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This podcast is dedicated to changing the automotive industry for the better, one conversation at a time.
Whether you're a technician, vendor, business owner, or car enthusiast, we hope to inspire you to improve for your customers, your careers, your businesses, and your families.
No, let me try it. Let me try it. Okay. Faithful.
Boom. There you go.
Faithful. Lucas.
Very Lucas. Underwad. Underwad. That's right.
Stephen fossil from Autobot. Faithful. I just
said it. Faithful. I don't run with you,
blood. Steven, how you doing, buddy? He's getting fired from
intros. No, it's not as bad. I was at a church once and
it was our first time visiting there. I met the pastor right before the church
service started. I said, oh, my name is Stephen Faithful. Nice to meet you. He
goes up in front of everyone, said, I can't believe it, we have visitors here
today. Their last name is Faithful. Can we get a round of applause for that?
Okay, well, misheard there, but it's all good. It'll work,
right? It'll do.
From auto ops. Yeah, a little bit about
myself. I'm 65 years old. I've owned a shop for 30
years. I'm definitely on wait a minute, you read David's track.
Come on. If
I'm 30 years into shop ownership at 65,
I've done something wrong. The plan is to get crushed by a
car at 50
because I'm still going to be within that 20 year term life insurance
limit. So at 50, I'm underneath a car and
just hear creak and then crush and then just a
slow bleed out for me, and I'll just be like, Let me
go, it's fine.
I told my wife that, she got mad. She's like, what is wrong with
you? Well, let me tell you, I guarantee you
we can come up with a very definitive list of things. I'm
sorry you're not 65.
I'm a little younger. I'm 25 years old, originally from Lancaster,
Pennsylvania. There's not many software platforms coming out of
Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I tell people sometimes, yeah, we hire a lot of
Amish people as developers and they're like, wow, that's really cool. So I guess they're
not super familiar with Amish people.
They're fantastic web developers. They do such a good
job. They do it with pen and paper, though.
I even just moved, actually, my brother and I, which my brother is also one
of my co founders. We're both originally from Langster, but we even just moved deeper.
We're in a small town now called Coreyville, Pennsylvania, which is like
Amish central cornfields, as far as you can see. So that's my
background. I moved out for a was in a past life. I was very
into rock climbing, traveling, outdoor sports of all kinds. So I was
gone for about five years. And then when I came back to
Lancaster, my father was working at a company
that did online scheduling in a similar industry. And basically
I saw what he was doing for a while. I had a marketing background. I
had a marketing company for rock climbing gyms before this. And
my brother and I saw what he was doing in that industry and how it
totally revolutionized it. And we thought that automotive was the last
industry in the world to come over to modern, integrated, intelligent
online scheduling. We pitched him and a couple of other people on his team the
idea, and we were off and rolling. It was kind of funny.
So my brother and I, we had a marketing company for rock climbing
gyms. After that slowed down, we both went to other startups.
Not super small startups, but he actually went to a startup that did online
scheduling for high end restaurant reservations.
So we bring a couple different industries from online scheduling
together to start auto ops and really just focus on this
conversion point that we think is super important. It has been overlooked for a long
time in the industry. That's kind of my mindset. Second background. But yeah,
no, not 65, 25 years old. A little on the younger side,
but I'm learning as quick as I can. That's awesome, dude. So
let me ask you this. Why automotive? What was
it that drew you to automotive? Did you have an automotive background?
Was there something about automotive that drew you into it? Was it just like, there's
opportunity here. What was your main drive for that?
Yeah, and it's kind of two parts. Two parts is I call ourselves Z level
technicians. We're all extremely honestly, I'll give a shout out to my father. My
father, he recently did, like, a full engine rebuild, so he
has been promoted from Z level technician to, like, a C level tech. So
we all have general automotive. We like working with cars. We
like cars. We've always been kind of into. In my driveway
and my parents driveway as a kid, we always had, like, ten different vehicles. They
were all, like, under $1,000. We were always swapping it out. Some
was in the shop, this is the shop. So we've always enjoyed kind of being
around cars, not in the fancy sense that some people are. So I
think general Automotive, like, I think another part
is it's an industry that fits our personalities well. I'm from
Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I'm not from Silicon Valley.
The people who I get to work with on a daily basis are
people who have similar characteristics to myself and my team,
similar values, even though we're not obviously shop owners. I think just
the way that blue collar people approach life
is similar to the way as close as I can get from the tech side
of things, that's really cool.
And that's something to think about, right? Like, a lot of these companies, they
are very different as far as values.
And it's like when we signed up and started working with
shopware, right? Like, Carolyn is a shop owner, right.
And she was a tech, and she understood what we were going through and what
we were working on and why we were doing what we were. That
that's always been, like, a cool connection for me because I like
working with people who understand what it is that I'm going through and so
it's neat to hear that perspective. I hadn't ever thought about it that way. Did
COVID kill rock climbing. COVID
sadly, did not kill rock climbing. COVID kind of blew up
a portion of rock climbing, but for the people who wanted to get outside, it
was one of those sports where you go outside and there wasn't a ton of
bands on it. So I think it pushed a lot of people to go outside
and now all those people are coming to the rock climbing gyms.
But yeah, it's also crazy they survive through COVID
because technically not in my area, but some parts
of the country, you couldn't go into
that indoor facility. They were shut down, right? No, it
definitely hurt. Climbing gyms as a whole. Yeah, there were a lot of climbing gyms
that shut down over COVID. I think like a lot of industries, it
separated the wheat from the chaff. Is that the correct expression? But yeah,
the gyms that were struggling definitely did not get helped out during
COVID But I think the popularity of there was some big climbing
movies released during COVID so I think the general popularity of
climbing name one. What are you talking about?
Have you guys free solo? That was the one. The dude who
climbed one of the faces in Yosemite with no rope. Did
you guys hear about this at huh? Very popular film. Free solo. You
guys gotta watch it. It'll make your hands sweat. Oh, dude, there is
some yeah. Is that the whole movie? Him climbing it up and like, hey, we're
halfway up, so halfway through the movie. The
key really is that he did it with no rope. That's the insane part. It's
like a 2500 foot face and
climbed it with no rope. I mean, I might make it like 5ft
up and by then be tired. Didn't need a nap,
so not going a lot. Far possesses somebody to do that. I'm going to
climb up 2500ft, no rope.
I'll be fine. I will. I'll be okay.
And I think there's some correlations you could bring in. But there's something to needing
to be perfect. There's something to just you have to the
mental flow you get in where you know you can't mess up when it's not
even an option. Something crazy. I try to sometimes get into that
in business. Just even where we do have options, I try to put
myself on hold, being like, if this doesn't happen, we're failing, we're failing.
There's something about where you just put yourself up against a wall. Yeah, but that's
like, okay, if you fail, then you
start an online scheduling company for, I don't know,
something else. If that guy fails,
he dies. And he has a second or two of
contemplating his life choices as he's seeing those rocks
coming at him at terminal velocity. And he goes, maybe
this wasn't a good idea. I should have had something as a safe
splat and then that's it. And I
understand I can't say anything more because if my mother ever
watches this, but there may or may not be some videos on YouTube of me
climbing without ropes. 2500Ft
straight up. Like not like 90 degrees.
It's like the wingsuit, dude. Right? Like you've seen the video. No, the
wingsuit. That makes sense. It's just a thrill. I get that.
It's like jumping out of a plane. Yeah. But I'm talking about not what normal
people do. I'm talking about the guy who comes down and they're holding the balloons
and they let the balloons go as he comes across the top of their head
and he's like, feet off the ground. It's what made sail that AWOL Nation
song famous. You know what I'm talking about? Have you ever seen that video? Yeah,
I can't remember dude's name. I've seen the video of the guy getting, like, clipped.
Did you see that one? The same dude. It's the same dude. And
I think that's how he met his demise. But I mean, dude,
you're traveling 120 miles an hour just floating through the air, feet
above a rock. I mean, come on now. Eventually. No, well, they're trying to get
close to the ground because that's a thrill. Otherwise you're just
jumping out of the plane, you're going down
fast. That guy wants to skate just above the
ground and then hit a tree. Or whatever it was. He
clipped something and then that was it. There's a famous climber
who is dating now, or married to her
third wingsuitor because the previous two are no longer with us. And
she just keeps marrying them. Keeps marrying them and
they keep wingsuiting. Hold on.
Now she's got a plan.
Here's my question, though, right? Oh, you're really into wing suits.
