving is going like this and they're getting there, but they don't necessarily have this in their hands, but that one that can, like, see all the gears turning in their head, man, that's an asset to have. That's somebody that, like, in the old days, we would have thrown that kid away. And now.
Eric Sprague [01:07:46]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:07:47]:
Oh, you got to build that because, like, that's the kid that's gonna go out and triage cars for you. And diagnose cars and test cars and then somebody else will be putting the parts in, in. You know what I mean? And the next day it's going to be another Eric where they're. They're looking at three and four more cars and, and you know, well, and that's.
Eric Sprague [01:08:06]:
But that's, you know, we've got to be the ones to adapt. We, the, the us old stubborn bastards in this industry. We're the ones who have to change and adapt to, you know, to be able to convey what we need to convey in a way they can digest it.
Jeff Compton [01:08:21]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:08:21]:
And we're so resistant to do that. I mean, we're all resistant to change. Right. Change is uncomfortable. Change doesn't feel good.
Jeff Compton [01:08:27]:
Good.
Eric Sprague [01:08:27]:
But we have to do it. I mean, we're driving ourselves into the ground. This industry has spent a century driving it, driving everybody into the ground. We have got to stop that. We've got to arrest it and start building these kids up and building up all of it. And you know what? A lot of shops are going to die, thank God.
Jeff Compton [01:08:45]:
Yeah, yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:08:46]:
Some of these shops should not be touching vehicles.
Jeff Compton [01:08:49]:
That's an unpopular opinion though, eh? Like, Brian and I talk about that a lot. Lot. And it's, it's the truth though. It really is.
Eric Sprague [01:08:56]:
You know, I can think of. There's probably six figures worth of damage that I have, that I have repaired from other shops and it makes me. It pisses me off. Not because they're. I don't think it usually, I don't think it's malicious. Some of it I think is. But it's just, it's sheer ignorance and, and stubbornness. It's unwilling.
Eric Sprague [01:09:19]:
There, there people are unwilling to evolve and learn and adapt.
Jeff Compton [01:09:24]:
Right.
Eric Sprague [01:09:25]:
And that, that creates so many more problems.
Jeff Compton [01:09:28]:
And see, I'm still like. And again, people will say that maybe it's a bad attitude or something like that, but I believe like a lot of this, like we say, well, it's not malicious, but at some point somebody has probably told, you know, I go back to the example of, you know, the shops that still don't have service information. Everybody goes, oh, there's. They don't exist. Yes, they do. I've talked to several young technicians now in my doing this little thing that, that they tell me all the time they work in a shop that doesn't have service information, you know, and it's like, well, how are you getting through the day? Well, the day for the most part, you know, is like some brakes or some control arms or, you know, some Tie rods and, and some fuel lines and brake lines. Like they love seeing those Chevy trucks come in and need fuel lines and brake lines. Like because it's just.
Jeff Compton [01:10:11]:
Yeah, it's an eight hour day. Right. They get through the job and, and you know, you didn't need service information. Like you drew your little diagram on where they go on the ABS module and you didn't ever lose that. And done. But when I keep saying this to the people, it's like there are shops out there and those are the shops we need to see go away. Because at some point somebody has told them and they've been made aware they need it and they choose not to buy the service information. That to me is now is malicious.
Jeff Compton [01:10:38]:
That's operating the arena with the intent of not, I don't want to say play by the rules, but you know what I mean? Like not meeting the minimum, I guess is a better way to put it than meeting.
Eric Sprague [01:10:49]:
It's racing. Racing to the bott bottom. Yeah, it is racing to the bottom. I can do it cheaper because I don't have to pay for this. I don't have to pay for this. I wish the US would implement something like the. What is it, the red seal program you guys have up there?
Jeff Compton [01:11:03]:
Yeah, yeah, I'm looking at it right now. It hangs on my wall. Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:11:09]:
We need that down here. I hate to say it and I know that gets. That's a really unpopular thing to hear, but we need it. You know, if you screw. I mean, how. We had a vehicle not too long ago, some dude put, put Amazon LEDs in it, raised holy hell with the car.
Jeff Compton [01:11:27]:
Yeah, it.
Eric Sprague [01:11:28]:
It had ADAS faults. It had ABS faults because of light bulbs.
Jeff Compton [01:11:32]:
Yep.
Eric Sprague [01:11:33]:
Because it was back feeding through the stoplight switch and it was giving the ABs all kinds of bad information. Like it was. I have never seen something like that and I have a feeling that's not the last time I'm going to see that.
Jeff Compton [01:11:46]:
No. And you know, the apprenticeship thing is great because I say this. When they come out of it, they can't sit down in the interview and say that. I've never been exposed to this level of technology or I've never been exposed to these fundamentals because at that point it's just a bullface lie. Like if they went through and did the program, somebody sat them down in a classroom and taught them it. Now if they chose not to pay attention and they didn't get it, then they didn't get it and that's on them. Right. But.
Jeff Compton [01:12:15]:
But it's Crazy to me how immediately when we start to talk about that this industry could really benefit from that. And everybody immediately puts their hands up and go, I don't want the government involvement in this. And I hate to say it, but you know what, it may not be the government that's going to involve it in the US but it's going to be. You don't want the other option, which is going to be the insurance companies that is going to force you to do it. And I think that that's. We're on this very tipping point right now where the industry either needs to come up with something and adopt a IT and implement it, or the insurance companies are going to do it because, like, people will not tolerate cars that are not calibrated properly from an ADAS system and having accidents out there. It's going to. People are going to go lawsuit crazy.
