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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.
Jeff Compton [00:00:00]:
I sound like, you know, I'm, I'm constantly waving a flag to abolish flat rate, but I'm not. People have to appreciate more what detects the obstacles that's in place for them when they're paid that way and then adjust accordingly. I think that's.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:00:19]:
What do you think, in your opinion, that it was something that was set up for back more like in the 80s and 90s where everything was more uniform and easily.
Jeff Compton [00:00:27]:
Oh, I, I think it was probably optimized for the 60s. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another exciting episode of the Jaden Mechanic podcast. It's a nice Saturday night. We're finally out of the heat wave and your, your boy was fishing today, so that's always a good day. But what I wanted to share with everybody tonight is, is somebody that I just got the pleasure of getting to know a little bit recently again through the podcast. And, and we have some, we've probably driven some of the same crappy stretch as a highway. Mr. Matthew Patton from the Ottawa area, which is, I'll call that my second home, is a mobile technician, mobile diagnostic and programming.
Jeff Compton [00:01:13]:
So, Matthew, how are you tonight, brother?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:01:15]:
I'm good. Yourself?
Jeff Compton [00:01:17]:
Very good, very good. A little stiff from fishing, but other than that.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:01:20]:
Well, that, that's a good day then.
Jeff Compton [00:01:21]:
It is. We had, we had frost actually first thing this morning in my.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:01:25]:
Oh, really?
Jeff Compton [00:01:26]:
We were out in my area, so. And the fingers got a little numb by. So about 10:30, 11:00 clock, we're like, well, the fish are not, we're not hammering them. So let's like, let's call it a day because we were up, we were there before the sun was up. So, you know, six o' clock, we're getting the first fish in the boat. So I mean, it's by 10 or 11 if they start to peter out. I don't need to stay out there all day when my hands are cold. So.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:01:47]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:01:48]:
So what about yourself? Doing anything fun today?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:01:51]:
Not really. Worked in the shop. Yeah, that's pretty much all we did today. Right on that. Nothing exciting.
Jeff Compton [00:02:00]:
So tell us kind of a little bit about yourself and your, and your business and whatnot. We, he's from the Ottawa area, folks, which is like where I spent a big portion of my career working before coming back home to Kingston area. And Ottawa is a really cool, really cool city, really cool area, beautiful part of the country. It's in for a lot of American listeners, it's in, it's in Ontario, Canada. So it's two Hours away from me, our nation's capital, kind of like your Washington, I guess you'd say. And a very eclectic mix of people are in Ottawa. And I was, that's what I was talking with Matthew before. What is that going to be like to be doing mobile in that kind of area? So, Matthew, give us the kind of the rundown on, you know, how you started it and all that jazz.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:02:44]:
Well, the way I started this was I started my career professionally working for a school bus firm actually, and worked it. I worked there for, I would say about seven years. Loved it. But I started doing this nights and weekends, you know, like most of the guys do after hours. And eventually it got to the point where I got so busy that it was kind of interrupting with the. Both the, the work and also my business. So at one point I had to make the decision, what do I do? And that's when I decided I'm going to go on my own. And that was back in.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:03:22]:
Yeah, 2002. So then I went out on my own. I worked out of a Jeep. Jeep Cherokee, 1988. That's how I started, believe it or not. And then from there I went to a truck and trailer set up, you know, to do the. And I actually used to pull my toolbox in the back of that trailer, believe it or not, every night. And that got scary.
Jeff Compton [00:03:46]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:03:47]:
You know, because then every. I have to get up early to go back to the shop, unload my toolbox. I can do my day and then, you know, just load it back up at night. And. And we're not, we're talking like a snap on thousand three series, not a, not a little master graph box. And. Yeah, so it just, it grew from there and just started getting more and more work and then. Yeah, I just, I, I expanded and expanded and it's been going on for 23 years now.
Jeff Compton [00:04:16]:
So when you started out on doing kind of the. I'll call it the side hustle, did you focus on like doing diag and stuff or were you.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:04:25]:
Yeah, so that's basically what like, like I don't know if your, your listeners will know. Like I do more heavy. Like I'm trucking heavy equipment. That's, that's my. That'. I don't do automotive.
Jeff Compton [00:04:37]:
Okay.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:04:37]:
So I've always been like big into the, the. The diag. That's my, that's my thing. That's the thing I love the most. Yeah, I do a lot of diag and I go and diag stuff at night and then do some, some obviously you got to do some general repairs. You can't just, you know, live on just diag. Kind of like what Chuck is doing right now, actually, how he started doing everything then, you know, and then he figured out that maybe, you know, I need to pick my battles here, you know, because. And yeah, so because you know what.
Jeff Compton [00:05:07]:
The trucking market could be, right? Like, especially in the big cities, you can get into some real. I'll say that challenging modified jobs that like, even sounds simple when you hear it over the phone and you get out there and you see how modified it is or well, that's it covered in mud or how rusted or, you know.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:05:24]:
Yeah, yeah. And you can never get like a straight answer from the people, right? So, you know, it's a no start. Well, does it turn over well? What do you mean? Well, does the end. Is it just clicking or just turning like, you know, like you can't get. And now I'm to the point where sometimes I. They don't even know what engines in it. Because I need to know sometimes, like if I get a service call, I need to know, well, what am I bringing preemptively? And like. So now I go by color.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:05:51]:
Well, just open the hood. What color is it? And then we'll go from there, right?
Jeff Compton [00:05:54]:
Like it. Where.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:05:55]:
That's where we're at now. It's unfortunately, but you know, but so we do a lot of. Do a lot of that. A lot of service calls like to get roadside and on stuff like that.
Jeff Compton [00:06:08]:
And I've done that not at the degree of like having to go out and do a ton of die. I've had to go once in a while and do like. They kind of have a suspicion that it's a starter. So you mean you might go and like, you know, check it out and yeah, it needs a starter. And then it becomes a situation of like, okay, like, can I get this going by hitting it with a hammer? You know, and like everybody this cringes when you say that. Right. But us old school heads, we know it's not. You can save a lot of diagnostic time and if you can get it going again, I mean, as long as he never shuts it off again, he can probably get to where he has to be, even if, you know, across the border into the US Right.
Jeff Compton [00:06:46]:
Like, as long as he. Because, you know, nobody makes the truck driver most of the time shut it off when they're fueling. Right. Unlike a car. So.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:06:54]:
Yeah. Except a lot of fleets now, though, have them shut down the timer. That's a problem.
Jeff Compton [00:07:00]:
It is.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:07:00]:
So, you know, and it's not so bad now because most of the trucks are automatic also, so there's less chances of them, like, stalling the truck. You know what I mean? So they can. But yeah, like, nine times out of 10, though, it's not a starter. It's usually a broken wire right between the little. The relay and the solenoid on the. On the new 39 mts and stuff like that. So.
Jeff Compton [00:07:19]:
Yeah, but I would go and get lots of them, and it's like, okay, now I gotta figure out which truck, you know, center has one in stock and then go get it and then bring it back and, you know, start the process of taking it off and then delivering the core after the fact or whatever. Like, that was. That was my fun days.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:07:37]:
And the thing, too, that's changed in the industry from when I've started to. Now I've noticed a lot of the trucks back when I started in this, a lot of stuff was uniform. You know, the alternators. You can get away with having one or two alternators. Same with starters. You can change the. The cone on it, the. The index.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:07:54]:
It. You know, you can. You can get away now, though, there's like, actual specific, like, brand.
Jeff Compton [00:08:02]:
Oh, yes.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:08:02]:
You know, like, specific parts that they may not have in stock. So, you know, 20 years ago, I can. I can confidently say I can get your truck going or, you know, there's a good chance I'll get it going. But now it's, It's. That's changed over the years.
Jeff Compton [00:08:17]:
And I remember we used to go out and just change the mag switch, you know, on the back of the starter. The big.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:08:22]:
You know, I used to keep them in stock.
Jeff Compton [00:08:24]:
Yeah. People that don't know. Like, a lot of the heavier trucks have a mag switch mounted up and then a solenoid still on the starter because of the amount of amperage that we're drawing. Right. And the mag switches will go bad a lot more frequently than the solenoid because it's really heavy. But the mag switch is mounted remotely. And it would kind of like think of it as it's just another relay. That's all it is.
Jeff Compton [00:08:44]:
But I've seen instances where we've been able to get it going by, you know, putting on a starter that wasn't meant to have a mag switch, but we could use that starter because it would bolt up like Matthew was talking about, and get the truck going again. Right. Like, it was good. Now he's exactly right. Like. And we're getting into, you know, more of the things where it used to be just the old school stuff, you went in and pushed the button or went down and jumped the relay and the truck would crank. Now it's. They're just like cars.
Jeff Compton [00:09:11]:
They've got way more and more interlocks and stuff that's stopping you cranking the truck up. So.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:09:16]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:09:16]:
Yeah. Frustrating.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:09:19]:
It is. It's. It's harder to. To plan your, your service calls.
Jeff Compton [00:09:24]:
Now.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:09:24]:
The one thing that is helping me a lot lately is the, the, all the, like the geotabs and all the. I can, I can remotely access the trucks from. From here before I leave. So if a driver says, well, I'm derated. Well, that could be so many things. Most of the time it's low coolant.
Jeff Compton [00:09:46]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:09:46]:
And it's just the engine protection that kicks in. Then you get there and you're adding a jug of coolant and then you have to call his boss and say, well, it just needed a liter of coolant, you know. But sometimes, sometimes it's after treatment stuff and I can preemptively figure out what I need before I. So I can stop in at the parts house or the dealer and get whatever component I need, you know, that I think I need and then diagnose it from there. So.
Jeff Compton [00:10:12]:
So in, in the Ottawa area, how far, like, do you travel? I'm assuming you stay like on this side of the, the Gatineau border. Right. The. You stay on the Ottawa side or will you go?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:10:23]:
I'll go. I'll go all the way up to Manatek or Maniwaki. I'll go. I'll go up north if I have to. I've. Over the years, I have shrunk down the area. Like, I used to go to Kingston, like, often.
Jeff Compton [00:10:37]:
Yeah. It's.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:10:38]:
Now it's just I don't need to. And I'm also 47 years old and I don't feel like driving for three hours to go, you know, so the times have changed. But yeah, I just, I do about 150 kilometer as the crow flies from yrm.
Jeff Compton [00:10:54]:
Very cool.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:10:55]:
You know, but then again, I have, I have good clients that if, like, if they were broken down in Toronto, Well. And they really needed me to go down there, I wouldn't like if that's. That's not an issue.
Jeff Compton [00:11:05]:
But. Yeah. What do you think of the Ottawa winters for working?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:11:10]:
Horrible.
Jeff Compton [00:11:10]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:11:11]:
Horrible. And they don't get better with age.
Jeff Compton [00:11:14]:
They really don't, I'm telling you. And, and I grew up in Kingston I can still remember my first winter in Ottawa and everybody kind of joked about it and they said, because Kingston, we're right on the shore of the lake, so we get the lake effect. So when it does get cold from the lake, you stay cold, but it takes a lot longer to get cold. I remember my first year in Ottawa. We're standing outside of the Rideau center waiting to catch a bus. Yeah, it was freezing. And I mean we weren't dressed well. I didn't have a car in Ottawa yet.
Jeff Compton [00:11:43]:
This is like my second year going to school up there. And like we're standing there not dressed for. Everybody else was just laughing because we're in park there in parkas and big winter boots and just to get on and off the bus. Yeah, there's sneakers right in like December and freezing and people are just laughing at me. And I think about it now because it's. Ottawa is in a valley, people. So it like literally gets a, a cold air funnel almost all the time. Yeah, it's a really cool part of the world, but it is cold in wintertime.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:12:15]:
Cold and damp.
Jeff Compton [00:12:16]:
Cold and damp. The streets suck to try and drive around, you know, in the wintertime especially, like they don't do snow removal like they do here. Montreal snow removal is worse again than Ottawa, but it's pretty damn close. Like they.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:12:29]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [00:12:29]:
You know, there's a reason they don't allow you to park on the streets because they don't intend to hardly do the sidewalks. They barely, like, they let the cars keep the snow off the road.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:12:39]:
Yeah, that's. That's actually true. Yeah, that's pretty much how they do it. Yeah, so they rely on the fact that cars drive to melt the snow, man.
Jeff Compton [00:12:46]:
And the OC transport buses, you've probably seen them, right? They've stuck the OC transport buses sometimes.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:12:50]:
All the time.
Jeff Compton [00:12:51]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:12:51]:
Yeah, all the time. Now I can't wait to see how this train's gonna. Oh, because I hear it's getting stuck too because they went and put hills on it and it's just.
Jeff Compton [00:13:03]:
I'm laughing people, because what he's talking about is what he called the old train was like, was supposed to be a five year project that took like 15 years to get built in Ottawa. It didn't really go anywhere that anybody was going. But again, government infrastructure is like, well, eventually it's going to run all the way from the west end to the east end, which is a big, big feat to achieve in Ottawa because there's. Logistically it's, it's different in Toronto per se. And it has been, I don't know how many billions of dollars over bud. Years behind schedule. And it still has like they, the week they rolled it out, the very next week. I remember reading in the news here, there's like, they're having all kinds of issues with just randomly shutting down and all this kind of stuff, so.
Jeff Compton [00:13:45]:
Oh yeah, yeah, it's. It's a ter. It's a nightmare. I can still remember seeing the ULC transport buses on the snow because they all run snow tires up here. They'd be stuck on the off ramps when they're, you know, trying to go around and then you want to see traffic back up and it was crazy.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:14:03]:
Especially the, their accordion buses.
Jeff Compton [00:14:06]:
Yes.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:14:06]:
It gets, it gets pushed from the rear of the unit. Well, what do you think is going to happen? You're pushing a rope up a hill, you're going to get stuck just like. I don't know.