Sure, yeah, let's get married. Those people are not no prenup
people, though. Those type of people are the people to have, like, a pack of
ramen noodles during the day, though, too. So I think she just
well, maybe, but you think that's pretty
expensive. That's an expensive hobby. It's not like, well, that's why they. Have packs of
room. Well, I get that, but they're spending the money on the
equipment and stuff like that. But you got to think that they are at least
building up enough funds to then be able to go out and do the whole
thing. And she's like, hey, on this last trip,
whatever, like, good luck. As someone who owns a lot of expensive
climbing gear, I can tell you that it was like, oh, I'll buy
this $1,000 climbing gear and then I won't pay for housing for
the next two months. Hey, mom and dad, can
I come back and stay with you for a little bit? Like, hey, man, I'm
a little behind on my rent. Dude, we all have our
stupid spending vices. Don't shame him. He's fine. I'm
not shaming him. If you spend shame anybody. We're shaming you over your Steam
account, man. That's terrible.
$50,000 in video games. You never play.
I never play them. You know what? They're $2 apiece. How do you
get that much money? Like, we're friends on Venmo. I watch.
I'm like, Dude, n 64 games. In 64 games? In 64
games. My God. How many n 64 games can I. No,
I don't have a console yet. So it's a thing. Like, you grew
up, you didn't have any money. You're like? Yeah. One
day. Well, one day is now.
Well, I don't because I spent it all on old video games.
Yeah, it'll hit you too, dear. It'll hit you,
too. You're a wild success in your forty s
and you're sitting on a pile of money. All of a sudden, you're
going to be that guy climbing up the side of El
Capitan with no rope, going, yeah, I've got
so much money. What else am I going to spend it on?
I got my three personal trainer, personal
chef, massage therapist. I don't even need them to be nice. That's
all I want. Eat. To be able to eat well. Being
able to eat well. The cooking is fun. What are you talking about? Cooking is
fun. It's fun to cook. No.
Last night my brother made fun of me because I brought up a
massive bowl of air fried meatballs. And that was our dinner last night.
Ah, well, I I enjoy cooking
so that I wouldn't want a personal show. I get the appeal. I get the
appeal. The personal trainer, for sure. And I don't like people touching me.
So physical therapist or personal massage person
now? People touching me. All right, so
Steven, you don't know this. David and I were talking about this before you came
on. I want your feedback on this. We're changing gears completely. We're going in a
completely different direction. Hold on. I just want to mention
this. 711 has the worst cups.
The styrofoam is good. The lids are the
worst. The lids don't attach.
Our local one our local one, you can't get
lids. Our local one has plastic or Styrofoam. Cups because the lid
lids the lids just flop off. They have these
eco straws. They're okay. They get little holes and stuff like that poked on them.
They're okay. But the lids are the worst lids. So seven up.
You're probably never going to listen to this. One, we need a sponsorship. And two,
I need you to fix the lids before we accept your money.
I don't need money for your sponsors. Oh, yeah,
you can. Popeye's Chicken. Popeyes Chicken. Eleven.
Popeyes Chicken. They're opening up one. Hey,
Lucas, sorry this is going sideways, but I just wanted to tell
you this. Lucas, the best chicken strip place in
Kansas City is opening up a thing, like a
restaurant, caddy Corner, to my shop. Caddy Corner?
Really? Just like on which corner?
Just what is it?
Southeast of us. There was a bar there. The bar
closed up. It was a sketchy bar. And
they bought it. They're going to keep it a bar. They're going to make it
a dive bar, but they're going to sell their full menu, and
so they're ridiculously good. Coleslaw the
chicken is fired. We'll have to check next time. I'm
out. So I don't know if you know this talking about fast food
restaurants. Popeyes is owned by Restaurant
Brands Incorporated, right? RBI. And then they also own
Burger King. And the dudes who saved
Domino's came in, and now they've invested all of their
money in Burger King to salvage Burger King because Burger King had been flat. And
then it started going down, and they were talking about it was really cool because
I watched this interview the other day. God knows how I ended up on the
interview. But they were talking about their strategy for saving
Burger King, and they were talking about the mindset of what
a consumer looks like when they look at Burger King and how do they think
about it. It was a really insightful interview, even though we're not even
related to fast food or anything like that. Their mindset of
the CEO, he said, when I came into Burger King,
I decided to take it over. He said, I've made a rule. He said, we
did the same thing with Domino's. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to
invest personal money. And they said, well, why did you do that? It's a
dangerous move. Burger King's been in bad shape for a while. And he said, listen,
I need to invest money in it so I have a personal attachment to its
success. And he said, that's what drives me is that
I've invested in it. I know that if I'm going to get anything back out
of that, if I'm not going to lose everything I have to have, I've got
sweat in it. And so he talks about all of these things that they're doing,
these strategic mindset changes within the organization. And so the
interviewer says, well, wait a minute. Like, you're talking about these
huge strategic changes, but you're not talking about changing the food
or even necessarily the branding. You're changing the way that the employees think about
the business. And he said, well, because the employees are the business, right? Like, I
can build any building and make any business. He said, that's what we did with
Domino's. We changed the way that the employees saw the business. And
so now they cared about the business, and they provided a better product to our
consumers, and we paid them more, and we created more opportunity for them. So
it wasn't just a dead end. I'm 16 years old and
need a job deal. We created something that was theirs.
And I thought that was such a cool concept when you really dig into
it, that these guys are investing that kind of money and
it almost seemed like this was just a thrill sport for them. Like the dude
climbing the rock face with no rope. I mean, it's like, hey, I'm going to
invest half my money in this. I'm going to put it all on the line
and gamble just to see if we can turn it around. And up to that
point, they said that there was no chance that they were going to turn it
around. And then these two super duper CEOs
that have saved all these other businesses come in just for funsies, to save
Burger King. I just thought it was a cool idea, right? And then
they closed my local pupey's. Turns out they're opening the
one right by my house.
Listen, we're going to have to get bigger monitors or we're going to have to
switch platforms because you're not going to fit into the frame. In a couple of
months, I'm going to go to full frame camera
just to be and then I'm going to sit in my
personal what? No, I want Popeyes, bro.
He's got a personal right next door.
What you said. Lucas I think there's a point in my brother and I were
talking about this last night that some of these people, you just get past money
and you just like, I think no pun intended, they like
changing industries. They like changing entire sections of how
businesses work just for fun, just because they're like, oh, I think I can. And
now, obviously, it's still in the food industry. Burger King's big enough where it's like,
I could change a massive corporation. I think they just find fun in that. And
I was talking with my brother last night, and he, you know, listen,
we obviously were eating air fried meatballs. We ain't crushing yet. But he was like,
if we ever make money, he's like, I don't even know if it would be
that cool. It'd be way cooler just to leave a mark on an industry. So
I think they just get to the point. He says that now, but
one day he's going to be like, I've got 40 billion. I'm going
to buy Twitter and then change it to X. Because why
not? Because I can. But I think making
changes, like massive changes like that is way more fun than the money.
I kind of relate with that because you look at my shop
and you can ask David. David's always like, you're crazy. The amount of work you're
putting in and the things that you're doing with the shop. I mean, you're pushing
really hard. For me, that's the thrill in doing it right.
Like getting paid, like, know, I can do without the money, right? I don't
really care about that except when I can't pay the bills. That sucks. But
being able to say that we push something to the absolute
limit, that's what I get my thrills in. I probably should have gone into
engineering. I was the kid who like, I'd take the little dump truck and I'd
fill it up with dirt, and I would push it to see how far it
would go before it turned ever. Right. And so I like pushing things to the
absolute limit of sanity. And so that's why
David's lost his mind at this point. But
look, change gears here a little bit. I'm curious about we already said
that. I know. We changed gears to something else. Now we're changing gears to
something completely different. Okay. This is going to be the
ADHD episode, and it's not
your fault this time. I don't know what's happening exactly.
Well, maybe I brought up the seven up, and then you got on the tangent
about Burger King. Is Burger King going to get saved? I feel bad for
Burger King. It looks like Burger King is going to get saved.
They've started burger. Yeah, I know, right? They can
keep that thing. It looks like they've started seeing changes that are making
a difference. Right. It's interesting to eat
there. Do you have a Burger King? Me? Yeah. There
you go. That's a no. You see the pause where he's like,
yeah, that's a no. You don't eat there. I don't eat there
either because fries are gross.
Yeah, their fries are kind of gross. But the staff was the reason that
I wasn't eating there. Right? Probably the staff. You cared.
Well, dude, if you are super inefficient in a fast food
restaurant yeah, like a major pet peeve for me. I
can right. But look at the appeal
of Chickfila. I think their food is gross. I'm not a
fan of Chickfila. I'm not. It's gross.
It's bland. It's meh. Like, you gotta put the sauce everybody
goes nuts with these stupid sauces. It's all gross. That sponsorship.
Holy cow. Yeah. Right. No, I'm a popeye. Popeyes?
Popeyes has a much better much better chicken sandwich
by far. Popeyes is a superior
chicken sandwich to Chickfila, but everybody goes nuts, and
so they wait in line. Now you're saying don't be inefficient, but
dude, like, 30 minutes in line to. Go pick up a it's not 30 minutes.