Jeff Compton [01:12:59]:
And you're going to see it's going to cost one shop and then another shop. And then we've already seen it happen in the industry, right Y cases. So the na. It's not necessarily an apprenticeship thing. It's a more of a basic level of competency that goes above ases because right now you can't even talk about ASES without people getting offended and pissed off and saying somebody who you and I know very well have a big platform and, and you know, are doing a wonderful thing for the industry. They don't. Theirs aren't valid anymore. They let them expire because they saw no point to keep them.
Jeff Compton [01:13:36]:
And that says a lot about the, the quote unquote benchmark within the industry. If you see some of the sharpest minds in the industry right now going, I let mine expire because it was just like it wasn't. The people that came in didn't even ask about them, didn't know what it meant, didn't care. We have to. Because it's still the same thing. If I tell somebody I'm a mechanic in Canada, they go, oh, you're, you're still a red seal mechanic. Like, they know what that is. You know what I mean? Like, and I think the States is going to have to get something like that going eventually because otherwise people are just going to be.
Jeff Compton [01:14:08]:
They don't ask, oh, you're ASE certified, like we in the industry do. But the public has no idea what that means. Oh, you fix.
Eric Sprague [01:14:16]:
They don't care.
Jeff Compton [01:14:17]:
Yeah, yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:14:18]:
I mean, they don't. They don't care because the value in it is gone, you know, and it's the same thing with, oh, you just triggered something.
Jeff Compton [01:14:28]:
Wow.
Eric Sprague [01:14:29]:
And it left.
Jeff Compton [01:14:32]:
Oh, the or when we talking about the ADAs. And. And then.
Eric Sprague [01:14:38]:
Right, right. So, you know, like Nast Nastif is something that a lot of people hate. But you know, the people that are usually not always. There are some cases that I know of people that should absolutely be able to be credentialed and aren't.
Jeff Compton [01:14:52]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:14:53]:
But the vast majority of people complaining about it, in my opinion, are probably contributing to the reason why we need to it. You know, if you do an alignment, you do a four wheel alignment on something and don't recalibrate it, you just set that car up for an accident. You know, if you're mixing and matching tires, you just set that car up to do something really bad. You know, if you don't understand these things and I don't think that's all. You know, sometimes you're in that situation. You know the single mother of 17 kids who blew a tire and is trying to get home 300 miles away. Sometimes. Yes.
Eric Sprague [01:15:29]:
You got to do what you got to do.
Jeff Compton [01:15:31]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:15:31]:
You have to do the right thing. We're here to serve people and we have to do that, but we have to do that in a safe, ethical way. You know, this fleet mentality of, hey, I got a set of brake pads, but only one wheel's grinding. Can you just put the one pad that's worn out in me?
Jeff Compton [01:15:49]:
Well.
Eric Sprague [01:15:49]:
And people do it.
Jeff Compton [01:15:51]:
And going back to my. My tire story. So that young lady had the blowout. The rest of the story is she came into the shop with now her all seasons that are on the rims. Right. Ready to put on the car, all four of them. And I'm looking at the advisor going like, what's going on here? Like, well, she can't afford a new tire right now. Okay, so what did we tell her we're gonna do? Oh, we're told her we're gonna put her all seasons back on.
Jeff Compton [01:16:17]:
I'm like, we're getting a blizzard today. Like, do you really think that that's the right thing to do? So what do we do? We end up putting season on the left front and the other three snows are on the car. Now, I'm not trying to advocate and say that that's the right thing to do. I'm not defending it. The end of the day, the customer is in charge, right?
Eric Sprague [01:16:40]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:16:40]:
And unless I want to reach into my pocket and buy this girl one tire so that she has four snows on her car, I made the choice that three Snows in an all season is better than four bald all seasons in December in Canada. That's the choice I made. And you know, I can. So in that sense I can understand when some people were getting down my throat about making her buy, you know, tire pressure sensors and listen, I'm not making her do anything. At the end of the day, she left with nothing but a tire installed on the car. Right. $40 labor. Whatever it was, she left with much more information than when she came in understanding about how critical that system is to the car.
Jeff Compton [01:17:24]:
That was my job in having the conversation with her to explain whether it would be ABS or airbag, adas, lane departure. Any of these systems that somebody would be asking me about, it's my job to inform them about what it means and what it actually is doing and why it's important. If it wasn't important, it wouldn't have been put in the damn car in the first place. That's the part that pissed me off, was so many people then put their hands up and admitted to being unprofessional and saying, I'll disable that system all day long if the customer asked me to. My goodness. So then where is, where do we draw the line? A customer can come in and say, I really don't want an airbag to go off in my face when I'm in an accident because like I've heard it does really bad damage to the, you know, my teeth and stuff. So I'd like you to take that relay out, Eric.
Eric Sprague [01:18:07]:
Well, the steering wheel is going to do more damage, right? Yeah. I'm not like, yeah. Oh no, it's it, absolutely. And I think that's a lot of that comes from the mentality of the client's always right. Yeah, the client is not always right.
Jeff Compton [01:18:23]:
No.
Eric Sprague [01:18:24]:
You know, it, it. We have, like you said, we have an absolute duty to inform them of what the long term implications are. It's no different than when you have an intermittent problem. Right. You have an intermittent problem, you have a code, but you can't duplicate it. What do you do? Well, we can right now. This is working. This is where we're probably faulting.