Jeff Compton [00:14:16]:
Yeah, I'm waxing nostalgic. You're making me miss that city. What is like kind of get me when you first started it, what was kind of like a typical, typical call for you when you were starting out? Anything, I guess.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:14:37]:
Eh, Anything. That's the thing. I was young and gung ho and I take anything. If I didn't know, I'd figure it out, I'd learn. And then I just, I go through the process and then figure it out. And I've done a lot of things, you know, over the years. Now then, as, as I, as I, the business grew then I, I had a fixed location that I could do stuff in. So then it, then it became parsed into two different.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:15:05]:
There's a roll call. So the roll call is like get you going, get you. You know, but I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna drop a transmission, let's say for example, or you know, on, on. Now I have done engine work in other people's shop and I do work in other people's shop that have. If they're well equipped and you know, I know that the, whatever I'm working on isn't going to get disturbed by, by other people. You know, like I'll do it in another shop, but for the most part.
Jeff Compton [00:15:30]:
Yeah, yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:15:31]:
And, but all the bigger stuff like the, in frames and the, the clutch work and all that, that's all done in house here.
Jeff Compton [00:15:38]:
Yeah. You bring it to your own location.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:15:41]:
That's right. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:15:42]:
Yeah. You kind of have to a. For quality control.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:15:44]:
That's exactly why.
Jeff Compton [00:15:45]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:15:46]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:15:46]:
Try and do it at Somebody else's place. Like you said, it can be. Not saying there's a bunch of people that go out and throw a bunch of extra bolts in the side of the engine to sabotage you, but, I mean, it's. It's one of those things where it's your work area, you keep it clean, you keep it organized, you keep it safe that way.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:16:01]:
Well, and a lot of times, it's not even the. It's the people that just don't understand. Like, I was doing a head gasket job on an MB900 Mercedes engine at one point, and. And, you know, they were grinding, grinding beside it. And I'm like, guys, like, yeah, you can't do that. I got an open engine here. Like, you know, and then a lot of customers, sometimes they don't. They don't understand that.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:16:24]:
I'm like, they're like, oh, well, why can't you do that here? Well, I'm not gonna open your engine outside in your yard, you know, your dusty yard. It has to be some control. I want to have some control over the stuff like that. But I'll do, like, I'll do suspension work on site if I have to. Like, I've. I've done enough of that. Enough of that. You know, I'll do airbags or driveline, you know, stuff like that.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:16:49]:
I'll do brakes, too, like, if you need. You need any kind of, like, drums or shoes or whatever, that's not an issue.
Jeff Compton [00:16:57]:
Yeah, I used to do a pile of them right in our parking lot when I worked at the truck shop years ago, like, right in the summertime especially. It wasn't a bad job out in the summer, in the wintertime, like, we didn't even try it. We would drag it into the shop, and it wasn't a big shop, so it was. It was. That was a manipulant, like a kind of challenge to get two trailers. You could fit two trailers side by side, but the door was really only wide enough to bring one in. So you kind of had to bring one in, use a forklift to shove it over. Right.
Jeff Compton [00:17:23]:
Get the wheels off. Like the duals up against the wall. That was. And then we get it off.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:17:28]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:17:29]:
You know, and you make do. Like, that's the thing about the. The trucking thing is, you know, and everybody goes, oh, it's so. It's so. You know, it's exactly the same. No, it's so different because, like, every scenario almost to where you're working on adds so many layers of time that nobody's thinking about like, the job only pays this. They're thinking about, like, he's going to be on the job for two days. I'm paying him for two days to get there.
Jeff Compton [00:17:53]:
That's how the. The mentality works. Right. So when we hear about the big prices, that's a lot to do with it is like, if I'm coming to you especially, like the little obstacles that you're not set up for and I got to run out and do this or I got to go and find this tool or make do because you don't have it working. Whatever. That's all adding to the bill. People just pay it. You know, we can work a lot in the automotive side from that.
Jeff Compton [00:18:15]:
That aspect, you know, it's. I miss it, man. Some days I miss it. And then I think about, like, beating kingpins out. Like when I was younger, I'm like, I don't miss that for a minute. My hand.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:18:27]:
I am actively looking at a good kingpin press at this point, because I did a set there a couple of weeks ago, and I'm like, oh, boy. To be swinging sledges at the, you know, like, all. All day long to get those, you know, it's not like down south where they pull the lock pin and then use a little hammer that comes out. Yeah, that doesn't happen out here, guys. I'm sorry. It does not.
Jeff Compton [00:18:48]:
I probably. I bet you in my career I've 50. I've cut it with a torch, you know.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:18:52]:
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:18:53]:
On that too. Or he just. They just.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:18:55]:
Or a lance.
Jeff Compton [00:18:55]:
Yeah. They do not come out any other stupid way. And you know, you know, you and I know that if you've had to put that much heat into that axle end to get that kingpin out, like, it's not.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:19:06]:
I. I don't like doing that.
Jeff Compton [00:19:08]:
No.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:19:09]:
I really don't. But sometimes, like, you gotta. You gotta apply a little bit of heat and.
Jeff Compton [00:19:15]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:19:15]:
Science to get it out. Right.
Jeff Compton [00:19:17]:
You would do it and then you'd see it. Next year, that kingpin was wallered out again. You know what I mean? I just think you've changed that metallurgy so much that, like, even when you put a new kingpin in the bearings and the customer greases it every day like they're supposed to, it's still. You've wallered it. You know, there's no around it. And you gotta look at it and go, it's an old truck. Like, this is maybe what you're gonna have to do now. Every couple years, you're putting A kingpin.
Jeff Compton [00:19:38]:
Because, you know, that's right. We didn't, we didn't. You let it go too long the first time, right? So.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:19:43]:
Yeah. And a lot of guys don't spec their trucks correctly also. That's another problem.
Jeff Compton [00:19:47]:
Huge problem, right?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:19:49]:
Huge problem. I mean, you got a 12,000 pound front end, you know, carrying them at smacks capacity every day, all day. What did you expect? You're gonna go through kingpins, right?
Jeff Compton [00:19:58]:
Like it's. Or liquid load is a whole other thing that, like when I talk to automotive techs and you start talking about like liquid load, that's a completely different. The way it. It breaks stuff is so different. You know what I mean? Because every time you hit the brakes, you're completely shifting a whole lot more weight.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:20:14]:
Oh yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:20:15]:
Just a static load. And people are like, I never thought about that. Like it, you know, liquid loads would burn the front brakes off constantly. They're like, I don't understand this. Like my drivers. And it's like, it's the driver's problem. He's braking too hard. Too late, like.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:20:28]:
Yeah, too late. Yeah. And I had a service call once, like that one. A little single axle with air ride. And the service call was for. It was riding rough and he thought the air. The suspension wasn't airing up. And I get there and I'm looking at the tires.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:20:43]:
I'm like, those seem pretty bulged for, you know. And then I look at the airbags. Oh, no, there. There is air in your airbags. And open the door. And he was hauling cream for ice cream from front to back. And that is heavy. Like, that is heavy heavy.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:20:59]:
And I'm like, yeah, you're gonna have to unload this too, if you like. There's nothing I can do here.
Jeff Compton [00:21:09]:
I tell the story all the time. I got. I used to. Years ago, we had the Kim. We had a contract with Kim Coasteel in Kingston, which you probably are aware of. Kim coast deal.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:21:17]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:21:17]:
And we would go down to. To grease the trailers on a Friday night. That was our routine. And then we all parked in the yard and some of them would be loaded with a load of steel. And you get down there to grease it and you'd see that the wheel seal was leaking. Okay, no big deal. There's a wheel seal in the truck and all that stuff. We would start doing it.
Jeff Compton [00:21:34]:
Well, I don't know how many trailers I started to jack up and that steel load would shift and you'd start to see the pump jack start to like, sink into the mud. It Was, you know, a dirt parking lot. And I would call the boss and like, put it back down on the ground, leave it alone. Don't get underneath it. Like, you know, they'll, they'll unload the trailer, they'll just have to offload that load onto another one and we'll fix the trailer later. Like, I was very lucky. I never had a boss say, just get it done. I don't care about your safety.
Jeff Compton [00:22:01]:
You know, that was, that was key.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:22:03]:
Oh, yeah, no, no. You know, I'm keen on, I'm big on that. I won't work on loaded trucks. I won't load on like it takes two minutes to unload a truck. And if you like, if you don't care about my safety. Well, I mean, it is what it is, right?
Jeff Compton [00:22:17]:
But yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:22:19]:
Yeah. Especially liquid loads.
Jeff Compton [00:22:22]:
Yeah. So can I ask with your business, are you still just kind of like a loan operator? Do you have some people helping you out or.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:22:29]:
Right now? I'm, I'm, I'm a one man wrecking crew.
Jeff Compton [00:22:32]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:22:33]:
I have a friend that gives me a hand occasionally, like to help me out. He's another 310T guy. Great guy. But right now we're in the midst of. Right now expanding. So we are looking at a fixed location and we are, we are going to be looking for some, Some texts.
Jeff Compton [00:22:52]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:22:53]:
Soon enough.
Jeff Compton [00:22:54]:
Very cool. Is there a shortage in Ottawa? Like. There is.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:22:58]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [00:22:59]:
Yes.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:22:59]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [00:23:00]:
Yeah. I was gonna say it doesn't seem to matter who I talk to where. It's always the same. You know, I can remember when I lived there a lot like OC Transpo was snapping up a lot of talent, you know, a lot of guys. O.C. to. To. To.
Jeff Compton [00:23:14]:
I mean, it's shift work and unionized and, you know, there's, there's drawbacks and politics and all that kind of stuff. But I can remember like several guys I knew went to work at OC Transville.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:23:24]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:23:25]:
Just like Standard Lane. Do their one thing. Like they were, you know, I can remember when they were paying the guys to watch the buses were getting paid higher than a lot of the techs in the city. You know what I mean? It was crazy. And all you did was watch the bus. That was it. Bushes all night long. Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:23:41]:
Your biggest hurdle was cleaning puke at one point because somebody puked on the bus. That was your, the low light of your day. I'm like, wow, okay.
Jeff Compton [00:23:50]:
It's not like, you know, getting under a garbage truck or, you know, all that kind of fun stuff that I've done in my past too. So. Hey, you work on garbage trucks?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:23:59]:
No, no, no. And it's not because I haven't been approached to do so. It just. Yeah, it's. They. No, I don't do garbage trucks.
Jeff Compton [00:24:11]:
I'm pretty.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:24:12]:
I'm pretty right now. I have a good. A good. Like good clients. A good set of clients that I. That I attend to and so. No, but I could just imagine. Can you imagine working on now? That being said though, I did have the contract at local municipality and I did have to take care of the equipment at the landfill.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:24:32]:
That was not fun. Oh my God.
Jeff Compton [00:24:34]:
Yeah, that sucks.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:24:35]:
The summer. Summer.
Jeff Compton [00:24:39]:
I'll say this about garbage trucks. You'd rather work on them in the wintertime than the summer.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:24:42]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [00:24:43]:
They don't smell as bad.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:24:45]:
Yeah, I remember this. This one call I got. They. They ran over a mattress and the mattress wrapped around the drive shaft of the loader and ripped all the hydraulic lines and it was stuck where it was stuck and it was like 30 degrees that day and just truly hot. And I was like doing all I could just hold my lunch to be able to finish the freaking job and get this. This thing back and running. Eh.
Jeff Compton [00:25:08]:
Yes. I. I found on my two though that they're the. The customer sometimes in the trucking side of things are a lot more appreciative. You know what I mean? Like, that's true.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:25:16]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [00:25:17]:
Really get the. Because it's. I've talked about it before. They. That's how they make their money. Right?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:25:22]:
That's right. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:25:22]:
Back to them working. They're so happy. Like, I mean. Yeah. Sometimes they get the bill like at the end of the month or like frig. You know, I didn't.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:25:32]:
Yeah. But that truck probably produced four times whatever that bill was. So at the end of the day.
Jeff Compton [00:25:37]:
Yeah, so what? Go ahead. Sorry.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:25:39]:
Go ahead. And. And it's. It's funny you say that because I listen to your podcast and because I'm. I'm a little detached from the automotive side and I listen to the struggles on. Especially with Lucas and David's side. They're like, well, I don't have that kind of issue because for me it's more about like the truck needs to go, like it needs to work. And especially when it's a specialty truck, like a.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:26:00]:
Like a concrete pump, like say for example or something. You can't just go to budget and rent a truck for the day. You know, that truck needs to work so that the dynamics a little different when it comes to that. You Know, so. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:26:11]:
And that's the specialized stuff, is it almost like is like a license print money. It's the same thing, you know, Like I've seen the car haulers, like those guys when they pull in and they're broke.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:26:20]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:26:20]:
They're like. Because it's just like Matthew said, you can go to Enterprise and rent a truck, you can go to Budget and rent a truck, you can go to a surgeon or, you know, any of these places, and if your truck is down, they'll lease you another truck for a month, no problem. They do it and you hook up to your trailer, you go back down the highway, right. Like it's no big deal. Program your phone done. When you have a specialized piece of equipment, it's a completely different thing. They're talking like they're losing money so fast it could, you know, they could lose their whole quarter in a matter of week if that truck is out. So it's a big difference.
Jeff Compton [00:26:54]:
And that's what I keep saying from the automotive side, like, everybody thinks, oh, my customer doesn't have the money. My customer doesn't have the money. The customers all. I'm going to say it. They might not even have the money, but they probably all value their, their transportation to the same level that we have been. Matthew and I have been used to dealing with people that use the, a car or truck for a piece of business. They, the reliance is the same. Right.
Jeff Compton [00:27:22]:
The function that it serves is a little different. One is making money and one's just costing us money. But it's the same. Their priority is still the same. I need my vehicle. So when we say, oh, they can't afford that. They can, they can. We just have to make it feasible for them, show them why, you know, so my brother is without a vehicle right now and, you know, he talks to me every day about how frustrating that is to, to not have a car.
Jeff Compton [00:27:45]:
And I go, yeah, but you know, we kind of. He had a 2012 Ranger that we finally scrapped. It was rotten and was not worth putting tires on, was not worth putting brakes on. And that's the thing. And it's now the market changed so much from 2012 when he bought that. He's in a situation right now where he's like, oh my God, even look at the price of the used stuff. And I'm like, yeah, it's bad, you know?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:28:09]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:28:11]:
So our customers can't afford it. Don't, don't tell yourself for a second that they can't. They will, they will find the means 100. So it might suck, but they'll find the means.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:28:20]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:28:21]:
So what. So this new kind of going forward, what do you. What are you hoping to build? What are you hoping to.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:28:29]:
Well, it's going to be a fixed location. We're actually acquiring another business that's more on the hydraulic side.