That's just it. Chickfila is super efficient. You pull in that drive through and it
looks like it's wrapped. Car is still going to take 30 minutes.
Dude, it doesn't that's what's crazy is they're building these restaurants. It's a
restaurant parts upstairs and down below. It's like you're pulling through the
middle of the building and they're just, like, handing you food as fast as you
go through. Our local Chickfila will be backed out into the road. Like, you can
have a mile line into Chickfila and it still takes you 15 minutes to get
through it. Right. I mean, it is insane how efficient they are. They
will block up all of the road in front of the restaurant with cars. And
I mean, you just see a constant line. There's as many cars coming out as
there are. Don't get the appeal. I don't get the appeal.
Look being Keto. I don't like chickfila either. I think the
grilled food is just meh, right? The fried food is fantastic,
but that doesn't work very well. Just breading. That's the only difference. The
chicken still sits in that VAT of whatever to brine
it. It's gross. I can't believe you don't like Jesus
chicken, man. I thought you were a Christian, not Jesus chicken. That's
the other thing, too.
Just because they're closed on Sunday just because they're closed on
Sunday, that's obnoxious too. You got to tell your kids.
I can't go, hey, I want Chickfila. We can't. It's Sunday.
That's, like the best running family joke we have in my family right now
is like, my wife wakes up and I'm like, hey, what do you want for
breakfast? And she's like, Chickfila. I'm like, all right. So I'm jumping up and she's
like, Dumbass, it's Sunday. That's what we do.
So. Thanks, Chickfila.
Anyway, go on to your story. Sorry.
You've been waiting for this. This is going to better be we're building
suspense. All right, so David did not believe
me about this, and I want to hear your input and your feedback. You're kind
of a software guy. You probably don't know anything about this. David didn't know
anything about this. There's been four posts in ASOG over
the past couple of months. Very interesting theme. And I've seen this
post elsewhere recently. And so this person says,
this morning, coming into the office, I've received a text from a client, which
we serviced her vehicle yesterday. She stated one of my
texts, texted her and told her there will be an additional charge on top
of our repairs we did on her vehicle. The number she received the text
from was a subscription number only. It seems that my information
was breached, and somehow this person got a hold of this client's number but told
her to contact me instead. This doesn't make any sense. Have you ever
encountered anything like this? Was his question. So here's the thing
is, we noticed there were four posts in ASOG. It's been, like,
months apart, right? And then there were posts in other
groups. And it seems like it's either a shop management
system, it's some type of integration, like through Full Throttle.
Somehow there are certain shops that their information is getting
out, and there are scammers calling their clients saying,
hey, I know your vehicle was just serviced with us.
Tell you what, we mischarged you. You owe us more.
Give us your credit card number, and we'll just charge it right now. And so
they charge the client, and then they keep the money, and the client
calls the shop and says, hey, do I have a
receipt for what you charged me last night? And they said, well, we didn't charge
you anything. What are you talking about? Now, the thing is,
a in my shop, if you're leaving and you're already gone.
I'm not charging you more. I'm calling you to say, hey, I messed up and
left a part on your bill I wasn't supposed to. Where do I mail the
check? Right? And so there's a lot of scams going around all over the
world and all over different industries. It's not just us. What do you think
about that? What does it make you feel when you hear that?
I'm glad you're telling the story because it helps people understand all the time. So
in Auto Ops, we pull information from the Shop management software
into the scheduling experience. We have our scheduler on hundreds of sites. People all
the time will be like, why do you need a verification code? It just pulls
up someone's name and it just pulls up their vehicle. Is that super sensitive information?
As much as it may not be sensitive, you always have to think back to
scammers. Scammers do not need that much information to
trick you into thinking that you are connected with them. You know them
sometimes even just using someone's name. But Lucas, if you got a text that said,
hey, Lucas, I know for your exact vehicle, I know for your
2020 Maserati, because that's of course we drive. I know for your
2020 Maserati, we had this in the Shop yesterday. Blah, blah, blah,
here's your bill. And just linked out to some payment page. Just
with that information, just being able to identify a vehicle that you have, you're all
of a sudden your guards down, you're like, oh, they know me. How would someone
know who my vehicle is? So that's why and there is definitely
yeah, I think it's a I'm glad. At Auto Ops, we use a verification code
to protect that data for pulling any customer's information from a Shop management
software. Because scammers don't I mean, the classic scam going around is
just using your kid's name. One of your kid's name,
hey, blank's name is in trouble. They hear their kid's name, they're like, what the
heck? I'll do anything. I'll wire you over $100,000. Right? So
I think people understanding that you don't need that much data to pull someone's
guard down is super important. So using verification codes,
autops, if anyone, there's not many other people pulling intelligence into the
schedule experience like we are. But for the ones, if anyone is better, have a
verification code. I've definitely seen working with Shop management
softwares that some have much better guidelines
and protections on who their integration parties are, third party
integration parties, how they use their data, how they protect their data being ISOC
compliant. There's all these kind of tech privacy compliance policies
that yeah, I would just recommend that Shop management
software, as they do more integrations, a, they should obviously secure their data
well, too knowledgeable on that. But with third parties, just make sure
you're vetting third parties properly who are going to be able to like they're actually.
Legit. Yeah, well, I know there was a while
and a lot of stuff went around and around and there was a company, and
I'm sure you know who I'm talking about when I say this, but they manage
like 90% of the integrations with all shop management software
and they're basically a data aggregation warehouse, right? And they just take the data
and they split up the data to where it needs to go. And
they were talking about the fact that there were multiple terms of service,
and that company had like 15 or 16 different terms of service that may be
used in any one situation. And so some of those terms of
service were that if you put your data into our
system, that then Carfax's equity mining
aspect gets every single bit of that data. So the car
comes into your shop and you say, okay, I'm going to work on this. Car
client comes in, and while they're in your shop, or shortly after being
in your shop, they get an email and a telephone call from the local
dealer, says, hey, I know your car is in for some repairs. We've got
this amazing deal going on. You can come out to the dealership.
I'll put you in this car. Why don't you drive it for a couple of
days? Tell you what, we'll even give you $500 off your repair if you
bring it here instead. And so people were pulling their cars out of independent repair
shops and it was happening over and over and over again and people
couldn't figure out why. And it turned out that it was equity mining. And
part of me says, well, it's free market. They
can do whatever they want. And if you give them permission to use that data,
then it's on you. Right. But in the same respect, I mean,
that seems kind of sleazy to me, especially if you're working with a professional business
that's supposed to help you build your business and they're taking your information and
giving it to somebody else like that. Come on now. Yeah, and I'm almost ready
to blow auto op shot with Carfax because I've been
hearing more and more people just be like,
when they are taking your data and aggregating it, they ain't selling it to the
local shop down the road. They ain't selling it to you to help you out.
It ain't going in your direction. It's going to Ford of Dallas,
who pays them $14 million to be able to access this data and then
take business from local shops. So I need
to do more of my research on exactly how the data is used and
how if we wanted to pull out data, what data we would be offering.
We don't feel like offering up customers data to be sold away from independent
shops. Obviously, on our side, we want is it good
to be able to recommend services for a customer's
vehicle that you may not have at your shop the knowledge of, hey, where did
this car come from? What had it previously? For sure. How has it previously been
serviced? So it's good for us. For example, if you had auto
ops on your website, it'd be cool. Right now we pull in declined services,
but also being able to pull recommended services from previous history of the vehicle.
It'd be cool to be able to upsell that for your specific shop,
but yeah. At what cost is that data coming to us is kind of what
we're trying to figure out, because we don't feel like selling customers
data. I was talking to somebody a while back, and they were talking about shop
management softwares. They were talking about restaurant management softwares. They were talking about
just a plethora of organizations. They're talking
about these software companies that to them, and this was
somebody who would know, right? Like, they have the intel to be able to
say that for them, it had nothing to
do with even necessarily the subscription cost
of what it is that they get every month from the shop
or the restaurant or whatever it was for them, their primary interest
was in the data that they collected. Right. And they have terms
of service. Again, I don't know about you. I'm terrible. I don't read terms
of service. Right. I don't read any of them. But
they are interested in the data. And that one of the key currencies in
our current society, is data. Right. It's valuable.
Yeah. There's whole companies data as service.
There's whole companies that just sell data, and they'll
start one of those companies. Yeah, what a sketchy
product. It's like, hey, I gave you the data, pay me. And then that's it.
You know what you don't get is a call on Sunday
at 02:00 where the coolant hose that you
just installed on this vehicle popped off, and now there's coolant
dumping everywhere, and they're 2 hours away from you. You don't get that call
with data as a service. You see what I'm talking about, Lucas? You see what
I'm talking about? That's what I'm talking about. Data as a service.
I don't know anything about it, so I'm going to start researching it right now.