Eric Sprague [01:18:45]:
I can replace this or we can wait for it to get worse. What would you like me to do? Yeah, you know, and here's the consequences if we replace it. And that's not it. We're not doing a freebie to go over it again. There is going to be a charge involved. Now if we wait for it to get worse, there may not be because if I Can't duplicate it. I can't do my job.
Jeff Compton [01:19:06]:
That's right.
Eric Sprague [01:19:07]:
So, you know, but we've got, we have to inform. We have to make sure people are aware of what we're playing with.
Jeff Compton [01:19:14]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:19:14]:
And if we don't know what we're playing with, we have to figure that out before we can go up there and say anything.
Jeff Compton [01:19:20]:
Yeah, we can't. Yeah. She doesn't know what she's driving like. She doesn't understand the true reality of what you know. So I'm taking pictures of the sidewall of her tire and see these tiny little cracks that are already in here now. You know, people might have said, jeff, you're nuts. Because she's driving around with now build date 2013 tires on the car. Car.
Jeff Compton [01:19:41]:
Right. That, you know, or she could have put on. Yeah. She could have put on bill date 17 all seasons on the, you know, back on it to drive around in Christmas time. I made the choice to do what I felt was the best thing for if my daughter was in the shop, I would. And she was to call me and say, dad, what do I do? This I, you know, 100 the same thing as what she did. That's how I treated that interaction. And that's how we have to.
Jeff Compton [01:20:08]:
Sherwood said to me the other day, he says, what we have to do is do what's right. And that sounds such a simple, you know, kind of answer. Oh, no kidding, Jeff. You gotta do what's right. But it's so big what that really entails when we say what has to do what's right. You know, and it's not. We don't get off scot free when we say we do it right. Sometimes we just still get it wrong.
Eric Sprague [01:20:29]:
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:20:31]:
Yeah. But you have to advocate like, you got to do what's right, not what pays the best, not what gets the car out of here faster. We have to do what's right.
Eric Sprague [01:20:42]:
No, and that's, you know, at the end of the day, our job is to serve the clients.
Jeff Compton [01:20:46]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:20:46]:
At the end of the day, you know, we're the professionals. They don't know. They know what. They know what the logo says. They know what the NIT model is. Maybe. But we know how it works. We understand how it works and we understand what the implications of, of shortcutting or half assing a repair is.
Eric Sprague [01:21:03]:
We know what that means. They don't. We have to inform them. We have to give them that service. That's why they're coming to us. We're Professionals, we know better than they do and we, you know, if they're telling us something that's not right, then we have to push back on that.
Jeff Compton [01:21:17]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:21:18]:
Lightly.
Jeff Compton [01:21:19]:
Yeah, but I don't love the fact that she can go on to Facebook marketplace and buy 13 year old tires.
Eric Sprague [01:21:24]:
I don't love that that used tires should be illegal, in my opinion. I, you know, there, there's always that, there's always that caveat situation. Like I said, you know, the, the single mother of 30, 37 kids who had a blowout and needs to get home, whatever. If I can do something ethically without putting a 20 year old tire on the car.
Jeff Compton [01:21:45]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:21:46]:
You know, chances are I might have an old tire that's not damaged, it's just worn down. Yeah. But if I don't, I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna compromise somebody's safety to make 20 or 30 bucks on something. I mean, that's, you know, at that point, go get, go get a tire from wherever and I will put it on for you. I won't charge you for it. Yeah, evil words to say. I'm not going to charge you. You're in a situation, you're in a bind.
Eric Sprague [01:22:11]:
You know, you legitimately can't afford to have me do something. You know what, I'm going to get you safe so you can get to it. It's not fixed, it's not correct, but it is less likely to cause you a problem. It is in better condition than when it left.
Jeff Compton [01:22:23]:
And I think that's why this industry's gotten to where it is, because we've always like what you just said, well, I'm going to go and buy a tire for that customer then. Right. And here's the thing. In this industry, we've never operated effectively enough where we could do that every time that it needed to be done. So we make the compromise. Okay, I go get an old tire, but like, it's not as bad as what's on there. And I charge you some money and I put it on, on. And you feel good because like I saved you some money and I feel good because I got some labor, I got some money generated.
Jeff Compton [01:22:55]:
Right. I didn't do this wasn't complete charity. Charity is a funny thing because like sometimes the right thing to do is to be charitable and give them the tire because the standards would be, anything else would be a compromise on safety. But at the same time, charity is the big reason that this industry is, is where it's at from a standpoint of you know, so many people have only bought themselves a job. You know, they opened up a business and they just bought themselves a job they didn't actually get to build a lucrative. Lucrative is the wrong word. People don't like that word. They haven't built fulfilling, you know, scalable, flourishing, constant growth business.
Jeff Compton [01:23:38]:
They'd never built that. They bought themselves a job. And I don't know. I'm not smart enough to know what the right thing to do is, but I know I've seen too many things that were compromised on what was right to make a little bit of labor, to know that it was. It's still being done too much.
Eric Sprague [01:23:55]:
In cases where it's something dangerous like that, I will happily donate my time to get somebody safe. I'm on the same roads these people are.
Jeff Compton [01:24:03]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:24:03]:
You know, if I put a vehicle out there that's dangerous, now I'm compromising my safety, my family's safety, you know, and it's not. I mean, I don't do that all the time. That's not a frequent thing.