Jeff Compton [00:28:37]:
Okay.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:28:38]:
Because we also do hydraulics right now. So we would be adding the, like that business with our business and merging those two together. So I'm hoping it's gonna do something. Something pretty good, you know, like, eventually grow it to. Because eventually what I, what I want to do, my, my ultimate goal is I want to be able to teach and, and show and. And this location that we're getting actually has like a whole conference room that like, that we could actually host like, like training seminars and stuff. So hopefully, like, like, I would love to. To be able to do that.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:29:15]:
That's the ultimate goal. At the end of the day.
Jeff Compton [00:29:17]:
That's pretty cool.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:29:18]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:29:19]:
Kind of neat. Where boats in the, in the area. Can I ask?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:29:23]:
It's. Well, it's going to be more. More east towards. Towards Hawkesbury area.
Jeff Compton [00:29:29]:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I was in Orleans forever. Like I said, you. We were talking once you. You bought a truck from the dealer that I used to work at way back.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:29:37]:
Well, it's. It is the truck I'm still using to this day. I bought that ram in, in 2008, and it is my, my flagship vehicle.
Jeff Compton [00:29:46]:
People rip it on me that, like, Dodge doesn't build a good product. And it's like, I don't know, 2008, you're still driving it.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:29:54]:
Oh, that's. So my first one was an 03 Dakota.
Jeff Compton [00:29:57]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:29:57]:
That was pulling a trailer and it's to this day still operational. I sold it to a friend of mine that uses it to plow his yard. So she was a good. She's a good unit.
Jeff Compton [00:30:09]:
Yeah. You guys know, I keep saying, oh, no, they're terrible, but they just need maintenance so they got anything else, you know, but.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:30:17]:
Yeah, yeah, but they're. They're serviceable. That's the thing I like about the. The Mopar products is they're serviceable. Like. Like there's not really any job that on the, on any of them. Like, we own like three of them and we've. You know, I can't think of anything that I'm like, dreading doing.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:30:35]:
You know what I mean?
Jeff Compton [00:30:36]:
Like, and, and you know, you hear the car guys, the automotive side talk about, oh, there's so many electrical problems in Chrysler. But I Mean, coming from the heavy truck side of things that like I did as well as you do, we don't even look at as like, as one brand as like, right. Full of electrical problems. Right. We just look at it as like it's just another electrical problem on another truck. Like it's just the way it is. You know, some of it is human error. Upfitting does a lot of damage to a lot of trucks.
Jeff Compton [00:31:02]:
Like when they add on things that are. They need on there, it causes issues with what should be a simple thing to access all of a sudden, like a nightmare. Like you just, you know, you adapt and overcome. That's how you do it. But I mean, I love the product. I think it's great. Like I always have. I just, it's something about it clicked with me and it was like, yeah, the build quality sometimes was like, what? You know, they take a place together with no heat, shrink.
Jeff Compton [00:31:28]:
Like it's just taped with hockey tape and stuffed under a carpet. Like that's not good. But then we remember.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:31:35]:
Have you ever worked on Hino?
Jeff Compton [00:31:36]:
Oh, yes.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:31:37]:
There's no, there's no. Absolutely no weatherproofing of all their electrical connectors. So they get a little bit of salt because we get a lot of salt out here. It doesn't take much to throw a wrench in that gear. Right.
Jeff Compton [00:31:49]:
But see, hinos are built for Japanese climate. Right. So yeah, they don't, they don't have the kind of weather that we have in Japan. Like, it's. No, you know, it's wet there, but not wet and salty. Yeah, wet and salty is a completely different chemical. It's just cool.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:32:06]:
Oh, it's just.
Jeff Compton [00:32:07]:
I worked on a lot of HINOs. I worked when I worked at the Benson's garage here. They're. They were a Hino affiliate.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:32:12]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [00:32:13]:
So I mean, like, we had a lot of them come in. I didn't get into too much. Like, we had one technician that was a really trained high up on Hino and he was phenomenal on the product. But I would look at that product and it was like. It was just weird, eh? Like it was the way it was first put together. And then during COVID they had a whole thing where, you know, they stopped essentially being able to get engines to put in these trucks or anything. Yes. So.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:32:37]:
And apparently HINO USA doesn't talk to HINO Canada. So there might, there might not be inventory in, in the country, but there is in the States, but they have no way of checking or knowing, so. Oh, it's just. Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:32:51]:
They build a really good truck for what it's intended for, I'll say that. But it's, it's hard because the, the customer support, product support's not there yet the way it really should be. Which is too bad because. And like some of them, they went and put a little Cummins engine in it, and they're great. There's a whole learning curve when the, when the Cummins gets in and it replaces the Hino and there's a whole other operating software system and all this kind of stuff. Like it was. My buddy still works for, you know, a HINO affiliate, and there's a whole learning curve that he had to go through to learn, you know, the common things. And then you're talking to people at Tech Line at Cummins, and it's brand new to them.
Jeff Compton [00:33:29]:
This engine was never in this platform before. Like, you're familiar, you know, like, you just have to go back to your basics, right?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:33:35]:
You got to go back. Yeah, you got to be patient. Go back to your basics and just you, you can reverse engineer it. You can figure it out.
Jeff Compton [00:33:42]:
That's right.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:33:42]:
Yeah. But again, trucks are all, they're, they're, they're Lego pieces. They're all, all bunch of parts put together and make, put into a frame of whatever. So, yeah, once you get to know all the different platforms that are put together, you can, you can, you can figure it out pretty quickly.
Jeff Compton [00:34:00]:
100%. 100%. What. What makes you really want to teach?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:34:05]:
I like teaching. Yeah, I like, Yeah, I like. I like. I think we need. And this, I honestly, this is what got me interested in you because you're, you really push out like, the industry and what it's like and you know, the shortage and the fact that people don't, don't seem to want to teach anymore and don't want to show to the next generation. And it's. Yeah, I've always liked to, to teach as long as you're willing to learn, you know, like, because I have a son. He's, he's an apprentice 310s right now.
Jeff Compton [00:34:36]:
Okay, good.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:34:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. So he's actually stuck in the Flat Rate thing, which I know not much about. So I actually every, like, every time you have a topic on, on Flat Rate, I forward him the, the, your show. And listen to this. He knows because it's a different world. But yeah, but I like to teach. Like, I like to show them the basics, you know, like just the.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:35:00]:
And he's, he wants to get into Diag too, so he worked at a Mercedes dealership for a while and he, he really liked it, the diagnosing in that and the getting deep into the.
Jeff Compton [00:35:11]:
So, yeah, just gonna ask you, what brand was he, was he pursuing? You know, because, like, for people listening when you say, you know, apprentice and flat rate up here in Canada, you can almost always assume that's a dealership because a lot of people don't put flat rate in their independence up here in Canada. That has been my experience. And not at least until they're licensed. Right. So if he's, if he's going after Mercedes, man, he's, he's, he's in for some challenges. He'll become a very good tack because, you know, systems to learn and, and I'm sure you've been able to really get his fundamentals down for him. Right, because he's, you know, but yeah, I, those cars, man, it's, it's not the car for me, it's the customer. It really is like, I gotta, I almost have to change my headspace when I'm working on it to think about, like, you know, what they, the, the level of what they expect is what I'm trying to say.
Jeff Compton [00:36:07]:
Not that they're, they're crazy and what they expect, but it's like, it is a very hard level to, to, to, to hit every day even. I, my friend was a service manager, the Jag Land Rover, you know, dealership in Ottawa for quite a while and it burned him out. It burned.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:36:24]:
Oh, really?
Jeff Compton [00:36:25]:
Yeah, because he had worked with me in Orleans. The Chrysler type, phenomenal technician, can fix anything, you know, Did a stand at OC Transpo spin service manager, been technician, gone back. Worked at a little, essentially a restoration shop. Like, he can do it all. And he still said that, like, the demand that those customers have for that vehicle the way they want it burnt him out. Burn him out.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:36:49]:
I can imagine.
Jeff Compton [00:36:50]:
Because it's, it's, you know, it's, they, it's a lot of money, but they know it's a lot of money. And for that money they expect, like. And it's nothing. It's just the car intermittently has a problem. Nobody at Mercedes knows the solution yet. Nobody knows, like, what are you supposed to do? Tear the car all apart looking for it? Well, that's what the customer expects you to do. Yeah, that's not feasible. It's not realistic and it's frustrating.
Jeff Compton [00:37:16]:
But I mean, I'm a big believer that eventually, you know, when it's one of those things, a lot of the time it does get Figured out what it is and OE will tell you, you've seen it. It's not just a tsp. There's, there's so many levels now to the information that we can get that it's not, it's, it's tech tips and, and fast response transmittals and stuff like this that it's like little things that they're always telling you, hey, did you have one that do this? Yeah, go look here. Because we had a case study somewhere other side of the world, same thing happened, same code, same same connector, blah, blah, blah. That's not what you're always going to find in tsps. That's like inside level, you know, knowledge that gets taught to you eventually or passed down to you if you stick around with long enough with it. And that's what a lot of these people is just like they're frustrated but there's, there's a process that it takes to find them out. And now, man, I'm, I'm old enough to remember like when you had the phone Chrysler tech line, you were talking to a person.
Jeff Compton [00:38:12]:
Now it's your, it's an email chain back and forth, back and forth and too you know how that can go. Like, that's the, like I, I joke. I could still, I, I memorized the phone number from Kreiser. Not that I called it a lot, but it was, it would hang above everybody's toolbox. There was a sticker that had the number. Well, you look at it a million times. It's ingrained in your brain. Yeah, but like I can't even when I was at Nissan, it was an email thread and it would take forever.
Jeff Compton [00:38:42]:
Sometimes they'd respond back to you in 30 minutes, sometimes be the next day and the car really? Yeah, yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:38:49]:
Oh my God, that would be annoying. Could you imagine sitting on the side of the road and waiting for somebody to email you back? I'm sorry, you're gonna wait for an email for you.
Jeff Compton [00:38:58]:
Yeah. You know, the frustrating part is because the car's under warranty. It's an intermittent, you know, you're asking, you're getting, it's almost like you're not even asking, you're getting permission to where to go next. Because like, you know, it's the kind of thing like you're trying to chase down this intermittent. Where do you want me to go? Because if I go in the wrong direction, you're not paying the dealership for my time, which means I'm not getting paid, which means I'm not gonna do it. You know, it's. Yeah, it's. I sound like, you know, I'm, I'm constantly waving a flag to abolish flat rate, but I'm not.
Jeff Compton [00:39:34]:
But I just like, I think that it has to. People have to appreciate more what detects the obstacles that's in place for them when they're paid that way and then adjust accordingly. I think that's.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:39:44]:
What do you think in your opinion, that it was something that was set up for back more like in the 80s and 90s where everything was more uniform and easily.
Jeff Compton [00:39:52]:
Oh I.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:39:53]:
Or is it like because it's, I mean the, the cars are. The evolution of the cars is just astronomical compared to.
Jeff Compton [00:40:00]:
I think it was probably optimized for the 60s, you know what I mean?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:40:04]:
When it was that far back. Eh.
Jeff Compton [00:40:05]:
Oh yeah. When they had maybe like you had a, an inline six and you had a small block V8 and you had a big block V8 and you put them in the whole platform. You know, it either had a two barrel carburetor that was this part number or four barrel covers and, and a distributor that was shared to each. And you just fix the car all day long. Like you, you know, people go well how did you diagnose the car? Well, there was 10. Eric Ivan from Pine Hollow today is working on A, an 89 Dodge 250D250 and it gets under the dash because it's got it. So it gets called out for. It won't start.
Jeff Compton [00:40:41]:
And it's a wiring from the ASD relay. They still use an ASD relay but essentially all it did was turn the coil on because it's you know, throttle body injected with a car with a distributor.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:40:52]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:40:53]:
And so he, he diagnoses that in half an hour. And then it's like, you know, parasitic drain because there's an add on. It's a plow truck in, in upstate Pennsylvania so it's Canada. There's an add on that's back feeding, keeping the fuse or the switch alive. So there's a parasitic drain like it was. And he's joking but he's literally like there's 10, there's 10 fuses in the fuse box. Like back then when flat rate would work is because like if you were having to solve an electrical problem. I say it all the time.
Jeff Compton [00:41:23]:
It was a one hour, two hour ordeal tops.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:41:26]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:41:27]:
Run the wire from front to back, an overlay in no time, you know, and eliminate the short or eliminate whatever. Now you could be an hour just to update software before you can figure out the next step of, you know, my diagnostic process. Right. Is because, like a lot of us, when you're in the dealer thing, the first step they tell you is update the software. You know, there's a flash through the flash, then go back and road test the car again. Did it fix it? No. Okay, cool. We don't even.
Jeff Compton [00:41:58]:
So flat rate doesn't work for that because, you know, if it didn't fix it, they don't want to pay you for that. Well, that's BS because that's literally their process. And it just goes and goes and goes and goes. So I think flat weight worked really well when cars didn't have electronic parking brakes, didn't have, you know, all this. This stuff that takes longer to use. I think it could still be done in the sense that, like, you're going to do a transmission overhaul. Cool. No problem.
Jeff Compton [00:42:26]:
You know, the. You got a heavy line guy, he gets him in and out. He beats the time. But when it comes down to the determining what the car is going to need and if it's a diagnostic kind of heavy repair, I don't think flat rate has any place in it. I just think it's always been a compromise on the technician and it's a compromise for the customer. They do not get as good a repair. 100, 100. If you're looking.
Jeff Compton [00:42:52]:
I know even as me, I'm always looking. Even when I was doing diag, I was always looking at like, what else can I sell on this car? Like, we were doing very good inspections before DVI was a big thing. Because you're looking for the maintenance that has to get done. Because I'm trying to offset the time that I lost on my diet. I'm hoping I get the brake job. I'm hoping I get the flushes when we. When we pay our people that way. And everybody thinks it's good because it's.