David's all of a sudden going to train off. He's
selling a shop. That's it. I'm not selling
anything. There's nothing to sell. There's debt. You know what I'm going to do is
just hang a little sign. I'm going to pull what's his face
from Oklahoma, old boy. He just hung a sign up one day,
and the customers didn't know. He just hung up a sign and said, hey,
we're closed. And the customers are calling. And then they show up. Their
cars are inside the building. Cars are inside the building. Can't get
yeah. He's like, oh. And then he had to get online and be like, hey,
we're going to work with everybody. Get your car back. And this that and the
other, they just closed. He's living the
dream. That's the dream. I'm going to
call what's that? No, he took
care of it. I'm sure he didn't pull what that
Canadian company did where it was months,
right? I'm going to go down to my list and I'm going to find every
Asterisk customer, every single customer that I had an Asterisk
next to, I'm going to call them up and I'm going to say, hey, next
week, free automotive repair. And they're going to be like, what? Yeah, bring your car
down and I'm going to pack all those cars into my shop and then that's
the day I close, all those cars are going to be inside my shop and
I'm going to hang a closed sign and we're like, yeah, you dirt bag, you
wanted free repair. How the hell was I going to pay my bills? This is
why we're closed, dirt bag. And then that's it. I'll be
closed. I'll get my revenge too.
Every one star review. Unjustified one star review.
We have a few on there that were justified, I think maybe one or two,
but the rest of them, all the rest of them,
yeah, I got your names, buddy. Don't you? You just wait and see one
day. Speaking of that,
so that was something I was curious about when all the online scheduling started
happening, right? So like in my online scheduler, I have the ability to block people.
And anytime, even if they just come in and I know it's going to be
one of those, I'm like going in. You can't book your own appointment anymore.
You have to call. And then when they call, they've got all these Asterisks next
to their name. And I'm like, Man, I'm really sorry. But we're
six and a half months out.
What tactic have you used to manage that? Because you don't want to upset
them, right? You don't want to set somebody off and be like, they're
discriminating against me. This, that or the other. How do you
manage that with Auto Ops to where you can kind of have some control
over that? Totally, yes. Right now we call them the
special customers, the Asterisk customers. We don't have a way to say you
can't say, this is my blocked list of customers, but in general, we're
adding a lot more features over the next month about basically at
certain points in the experience, if we note certain things leading people to
call the shop or just get in contact with the shop. Now, for example, if
you're like, hey, my car is broken on the side of the road, I'm going
to take it to the first shop that answers. If someone engages with that shop
through auto Ops, we want to get them connected with your shop as quick as
possible. So in that time period, as we kind of build out that functionality throughout,
we may get to a point where, okay, if there's a list of customers based
on their phone number that we would like to call the shop so we can
speak with them about their service. Obviously, we can't just block them
and be like, hey, it'll just seem like Auto Ops is broken, but we
can prompt them to say, well, for this customer, if you'd
like service, call the shop. That's something we may do at some point, and
maybe this is a learning opportunity for me. Is this like, you have, like,
100 customers that you're like, I will not service, or is it like
one or two? Well, it depends on the customer. You got five or
six, five or 600.
My customer list is in the thousands, right? Yeah. I mean, you
probably have 100 names over ten plus years.
What? Eleven years that I've been in business? Yeah. You're going to grow
a list of 100 or so names. Now, those people may have moved away, or
they may not have the same vehicle anymore, or they may have died. I don't
know. They may have no interest in coming back. Yeah,
they may not have any interest in coming back, but those are people
that if they call and one of my source
advisors pulls that name up and there's an asterisk there,
it's, hey, I'm sorry, I can't get you in right away. Are you willing to
wait six months, a year? You're
not telling them no, but you just want them to quietly go away?
And in our online scheduler, they
cannot set their own appointment. That name and that phone number is
flagged because it creates a unique customer
ID. That unique customer ID,
if they put in their information, it pops up and says, hey, are you so
and so? Yes, I am. Because they've been there to the shop before, and so
they're in my customer list. That person
cannot schedule their own appointment. They have to call in, and
when they call, they get flagged. And is this normally because of
the vehicle for you guys? Is it like, hey, we just hate working on that
vehicle? It's usually client. Some
people are impossible to work with. It's just not worth risking a bad
review. It's not worth the money. The bad review may have already
come. Assault on your employees. Right.
The ones that stand out to me, I won't flag them on first visit. I'll
only flag them on second visit. The ones that stand out to me,
we had a guy come in and basically, literally
commit friendly fraud. Right. His whole intention was to steal the
money. He never had intentions of paying the bill. He never had
intentions of letting the charges go through. His entire
program, everything he did was about stealing the money, getting his car fixed,
and not having to pay. And so somebody like that, I don't want them back
in my shop. Someone who curses at my staff, you say
one curse word to my staff, I will carry you out the front door of
this shop and you will never set foot back in it again. Right? You don't
disrespect my staff. Somebody that is extremely high
workload to deal with. Right? We've
got a really great client. Love them to death, but
they experience some mental issues. And it
is four and 5 hours on the telephone calls,
right? It is every day you're spending 6 hours on the telephone with
this person, just trying to work through explaining things to them and helping them
understand and then them going back and forth. And at some
point, I have to say, this isn't healthy for me or you.
And so my job is, as shop owner to come back and say, listen,
I'm really sorry, but I'm busy right now. I can't get you
in. People who don't want what we sell, right?
And I've got a perfect example of it. We had a guy who came in.
We're perfectly friendly. He's from town. He's friends with a
friend of mine. And this guy literally
is known online by a persona that starts with crazy. Right.
And he's a smart guy. I'm not saying he's not a smart guy.
It's just the point that every single time he comes in, well,
I don't understand why I'm paying for this, and I don't want to pay for
that, and I don't want to pay for this and I don't want to pay
for that. That's not fair that I'm paying for this. Sometimes it's the
argument after argument comes after they've approved
it. They've already approved it. You had that crazy guy fight you. Just to get
the money back. Yeah. They'll create a fight just so you'll refund it.
The guy that you had at the counter, he's like, I guess I'm going to
have to pay it. You're holding my car hostage. Like, whoa, what are you talking
about? You approved this online? Like, you had to physically approve this
online? Absolutely. How did you not know how much this was going to be? Well,
I just don't think it's fair that guy's not coming back in.
I'm not going to get into confrontation. I avoid confrontation. I'm not going to carry
anybody out the front door. That's going to be a thing. I don't like
confrontation. So if I have to confront somebody, I'm already
uncomfortable and I'm already annoyed. You're going on the
list. I shouldn't have to confront you as, hey, this is the
bill. You have to pay it. Hey, you approve this? Hey, I'm sorry, we
don't take 330 waiting oil changes. You can
complain all you want, but we've already talked about this. This is the third time
I've had to bring this up. Do not call for a 330 waiting or
show up and expect that I'm just going to drop everything and go.
And we just had a customer. Something got messed up with the brakes.
The park and brake didn't get adjusted properly. Whatever. The car, when you
first thing in the morning, would moan like a whale. Okay?
It was terrible. Okay, fine. Now she's concerned that there's a safety
concern. Fine. She brings it back in for another service. We
check the brakes. The brakes look fine. The noise only happens for 20
minutes. So after she pulls away from could. You imagine driving through
town sounding like a whale for 20 minutes? Yeah,
well, it's for 20 minutes of driving, and
maybe even not 20 minutes, but the car
was cold, sat overnight. You would go drive it. It would moan for a while.
It would stop. By the time she would get to our shop, the moaning was
gone. And so we didn't hear anything.
She comes in for a service. After we had done the brakes, we checked the
car. She's like, hey, I'm hearing a noise. Okay? We check everything
physically looks fine on the brakes. Now, I don't think we went in and checked
the parking brake or whatever, but everything looked fine on the
brakes. Everything looked normal, and there was no noise, and the car was stopping, and
we had nice, even wear. Everything was fine. Two months
later two months later, she walks in at, like, in the middle of the
day at 1230 and demands that we look at it right
now, and we're like, okay, well, let's put you in a
loaner. I don't want a loaner. Okay, everybody's
at lunch, so there's no possibility of somebody looking
at it right now. On top of it, you've already driven the car. The noise
is gone, so the noise is now not there. So we don't know what to
look for. It's 1230, everybody's at lunch,
and you're refusing to leave the car here. Well, that just doesn't fit my schedule.
It's like, okay, you need to work with us. I want the owner
to call me. Fine. I call her, and
she's giving me the same spiel. And I finally have to ask her. I
say, hey, what is it that you want me to do? I want you to
come down to my house and listen to this noise. I don't want to go
to the shop and leave my car. And I said, fine,
I will go to your house. So at 830, I was at
her house, and we got in the car, and I heard the noise, and I
said, I think there's something wrong with the parking brake. Fine. Okay?