Jeff Compton [01:24:13]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:24:14]:
You know, extenuating circumstances sometimes require extenuating reactions to it. And it's not, you know, obviously, like you said, we're in business to make money. I mean, that is the goal of the business. But I think we, in some cases, we do have a responsibility to go a little above and beyond that.
Jeff Compton [01:24:32]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:24:32]:
You know, I mean, we, if we see something, say something or do something about it, you know, I mean, we, we have a bad reputation globally as being shady, shitty people. I think that is slowly starting to change.
Jeff Compton [01:24:49]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:24:51]:
But it's going to take time to rebuild that, you know, and I don't, I don't, I definitely don't subscribe to charity. I mean, I don't like doing free work. Nobody does. But we've got to be able to justify what we're doing. You know, we, we need to be charging more. Every shop on this planet needs to be charging more. I would, I don't think tech should be working for less than 100 years.
Jeff Compton [01:25:12]:
Year.
Eric Sprague [01:25:13]:
Yeah, the way, you know, between inflation just cost of living in general, even before inflation.
Jeff Compton [01:25:19]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:25:19]:
You know, I know guys that are still working for 10, 12 bucks an hour and it makes me want to punch their boss in the face.
Jeff Compton [01:25:25]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:25:27]:
You know, I mean, tool bills we've mentioned a couple times beyond basic hand tools. I don't know that I think tech should be buying the tools. Lucas has worked really hard to convert me on that.
Jeff Compton [01:25:37]:
Yeah, it's tough. Eh? But I mean, when, when we see what, what like what Benji was able to put together for his guys, you know, at Frog Pond and we've seen some of the other, you know, our friends in the industry, what they've been able to do. I make the challenge that. Yeah. Like other than maybe bringing in like.
Eric Sprague [01:25:57]:
The very basics in the, in the, yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:25:59]:
In the extreme world I'd like to see coming forward is that like they walk in with maybe you know, a set of wrenches, a half inch electric gun and some sockets and you know, a couple pairs of pliers. And I think the rest becomes like the torque wrench I think should be a shop tool so that it gets calibrated every three months and it's, it's, you know, we know that it's untested. Somebody just talked about, you know, in the groups they had a, an icon torque wrench and the car almost lost a wheel because it was, was awful calibration. You know, like that happens. I mean, I'm not. People are like, oh, you know, it's an icon. Come on dude, go look at that icon torque wrench. It looks like the same one the Precision instruments makes for Snap on and Mac and Matt Cohen, everybody else.
Jeff Compton [01:26:48]:
It's the same damn torque wrench. It's made by Precision Instruments. Where that got off is obviously it's probably had a ton of use already and nobody's checked its calibration ever. You know, so those kind of things like we need providing the young people because it's then just. It takes the stress off of like where do I spend my money to. To make this next purchase? Because we can go down a whole rabbit hole of where I think like a lot of the predication that happens from tool vendors now.
Eric Sprague [01:27:17]:
Oh yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:27:18]:
Is not a good thing. But when we set these young people up for success with what the, the tooling responsibility taken care of, I think they can get back and focus now on actually learning how to use the tools properly. Properly.
Eric Sprague [01:27:30]:
No, of course. And that goes back to, you know, reading the service info and understanding what you're doing. Yeah, you know, I mean there's such a, you know, the other thing that we're taught in the dealer is chasing the symptom. What's the symptom? I try and teach my guys, okay, you know what the symptom is now forget that. What is the system? What is the entire system doing? Who's in charge? Who, who's reacting? Who's making decisions? How are they making decisions? What is the entire system doing now? What can make it do that? What's not right.
Jeff Compton [01:28:04]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:28:05]:
And that. That's something that is not. Not taught in trade schools. It's not taught in a lot of places. Everything is chase the symptom. I don't want to discuss my recent experiences with chasing the symptom because they haven't been good.
Jeff Compton [01:28:20]:
Well, I can. Well, and. And Sherwood just shared that perfect example. It was on this video. And I mean, because I talked to him the other day or before he'd released the video, and he's talking about one of his texts in. It was a BMW or Mercedes Class or something like that, 100 miles an hour. The car would go in the limp. And they chased it down to this module.
Jeff Compton [01:28:40]:
And the module is like, actually, it's got a direct short. Okay, cool. He does his test. You know, module shorted, gets another module.
Eric Sprague [01:28:49]:
Module.
Jeff Compton [01:28:50]:
It ended up being that there was a pin somehow inside the module back in behind where the connectors would plug in. Was. Had worked its way over and was touching another pin. Right. And this is. So this is the replacement module that they got. This is what happened as soon as they plugged it in. The code was initially the complaint came in, but it started having something different happen.
Jeff Compton [01:29:14]:
And everybody's like, like, what's going on here? What's going on here? And that's where when we're taught to chase the symptom, right, we, we. We get blinders on and we got tunnel vision. And we're very much like, we're running the test as it would. You know, we can see it in the service information. We're not able to not slow down and think about how does this all just work as one big system? What happens here? You know, And I think that that is. Is a just a culture thing. Like, because.
Eric Sprague [01:29:43]:
Because.
Jeff Compton [01:29:44]:
And Sherwood's lucky. Like, those guys are lucky. They can all go to Sherwood. There's never. Oh, my God. I can't believe you don't know how to do this. Oh, my God, I can't believe. Like, this customer is going to be freaking out.
Jeff Compton [01:29:55]:
Oh, my God. Like, I. My parts. I'm never going to be able to. There's none of that ever. It's like, okay, let's slow down and look at what's actually happening here and why.