Jeff Compton [00:43:18]:
You got hustle. We're. If it's there for just the problem that the customer wanted fixed, we're going to compromise that because we're trying to find the other work that needs to get done. And. And that's where I think this industry has kind of got a. Not abolish it, but, like, stop for a minute, really look at what's happening and the challenges and then think about it, revamp it. I think it can work. It still can, but it's going to cost a lot of people a lot more money, a lot more.
Jeff Compton [00:43:47]:
You know, door rates are almost 200 bucks an hour in. In Ottawa there's lots of $200 an hour door rates. Lots of them. My area, there's lots of $150 an hour door rates. I can remember coming into Ottawa when I first moved there. 110 was a high door rate. You know what I mean? Like, so when we think about that now and it's like, so if you move away from flat rate and go to everybody on hourly or salary, your door rates are gonna be 300 bucks to make it work. Lots of people right now in Canada can't afford a 300 an hour door rate.
Jeff Compton [00:44:21]:
I guarantee they can't. So it's.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:44:24]:
Something's gonna give way though, and it's gonna be the, the, like the jobs are not going to get done correctly. And then we're already seeing it now. I, Well, I see it in my industry anyways.
Jeff Compton [00:44:34]:
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, not to get political, but I mean, we have. I've had several people reach out to me too, and about. A lot of the young people coming into the trade in Canada are from other countries. They're international students that are coming in and that kind of stuff. And they have, they have the work attitude, but they're so like, English is not their first language.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:44:56]:
Yeah. There's a barrier.
Jeff Compton [00:44:57]:
First language. Like the way they fix trucks in foreign countries is very different than how the trucks have to be fixed in Canada. Like, there is a huge. And I find that like, when we are. I think people in the apprenticeships in Canada think that the immigration thing is going to fix the problem and it won't, not for a while yet. You know, there's too much language barrier. There's too much culture barrier. Like, it's, it's, it's a very different thing, you know.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:45:23]:
Well, if you can't read a service, a service information correctly and follow the steps and procedures, you know, like, and, and it's, it's a detriment also to the apprentice. Right. Because he's, he's also not learning correctly. Like, it's. Yeah, it's a, it's a lose. Lose on that one.
Jeff Compton [00:45:40]:
Yeah. I was always amazed, Matthew, about, like so many technicians that I worked with, French was their first language. Right. Being that they. A lot of them came from. Like, I worked with guys that would drive over from Gatineau to work in Orleans. I worked with guys that would drive over from Gatineau to work in downtown Ottawa.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:45:57]:
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:45:57]:
And it amazed me that, like, you knew their English wasn't very great, but they could read it well enough to get through the service.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:46:05]:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:46:06]:
And I'm like, if I ever went to Kolbach or, you know, the Chrysler dealers over in Hull and tried, I'd be screwed. I couldn't have manual in French.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:46:14]:
I'd have been, it's happened to me. Or I've had to order parts. I'm francophone and I'll order parts in Quebec. And I'm like, what is this part in French again? And it's like.
Jeff Compton [00:46:26]:
How is that? Because I can remember sometimes I joke all the time. But in the. In Orleans, literally, it was like one side of the shop is. Was Francais. Yeah, it was English. Right. And. And everybody got along, but it was very different.
Jeff Compton [00:46:42]:
Like, if you walked across the shop, hey, what are you doing here? You know, it was that way. Like, it was. It was all fun and games, but, like, you know, it's.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:46:54]:
Is it still probably more animated on the French side too, I would assume, eh.
Jeff Compton [00:46:57]:
Oh, yeah. Like, I had. God bless him. I had a guy, I used to just joke with him all the time, and it just used to drive him nuts. But, I mean, Shiloh Tess was his name and he was a. Our transmission guy. And he's 60. God, what did they say? He's 68 and he's still working at Orleans Dodge.
Jeff Compton [00:47:16]:
And I just saw a picture of him the other day. Looks good for 68. He had a heart attack last year. You know, he missed a few months. Like he was off recovering. But he came back. Like, he just. He loves the job and he's not doing so much heavy transmission now.
Jeff Compton [00:47:29]:
He's doing a lot more diag. But I used to just. I used to joke with him because we were always again, pushing to. To make the most hours. And my baby's across from him. And so every time I would get a FUE system cleaning service and I would dump the can in the machine, I would throw the can across the shop at his bay, so he knew I was doing another one. When he went away on holidays, I kept all the cans and I put them on his bench and on top of his toolbox. So when he come back after a week, like, he had to open the lid and, you know.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:47:58]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:48:01]:
And it was just like, yeah, I miss those guys. It was good times. So it. It. We all got along, like, even for all the differences, you know, and it's a very divided country right now. We all got along. And I think that was just part of. It was like you had to rely on your friends, you had to rely on your co workers, you know, like, you had to.
Jeff Compton [00:48:21]:
I think that's something that needs to be taught a lot more today.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:48:24]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:48:24]:
How to get along with people.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:48:26]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [00:48:27]:
You know, and I think the flat rate thing is, is makes that difficult, you know, to, to sometimes learn how to really make the team strong, if you know what I mean.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:48:40]:
Yeah, well, yeah, because there's no incentive for people to help each other. They're too focused on getting their hours and their, their, their jobs done. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:48:49]:
Like, and you know, they talk all the time. One bad apple. Right. Ruins the whole thing. But it really does. And you know, it's, it's not a situation. A lot of that stuff sometimes sorts itself out. But I've also seen like shops where the bad apple becomes very protected because they look at what the bad apple produces and they go, I'm not, I can't see the shop operating without that.
Jeff Compton [00:49:13]:
And, and then, then you're in a very problematic because you know, if they see that, that becomes a norm how. Or he or she acts as a technician, that becomes the, the allowed level.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:49:28]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:49:28]:
And it's not always good. It's not always good.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:49:31]:
So yeah, I have seen that. Yes.
Jeff Compton [00:49:33]:
Yeah. What, what's the young people that you have coming in, what do you see the weaknesses? Like when you see other technicians, where do you see their weaknesses?
Mathieu Patenaude [00:49:45]:
Just learning, just, just take the time to read and learn. There's a lot of problems that I've noticed that I've, that I've like taken over to solve. That was like an example. I got one recently. I had a truck towed out of a dealer that came to my shop because they claim they couldn't figure it out. I don't know what the story was, but long story short, all it needed was to do a forced region to complete the repair. I'm like, well, it's right there in the service information. It's the last line.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:50:17]:
If they would have read that last line, they would have seen, oh, then do a force region and then it brings everything inactive and then you can clear the code, road test it to make sure it's good. Road test, guys. Come on, guys. Road test. Like you guys have to road test. That's something that I like. I don't know. I, I guess it's because of this flat rate thing.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:50:36]:
They don't want to road test and confirm the repair, but you have to make sure that your repair is, is, is correct and that you can, you know. But yeah, and yeah, that's just one of the, Just pay attention and, and they come in and I find they That I know it all attitude. But they don't want to learn.
Jeff Compton [00:50:56]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:50:57]:
Like, you know.
Jeff Compton [00:50:57]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:50:58]:
And it's.
Jeff Compton [00:51:00]:
I know the, the road testing is very like I didn't really. From when I left the dealership and started going to the independent side, I learned that it was much more important to do a better road test after the fact than I had been. Like, it wasn't like I had cars coming back because of it. But I mean like when you actually look at how you're supposed to set in a set of brakes, bed them in. That's a process in itself. No. No dealership guy is doing it at all. They're not.
Jeff Compton [00:51:27]:
And so do you have to make. You know, like I forget what they used to want us to do was like 30 stops at 30 miles an hour with like, you know, five seconds in between stops. You do the math on that. That's you're there for an hour.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:51:40]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:51:41]:
Necessarily do that. But you can't just drive it out of your bay and park it in the parking lot and send it home with the customer without never driving it to bed them in. You know, I'm not trying like.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:51:50]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:51:51]:
If you have a clip rattling or scraping or loose bolts is going to come. I'm talking about like you haven't even got those brakes hot and glazed in yet and you're expecting a customer to do that. I know. I remember I had lots of customers come in. Not my customers but other. And it was like, oh, when I first drove it home, the brakes felt terrible for the first. Yeah. They were brand new, shiny, you know, fingerprints all over them.
Jeff Compton [00:52:13]:
It takes a while to get them off.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:52:15]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:52:15]:
I found that I learned to do a better job. Quality check and road test. Because no company is going to send out a driver. Like this is the other thing that in Matthew's line of work, they're not going to send a driver over to go and drive this truck because like they're. You're telling them it's finished. He comes, the driver comes and picks it up. He leaves, puts a load on it. He gets out in an hour.
Jeff Compton [00:52:37]:
Out of town, truck's broken again. Doing the exact same thing. D rated or whatever. Guess what? If you'd have been done doing your road test, you could have saved that phone call and that customers. Because now we're into a lot of time because we've paid that driver for a shift and he spent half the shift sitting in the truck waiting to get towed back. You know, it's.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:52:57]:
And the product didn't get delivered and it becomes a whole thing.
Jeff Compton [00:53:00]:
Right. That's the other thing. Yeah, we. I didn't even think about that. You got sometimes perishable load on.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:53:06]:
That's right.
Jeff Compton [00:53:07]:
It's like, how do we get that off? And somewhere like we're talking thousands of dollars. Like comebacks in Matthew's side of the, of the game are not hundreds of dollars. There's thousands of dollars that people are like losing. It's a big deal I found with the young people like that I work for now. It's not that they don't seem like they don't want to learn. I just find that it's like it can, you can overwhelm them really fast.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:53:34]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [00:53:35]:
The thing that they have to know, you know, it's crazy. Like, it was a lot when I was coming up and it's now it's even more.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:53:42]:
But they need to, they need. I think they need to do it in small increments instead of like looking at the, you know, like, learn, get. Learn one. One thing, one task. If you want to do diag, learn diag. And you mentioned something in your podcast once where becomes an intuition as text. Like, you just know. You know, you have a feeling you'll get those intuitions up and then, then once you get good at that, then you.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:54:05]:
But I think it's. They. They want to, they want to do everything. They want to learn everything. And, and. And it takes time. That's another thing too. Like, you won't become an a tech in.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:54:15]:
In, you know, five, six years. You know, it could take. It could take a longer than that, depending on what you do. Right. Like, it's. I mean, we. I'm sure you and I have our 10,000. 10,000 hours in, like in, you know, like in no time.
Jeff Compton [00:54:30]:
Yeah. So, yeah, like a lot. I had double the hours I needed by the time I wrote the test.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:54:35]:
Yeah, same here.
Jeff Compton [00:54:35]:
First I sat back and I'm like, I don't know if I'm gonna pass that, man. Like, I, I feel like I need a little more of this and I need a little more of that. All it did at the end was cost me money because like in the dealership world, license tax were at this third year or final year, we're at that. Until you wrote you didn't level up and pay until you wrote the damn test.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:54:55]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:54:55]:
I was like, that's so stupid because at the end of the day in the dealership world that I see yours is hanging on the back wall. Your. Your license is hanging on the. In on Your wall.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:55:06]:
I have it on my tattoo on my arm.
Jeff Compton [00:55:09]:
Yeah, there you go. All you need that for in a dealership is to be able to sign the safety on the car. There's only one guy in a lot of dealerships doing used cars. He's the only one signing safety. So it didn't, it didn't mean a thing. Right. I was fixing guys that had 20 years longer on the product than me. I was doing their comebacks.
Jeff Compton [00:55:27]:
I was doing their diag for them because they couldn't get it. I didn't need that CFQ for that. I couldn't get paid what he was getting until I got it. You know, that's the, that's the rub I have with this. And you know, everybody, my, my good friends talk all the time in the group. You've probably seen this too. A lot of guys right now. There's, there's a mystique about doing drivability.
Jeff Compton [00:55:49]:
I want to be a drivability tech.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:55:52]:
Okay.
Jeff Compton [00:55:53]:
And a lot of what I find is, Matthew is like some can. I believe everybody can learn to do it. But what the really high functioning people that I know that do it, like, they're just. There's something about them that makes them better at it.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:56:08]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [00:56:09]:
An intuition or something like that.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:56:10]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:56:12]:
Too many times. I think in the industry we're steering these people into roles that they're not necessarily because they have to learn it. You know what I mean? It's like they're forced to learn it. Yeah. I, I don't necessarily believe that's right. From the, from the apprenticeship line. I think we have to take the, the trade and break it down a little more where it's like, do you ever want to work on air conditioning? Nope. Okay, then I'm not going to make you sit through months and months and months and months and months at the classroom level.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:56:40]:
Yep. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:56:41]:
Of learning and air conditioning here it can be a separate, a supplement. Maybe you go back and take it. But here's what I want you to know. I want you to really learn, you know, the basics of fundamentals, electrical and, and so that you can go out because everything is going to operate on electricity pretty soon. You know, Edison's building trucks that are, you know, hybrids. Like that's the thing. How many trucks do you go out and look in? The AC still doesn't work. You know, it's old enough that they don't care.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:57:08]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:57:09]:
Right. So all that time that maybe that, that technician spent learning how to do air conditioning and then he gets Himself into. Or she into a business where, you know, the priority is making the truck work, not have cold air.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:57:23]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:57:23]:
All of that time spent or that money spent is. They're struggling somewhere else. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say. So when we. When we keep pushing all these texts to be like. I wrote them to be all diagnostic texts, you're pushing a lot of them out of the industry because, like, they get to it and they're. They're handed a ticket and they have no process yet on how to even approach this.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:57:45]:
Yeah, the process is the thing.
Jeff Compton [00:57:47]:
Yeah, yeah. And then the. The senior technician maybe is not very helpful, doesn't want to teach them, or, you know, like, can I go over here? And it's always this connector underneath this seat. Then there was no process taught there. You just gave them the answer.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:58:01]:
So that's. That's funny you say that, because I get that a lot. I get phone calls from people looking for advice, you know, and other texts and. Which I love doing, by the way. But they're like. They're looking for the answer. They're looking for me to tell them, go look at that connector. And it's probably.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:58:15]:
And so my approach, what I'm trying to do is like, well, let's. Let's walk it back and just try and come up to how we could figure this out, you know, like, using the process so that I can get him to think, or heard to think about what. Where we're going with this, you know, instead of just giving him the answer. But I find a lot of people now just want the answer. They'll go on you. Because I'm sure you hear it too. A lot of people go on YouTube and. Yeah, but there's a lot of misleading information on YouTube.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:58:41]:
It could be like, you know, it's. So you gotta. You gotta kind of have. Figure it out, you know, have a knack for it. And.