I said, come in tomorrow at 830, and I will
bump everybody out of the way to pull your car in
first so we can service this and fix it. 830 the next morning. Do you
think she was there? No. She should have
scheduled online. Took a video of her the sound she
was hearing. She did take a video of it. The problem is
she had a video of the noise so we could hear the noise. The problem
is it wasn't crunchy. It wasn't crunchy.
Yeah, it sounded like dory.
The dory sound. What sound is your car making? Sound. The
dory sound? Yeah, the dory whale sound. That's what it sounded like. And
so at 830, she wasn't there. She had shot a video.
But the problem is you still need to be able to drive it. Do I
hear it backing up? Only going forward does it increase as I go
faster? Because that means it's all different things. No, once
you got it up to a certain speed, the noise would go away. It was
only from a stop accelerating the first like 5 miles an
hour, it would make the noise. Anyway. She rolls in about
10, 10 30. She wants service
now. And I knew she was going to do that. I see.
You see, Stephen? Do you see that reaction, that visceral
reaction from Lucas? My entire
schedule is now upended because of this.
She's going to go on the list. And here's the
really annoying part. I bought everything. I'm
like, I don't know if it's the brakes. I don't know if it's pads. I
don't know if it's parking brake hardware, whatever. I bought it all brand new. Had
it all sitting there waiting. We had a bay open. I said, don't put
anything in this bay because she's going to roll up late. I just had a
feeling when she wasn't there at 830, my service advisor was like, she's going to
pull in like 10, 10 30. Well, he texted me. He's like, Guess who just
showed up? She pulls into the bay,
we take it all apart. My tech's like, hey, I think it was the parking
brake got adjusted out too far. I said.
Okay. Well, whatever. Do whatever you got to do to fix that. Just don't want
this thing come back for this noise. The
entire time. She's standing at the window staring at my tech the entire
time, watching him take every bolt out. Just mean mugging him the whole
time to pace him back and forth, which is right by
where my service advisor sits. And he can't sit down and do his
job because she's all up in his business. So this is
disrupting for like 2 hours. This has disrupted the entire flow of the
shop. Everything is out of whack now. We're behind on other
cars because we had to stop deal with this one car because she didn't want
to follow the way we do things. We drop the car off. We give you
a loaner if you can't get a ride or whatever, right? We have loaner vehicles.
We offered her to, she wouldn't take it. Whatever, fine.
He's taking all this apart. And then at some point she's like, hey, I've got
new brake pads in the back of my car. Can you put them on?
Yeah. I bought what was really going on. I
bought Akibono brakes. Now, she was very impressed
with herself that she bought Akibono brakes. The problem is, Acubono isn't OE
on Toyota. It's like advios or whatever the name of that company is.
OE on Toyota, she thought she was buying OE brakes, but at a
discount because they weren't green Toyota brakes. Toyota brakes are typically
green. And so she thought she was impressed with herself that she had
bought. And here's the other thing. Akibono has like three lines. They have a cheap
line, a middle line and a premium line, and they all squeal. So I'm definitely
not putting Akibono brakes on her car. And
on top of that, she'd already bought brakes for me. We were already doing the
job again, just to appease her. There was nothing wrong with
our pads and rotors. It turns out it was a parking brake, which we didn't
replace. The technician had not adjusted them
properly when he did the job the first time. So now he was
doing it, he was cleaning it, everything up, lubricating, everything. We were redoing the whole
brake job. Anyway, she's going on the list is what
I'm saying. All that to tell you that now there's an
asterisk on her name. Well, I mean, here's the thing
for us. We set very specific
rules about how you're going to act in the shop, and we don't tell them.
Like, we have rules and you're going to follow them. It's that here's how
we work, here's what we do. And I'm building a product, and we. Do that
to be equitable to everybody. This is so nobody gets screwed
over. It's fair to the shop, it's fair to the employees, it's fair to the
customer. That's why there's rules. Sorry, go ahead.
But is it that the other shops aren't doing
that? That the consumer gets this idea everybody's trying to screw them over?
So now what happens is they come to our shop, which we're not trying to,
we're trying to do it right, but they are so afraid they're going to get
screwed over. So afraid somebody's taking advantage of them that they don't ever see
it. It's the flipping seven to Steven Firestones, dude. It's the
seven to seven Firestones. I'm sorry. If you're listening to this and you're
open seven to seven, we need to talk. There's some BS.
All seven days. Like, you don't have a day off, so what are you doing?
Just rotating schedules out and you got to overstaff your store
because you got to give people days off. And so you have guy working four
days this week and three days the next, and four days and three days. Whatever.
All I'm saying is they shouldn't be working that long. And we've conditioned
customers that I hate. I'm going to wait here. And that's why I have
this nice waiting area. And I've got coffee and I've got TV
with Family Feud playing for
24 hours a day. I've got this built so you
can expect to sit here and wait for me to service your car.
Do they even get to the vehicle. Have you actually gone in and waited?
I went in to a dealership to have my
transmission. The car was under warranties before I owned a
shop. The transmission had a problem in the
synchro, a third to fourth synchro, something like that.
And the service advisor goes, yeah, we're going to have to replace that Thunder
with the warranty. They're going to have to open the case up. I said okay,
well they didn't offer me a loaner. It was like a 30 minutes
drive to the dealership. I sat there and waited. I watched
tennis. Have you ever watched tennis? It was most awful
boring sport. I'm sure playing tennis is fun. I don't know, I'm a
chubby guy, I'm not going to play tennis, but I'm sure it's fun. But
watching it, I'm sure live, it's interesting. Some
sports like hockey is interesting live. Don't watch hockey
on TV. That is boring. AF
the tennis is boring. It is
awful. They were playing tennis. I watched 6
hours of tennis. I think it was Wimbledon or there was one of the big
opens, australia, I don't even know. The court was blue.
I remember this, this was like 15 years ago.
15 years ago this was burned in my
brain for 6 hours. I sat there six, 7 hours I
sat there waiting for this car to be serviced in this big cushy chair.
I didn't want to be there. What is wrong with people? Why do they wait?
Why do they do that? I don't understand. Do you really want to sit at
a dealership? Do you really want to sit at a firestone and drink crappy coffee
and watch Family Feud? There's other things to do. Get a
loaner. All I'm saying is they shouldn't be open.
Seven to seven. You're conditioning these customers to expect immediate
service. Right now I've got 17 technicians waiting for
you to come in right now. You know who I could see that would want
to go into a shop like that and experience that? George. I
bet George was the guy who took his car into a shop and waited. And
old people that have nothing else to do. Old people that are retired and my
family's moved away from me and maybe like they're estranged too. So
now nobody likes me and
I don't get invited to Thanksgiving and what do I have to do all
day? Bitch and moan to people and show up to stores and waste
people's time. And I'm going to go and I'm going to sit there and I'm
going to drink your crappy coffee. And they always ask for coffee. I don't understand.
Do you have any coffee? Do you really want to drink the coffee I make
at a repair shop? What do you think I have got a barista in the
back? Do you think that's what it was going coffee filter?
A what? Red grease, red coffee filter? Yeah,
red grease, red coffee filter. That's the coffee. You're getting
that coffee. That's what's going on. What kind of coffee
do you think you're getting? At least go sit at a restaurant or a coffee
shop. Like, that's what they're designed to do. Get your laptop.
It's always an iPad because old people right, it's an
iPad. Go to your coffee shop. Don't worry,
Steven. Nobody over, like, 50 listens to this
podcast. Nobody at 50 listens to this podcast. I'm just telling you
right now, so you don't have to worry about it, complains about it. And Dutch
is definitely not going to. Listen to this because Dutch doesn't listen to the podcast.
He's wholly against he is absolutely against online
scheduling. He thinks it is our industry.
Working on him. I'm working on him. Slowly but surely, he'll
come at some point. He was actually one of the first
people one of the ways that Auto Ops gained some traction in the beginning was
we just sent out some surveys, and I was actually trying to learn about how
shop owners think about online scheduling. One of the very first people last year,
he was like, this is terrible. I almost quit.
Dutch is still ruining people's lives. No, listen. No. But
he's softened up a little bit. I'll reach out to him soon, and I want
to go back real quick to what you guys were saying about I call it
personally firing a customer is that not only do you avoid a bad
review, do you save yourself a hassle. Your employees don't get
hassled. Is that it actually allows you to continue on
being known for being good at something is that it actually allows you
to when you do jobs that suit your shop better, it allows you to gain
reputation. Being known. Well, for that industry, the
repairs could be equal. The repairs that shop A and shop
B could be the same repair. It's personality. People that come into
our shop and are happy with our service, it's because what we
delivered is what they were expecting. We set the expectation they
were fine with it, they were happy with it, and then they left
happy. We didn't do anything different on our five star reviews that
it did with our one star reviews, the unwarranted ones, we
didn't do anything different. We treated everybody the same. We were friendly. We
communicated the way we communicate through text. We sent pictures.