Eric Sprague [01:30:03]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:30:03]:
And what's a different way to. Somebody check engine. Chuck just put a video up showing. And it was so simple. You know, every time the customer would turn the light, the wipers on, blow the fuse in the fuse box. And, you know, the guy had been dealing with this issue in his Truck for two years, you know, and somebody. And. And literally what does Chuck do? He just takes the wires out of the box, you know, puts a new fuse into the box, turns it on and still blows.
Jeff Compton [01:30:31]:
Fuse. Cool. Dead short. And tip them, you know.
Eric Sprague [01:30:35]:
We tip them.
Jeff Compton [01:30:36]:
Yeah. Well, see, we don't sometimes break it down that simple, Eric. To just be like, just think about this. Do it like that. You know, it's like somebody's going, oh, now get your meter out and do this and do that. There's nothing wrong with that method, but like his method was so fast because like he goes through the process of like, you know, taking the pins out. And you and I back in the day would have been like, snip, you know, new fuse, ding. Tip them.
Jeff Compton [01:31:05]:
Done. Right. Like we would have. We wouldn't have unpinned it. Are you crazy?
Eric Sprague [01:31:12]:
You know, there's different schools of thought at work there, you know, I mean, we're coming out of that flat rate environment. It's the quickest way you can do it.
Jeff Compton [01:31:23]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:31:23]:
You know, if it has a reasonable chance of finding the fault, that's what you're gonna do.
Jeff Compton [01:31:27]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:31:28]:
And then if you screw up and you have to repair it now that's on you because you made a bad call. All.
Jeff Compton [01:31:32]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:31:32]:
And that's the other thing that's got to stop. I mean, guys have to be allowed to make mistakes.
Jeff Compton [01:31:37]:
Yes.
Eric Sprague [01:31:37]:
How did we learn? 90 of what we know. I have broken more than I can count. I mean, ask Lucas about me and Mercedes wheel bearings or powerstroke fuel heater fuses. I don't want to talk about it.
Jeff Compton [01:31:50]:
Yeah, I remember that one.
Eric Sprague [01:31:52]:
Yeah, so do I. Yeah, I remember that.
Jeff Compton [01:31:55]:
But even prime. Prime. Pollock tells me about the cars that like, like haunt him still. You know, he's got one sitting on the lot. You know what I mean? Like those Sherwood and I had that conversation about that Nissan that was in that video. That was 17 months at his shop. 17.
Eric Sprague [01:32:10]:
The hood latch.
Jeff Compton [01:32:11]:
Yeah, the hood latch. Yeah. Like they're. They're. If. If you had to put Sherwood or anyone else on that car in that environment and said this, listen, this has got to go by weekend or day end or whatever, by after lunch. That thing's got a roll. Think about what we're doing to ourselves when we say that.
Jeff Compton [01:32:31]:
And I understand what it is. It's because we've set the expectations that. Yeah, Mrs. Smith. It should be pretty routine thing and you know, like we're gonna. And you know, should have a call for you by the afternoon or Something but there are cars frankly that just don't friggin want to get fixed and we need to be understanding in this industry and it's not a situation of like we don't want to fix them. We just have to have, we need to become a lot more honest and upfront and better with communicating to the customer sometime that it's just like I, I, I just can't make this happen. And you know, I'm sorry that we wasted your time.
Jeff Compton [01:33:07]:
I'm glad that we didn't waste any of your money. Here's your keys and thank you for the opportunity to, you know, have our teeth kicked in on your junky vehicle.
Eric Sprague [01:33:17]:
You know, look at my Mini with the knock sensor dude, right?
Jeff Compton [01:33:22]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:33:23]:
And now that one has water intrusion so it's now sitting on our lot and it's like I have to drive by it every day and it's like, yeah, that was two years of my life in that thing.
Jeff Compton [01:33:35]:
And that is it up in the air as to what's going to happen to that car or is it like, is it customers wash his hands of it.
Eric Sprague [01:33:42]:
So I've got about a half case of 556 and 300 blackout that I would like to find its way into that car. Yeah, I think he's getting rid of it with the water intrusion. I mean we've got mold growing inside of it. It stinks inside. So yeah, after we got the knock sensor fixed, it died. And I was.
Jeff Compton [01:34:05]:
And you're not responsible for the water intrusion. That's just a mini, BMW, Mercedes Benz. Name any euro car that's just a free freebie side effect, you know.
Eric Sprague [01:34:17]:
Yeah, but why couldn't it happen two years earlier here?
Jeff Compton [01:34:19]:
Yeah, well, you know.
Eric Sprague [01:34:22]:
It'S a fishbowl looking for a place to get filled up.
Jeff Compton [01:34:24]:
Say listen, you get a free aquarium with every European built car, you know, it's just a matter of time, right. We get them too. And it's like, you know, I get in some stuff and I look up and it's got a headliner like a headliner stain and a sunroof. And I'm like, nope, what do I do? And I go out and I tell the, you know, service writer and the sales people that it's like, hey, and we can make two choices there. We can take it apart and investigate further or we can hope that it was fixed under warranty. Yeah. And you know, and then it's like, because ultimately the customer like we have sold, we sold stuff that doesn't have a working sunroof. We tell the customer flat out, it doesn't have a working sunroof.