Jeff Compton [00:58:49]:
And not only that, like, if I was ever stuck where it was, like I was asking somebody for, like, a tip or a bullet, it was because I didn't have access to the service information. Especially side. Because, like, I don't know how much you subscribe to so many different information systems for the different, you know, Cummins, Navistar.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:59:06]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:59:07]:
Volvo, you know, Wabco for the. For the brake systems, all that kind of stuff. Like, people that aren't familiar with the trucking industry, like, you're not so much going in and going. Punching a van in and going, okay, this is everything that that truck was built you're punching a van in, you're getting a very basic of. This is the basic that was in the truck. All these other systems have been added on and you have to know the. The. The suffixes of those systems.
Jeff Compton [00:59:30]:
That's right. Then you're interrogating that system independently of the truck and then trying to figure out how it's talking to the truck like it. So when people in the. In the trucking side are going I have this truck and I have no idea where to go. It's because they don't have access maybe to Bobco, they have access to Cummins but they don't have access to the brake side of the truck.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:59:48]:
That's right. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:59:49]:
Right. So they're getting these codes. But it was like what does it mean? The regen stuff was terrible. We had an old. I'm trying to think of what the scan tool was. It was a laptop base like a.
Mathieu Patenaude [00:59:57]:
J something J Pro or a gel test.
Jeff Compton [01:00:01]:
And it was so out of date and like that you didn't get half the codes that were in the truck. You couldn't force it to do anything. You had no bilateral controls. And it's like why are we looking at a regen problem on a truck when. But it was again the person employer that I worked for couldn't see the value in keeping subscriptions up to date. Paying for them. A new scan. No.
Jeff Compton [01:00:23]:
So why are we just telling this customer like just tell them what we are. We're a front end shop. We're not going to look at your, you know.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:00:30]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [01:00:30]:
Yeah problem. But they wouldn't do that.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:00:33]:
Yeah. Because when any after treatment issue is expensive like there's no cheap comp unless it's a wiring or. Or a leaking def line or something simple which is never really is any call you make you got to be pretty sure of your shot because it's. Everything's expensive. Like if you know if you got to call a one box on the DD15 you're looking at $20,000 up here. You know like it's. You better be sure of that of your diag in that case. You know, like.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:01:04]:
So I only use dealer level stuff because I this the aftermarket stuff.
Jeff Compton [01:01:11]:
Terrible.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:01:12]:
Well in the trucks because, because of like what you said right. Like the, the. It seems like because there's Cummins, there's Wabco, there's Eaton, there's the. And everything. Everything talks to each other on the can bus system. Right. So and then you get. You gotta.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:01:25]:
You gotta learn how to. To navigate through because you know when you see a can bus issue, it could be just a power issue of one of the modules not talking and everything talks to the can bus. Like every knock sensor on an after treatment talks to can bus. Well, it could just be a broken wire, rubbed wire somewhere. You know what I mean? But yeah, I've been had like so I run. I have snap on the edge and the. In the truck as. Because it's just.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:01:53]:
Their hardware is pretty, pretty solid. Like they, they can live through the cold. But I will pull codes up on. On let's say the snap on platform and then plug it into Insight and oh, look at this. There's four more codes that this, this nap on didn't. Didn't show me. Right. So.
Jeff Compton [01:02:11]:
And that's the huge things because it's. Normally it's those four codes which are the. I don't want to say the smoking gun, but those four codes that you couldn't get from this, from the J Pro. Like I can remember. Yeah, it would go next door to the, to the dealer over there that had, you know, Zoe. And they, they'd spit back three more codes to you. And you're like that right there. That's exactly what I needed to know.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:02:32]:
That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:02:34]:
All of a sudden it's like, yeah, okay, I need a dozer. No big deal, right? Like, that's right. But it's. Or say, hey, thermostat rationale. You're getting that from the common side that you didn't. Well, there's why it won't regen. The freaking thing is too cold. Like that.
Jeff Compton [01:02:49]:
All that is is not always accurate. And the refresh rate on the J Pro was so slow that you knew like you were at 190 Fahrenheit. And yet it was still telling you at 170. It was so slow to creep up. It was very. Yeah, I hated it. I hated anything like that. That it was just like, no.
Jeff Compton [01:03:06]:
And they're like, I thought you could do dyke. Yeah, I can see that car over there. No problem. See this truck with this archaic laptop? Get it the hell away from me. Like, you go take it to the dealer. You tell them, diagnose it. I'll come back, put the part in. No big deal.
Jeff Compton [01:03:19]:
I've done my visual. I don't know, have a nice day. Like, it wasn't me a case of looking for a bullet. It's just I'm not spending hours and hours and hours and hours on some ego trip because somebody won't pay for software I just won't do it.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:03:34]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:03:34]:
You know.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:03:35]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:03:35]:
It doesn't. And at the end of the day, it doesn't make me look good and it doesn't make my business look good. My company that I work for, my business. I mean. Well, you're, you know, you work for me. You do what I'm told. Yeah. You know, I'm not, I'm not here to make myself look worse because you can't accept what I'm telling you.
Jeff Compton [01:03:53]:
We're not to do this. You know, I can remember I had a technician I worked with and it was like they were sending him on ford Power Stroke, 6 liter class. He didn't even want to go. Did not want to go to the class. And I'm like, I put my hand up. Can I go to that class? No, you haven't been here long enough. Wait a minute. Like, I've worked on way more Ford trucks.
Jeff Compton [01:04:14]:
Ford trucks than he has, let alone six. Kind of have an idea what's going on. But while he's our senior tech and he doesn't want to go. Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:04:22]:
I send him if he doesn't want to go. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:04:25]:
Because that was the, that was the politics that went on at that particular, you know, employer, which is fine. He got nothing out of the class. You know, he would still call me if he's stuck on a 6 liter and I'm like, I'm not a 6 liter expert. But he knows that I know a lot of people that are.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:04:41]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:04:41]:
Like. And I'm just, it's, it's those kind of things. At the end of the day, that in this industry is where sometimes I think we drop the ball. It's again, it's the young people. And then when we, we're not, we're not, we're not honest with enough with ourselves on where our strengths are as a business or as a technician. Like, is there anything that you won't touch?
Mathieu Patenaude [01:05:04]:
Tires.
Jeff Compton [01:05:04]:
Tires.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:05:05]:
I don't do tires. Yeah, there's tire companies for that. I'm, I'm, I don't even do my own anymore. But, but no, like, as far as, like platforms being like, as far as not really. I like a challenge. I'm that kind of guy. I mean, if I can really, if I can't get any information at all, and I'll advise, like the client. Well, I'm gonna have to reverse engineer some of this or whatever, you know, like, but as far as, like, I, I've taken on jobs like, like knowing I'm, I might lose money just Because I want the, the experience sometimes or the.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:05:51]:
Yeah, like I've done some pretty, pretty wild stuff over the years.
Jeff Compton [01:05:56]:
I think that's what we, we forget sometimes is that when they. We say the young people don't want to work or they don't want to try. When we put again, going back to that money thing, well, how much financially should they donate for the learning? You know, and it's. That's when incentivized pay comes into it again, right. If you're flat rate, like I always joke, like, if you sold an hour die, you get an hour diag. You know, if I didn't know at the end of the hour, I could sleep that night not knowing, like, it didn't bother me, you know. Now if I sold something and it was wrong, yeah, I'm fixing the car 100%, no question about it. Right.
Jeff Compton [01:06:30]:
Like, I have to make it right. But you know, customers that didn't want to pay for Diag or advisors that didn't want to pay for me for Diag, no problem. I'll put the car back outside. I don't need to know. You know, it's. There's another cars, there's other work. When we get into the incentivized side, I think that's what happens is they say too much. It's like the young people don't want to learn.
Jeff Compton [01:06:50]:
But when we cap it at like, okay, you're young, but you're only going to get an hour to figure this out. Even if it's an intermittent, even if it's especially in the dealership, your son's gonna run into this. Well, this is why sometimes we take guesses, we take chances, you know? Yeah, yeah, we try known good parts because, like, it's faster, you know.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:07:11]:
And again, my big thing too is like failure analysis. I. I want to know what failed. Yeah, good example. Just my mom has a 16 patriot and the, the throttle, the throttle valve like that famous issue. But I wanted to know what, what caused that failure? So I opened up the board and it's full of engine oil in there. So I guess it's getting sucked in through that shaft seal. So now, okay, I can sleep tonight because I know, I know I fixed it because I diagged it correctly.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:07:38]:
But also, okay, now I know why, you know, like, it's just air valves, you know, like pull an air valve apart. Like, what. Why did it fail? You know, why is it? I'm. I'm big into that. And that's something I noticed with the younger generation is like Whatever, just toss it in my. Well, you're not, you're not at all curious like, you know, like. But I get in the incentivized pay, I can see that being a really big problem because it's on to the next, onto the next, onto the next. It's all about production.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:08:05]:
Right?
Jeff Compton [01:08:05]:
Yeah. And you, you make a good point because failure analysis is exactly how, like it's the person that actually did the failure analysis to determine what maybe was the improved part or the improved service procedure or something to avoid that happening again. Yeah, I can think of like. What can I think of? I can think of like PCV lines and evap lines that were changed and, and updated so that condensation didn't collect in certain spots and cause the vent to freeze. Stuff like that. Right. That's all for exactly what you said from failure analysis. If you just hang the, keep hanging the vent valve on and don't even think about what it is, why it failed, you're never going to become better.
Jeff Compton [01:08:43]:
But like it's only. I've. It's been my experience that the only task may be one tech in a lot of shops with the time to do the failure analysis or when we have a customer come back, that's when we actually might do cus. You know, failure analysis. This thing went through a transmission inside of a year. Why did that training fail? Like you know, he, he does good rebuilds, he doesn't normally come back. Oh look, the cooler lines are plugged up or oh look like you know, the, the, the fan doesn't come on so that's running too hot, you know, that's why stuff like that, that's not part of the failure analysis like it should be when we do our thorough inspections. Like nobody I ever saw do a transmission overhaul ever check to see if the lines were plugged before they hung the tranny in front of it like it wasn't part of it, you know? Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:09:33]:
You talk to other guys and it's like I sell the lines with every transmission I do.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:09:36]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:09:37]:
You know, I either replace them or I flush them. And I've had zero luck with flushing, so I replace them every time. Well, then we get into that. Why do they cost more? Somebody has done some failure analysis at some point in their career and figured out that like the right correct proper repair involves more steps. And that's where we get into the whole onion of why does it cost so much more money, you know? Yeah, because somebody's on failure analysis. It's, it's. I love I love, I love my time with the truck thing because in my career because it taught me about that kind of stuff. But it also like, you know, when you come into the automotive side, there isn't the time for it.
Jeff Compton [01:10:19]:
They don't want you to spend the time.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:10:20]:
No, I've noticed that it's, it's two different worlds I find. It's. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:10:25]:
Even like modules. You see that where it's like you put a module in and the module fails again. Put a module in, module fails again. What's going on? Oh, the alternator is charging too high or it has a coil that's going down and smoking the driver out of it. Nobody caught that. Yeah, I've been bit by that way early in my career too. Like you know so many things. Look at the grounds on the car.
Jeff Compton [01:10:49]:
Sometimes we're fixing stuff that's so rusted, you know, you know there's like, but like gee, what do I do here? Like sell them a new car, no fix what's there. Like it's just always a compromise thing with trucks too.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:11:05]:
Like you can sell them in another car but a $330,000 tri axle is a little bit harder of a sell. You know, like so.
Jeff Compton [01:11:14]:
A sixty thousand dollar engine doesn't seem like such a big lump when it's a $330,000 truck.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:11:21]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:11:22]:
What I mean like and, and we're people that are listening to the automotive side. They're like what? But like we just got talking in, in a group chat in a couple years up here, especially in, in Canada already. Most like if you want to buy, you know, an F250 with a powerstroke, it's $100,000 truck. You know what I mean? A Cummins Bighorn. It's $100,000 truck. Like you're buying hundred what people used to pay for homes, now they're paying for trucks.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:11:49]:
For trucks.
Jeff Compton [01:11:50]:
Yeah. When we think about like I can't charge $200 for an oil change on that truck or I can't charge $3,000 for a brake job. You most certainly can. It's $100,000 truck. You mean I can't charge four grand to put brakes on it? Of course I can. Now I'm not talking like $4,000 and using the cheapest stuff. That's not what I'm trying to say. For the people listening are going to call me everything under the sun.
Jeff Compton [01:12:13]:
I'm talking about using like O parts OE procedure all the time to do it properly. Complete calipers flush the Fluid, all kinds. If you think on a thousand dollar truck, $100,000 truck, you can't get four grand. You're nuts. You're thinking. You're thinking too small is what I'm trying to say. It's my friend Cecil Buller says, stinking thinking. Stop thinking like that.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:12:34]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:12:35]:
You know, just do the math. It's 4%. Like, it's easy, easy.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:12:42]:
That's true.
Jeff Compton [01:12:43]:
Don't look at that. Because they have in their mind still Midas did breaks for 150 bucks in, you know, 1983. Yeah, well, yeah, you know, it's a lot different now.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:12:56]:
And in my, in my field, everything takes an hour because they're like, they, they think that anything takes an hour. Oh, you can get that done in an hour. I'm like, no, this is a three hour job. You know, it's just. And it's all because they don't want to have to, you know, reconfigure the routes. And then I get it. Like, they're pressed like, okay, I'm like, instead of spending time pushing me to get the job done quicker, how about you? I will fix your truck. It's going to get done correctly in about two to three hours.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:13:24]:
And you know, while you reconfigure runs to work around, it's like, I didn't break your truck, it broke itself. So you know what I mean?