We sent them the estimate. We don't call and pressure anybody to sell
anything. We don't say, well, if you don't do this, you're going to die tomorrow.
We don't do any of that. That whole spiel. We avoid it all.
And yet they're upset at us because we recommended a
belt. Okay, decline it and move on with
your life. Don't leave me a one star review because I recommended a belt.
You felt like some cousin mechanic of yours who
doesn't know what the hell they're doing is telling you, oh, you don't. Need a
belt? At what point do you need a belt, then? When it snaps off? Do
you even know what the hell you're talking about? You don't know what you're talking
about. So why don't you leave it to the professionals or find somebody else
that fits what you want them to do for you? That's not us.
Personality. And the thing that should help you guys, and I
always tell myself is that the people who give one star reviews is they're also
the people with crappy friends you don't want at your shop anyway. So that's what
I think it reminded me when you were talking about the customer who
brings in the crappy non OE part, and you're like, we can't do this. We
get people hitting us up in slight offshoots of automotive repair.
We'll get car washes, we'll get tinting places, and
they'll be like, hey, can you put on this feature and this and they're asking
you to do all this crazy stuff. And that's when you realize it's not even
worth it, because I'm just going to lose credibility in the auto repair space. I'm
not going to be as good I'm not going to be known for being as
good at just full auto repair, independent shops. And so that kind of
reminds me of we got to consider that in RM, that there's a
time to fire customers because they just distract you. They just distract you from doing
what you're good at. Let me ask you this, and I've talked to
some other people. Obviously, restaurants deal with it. Hospitality deals with
it. Do you deal with crazy clients like that? I mean,
you're dealing with professionals who face those challenges every day, you know what
I'm saying? But do you shop owners are the most not
self aware group in the history? Do you
have any idea how cheap shop owners are?
Like, $99 a month? That's insane. I
just can't justify the cost. It's like, what are you talking
about? I've seen what you spend money on.
What are you talking about? That's too much money.
You do $2.1 million a year. You're arguing for
$99. It should be $69. Shut
up. That's a personal so two points. That
honestly, and this is the truth, I've never had, like, a real poor interaction with
the shop owner. I've never had anyone getting mad. No.
I like to think we specialize in one thing and we do a good job
at it. We don't try to do ten things. I'm sure if we came out
and was like, we do 100 things in one, I'd get yelled at from everyone,
but so I've only had positive interactions. But the one thing I have learned is
obviously there is some shop owners who really push us on price or
real price sensitive, is that they're never going to be
successful for us. They're never going to be successful customers. If
really the only reason that you find value in autoops is that you could get
it for way less of a price.
If you're crunching numbers over 30, $40 a month, then obviously
we understand you don't want another bill. We're conscious of that. But for the customers
to really push it on me, we've had, in full transparency,
we're in about 180 shops. I think we've had four leaves so far
since starting all of those people, I look back and they were given
huge discounts. And so I think there's a reason why if you just can't see
the value in what we do up front. From the get go, I'm not
doing a discount. Yeah. Because the problem is
the point is that these people complain about the customer nickel and
diming them complain about it.
Turn around. Yeah. It's like the shop owner that gets mad at the one Star
review, but that's the same guy leaving one star reviews at restaurants because
he didn't get the bread in time. Like, what are you doing? You own a
business. Leave five star reviews everywhere you go. Or
don't do it. You watch those people and you know who they are.
Right. Like, if you pay attention, we know you know who they are. Because
you see, they're always mad at their technicians. They're always
frustrated. The technician costs them. Always mad at the technician was the problem. They're always
mad at the customers. It's always somebody else. Right. I
think that's something to think about. When you deal with those clients that are like
that, and you deal with others in your industry who are like that, is
if you pay close enough attention, you realize this is not a you problem.
This is more of they're unwilling to accept responsibility for anything in life
problem. Right. Yeah. It's always got to be somebody else because it couldn't be
me. David and there's someone
I was listening to, and they were basically just saying, this is something that I
took on a personal level, but I expanded now on a lot of things, is
that usually when things aren't going well in your life, you
can always whether it's me personally, whether I meet someone, and there's always something
off. There's always something that there's off. No one is
like, doing everything perfect in life and it just doesn't work out for them.
There's always something weird and something that I've taken even a little
bit of comfort in. Auto Ops, the ones that and as I say
this, I'm going to talk about maybe shops who aren't of the highest quality. We're
trying to find ways here at Auto Ops. We're changing our pricing model. We're adding
new features to work with shops who are getting started, who are doing twenty
k a month. We're trying to find ways to work with those shops. But right
now, the shops that don't see value in Auto Ops are the ones where I
get on a call and they have 100 papers flying around behind them. Their shops
all in disarray. They're screaming out of tech while I'm on the call. You're like,
I know I'm not going to close this, and I know maybe not
even it's unrelated to autopsy. This is that you have other issues in your shop.
So that's not to say shop owners. Don'T use
while mid sales conversation. Man,
I can't hear you. What? I can't hear you.
And all of a sudden you just click end and you're done and
it's over. I've been on calls showing someone
and literally they're screaming at their technician while on the call.
Luckily, we have signed none of
those. You know they're going to be screaming at you
tomorrow because it's not working like they think it know.
And look, I think there's a lot of fear about online scheduling,
right. And so I was a little afraid right when I set mine up.
David had Acuity would you shut up for a
minute? That was a dumb statement at all.
No, losing control. No, it's scary losing control, like giving. A piece of
control over to let me explain. I was not afraid
until I talked to Dutch and then I talked to Dutch and he's like, the
world's going to be over. Your shot's going to go out. Why? I don't
understand. What's his hesitancy do you have his. List of concerns about online
scheduling? I can't remember all of them. I can probably go find them online. I
have it somewhere in a message, but I do not have it off. The long
story short, lets you set up parking lot scheduling like the way you do Lucas,
right? Exactly. Just build that into the online scheduler. That's how
I've got mine set up. Right. And I adjust it as I go. And so
if I get too busy, I back down. If I'm not busy enough, I ramp
it up. And so I'm controlling that workflow.
And his concern was how do you control this? How do you do this? And
there's no way you're going to have bad people in your shop. Yeah, a
couple of common misconceptions, like general ones. And I know not
all people think, but these are some common misconceptions that A, we get into
guaranteeing when the service will be finished.
Our goal at Auto Ops is to get customers in your shop to shake your
service advisor's hands. We don't get into being like, it's going to be 4 hours,
you can pick up your vehicle. At this point, it's your job to
communicate with the customer. On that end. Our job is to get the customer in
your shop. We just want to convert better from your current marketing spend. So that's
one thing. A common misconception. Another misconception is we get into guaranteeing
pricing. We don't do anything. I mean, you can there is ways to include pricing
ranges. We have a few shops who opt to do that. But in general, when
we pull declined services from your shop management software. We're not putting in the
price. Parts change all the time. If you quoted someone seven months ago so we
don't get into pricing. That's not something we do. Another thing is that
there's a fear that online scheduling is leading to, like, I never see
my customer. They come, they put in an electronic key drop, they fill out a
form, then they schedule online, they drop the car off, they come pick up their
keys, text to pay, and that I never get to see my customers. And that's
what Auto Ops is leading to. That's not what we're leading to. We still
think one of the most important pieces of retention is the service
advisor coming over, shaking your hand, saying hello, being
really friendly to you, and that david, you're shaking your
head. You do not believe that's not
yeah. We avoid all
yeah, I avoid all that. It's not that I don't want people
come in, they drop off their car, they're friendly, but I prefer they just leave
the keys. And then we try to do everything, communicate everything. But
at the end of the day, hey, we're not trying to hang out. Do you
still want me to fix your car in a friendly and communicative
manner at a fair price with a good quality repair?
That's it. That's what I offer. I'm not here to ask
you about your dog or
apart from, obviously, Auto. Repair for Introverts of Retention.
Yeah, and one thing, obviously, a lot of times we leave out service.
You have to provide good service. That's obviously the biggest part of retention. If you
do a crappy job, your customers leaving every time. But yeah, that's some of
the things I think. And then the biggest part, which this is something
that we've worked on over time and it's getting better and better, is the fear
of that. I cannot have enough schedule
settings and enough control over my calendar, and I can't tweak it in the ways
I want to feel comfortable that if a customer sees a time slot on my
scheduler, that I will actually be able to do the work. And that for
all of our shops we fixed. In the beginning, it took us a while to
get our first, like, five shops because our schedule settings were not up to
par. Today we have schedule settings you could say,
okay, I want three waiters from 08:00 A.m. To 11:00
A.m., and I want four drop offs from eight to 02:00 P.m., and I want
the soonest a customer to schedule is one day out. But if it's a new
customer, I want them to be able to schedule as soon as 2
hours out. And I want to block drop offs from dropping off from two
to four because something's happening in that time range. And I want current
customers to have this kind of experience, and I want new customers
to be able to skip these parts of the experience just get into my shop
quicker. And I want people to be able to call my shop at this point.