Jeff Compton [01:35:06]:
And they're like, why not? And they're like, well, when we first got it in here, it was leaking water and we managed to get it sealed up and it's tight now, but we have disabled the power to it so that you can open it. So, you know, if you're good with that, you're good with that, you get a nice view still. But you're not getting the aquarium effect that you would, you know, Probably.
Eric Sprague [01:35:24]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:35:28]:
That converse. How does that conversation with that Mini and that customer go? Like, is he pretty understanding of what he's got or.
Eric Sprague [01:35:35]:
He was. I obviously, I was speaking with that client quite a bit through that process and you know, we're fortunate. He's a very good client of the shop. Very long term client. Has a lot of vehicles.
Jeff Compton [01:35:48]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:35:49]:
And he was with us every step of the way through that punishing lesson in humility and learning how to use this to. So it was just like, look, we've got water damage in here. This is one of those things that is very degenerative. It, it, we can go after what I have now, we're going to have more problems. This is not going to stop. We can get all the water out of there. I promise. There is dissolved solid material somewhere that is going to cause problems.
Eric Sprague [01:36:22]:
I can think of five or six modules right now that are going to fail probably within the next year or two on this because of that.
Jeff Compton [01:36:28]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:36:29]:
So how, how much further do we want to go with this? You know, and he asked what I thought. I'm like, honestly, at this point, I hate to say let's pull the plug because this car and I have, we're on a first name basis, but I can't feel good telling you to put more money into this car at this point.
Jeff Compton [01:36:47]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:36:48]:
And that's, I mean it's, it's a really hard discussion to have. I mean, I don't envy those talks, but I'm gonna be honest with him. I'm gonna be straight up with them. I mean, I told him a couple times into the, into the knock sensor thing. Like, look, I don't know where to go from here because we've replaced the entire system.
Jeff Compton [01:37:04]:
System. Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:37:06]:
You know, I will go as far as you want me to go with this. I don't like getting beat and I am not going to get beat by this thing, but I don't have a realistic timeline on when it's going to be done.
Jeff Compton [01:37:17]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:37:17]:
You know, and Then finding the water in there, I mean, that, that was the worst feeling in the world. I got in the car and I knew as soon as I got into it. I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, tell me my, tell me my feet stink or something.
Jeff Compton [01:37:29]:
No, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:37:31]:
And then we found the mold back in the back, in the back. And I'm like, oh.
Jeff Compton [01:37:37]:
So, yeah, they're a car that when I see them come in, I hate them. Just Minis, I just hate them, you know, I, I, they look cute.
Eric Sprague [01:37:47]:
They're so much fun to drive. That's the worst part. They are so good to drive when they're working.
Jeff Compton [01:37:53]:
Yeah, they are. I know I met a, met a young lady that I, I think I blew the first date because she had one in the driveway. And when I walked in, I said, oh, is that, yeah. And then I proceeded with my rant about, you know, why I thought they were terrible and junk and oh, my God, I can't believe that you could afford that on your salary and all that foot in mouth, you know what I mean? Like, completely take the potential and just stomp it to the ground. The whole story of why she has the car is because when she was a young girl, her dad had one of the original old Minis, as did my father way back in the day. So she had all these memories of the original Minis, you know, and wanted to have one. And then I felt like a real dick for like, you know, saying all the things because you realize that's not a uni Mini, right? That's a BMW. And like, you know, that's saying about you when you.
Jeff Compton [01:38:44]:
But like all the stupid things that I shouldn't have said. Right?
Eric Sprague [01:38:48]:
Yeah, I had to have that talk of my mom. My stepfather's from Ireland and same thing, grew up, had a Mini, had an MGB with which picturing him in that is adorable. But he had a Mini and he, my mom called one. He's like, yeah, we were thinking about getting a Mini. I thought I was going to have an accident because I was choking on my drink. As soon as soon she said that, I'm like, well, lease it.
Jeff Compton [01:39:12]:
Yes.
Eric Sprague [01:39:13]:
For less than the warranty. Well, no, he wants to get one to buy. No, he doesn't. No, I promise. No, he doesn't. Yeah, it's not, it's not, it's not not, it's not what it used to be. It's a different car. It's a Beamer.
Jeff Compton [01:39:26]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:39:28]:
So that was, didn't make them happy. But now they drive Subarus and they're very happy.
Jeff Compton [01:39:34]:
So. Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:39:35]:
Win, win.
Jeff Compton [01:39:37]:
Still getting fun car to drive. Just not, you know, when it has a quirk. It's not a quirk. That's like a ten thousand dollar quirk, you know, it's like a. Yeah. Couple thousand dollar quirk. Like look, it's, you know. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:39:49]:
And somebody in the family that's very, you know, likes working on them. Like that's, that's the plus.
Eric Sprague [01:39:55]:
Yeah. Right.
Jeff Compton [01:39:56]:
You know, when I met this girl and it was like, oh, I'm like, oh, shoot. Like I just, it was just, it was just bad. It was all the way around. I should have just never. She knew I was a mechanic and you know, it's like, oh, she was planning ahead. Yeah. Yeah. So I shot my foot and I put my foot right in my mouth with that one.
Jeff Compton [01:40:18]:
So what's the goals for 2026 for you and LNN and everything else?
Eric Sprague [01:40:24]:
So I think, you know, increasing our productivity. Increasing our efficiency, we're starting to revamp more meaningfully. We're starting to work on some of our processes and so Lucas has had to take over a lot more responsibility at the family business. Business.