Jeff Compton [01:13:31]:
Like, it's another problem when it's been giving you warnings and you keep using it. You know, the truck driver's been hitting regen, you know, the whole time.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:13:40]:
Yes. Or the, the latest one I've been getting a lot is the, the regen inhibit. So it's a. Cancel it, stops it. And they leave them while we. And their excuse is, well, I got to get the truck unloaded. I don't have time to wait for a region. Well, now you're stuck on the side of the road because the truck's completely derated.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:13:58]:
Now you and I are both sitting here for an hour while this thing does the first region. So how did you save time exactly? You know.
Jeff Compton [01:14:05]:
Yeah, you didn't. And so where does that come from? Some of that, Matthew, where it's like our. Is it the way they're paying the drivers? Yeah, yeah. See, big problem.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:14:15]:
It's pretty. A lot. I've. A lot of them, I think, are paid for the run.
Jeff Compton [01:14:20]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:14:21]:
So they want to get back home as soon as they can. I think that's pretty much a lot of it. Because there's no excuse for it. Because if they'd be paid for the hour. They. Oh, that too. And the ELDS changed the game a lot because now they're all electronically logged. So they, they're, they're very strict on some, some companies.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:14:42]:
As soon as they hit their, their hours, that's it. The truck stops. Like it will live if it's, you're stuck on the 401, you're, that's where you're pulling over. Then they have to send somebody, another driver that's got fresh hours to bring the truck back to the yard or whatever. Right. So, so they get, they're pushed and pushed and pushed. Right.
Jeff Compton [01:14:58]:
So, yeah. And we know the old school guys used to just sleep in the truck then while they waited for the truck to be built or fixed. I worked on so many trucks where the driver was asleep in the cab while I worked on it and everybody's like, well, how could he sleep, man? When they were tired, they could sleep. Yeah, I got no problem. Like they put plugs in or whatever and they would go to sleep. Now it doesn't matter. Like he could catch three hours of sleep while he's waiting for you to show up on a service call that the ALD doesn't allow, that he has to be pulled from the truck and go. So there's pluses and minuses to it.
Jeff Compton [01:15:31]:
Both. I, the thing with the trucking side is like, there's always. So if, especially if it's a good driver, there's warning signs coming up that this thing needs work, right?
Mathieu Patenaude [01:15:40]:
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:15:40]:
You know, and, and it's not like cars that we see driving around, you hear the brakes and they're driving around and they hear them too, but they're like, well, you know, next week I get paid and that's when I'm fixing my brakes. The truck thing is like, there's been warning lights coming on and they know that it's got to come in and you know, it was supposed to have a valve adjustment 20,000 kilometers ago and that wasn't done and all this kind of stuff and it's 10,000 overdue for its service. I'm trying to get it in all at once. You know that they keep using that truck until it will not work and then they absolutely get all that stuff done at once. And then they complain about how long it's taken and what it costs. Dude, you knew it was going to break down. It was telling you it's giving you all the, that's what I, I, I respect a lot more. The, the managers that I had in the truck stations because they, they were just very point blank.
Jeff Compton [01:16:29]:
You knew it was going to happen. Your driver was telling you about it. We would see the, the daily inspections on some of the fleets that we had and it was written up, you know, D rated three times today. Yeah, they just put it in service tomorrow. Like I can't believe it's broken. It's in his logbook saying, yeah, it isn't. Right. Yeah, I, again we're talking, again we're talking about businesses where it's, it's all part of their operating budget.
Jeff Compton [01:16:59]:
And you know, people forget sometimes the fleets. Like the last fleet run that I had, if we pulled a bus on him or it didn't get done in time, it wasn't a big deal. He had another bus in the yard.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:17:10]:
Yeah, we don't have spares anymore. That's something you don't see anymore. Yeah, yeah, I agree. When I first started in this, a lot of the companies I worked for usually that the way it worked is the older unit got, got the spare, they bought a new truck and. But so if I couldn't get it fixed in a timely manner, they just jump in the spare. But now if it's got wheels, it's got to turn. That's the way they see it now. They just keep them running.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:17:33]:
Right. It just doesn't stop.
Jeff Compton [01:17:34]:
How much of your day to day you're dealing with like fleet managers. Fleet managers, yes. So you're not necessarily dealing with like the owner, operator or the, you know, the person that necessarily even owns the company. You're just dealing with this fleet manager who is like essentially just another accountant in the building and is like maybe never worked on a truck but has.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:17:57]:
To know it's a 50, 50 split. I'd say, you know, the way usually it works is like the, a manager or foreman, depending on what kind of business it is, they'll call me, you know, and then if, if it's a big call, like if it's something that I have, like I called, like that's a higher ticket item, then I'll call the owner directly and say, hey, like, are we doing this? Are we not? You know, like.
Jeff Compton [01:18:20]:
Because.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:18:22]:
Yeah, for the most part. Yeah, I'd say about 50, 50 or so.
Jeff Compton [01:18:24]:
Yeah. I gotta ask you because it was, it was a pretty good topic that in Tuesday's episode of Marshall Sheldon and Marshall's a heavy equipment tech as well. What do you look for when you're looking at younger hires? What do you kind of, where do you find them? What do you want to see them come from? Like, does it matter all scopes or.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:18:43]:
I want to see, I want to see like that you're into it and that you're really like passionate about what you want to do. You know, do you work on your own stuff or do you do side jobs? Do you do like, do you. Are you interested in this or is this just a job for you? Because my experience has been like, if it's just a job for you, then it's just a job. And they, they don't seem to, you know, they, they don't have that, that drive. I used to say farm. Got farm kids. Yeah, I used to say farm kids. Now.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:19:15]:
It's the, the thing, I do work for some farms, the bigger farms out here, but they're, they're so they're. The families run the farms now. They don't outside much anymore. So now it's a, it's a big family business. So I don't, I don't get to see very many of those. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:19:36]:
And I find a lot of the farming thing has gone to where it's, it's, it's become just like you said, a business. So the farm kid now is just like, not a whole lot different from like, maybe, how do I say this the right way? They might have had the same kind of level of entitlement and maybe the silver spoon dilemma.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:19:57]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:19:58]:
Kid never had. And now I'm finding that it's, it's just the same generational thing. It didn't matter whether they grew up on a farm or not. They always like, didn't have to work that hard for the, for money or opportunity. It was just going to be, it was a given that your, your last name is this and you're going to inherit this.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:20:15]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [01:20:16]:
They don't know. So they don't have that. I was up with that at 6 in the morning till 8 at night working and, and you know, the next generation is just like. We had a guy come in and fix this and they came in and fixed the tractor and they have no interest in learning how to fix a tractor because like they were looking at spreadsheets and somebody came in and fixed the tractor. That kind of example.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:20:36]:
That's exactly it. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:20:37]:
Yeah. And I, I find that that's, that's not just a farm kid thing anymore. That's, that's, I think. Well, when I talk to like, you know, anyone, they go, my dad was really good with cars. Like, he wasn't a mechanic, but he was very good with Cars. He always fixed the family car.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:20:53]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:20:54]:
We don't have that anymore. So guys that are coming in now, they maybe. They certainly probably don't have a father that worked on the family car. So they got a little bit exposure in high school maybe, or, you know, through a friend that had a fast car and they started maybe tinkering on it and they, wow, I really like this. It's not the same now. So they're not getting the exposure. So I find that when we get the young people in sometimes and they go, oh, the attrition rate is terrible. Like, they leave after two, three years.
Jeff Compton [01:21:23]:
That's because they didn't know what the reality of this was.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:21:26]:
That's right.
Jeff Compton [01:21:27]:
Until they were on the job. Whereas, like when they used to say, when I worked with my dad on the family car or saw him do it, I knew the reality before I ever decided to take it on as a career. I knew what it was.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:21:39]:
Yeah, exactly.
Jeff Compton [01:21:40]:
Because he did it. He was a body guy. So I was around it my whole life. I knew what it was going to be like. Right. I wasn't prepared for the political side and the pay side, but I knew it was going to be dirty, hard on the body, you know, breathing a lot of crappy stuff, buying a lot of tools, like, you know, struggling skin in your knuckles. I knew all that. But this is now.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:22:02]:
It's also rewarding, though. That's the thing. I like when you figure that problem out and it. It runs and it's. It's. I don't know. That's. That's the addiction.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:22:12]:
That. For me, anyways, that's the way I see. And it's.
Jeff Compton [01:22:14]:
I can remember getting down here when I was working in a truck shop and we'd get those ice storms that would come through. You remember them? Like some of the ones that hit like 20 years ago, remember? Yeah, right. Hydra was down for whatever. I remember. We'd have trucks lined up waiting to go, and us. And you'd be all day, and you were in. You were in your snowsuit and you're in your big boots and the whole thing. And the truck, the.
Jeff Compton [01:22:37]:
The service truck never shut off. You just went from one truck to another, hooked up, start charging his batteries, you know, refill his fuel filters, add a bunch of de icer. You finally got the truck run. It was so rewarding every time to get that truck going. Even though you had five more to do that day or. Or whatever you could get through before shift done. You just. It was so rewarding every time to finally get that guy back on the road because he was happy to be headed.
Jeff Compton [01:23:03]:
You know, like we said, this is before elds. He'd been asleep in the bunk or he'd been standing there maybe watching you for three hours and you finally get him going. He's just happy, you know, that's. That was. The addictive part is like there's. There's no. Your hands are numb, you're frozen. But the reward is, is that you've actually achieved something.
Jeff Compton [01:23:22]:
That's right. It's not like it's. It went beyond just, you know, putting a brake job on a car. It went to something like you said somebody's food, groceries were going to get delivered. Somebody. There's. There's. We're at another level here.
Jeff Compton [01:23:36]:
Like, it's. It's serious stuff, the trucking thing. I wish more young people would go to it instead of the automotive side.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:23:44]:
Because, yeah, it's hard. It's a hard sell, though. I don't understand why, but yeah, it's a hard sell.
Jeff Compton [01:23:51]:
I. I think that's a hard sell because the, the. We've made all the glory in the last couple years about fast cars and technology and we share the same technology now in the trucking thing. But the trucking industry is doing a terrible job of. They're having a hard enough time now getting good truckers drivers, let alone getting technicians. Right. So that's the other obstacle too. And the trucking industry's got some obstacles in front of it, but I think like, they really need to set their game up and say we need young people.
Jeff Compton [01:24:23]:
Because let's be real, if you're listening, the trucking stuff right now to start pays a little bit better than the automotive side. So if you, If. If you're just about the money, look at the trucking industry because you'll. You'll start out making a little bit better money, I think. And you. You're paid a different way right from the. Right from the jump there in a whole lot of flat rate in the trucking industry. So if you're definitely against it, I.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:24:48]:
Don'T know how you would build it, to be honest with you, because you can't. You can't. Like I.
Jeff Compton [01:24:53]:
Too much modifications, too many. Yeah, it started out as a two. Two frame rails, three axles and an engine and a transmission and some tail lights. And then they added something to it.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:25:06]:
That's right.
Jeff Compton [01:25:07]:
Flat rate, all that other added stuff. Because there is not in a book somewhere.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:25:12]:
Y.
Jeff Compton [01:25:12]:
It doesn't work that way. So if you're that kind of young technician that like wants to problem solve and, and, and can put behind you the time constraint and just go and fix the truck, go into it. Don't even look at the automotive side. Why, why does your son go to the automotive and not follow.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:25:32]:
Can I exactly what you just said? He likes fast cars. He's big into the Mercedes and BMWs and, and he wants to pave his own way and he wants to, you know, like he wants it to do it all all by himself and, and he's more interested in cars and he's intimidated by trucks. I mean he's seen, he's seen the dark side growing up and seeing me do it. So like you know, he seen me wake up at three in the morning to go start trucks or go diagnose stuff and come back like work 18, 20 hour days. That's not a, and it's a seven day a week. Like I haven't had a week long holiday since 2008 is the last time I had a full week of holiday. You know, and that, that's my, it's, it's my doing but it's just like still like he's seen it. So I, I think that's what he just kind of wanted to do his own, you know, carve his own path and he wanted, he likes working on cars and working in fast cars and, and he's good at it.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:26:35]:
That's the thing he's good at especially diagnosing and, and, and stuff. So he wants to, he was big into the evs for a while too. He wanted to get into the EV side of things because he knows that it's eventually going to come. So we actually went to the, the truck show in Toronto two, three years ago.
Jeff Compton [01:26:51]:
Okay.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:26:52]:
Last time I was in Toronto in Mississauga and we went, him and I went there for the, for the show and we went to go look at all the EV trucks and how it's coming up in the industry and I tried to, she's like seats. It's going to happen in the trucks too. So you know that might be a, an avenue that you might want to consider. Right.
Jeff Compton [01:27:10]:
He may come back around. He may come back around, you know.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:27:14]:
Yeah, well he's, he's, he's still an apprentice now, so he's still like salaried. So he's not, I think he'll be okay for now but at the end of the day when the, the, he sees how the older techs are, some of them are struggling. Right.
Jeff Compton [01:27:28]:
And yeah, yeah, and that's going to be that thing too. Or if he comes along and he's strong at that kind of diag and stuff like that, that, that adds another ripple sometimes of getting your spot in the dealership. Right. Because true, people have heard me talk about it. There's always the old wood that, you know, has, has paid their dues and done their time and, and should be taken care of. But a lot of times the young people that are really on the cutting edge of the tech, they struggle to make money because it's like, you know, we, we have these guys that we give good work to, as they should, they should deserve it. And then we have these young guys. We're absolutely burning them out on the really problematic cars because they had the knack to do it, but they're not making the money that the, the established people are, and they get resentment towards that.
Jeff Compton [01:28:16]:
I was that way. You know, I talk all the time. I, I fixed stuff that the guys had worked in that product line for 10 years, 20 years, and I was fixing the, you know, 2006 caravan that they couldn't figure out. Like, you know.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:28:32]:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:28:34]:
And, and, and they're still there and they're still being looked after. And yet that, when we compare 2006 to 2026, like, think of the difference there in technology, and yet they're still there being taken care of, looked after, whatever. It's a national evolution. But I don't necessarily. Again, it's a, it's a caveat for why I think flat rate doesn't work. I just think that you, you, you, you get paid on your ability not to produce, but to actually, like, solve. Because then if you start to trickle down in your old age where you're not solving, you're not an obstacle for the pay for other people that are. That's my point.