So the schedule settings, as much as some of the stuff that blows up a
little bit about autops is the fancy stuff. Fancy stuff is cool. Is it cool
when you type in your number and the customer sees their name and vehicles pop
up and it creates that live experience that they feel in other industries? Yeah, that's
super cool. But if you can't back it up, that live experience, the feeling
of a live experience with actually good enough schedule settings to provide live
time slots, then nothing right. The customizability and the ability
to move them where they need to be. And I think that's the biggest fear.
Once I got to talking to Dutch, that was really his fear was
that I get into a situation where I can't service the vehicle when it shows
up. That's the number one acuity. When we had that set up, we run
everything right. We don't manually schedule anything. Everything
we do here goes through Acuity. So like, if you want to make an appointment
for a client, you're going in Acuity to make the appointment. And so
is that something you can do with Auto ops? Do we have the option to
schedule manually in auto ops? Like that correct? Yeah, we have
an internal scheduler and kind of this gets back to that safety point for a
SEC. We have an internal scheduler where it skips the verification code for service
advisors who obviously already have access to customer data through the Shop
management software. We're not providing them anything they couldn't get. But yeah, you can schedule
on behalf of customers through auto ops, obviously. But once again, you could
schedule just schedule an appointment normally in Shopware, and obviously we pick that up on
our end. We're calculating all availability live instantly by
the time of right. Even if a customer if you put something in Shopware
and a customer is mid scheduling, but they didn't get to the calendar yet, we'll
still update that because we don't pull availability until you actually click on that
calendar page at that point. Then we're calculating availability based on the service
duration. We're looking for a time it could fit in your calendar and then all
the auto op schedule settings go on top of that. And honestly, a lot of
people we've switched a lot of people over from Acuity simply based on the
integration, the decline services that we pull, for sure, the
auto specific to what we do. But they have great
settings in general, acuity has done a good job at obviously, they
focus just on scheduling. So really what they're focused on the schedule setting
side. But then when it comes to being auto specific and the integration with Shop
management software and the way the customizability we have,
that makes sense only for auto shops. That's really where we've succeeded. But have you
guys been happy with just on the scheduling piece, the level of do
you really dive into the schedule settings? With Acuity, I dive in
pretty. So basically what I
do is I follow parking lot scheduling, which means that every
so each, each job in auto repair, you have an average
hour per ro. Right. And so I know how many
hours my technician can turn. So let's say it's Eric
and he can turn 9 hours a day. Well, if his average
repair order is 3 hours, how many jobs can he do? He can do three.
Right. And so I know better than scheduling, more than three.
And really what I'm targeting is the initial evaluation.
And one of my fears when I went to Acuity was,
how do I explain to them that most likely I'm going to have your car
for two days? Maybe it's three, maybe it's four, I don't
know. But don't plan on dropping your car off and picking it up that
afternoon. Right. And so we still schedule the majority of
clients on the telephone. That's where we still get the majority of scheduling.
And so when we set it up, I came in and I
built forms and I built a write up that helps explain
that, that, hey, you're going to drop it off, I need you to drop it
off first thing in the morning. We don't do any waiters. And so they drop
it off first thing in the morning. They bring the car in, we look at
it. And so that first schedule for us is an hour and a half. Now
they see 4 hours. Right. And I tell my clients, hey, it's going to be
four to 6 hours before you hear from me again. Right. I'm not going to
call you back in 2 hours. I'm not going to call you back when this
scheduling up. And so what it does is it allows me to get in. I
know Eric's going to be on that job. I've got a testing routine that's 1
hour on most all my vehicles, and I've got 0.5. That's for our peace of
mind process, that's an hour and a half. So how many can he do before
lunchtime? He can do three of those before lunchtime. And then we're writing the
estimates. We're getting the approvals that typically converts to four, four and a half
hours. And so you see what I'm saying? Like, now I drop that back into
the parking lot wherever I can fit it in, and it keeps me from
overbooking. Does that make sense? In other words, it's set up based on our
actual capacity and actual ability. And then if we get too busy in the shop,
I go in, I click, and I change it down to where Eric only gets
two appointments today. Eric only gets two appointments from here on out. Or,
hey, we're not busy enough. And my GS guy, he's flying through
work. I need to get more appointments in for him, and it gives me the
ability to curtail it and go up and down as I need to, if that
makes sense. 100%. Give me 2 seconds to plug in my laptop so that
it doesn't die real quick.
Thank you.
Okay. Sorry about that. But yeah, like you
were saying that stuff especially, and that's what we figured out a lot more is
a lot of people were saying, yeah, I want to scheduling, like, max appointments per
day, per technician, but if you're not doing it based off hours,
it's never going to be as accurate. So let
me ask you this. Is that how you're scheduling? Because so in other words, in
Acuity, I have it set up to where I'm scheduling for an
employee. Right? In other words, like, that is a technician,
and that calendar is how they look at it. And that calendar is
the technician, and here's his capability. And so if I need to back
it down, he's going on vacation, I can block just him off. Right. And so
one of my fears with changing was that a lot of the other scheduling I
looked at didn't do it like that. It was that all of the schedule, it
was just a schedule for the shop. And you have this many bays, right? And
I'm like, Nah, dude, I don't want that. I want to be able to break
it down by employee because each employee has different potential. They
work on different things. They have different abilities. And so I've got to be able
to funnel the right job to the right person. I've got one guy who just
does oil services and tires. I've got one guy who just does alignment,
steering and suspension. I've got one guy who does heavy line and diag. So I
have to be able to decipher where that's going. Now,
I'm an intensive manager in that sense, right. Like, I'm on top of
that, paying attention, trying to make sure we're taking it to that extreme
level. Some shops are just like, well, we'll figure it out when they get here.
How are you handling that? Yeah, and that's where
everything is going with Auto Ops. Once again, being a company that just focused on
online scheduling, these are the nitty gritty we get to dive into. So,
yeah, right now we're currently developing the ability hours. It's going to be
hour based and technician based. Right now, we're basing that on the unassigned
columns. The part that we've been struggling with is the shops who get nervous
assigning appointments to specific technicians because they don't
have a good enough understanding of what the customer exactly needs, so they don't
understand which technicians it's steven going to based on what the customer
says. Because the goal would be I mean, would you guys feel comfortable saying,
hey, if a customer indicated I mean, obviously you'll be able to move it
around your calendar. But hey, the customer indicated that they're hearing this kind
of engine noise, that it always goes to your heavy diag
technician. Yeah, that's how
I would handle it.
I know there's some crazy stuff you can try to do with Zapier for some
of the Shop management software to build integration. Have you played? Yeah, we're integrated
through Zapier. Zapier and Acuity integrate.
There's things that Shopware won't show Zapier
and there's things that Acuity won't show Zapier. So it
can cause some problems. The biggest frustration that I have
with Shopware, AutoFlow and Zapier right now
is Reason vehicles here. Right. Because I can pull Reason
vehicles here from Acuity, but I can't get it into the Reason vehicles
here in Shopware and I can't put it
into AutoFlow automatically. So my idea
was AutoFlow or Auto text me, right.
Like you've got an inspection. And so when we start that inspection at the top,
it's got reasoned vehicles here. And so what we use that for is we
take the labor lines from the repair order and we say, okay,
they're getting an oil service. Well, the oil service is done. That part
of the process is complete. Well, they're also getting a break evaluation. The break evaluation
is in process now. And then you drop some note in there that
says, hey, we'll be in touch within the next three to 4 hours to give
you an estimate. Well, that means you give them the first contact without the
service advisor who's already overwhelmed picking up the telephone to call them and say, hey,
I'll be to you as soon as possible. Now they've gotten a text and email
and it says in there, hey, we've done this part, we've done this part, we're
actually working on the car. We're in process right now and they'll be in touch
by this time. Well, what does that mean? Well, now I don't have to pick
up that client's telephone and call them. I don't have to bother them, they don't
have to bother me. I'm still moving forward and getting work done. And so
it expedites the shop a little bit. And so that's
probably my biggest frustration with any of the integrations I've got right
now is I really want RVH to be
fluent across the board in all of my applications. Right,
totally. Yeah. And we do a good job. And that's one of the biggest things
is how you can collect better information for your technicians. And
really the key is obviously can we have it in all of our integrations
and obviously all the Shop management software as we integrate it's going in for a
Shop where reason for customer visit. But yeah, can you
decrease slow? Could you get to a
diagnostic evaluation, correct evaluation quicker
with collecting better information and the way you can customize kind of this issue tree
in Auto ops to ask, hey, not just only brakes
hey, is it making a sound when you speed up. So
those kind of things like, hey, what kind of sound is it making? Does it
happen when you speed up, asking those questions to get better information while
not pushing the customer out of the scheduling experience just because it's too long. It's
kind of the balance we go against, but going back to that scheduling yeah, we
do a good job right now of basically appointments per time
slot, appointment in your shop, management software, appointments per time slot online,
total amount of appointments per day. Then going down into drop off and
waiting different hours for those different capacities for drop off and waiting,
getting into the duration of the service. So we do a good job at looking
at the duration of the specific service that the customer selects and putting that in
the Shop management software. The part we don't do now and that we're going to
be launching probably end of September is the full assigning it to
a technician and then being able to calculate availability based on
okay, yeah, this technician only does inspections. They can't do full diag
stuff. Then being able to limit availability based. On
technician, that's pretty cool. That's a neat concept.