Jeff Compton [01:40:41]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:40:44]:
So Jade has taken over most of the management duties down at the shop. And we're trying to, I guess we're trying to find our rhythm. Jade and I work very well together, which is awesome. But we're, we're trying to kind of get things structured around achieving our goals in a way that we can execute it meaningfully.
Jeff Compton [01:41:04]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:41:05]:
We've been doing a lot of kind of strategizing and planning. I want to get all the guys in the back, I want to get all of them through their ASES at the end of 2026. I want all of them A1 through A8. I want to. Personally, I want to get through my L1, L2, L3.
Jeff Compton [01:41:25]:
Nice.
Eric Sprague [01:41:27]:
I know they don't have a lot of value with the client, but I, I still think it's a good thing to have. You know, I still think shows commitment. To me it's like college. You know, half the degrees you get aren't useful, but it shows you have the commitment and the drive to continue working towards it. Want to. And I. The other, the biggest one for me is I want to build up our training plan and our methodology for getting the guys trained and get everyone on a regimented training plan that's going to be beneficial to them, beneficial to the shop and get everybody growing forward. Forward.
Jeff Compton [01:42:01]:
Yeah, yeah. Because you guys, you've got, you've got a strong team, you know, for sure, but you can always tweak things a little bit more. Right? And I mean, and it's only to everybody's benefit. I'm the same way. Like everybody. I'm not anti ase. I'm just like. Because it does say something, right? Like now my, my thing up here with my license is that, like, I have to have that to be legal to even touch a car.
Jeff Compton [01:42:24]:
That's just the way it works in Canada now. Now, could I get hired without it? Yes. But it's kind of like if I'm in the shop and somebody from the government was happy to walk in and ask, I have to run out the back door and hide and, you know, because if they catch me doing it without it, it's a big deal. ASCs are not like that in the States. And that's where I don't necessarily want an advocate for, for the US to have to go to that level, but it will come to that level, I think at some point where if you're, you know, removing a steering wheel will you need to have some kind of understanding about what you're actually touching before you're allowed to touch it? And there's too many right now. You can see them on social media and they're, they're in a parking lot or a driveway somewhere and they're yanking a steering wheel off to do something. And I'm not saying that they don't or do or whatever, qualified or not, but we know that a lot of them probably aren't. And they're not killing anybody right now.
Jeff Compton [01:43:18]:
They're not killing themselves. But it's not necessarily. We know that that car is not leaving and running over to some place to be ADAs calibrated. Right. It's, it's the, you know, the, the clunk in the steering columns fixed now. And they're happy, they're good, they're. They're laughing. Perfect.
Jeff Compton [01:43:36]:
The car's fixed.
Eric Sprague [01:43:37]:
It's only what happens when the guy pulls a bag off and kills himself.
Jeff Compton [01:43:41]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Or what happens if, you know, like, they, they pull on it. There's certain. Oh, man, I had a, had a, I had a Ford that fought me getting the airbag off and to the tune of like, we ended up damaging the steering wheel and had to buy the steering wheel because a little. It wouldn't clip in when we were done. And you know, like, and that's something that, like, we're getting that car ready to be for sale. It's not. It's no compromise.
Jeff Compton [01:44:06]:
I can't sign it that way. So, yeah, I screwed it up because I'm trying to. We're. There's a whole long story. I'll tell you after. But, like, it's different when we're doing it that way in a shop up versus somebody somewhere who's saying, hey, don't worry about this. Yeah, I know that the airbags kind of moving around a little bit now, but, you know, the clock spring's still working and, you know, the light's not on and so you're good to go. And somebody.
Eric Sprague [01:44:35]:
It's a claymore.
Jeff Compton [01:44:36]:
Yeah. You and I know what happens with that. Right. Like, it's not a good scene, you know, but what. What's the challenges you see for the rest of the support staff at LNN for 2026 a team, but like, you know, Scotty and George and. And, you know, oh, you better edit that out.
Eric Sprague [01:45:04]:
Oh, it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He doesn't get the two T's. Apparently he's not tall enough, according to him. And the Y on the Y on. I. Yeah, I'll let you handle that one next time you down. But no, I think, you know, just growing and scaling everything and managing to keep up with the workflow.
Eric Sprague [01:45:26]:
You know, we've got to. We've. We've got to increase. We've got to increase what we're putting through the shop.
Jeff Compton [01:45:31]:
Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:45:32]:
And that's, you know, on George and Scott both, that's. That's a huge load. So being able to, you know, work together collaboratively to make their jobs easier and remove as many roadblocks as we can through scaling the processes and scaling our procedures is going to be huge for everybody. You know, it helps. The front counter is the. The first place it helps. But we've all got to work together to support each other.
Jeff Compton [01:45:56]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:45:57]:
So it's.
Jeff Compton [01:45:58]:
I think you guys are above average in being able to do that. That's the. But always the, you know, the times that I've been in your shop and watched the magic unfold or chaos ensue is that, you know, for the most part, it's always like you guys are. Are, you know, running up the hill together. You know what I mean? That's what I've always seen and that's what I appreciate because, like, you and I have been in some places where it ain't like that, you know, not at all. You've been pushing a car in and, you know, watching guys stand there, you know, watch you push the car in like we've been in places like that. Like that's when I sure and I were talking. It was like when they go to push a car in at the shop.