Jeff Compton [01:29:14]:
Yeah, it's, it's tough, man. I wish there was, I was just, There was some magic, you know, say this is a solution for it. It's. The only way we get to it is we keep having the conversations about, like, and ask them, how do you want to. I was just having a conversation with my friend. He's like, I'll pay them any way they want to get paid. They want to get paid flat rate, I'll pay them flat rate. If they want to get paid hourly, I'll pay them hourly.
Jeff Compton [01:29:39]:
He says, if they want a dollar a minute, he says, I'll sit on a stool and I'll hand them ones every minute. He said, I'll Hand them singles every minute. Like, he says, whatever they want. He says, I'll make it work. I just. I need them to be able to come in and do the job that I need done.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:29:54]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:29:55]:
You know, and then. And that's it. He says, like, my friend Zeb that works at strokers, his biggest thing is getting guys that either, like, are reliable or. Remember, he says to tighten all the effing bolts. He says, so many of them, they can't tighten all the effing bolts. And, you know, I do.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:30:12]:
You find that's a bigger problem now, like, just going back and reviewing your work and goose bolts and forgetting to tighten stuff. Or is it like, I.
Jeff Compton [01:30:23]:
Like in the younger process, I think it's like, well, here's the other thing. The young people are so distracted now with that cell phone, and I think it's like, you know, that. That. And again, in the dealership, when we're allowing them to use their cell phone, say to use. To do the dvi. Okay. So it's like, okay, we're gonna let you use your cell phone because it's part of the process now of you're taking pictures with your cell phone of the car. Right.
Jeff Compton [01:30:48]:
Or we give you a tablet, and you've got your tablet hooked up so that you're watching the YouTube video or you're streaming your Spotify on the same tablet. You're going around. I think it's distracting. So I think what happens is, like, my cell phone doesn't distract me, but if I'm doing something and some advisor comes up and starts talking to me about the car that I'm either working on or like, a car that's coming in, I have to now consciously put my tools down and. And. And walk away from the car and have the conversation. Because if I'm standing there trying to talk and I'm tightening this, I'll miss that third bolt that way. And then it's like, what? Or I forget to plug this in, and then I go back and I put a bunch of other things in the way, and I don't have that connector plugged in.
Jeff Compton [01:31:32]:
And then I go and hit the switch, and the car doesn't start because I forgot to plug the starter motor in, and I put the manifold on over top of it and all that jazz and never stopped. Because I'm trying to get that five minutes back.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:31:42]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:31:43]:
That I had a conversation with somebody. So the young people, when we find them doing things like that, some of it is they're too distracted by their damn phone. Then you maybe have to make sense. You have to make a policy that says, okay, you can't be on your phone. And we hate that. Right. Like, we shop owners that are. They're on the phone all the time.
Jeff Compton [01:32:02]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:32:03]:
Is there a shop with that that has that policy? Have you heard of that?
Jeff Compton [01:32:06]:
Or shop owners that. Yeah, they're trying to. To if they could, they would say, you're not allowed on your phone while you're being paid. Now, here's the caveat. If I'm paid flat rate, I can do anything I want.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:32:19]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:32:19]:
In the sense that, like, because, you know, if. If I only turn six hours because I spend two hours on my. The day on my phone, that's on me. Right. If I make 10 hours for you in eight hours and I was on my phone all day, that's on me too. That's like, is the phone really the issue then? But when you start having comebacks all the time because you're distracted, you know, and, and you're forgetting things, you're not doing anything. But like, listen, I've known lots of older technicians that when they were going through stuff domestically, like housewives and. And all that kind of stuff, they didn't have cell phones yet.
Jeff Compton [01:32:58]:
And they were on the phone all the time. You know, they're on the shop phone that was in the lunchroom calling, you know, going through this, like, what do you mean, I gotta go pick up my kids? That, you know, it was your turn to pick up the kids. So. Distractions, period, really, I think are what leads to poor workmanship is distractions. I really think it is. I think everybody, for the most part, when they come in, they want to do a really good job and not forget that kind of stuff.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:33:23]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:33:23]:
But if we're distracting them with asking them about the car they're working on when it ain't even done yet, or what are we going to do if we don't get it done by five? Well, it's. Oh, my God, like all these scenarios. Right. Or remember the car that's coming in tomorrow? Remember the car last week? And we're trying to focus on this. That's how they have missed bolts. If we're trying to rush them because that's how they're paid.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:33:47]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:33:49]:
It's gonna. You're gonna have loose bolts. I hate to say it, but you're gonna have it. And it sucks. And I understand people are gonna go, listen, it's not the pay plan. You're. You are right. It's not.
Jeff Compton [01:33:58]:
If a good tech is gonna want to make sure they're gonna do the quality control regardless. But if I have to do a ton of quality control and I'm already right on the cusp of like going over on the job every time for time wise, because either we didn't bill it properly, we didn't estimate it properly, all these kind of things, then I either have to make a conscious choice that I'm going to donate time and money for a good quality control, or I'm going to shirk on the quality control. And what do you think most technicians are going to do? They're going to shirk on the quality control. That's why we have it, man. I think, anyway, that's my own theory. What do you think?
Mathieu Patenaude [01:34:38]:
I think that's. You're absolutely right. I think the distraction, the only reason I brought it up is because I, I feel like years ago, going back 20 years ago, it wasn't as much of a problem as it seems to be now. Like, I hear stories about all these little things that, you know, like forgetting these little things. Like I had a case recently where they, they mistimed an X15, you know, because it's, there's no, there's no keyway. It's all pressure, press fit and you have to lock the cams in and you know, so you got to take your time, you got to do it properly. And I double, triple. And when I, my policies when I start a procedure like that is I lock the door, I close the door, lock the shop, turn my phone off and whatever it is, when I'm done, I'm done.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:35:27]:
And then I'm sure I'm not distracted. So that could. Yeah. Now they're, they're, they're like. What about these DVIs? Like, is that something that. Just another added thing and added stress to the tech that they, they gotta.
Jeff Compton [01:35:44]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:35:44]:
What's your thoughts on those?
Jeff Compton [01:35:46]:
So they're a very powerful tool. Because then I didn't believe it because when I was at the dealer, I always did inspections. Right. But the inspection was like going over and look at what hadn't been done to the car so I could know what to sell. Right. Because again, flat rate, you want to sell as much as you can maintenance wise. Right. While the car is in for something else.
Jeff Compton [01:36:04]:
Oh, it's due for a transmission flush. It's due for. Yeah. You know, I would test drive every car. Brakes were howling, brakes were pulsating. It always got recorded, noted that it needed some kind of brake inspection or brake work. So I was always Good at doing inspections. Once I started doing the DVIs, yes, it really showed me the power of that.
Jeff Compton [01:36:24]:
But again, even though I worked in an hourly shop, he never put down the actual time, he never stated it, how long it should actually take you to do this long dvi. Because then he would have looked at his time for his oil change, allotted time for his dvi and realized that it was like his effective labor rate on that job was in the toilet. It was terrible because he didn't, he wasn't charging enough to get the DVI done.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:36:49]:
Okay, okay.
Jeff Compton [01:36:50]:
The problem then with the DVI getting done is that it gets done. Customer doesn't get anything. You don't convert anything off the dvi like up sell. What was the point of doing it? Yeah, zero. What's the point in doing it if the customer is only there? So this is what happens in the dealer. They have them trained now to do these big DVIs. Your customer is just there for warranty complaint. Right.
Jeff Compton [01:37:16]:
They have a technician like yourself or myself maybe that works somewhere else. I don't care what you found on the car. If it's not under warranty, I'm not doing it here. So I don't even. Like they're telling them at the counter that, well, there's no point in doing a dvi, trying to find an upsell. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. You're not going to get the work anyway. So we have to look at the DVI thing from.
Jeff Compton [01:37:40]:
You have to have top notch people on the counter that can convert what you find into sales. Otherwise it's pointless. If I do a DBI, I've said it before, on Mrs. Smith's car and six months later Mrs. Smith back for an oil change again. And all the work that we recommend on the last DBI didn't get done if we haven't prepped Mrs. Smith when, before she even makes her appointment, that we are going to tell her again and she says not again. There's no point doing the dbi Again.
Jeff Compton [01:38:07]:
Do Mrs. Smith's oil change and then get rid of Mrs. Smith. Period. End of. Like it's, it's, it's. I hate to tell you that, but there's a lot of shops that do that every day. They get rid of Mrs.
Jeff Compton [01:38:18]:
Smith if she's only there for an oil change. Because it's. We're not in the oil change business. We're in the car repair business. We're in the car maintenance business.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:38:25]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:38:26]:
So shops that are being sold that the DVI is a fix all a Cure all. It's not your super killers on the front counter that can convert inspections into work. That's your ticket. You need the product to sell, which is the dvi. But if it's really worth a whole lot, pay your damn technicians for doing it. And I don't mean even in the hourly shops. Give them the proper time to do it. Right.
Jeff Compton [01:38:54]:
And here's the thing we all know like this new stuff, there isn't a dipstick for half of these fluids in these engines.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:39:00]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:39:01]:
So we're not like if you look at the actual process of, okay, get the transmission fluid up to X amount of temperature, you're on a scan tool, then you're road testing to get it up and you want the level checked. Go find the special tool. It's an hour 45 minute process. That's not part of everybody's oil change. DBI on that particular thing. If the technician comes to you and says it's leaking fluid, the next question to the customer, to the technician is, well, is the level okay? That shouldn't be the next question because I don't know if the level is okay. Well, it's not part of the process for this whole change of doing that check. Well, she's going to ask me that the question customer can ask me.
Jeff Compton [01:39:43]:
Now you tell the customer, be transparent. No, it's not because it's leaking out. How low is it? I don't know. Because when you we allow them to come in and say, was it low enough to need to fix right away or can it wait? The answer is no, it can't wait. Right. Because if I tell them that can wait and they don't fix it, they blow their tranny up. I didn't do them any favors. So now if we want to say, well, what's the, what's it, how long does it take to check the transmission level? You have to build it more time.
Jeff Compton [01:40:14]:
As soon as you say to them, I'm going to bill you more time to check the level, they know the time will just say, just fix it because you're going to bill me that time. Next time additional to check it again, I might better fix it. The cooler lines or whatever is leaking. Yeah, Advisors don't have this concept in their head because we've forever, we've just spoiled the advisors with doing things for free. And then we turn around and we do it for the customers. We spoil the customers. If your technician is flat rate or incentivized, guess what they're all tired of doing for free. So every Little thing that's not on the dvi, that has to be done additional.
Jeff Compton [01:40:53]:
Somebody's going to pay for that.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:40:55]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:40:56]:
And even in an hourly shop where everybody's just paid to show up when we talk again about production, if all this stuff was done every week, add up all the things that we did, 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there, 15 minutes there. If we do 15 minute freeze. If we do them, four of them a day, that's an hour.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:41:15]:
We threw away an hour through a week.
Jeff Compton [01:41:17]:
The end of the week, that's five hours. Times how many texts in the shop. 4. You want to throw 20 hours of labor away a week?
Mathieu Patenaude [01:41:28]:
That's insane.
Jeff Compton [01:41:30]:
Let's do the math on that round. Numbers. 50, 150 bucks, 20 hours. I can do the math. Right. How many, how many thousands of dollars do we waste by not charging the customer?
Mathieu Patenaude [01:41:42]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:41:43]:
But you're talking, you're saying you can't afford to pay your tax, but you'll throw away $6,000 a week.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:41:49]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:41:51]:
Come on. This is not complicated stuff. Yeah, but it's. If you're a technician that has worked flat rate or incentivized like I have, and then you see all the stuff that doesn't get charged for, to me, it's why it doesn't work, period. Doesn't work, period. Whereas you and I know if somebody just says, matthew, I need you to go get that truck started and you punch the clock, you get into your service truck, you go, you come back four hours later. The service truck is the, with the service truck, that truck is started, fixed, they're getting build at least four hours. At least.
Jeff Compton [01:42:29]:
You mean to tell me in the automotive side, we can't make that work? Of course we can make it work. We're just scared to. It's not hard. It's not hard. This is easy, easy stuff. It's just, it's. It's changing your, your thought process. Right.
Jeff Compton [01:42:43]:
And everybody's so scared to, to, to seem too expensive or to burn out their customers. If you're the best tech around, you're the best shop around. You're not gonna come back. They'll come back. Yeah. 100 you've had, I'm sure you've had customers that stop using you and then use you again. Right? Same thing. Right.
Jeff Compton [01:43:04]:
I've been in the dealer game long enough that I saw customers that we didn't see for a year. And then they came back.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:43:09]:
They came back. Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:43:10]:
Their car was really effed up. You know, a lot of things they had tried the cheaper Stuff. Yeah, they were great because they.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:43:20]:
In my world, you're, you're, you're going back and fixing all the, the little hiccups that. Yeah, they tried to. In. What I'm seeing too is they'll try and fix it themselves too, to try and save money. And then I'm like, well, how much money do you say? Because now you're gonna have to pay me a whole week's worth of work to just getting back up to par in order for, you know, like every lights on in the dash, there's no abs. Every like, you know, like, it's just.
Jeff Compton [01:43:50]:
Yeah, it's coming up. It's coming up on its annual safety inspection. People. Like commercial trucks are done twice annual. Every six months.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:43:58]:
Every year. Yeah, annually.
Jeff Compton [01:44:00]:
Some fleets, they do them every six.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:44:02]:
Every six? Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:44:03]:
It just depends on the fleet, but it's mandatory at least once a year, the thing has got to be safety inspected. Which means when they've been using the cheap guy and leaving everything to the last minute, the truck ends up out of service much longer than they wanted it to be. And it costs much more than what they wanted wanted it to cost because they kept putting it off. And you know what it is, Matthew, to go back to loose bolts and things? Probably a lot of what you find is like when they've been doing it themselves, they're using so many cheaper. Just a lot of loose bolts.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:44:28]:
A lot of loose bolts. And. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:44:30]:
You know.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:44:31]:
Oh yeah. And you, you get. And, and every. Going back to the safety thing. Every safety. When you get the truck. Oh, it's, it's. It doesn't need anything.