That's one of the reasons I've never switched from Acuity is because I have so
much control in that area, and I have the ability to have it on that.
But the thing is, it's a lot of work to build out
Acuity to do that. Now, here's the thing that I'll say about
Acuity is that it seems less scary to
me to try and build that out than build out a trouble tree. Right.
Because I'm thinking, like, as the technically minded guy, I'm over here, like,
oh, my God, there's thousands of things that it could be, and there's
thousands of questions I would want to ask, and I'm going to end up like,
dude, AWS. But you can take me if I sign up,
because.
You can take Jim Morton's diagnostic questionnaire,
dump it in that'll, take, what,
80, 90% of the cases and handle them. Yeah,
that would work. And we have a couple of people that have uploaded
well known diag questionnaires that their service
advisors were previously using, and they just use them in auto ops.
So that's been cool to see. But yeah, the one thing you also have to
remember is we can take a lot of that load off. And the plan is
with Shopware is that we can already pull in. You'll just be able to go
in auto ops. We already have full integration. Well, you'll be able to see all
your technicians. You can just assign them to a calendar. We can pull in
if you have durations for certain services that we can match up and
correctly map out this if they answer these questions, we
connect it to this service in
Shopware and then we understand the technician. So there's a lot we can do on
the setup side to make that. And the plan is to make it super easy
where it's not like a five hour, I'm sure. How many hours have you spent
building out Acuity? The goal is that we can make that
build out process a lot simpler by being able to pull all that information in
from your shop management software. That's pretty cool, dude. That's
pretty legit. That's the plan. But yeah, these are the things. Being a company that
just focuses on online scheduling that we gives you some opportunity
yeah. Dive into our developers. We're not
building websites on the side or building the crazy CRM is that we just
really focus on this kind of stuff and props to the people. We couldn't do
our jobs without the people building great websites that drive for sure the
viewers to then yeah, we love all the website companies work with because we
need those viewers to actually convert to paying customers online. Once again,
a lot of this is just about engaging customers where they want to be engaged
at. If Dutch wants to call in his local shop, he can do that every
day of the week. And that's why we have a full integration so that when
they put Dutch's appointment on the calendar
for the person who wants to schedule online, we just updated that availability. So it's
really just engaging the customer we're at. And that's kind of where Auto Ops is
heading, is that obviously right now a primary point is people are
scheduling from the website. But now even a lot of people a QR code on
a mailer that goes to your website and opens up the scheduling. But that's kind
of an example of just meeting people wherever they at, however they want to get
in your shop. If they want to get in your shop, we want to provide
them a way to do that as frictionless as possible.
How do they find out about Auto Ops? As a
shop owner? Yeah, Autoops.com. I
don't like taking people right to our book a demo page because I want you
to go on research. Kind of what we do, see how it makes sense for
your shop. But yeah, really the benefit of Auto Ops is how customizable it is
for all these specific shops. Yeah, go to Autoops.com
and I say it on every show. People call me
on it all the time. Give me a call. My phone number is on the
website. 717-4407 Steven zero two. If I don't
pick up in 510 minutes, I don't care if you call me at 11:00 p.m..
I'll throw you a little bit of a discount, but I always pick up. You
want to hear a good story? David's calling at 01:00 a.m. Man. Dude, I'm cutting
all that out. What are you doing? No is terrible. Just throw the
form out online and I will get back to you as soon as
possible. A guy in North Carolina I almost want to. Give
a shop a shout up. He filled out a form at like
10:20 p.m. Last night. He filled out the form.
He's on his phone. He's awake. Gave him a call right then and there. I
said, hey, this is Steven. I just wanted to say hi. I took a look
at your shop. If you called me at 1020 after filled out a form, I
would freak out. He said, can you just get on
the computer now? This is the only time that works for me. My shop. I'm
busy at my shop all day. Can you do a demo now? I got on
the computer. We sat on there 25 minutes. I showed him all of auto
ops. He signed, give me the name. We're calling this guy out. We've got to
know who it is. Hold on. Let me pull it up. CNC
Automotive. His name is give me 2 seconds. I was on the bleep it
out. Be like, bleep. Yeah, bleep it out. Look, you ready? And he's
down in yeah, he's down in North Carolina. Chad
Nielsen. Chad Nielsen. You did make sure
that you invited him to ASTE, right?
Everyone's got to go to ASTE. That's going to be one of
we're having a big amount of our team come down. That's like, one of our
top awesome dude. And
there's a lot. I've ran into the world of conferences. We looked at, like,
1415. I mean, there's like three that we're focused on. And ASTE
is getting I mean, it's blown up. Everyone's talking about it. When I talk to
people, it's like, I was at a conference last week, and it's always
will you be at ASTE? Yeah, it's where
kind of like, I got my start trying to fix things with my shop. But
the three that I always try and make sure I attend is always going
to be ASTE, right? It's always going to be Apex, and it's
always going to be Vision. Right. If I can make those things work, those are
the ones that if I can attend, those are the ones that I'm going to
do my best to attend. I say
that sherry's going to kill me. I love vision,
but if I had a choice between vision in the freezing cold
in March with 200 miles an hour winds and 80 degrees the next
day, and Southern California and the Equipment and Tool
Institute's tool don't, that list was
terrible. It's ETI. Tool tech it's
ASTE. It's whatever the Institute's got going
on. Yeah, the Institute does some really awesome
shows, and man, you got to go. To are they doing the
management thing? Is that every other year? The one every
other year, yeah. Okay, so it's going to be Mars in 2024. And then
2025, they'll do the that makes a Manch and Apex and then
Tools. Forgot Tools. Yeah. I took my family to Tools last year.
Tools was good. Tools needs more vendor support. Poor
Tools. I'll be honest. Final thing, I've heard some mixed reviews about
Apex, especially on the vendor side. And a quick note on vendors is that people,
I think, sometimes think we're pulling people's tail. We say we have show
specials. Talk to the vendors at shows, you will actually I mean, with
auto ops alone, you will get the cheapest rate by far. If you're with me
at a show, I do a demo and you sign on the most recent conference
we're at people are easily saving $450. Not that what we
do is that expensive. We just give them a bunch of free stuff. So actually
talk to the vendors. If you're serious about if you want even a new shop
management software, go talk to them at the show. You will get a good deal.
Yeah, for sure. Good advice. Apex is huge.
I could see from a vendor side that you're going to be one of
8000 other vendors there, and you might. Get lost in the
noise a little too flashy. They're in the fun
mode. They're not really in the shopping mode. They're going to seema
the Apex side of it is a little bit
more. Serious, a little more subdued, for
sure. My family owns a
tourist attraction, and so we go to trade shows for that too. And it
is very much like a conventional trade show where you can get tons
of really good information, all of the
opportunities that you get while you're there. And you get to talk to the
people who have the ability to make change in the industry and can actually do
things right. A lot of these trade shows you go to,
right, you can get to a certain percentage of people who can make change within
a company. But at Apex, the people you're talking to
could be executives, they could be engineers, they could be product
developers. They bring everybody. And so when you're there talking
to these people and you get to see these products firsthand and you can experience
it, it's like nothing else, right? All the other trade shows are
like, we've got two or 3 hours here, we've got three or 4 hours
there. Dude, you go to you especially
if you're in the market to build a shop, or you're in the
market to reequip a shop. I could not imagine
doing it without going to Apex, because when we were building a shop, that was
the thing is, that was one of the first times I'd been to Apex and
I'm walking through and I'm learning about these products. I'm like, holy crap,
I was getting ready to do this, but this is going to work a lot
better in the shop. I like that hose reel a lot better. That's a much
better hose reel. And so it was things like where I would have
spent a million dollars in equipping the shop. I was
able to equip it for 600 and 5700 thousand dollars.
And that's a big difference. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Well, I'm excited for all the shows. We will definitely be at ASTE
and but, yeah, thanks for having me on this. Yes, sir.
Once again, I posted about this yesterday. We don't have a large
marketing budget over here at Autoops. We like working on our product much more than
pitch and shop owners all day. So things like that. The amish marketing
budget the Amish marketing. Budget is not high.
You put it on the side of a covered wagon, it's fine. Yeah, I know.
We got covered wagon.