Jeff Compton [01:46:35]:
He says we have more people out in the parking lot than we need. Like. And you know, because it's just everybody is that tight knit kind of culture of everybody wants to make, you know, all hands make light work. And he says words, sometimes he has to say, no, go back inside and fix that car. We've got enough people. But he says that's so much easier to deal with that problem than to deal with the other side of the problem. And that's where it comes back. We'll close this out on culture.
Jeff Compton [01:47:03]:
When we, when we pay our people a certain way or we value them a certain way, we look at them a certain way. There does come at a compromise for culture within the shop. If we choose to see it that way. Way. And you can say, well, at the end of the day we still get done. And my, you know, my numbers are this. That's cool. I'm not saying it's the wrong way, but there are some caveats that come that make the challenges there.
Jeff Compton [01:47:24]:
You know what I mean? You have, we're all just naturally the way we are. I think a lot of us are competitive and I'm not necessarily going to stand on my co workers head to keep them down, but I'm not really going to put my hand out every time either. Right. If I'm in that competitive nature. Nature, you know, it's just the way humans are wired unfortunately. And I think that that's something we got to go forward to. I think if we could have where all hands, you know, somebody drops a rifle immediately somebody else is picking that rifle up and grabbing them by the belt and saying, you know, we're just going over that hill there. Keep going.
Jeff Compton [01:47:58]:
When we have that mindset, that's a much more powerful team than a team that's like trying to compete against one another. Another.
Eric Sprague [01:48:07]:
You know, what's good for the collective is good for the individual.
Jeff Compton [01:48:10]:
Yeah, brother.
Eric Sprague [01:48:11]:
I want to thank you.
Jeff Compton [01:48:12]:
Yeah, I want to thank you for being here.
Eric Sprague [01:48:15]:
Definitely, man. Thanks for having me. This is awesome.
Jeff Compton [01:48:17]:
Yeah, it's always a good time. I enjoy your, I enjoy your weekly rants. I can't wait to hear them. So, you know, and I mean we need to do more of this next in, in the new year. I think we need to try and get into some kind of. You and I talked about it like we're once a month do we talk about, like, something that kicked our ass or, you know, what we're fighting through or. I think. Because I think.
Jeff Compton [01:48:36]:
Think it's, you know, I don't get to go to work with you every day, but I feel like some days, like, I'm part of the team.
Eric Sprague [01:48:44]:
Oh, you absolutely are, and you're absolutely part of it.
Jeff Compton [01:48:47]:
Yeah. And, you know, sometimes it's like, it just keeps me connected with you guys is what I'm. So going forward, I think we need to do that once a month or once every quarter or something, we sit down and have this kind of conversation, because I think it just. I think that there's some good examples that you guys can share that sometimes maybe don't. You know, when it comes from Lucas, is it. It hits a certain audience, and when it comes from you, it hits a certain audience. And that's what. I guess what I'm trying to say is, you know, you've got a lot to offer the people that are listening, and I think that that's why I need to continue to have you on a lot more.
Jeff Compton [01:49:20]:
So thank you.
Eric Sprague [01:49:21]:
I appreciate that. It means a lot.
Jeff Compton [01:49:23]:
Thank you. I mean, you've. You've been an awesome. You know, you're my brother. I mean, you've been an awesome support for me since. Since jump with this crazy thing. And I know. You know, it's like some days I have to pinch myself and go, holy crap.
Jeff Compton [01:49:36]:
Like, what the hell was Lucas thinking?
Eric Sprague [01:49:39]:
You know, I. I asked that. I asked myself that every day.
Jeff Compton [01:49:42]:
Yeah, yeah, he's.
Eric Sprague [01:49:46]:
He's.
Jeff Compton [01:49:46]:
He's got a. Yeah, he's got everybody convinced he knows what he's doing. You and I know.
Eric Sprague [01:49:52]:
Oh, he. He is a savant when it comes to some of this stuff. The way he does things and the way he approaches things is so unique and so needed in this industry. I mean, it's. You know, it. I'm. I'm here to retirement. I mean, I.
Eric Sprague [01:50:08]:
I'm. I'm here till I drop.
Jeff Compton [01:50:09]:
Yeah, yeah.
Eric Sprague [01:50:11]:
That is the same thing.
Jeff Compton [01:50:12]:
That's a stuff say people like, when you're listening, you hear somebody, a technician say that. That's powerful, because I've never heard another person say with enthusiasm that, I'm here until I drop. I'm here until I retire. Like, they might say, like, this is all I have. This is my only option. But that's. Eric's not saying it that way. So, you know, if you can think about in your business, how to build that, that's the magic sauce people right there.
Jeff Compton [01:50:41]:
You can get your people to think that and want to be that way, that invested, then you've got it figured out. So, everybody, Happy New Year to everybody. I don't know you're going to get this after New Year, but it's almost New Year and, you know, enjoy the turkey. Enjoy the New Year's celebrations. Don't indulge. Don't drink and drive. Don't let your friends drive European cars. And we'll see everybody in 2026.
Eric Sprague [01:51:07]:
Take it easy.
Jeff Compton [01:51:10]:
Hey, if you could do me a favor real quick and, like, comment on and share this episode, I'd really appreciate it. And please, most importantly, set the podcast to automatically download every Tuesday morning. As always, I'd like to thank our amazing guests for their perspectives and expertise, and I hope that you'll please join us again next week on this journey of change. Thank you to my partners in the ASA group and to the Changing the Industry podcast. Remember what I always say, in this industry, you get what you pay for. Here's hoping everyone finds their missing 10 millimeter, and we'll see you all again next time.