Jeff Compton [01:44:40]:
Doesn't need anything.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:44:41]:
Yeah, it doesn't need anything. It's. It's all good until you get into it. And then they go, oh my God.
Jeff Compton [01:44:46]:
Yeah, jack it up. And the kingpin's going like this. Or you know, like I'm the same. Like I roll underneath and. And I talk about like I would pound on the brake chambers and I could hear the spring rattle. Yep, it's a brake chamber. Right. Or you go underneath and you see one wheel seal is wet.
Jeff Compton [01:45:02]:
Okay, now you're into. And then you pull them off and it's like, okay, they're wet and they're not that worn because they, they're wet. You pull the other side off. Now you're into at least probably a four axle or excuse me, a two axle, four hub brake drum.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:45:17]:
That's right.
Jeff Compton [01:45:18]:
You're into, you know, a couple thousand bucks there. Labor. All that kind of jazz. If you do one axle. You might as well do both on a truck because like it's going to roll through an inspection somewhere. And like all this kind of stuff, you know, it's like you go out there and you test. Here's an example, people. There might be four batteries sitting in the battery box underneath the cab.
Jeff Compton [01:45:38]:
You go out there and you test. One battery is bad.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:45:41]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:45:41]:
Guess what? It's getting all three or all four. It's not getting one.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:45:45]:
Nope.
Jeff Compton [01:45:46]:
Because, you know, that's, that's how this works. So to bring it back to the automotive side of things, when you have a customer come in and it's like they've got two batteries in their car, they've got a main battery and auxiliary battery. And you've, you test the main battery and it, it's junk. Why are you leaving that auxiliary in there if you want them to have a failure on it, which is going to cause a different bunch of symptoms and all this kind of stuff six months from now? Do it both. Oh, it costs so much money. I'm sorry. Did you sell them the car? No. Do you design the car? No.
Jeff Compton [01:46:19]:
Did they do any kind of research to know that when they need a battery now in their Cherokee and their Cherokee uses two batteries that it's going to be a thousand dollars instead of three? They didn't do that research. It's not your problem. It's not your problem. Prep the estimate, sell it to the customer, onto the next car. It's, it's how flat rate techs think.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:46:39]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:46:40]:
Hard. You know, it's where we screwed this industry up is because we've always expected the, the flat rate producing technicians to think one way. But the people on the counter always wanted to think a different way. And we always used to say, well, they have to think that way so that we have business tomorrow. Nope. The technician in the back knows that, like, if I keep doing my job well, I'll always have work. This is where we screwed it up, people. Sorry, it's a bit of a rant.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:47:06]:
But you're absolutely right.
Jeff Compton [01:47:07]:
Yeah, that's what I think anyway, from my, you know, ivory tower sitting here, you know, telling shop owners every week what they do wrong. That's, that's how I see it. And you know, I'm, I'm not right all the time, but there is some truth to what I say because I watch it and see it and I've watched it since my earliest days. I've always watched how the business side of this business was done. And it, some people Tell me. I. Maybe I had no business looking at it. It wasn't my place to.
Jeff Compton [01:47:39]:
It wasn't my. And I wasn't telling them how. I was just watching.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:47:42]:
Watching you.
Jeff Compton [01:47:43]:
Listening and learning. So when I would see things that, you know, that customer can certainly afford that repair. They just won't want to. They drove up in a Mercedes. Like, you're not showing them value, and your value is you. Your value is what Matthew can do, what I can do. If you're not showing them that because you don't have confidence in what you are, you're in the long run of work. You're never going to last.
Jeff Compton [01:48:10]:
Well, Matthew, when we had the new safety systems come into place in. In Ontario.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:48:15]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:48:15]:
This is a funny story. One of the guys that I apprenticed under way back when, before the 1999, I worked for him. As soon as that new system came into place, man, he shut his shop down.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:48:29]:
I've heard. There's. I've heard dozens of stories of that. I don't know why. I don't understand why, but I don't.
Jeff Compton [01:48:37]:
Because, I mean, as long as I worked with him, he never bent on the rules of, like, what should be done in terms of a safety. Like, he wasn't the type that would go, you know, and sign it and. And not look at it and. And keep the guy on the road because, like, he's a good customer. He didn't listen. Type to do that. But as soon as they came through with the new system, he shut. He shuttered it.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:48:58]:
I think it's just people got intimidated by it, but really, it's now on our side. It's frustrating, though, like, trying to take a picture of the brake stroke and you're. I'm like, come on, guys, like. And give.
Jeff Compton [01:49:10]:
And.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:49:11]:
Why they. Why couldn't they give us a separate camera? Why do you have to use the tablet? Like. Yeah, I don't understand that part.
Jeff Compton [01:49:17]:
You know, like, and. And like my shop that I work in now, the lighting is terrible. My boss is probably gonna listen and I'll say it again. Call your buddy and get your estimate for the lights, because we've been hearing about this for two months now. But anyway, like, it's. So trying to hold the light, the tablet, and the measuring tool to get everything focusing so you can see it. It's. It's.
Jeff Compton [01:49:44]:
I do them pretty fast, but it frustrates the hell out of me, you know?
Mathieu Patenaude [01:49:48]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [01:49:48]:
And then, like, you know, they want the tire pressures in KPA instead of psi because Canada is metric.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:49:56]:
And all this.
Jeff Compton [01:49:57]:
Like, if I say to anybody that has practiced, you know, metric all their lives, and I say your tire has 255 kpa in it, they have.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:50:06]:
No, Couldn't tell you what that is.
Jeff Compton [01:50:07]:
But if I say it's got 35 psi in it, they go, oh, good.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:50:13]:
But I think that's our generation, though, because I feel like we. We were raised like half of metric and half imperial. And yeah, like, I measure in psi, you know. But the funniest one is temperature. Like I 80 degrees in my pool. I know what that is. I couldn't tell you what that was in Celsius, but for the outside, it's 20 degrees outside. And I'm like, oh, I know what that is.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:50:36]:
It's so we're so like 180 degree.
Jeff Compton [01:50:40]:
Thermostat or I want a 195.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:50:41]:
Yes. Oh, yeah, the thermostats. Yes, yes.
Jeff Compton [01:50:44]:
But.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:50:44]:
But I was not in Celsius. I have no idea.
Jeff Compton [01:50:47]:
I couldn't tell you that. Doing some cheat conversion and getting my phone, but yet I'm supposed to put the tire pressure down now and kpa.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:50:54]:
Come on. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:50:56]:
Allowed to do things like that. It's. I like the system because there's a little more. There's a little more documentation. There's a little more. A lot of cars that we would have passed. Now when they finally rewrote it, they rewrote it to say, okay, rocker panels that are rusted don't pass. Not.
Jeff Compton [01:51:14]:
Oh, there's still a fixed at either end, so that passes. Maybe, like, it's up to your discretion. There's no more of that. Like, if it's rusted rockers, we don't pass it. Somebody else can buy the car and pass it. We don't. Where I work, we just don't.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:51:29]:
Do you find that helps a lot for like, arguing and like the customers that try to argue, oh, no, that should pass and whatever. Now it's more.
Jeff Compton [01:51:39]:
So where I have the problems are like the salesman that is like wanting to sell the car. And it's like, because I work at a used car lot now. But it was the same thing even when I worked at the last shop I was at and used car lots would bring their cars in and you would say, that doesn't pass because you, like, you would look up in the back and the bumper brace is all rotten. It's all rotted. Like, the rockers were good, but the bumper brace is rotten. Well, that's a fail. But you can't even see that you know, no, you can't. From the outside of the car you can't see it but I know that it's rotten.
Jeff Compton [01:52:14]:
Yeah, well that's not a cheap repair to do. People think that oh it's not that much. It's a cheap, it's an expensive repair. Then you start looking the rest of the car and it's like I'm sorry were failing this based on the condition of rust and they get really pissed. We had a 2012 GMC terrain, low miles like 130000 kilometers ran great. I condemned it because it was too rusted.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:52:35]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:52:36]:
When I started to lift it from the rockers at the pinch points where it's supposed to, you could hear it creaking and cracking and, and rust is starting to fall out on the ground.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:52:44]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:52:45]:
Rest of the cars, there's no holes yet. But that car fails 100 fails all day long. In the old way of doing this because there was no photos, those cars passed all the time.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:52:55]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:52:56]:
It was a mechanics tires, looked at your brakes, looked your suspension, you passed the car. So I like that. The salesman problem is they still think everything is like everything passes. Yeah. Four tires still only cost 200 bucks and brakes still only cost 150. And yeah, every car should only take a thousand bucks. And you're like oh wait, now it's got an ADAS problem. And they're like a what problem? ADAS problem.
Jeff Compton [01:53:20]:
What's that going to cost? Thousands.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:53:22]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:53:24]:
We had a 2015 Mazda 3 that they gave the customer 8, 600 for. They bought the car from them. We looked at the car and I went this thing needs $7,000 worth of work. Well do the math. He paid 86 and it needs 7. It's the most expensive 11 year old Mazda 3 in Ontario. Now it went to the auction, they lost huge on it because at the auction they're not going to get their 8,600 back. No, they'll get 3,600.
Jeff Compton [01:53:58]:
But that again is where again in this industry we let the salesman throw money away all day long or we let service advisors dictate all these kind of decisions that cost us all kinds of money. And then we hold the technicians to such a high standard of production in order to get paid that never, that never made sense to me. I would watch salesmen do screw ups like that or service advisors all day long cost the business thousands at the end of the week. And a technician we couldn't pay for another 15 minutes.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:54:29]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:54:31]:
It, it, it's those kind of things. Matthew, that made me the way I am.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:54:36]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:54:36]:
Jaded or whatever. Pissed off, angry. Those kind of. That, that way of thinking. And when I talk to people, they look at it and they go, a lot of what he says makes sense. He's not, he's not wrong. He's not thinking. Wacky.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:54:52]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:54:53]:
But it's the way it was always done. And I think that if we want to get ahead of so many problems in this industry, we have to really look at that.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:55:00]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:55:00]:
And go. We might better listen to them a little bit more. Even if it's just on how long is this going to take? You listen to them and then charge for that.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:55:09]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:55:10]:
Do it again and again and again. And then I think we start to get back some of this industry where the customer is not holding all the power. We as a collective, not the technicians, have holding all the power, but we in the repair industry have a lot more of the power back. So.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:55:26]:
Yeah, I agree.
Jeff Compton [01:55:27]:
I think we can get there, so.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:55:29]:
I think so too.
Jeff Compton [01:55:30]:
I don't want to keep you any longer. It's been, it's been a couple hours and you know, geez, already. I know. It goes fast, man. Right. So anything you want to add, anything you want to say? What. Where do you hope to be in a year, two years?
Mathieu Patenaude [01:55:48]:
Well, in two years, hopefully we have this new fixed location up and running and if. Is there any text in the Ottawa 310 T text looking for a job? Hit me up on. On the Facebook and.
Jeff Compton [01:56:01]:
Yeah, yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:56:04]:
It'S going to be near Oxbury.
Jeff Compton [01:56:05]:
Yeah, yeah, right on, right on. Well, if I'm ever back in that area, I'll pop. Try and pop in on you.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:56:10]:
Oh, absolutely. For sure. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:56:12]:
I still go see my friends in. I have a friend near Limoges and I have some friends near Orleans still.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:56:19]:
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:56:22]:
You know, Hawksbury, I didn't spend a whole lot of time. I think I drove through a couple times, but I didn't spend a whole lot of time there. Every time I go back to Ottawa now, it looks so different right from when I was there.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:56:32]:
It changes every, every week. I find it's.
Jeff Compton [01:56:35]:
Yeah, like when I first came, I lived in the PN and by the time I was done, I was in Rockland. So to think about how I crossed the city as I kept moving, you know, different opportunities for two jobs and a relationship that ended and all that kind of stuff. Like I, I moved all the way from. At one point I lived in Barhaven, you know.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:56:54]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:56:54]:
I've done I've done the stretch, you know, when I drive out 17 now. You know what I mean? Past the split.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:57:02]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:57:03]:
A little different now. I can remember all those like before they built the college down across from the. From Plaster Orleans. Like, I can't remember what was fields, you know, I can remember. I remember Peacher island when there was nothing there.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:57:15]:
Yeah. You know, and now it's all houses now. Past. Past the trim road. It's all. It's all houses now. It's.
Jeff Compton [01:57:22]:
I lived off a trim. Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:57:24]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:57:25]:
And now it's so different. Right. So, yeah, it's. It's a changing world. So anybody, if. If you're in the Ottawa area and you wanna. You wanna set something up with Matu, get a hold of me and I'll make it happen. I'll help you out.
Jeff Compton [01:57:40]:
So I think he'd be a fantastic guy to learn from and, you know, I think he's doing it right. So I want to thank you for coming on tonight, man.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:57:50]:
So thanks for having me.
Jeff Compton [01:57:51]:
This has been a lot of fun. Thank you for listening that always. Don't say that enough. But, I mean, it's. It's pretty cool to talk about my, kind of my. My beginning steps in this industry and where it took me, and I don't think I'll ever make it back to the truck thing. I'm too old. I'll be 50 next month, so.
Jeff Compton [01:58:11]:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll be turning 50. This is a little sidebar. I'll be in Las Vegas, Nevada for SEMA Apex for our giveaway, and I'll be turning 50 in. In Las Vegas, so.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:58:24]:
Oh, perfect.
Jeff Compton [01:58:24]:
Yeah, that worked out. Look for me on the Internet somewhere. Bearded Canadian rested, you know, three in the morning on Fremont street for, you know.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:58:35]:
Yeah. Oh, there's Jeff, there's me.
Jeff Compton [01:58:38]:
Yeah.
Mathieu Patenaude [01:58:38]:
That's awesome.
Jeff Compton [01:58:39]:
Thank you, Matthew. Thank you. Merci Moncho. So, anybody get a hold of me? Get a hold of Matthew. Love to talk to you guys again. So thank you, everyone. 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.
Jeff Compton [01:59:02]:
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 it.