Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This podcast is dedicated to changing the automotive industry for the better, one conversation at a time.
Whether you're a technician, vendor, business owner, or car enthusiast, we hope to inspire you to improve for your customers, your careers, your businesses, and your families.
David Roman [00:00:00]:
I'm prepared.
Lucas Underwood [00:00:01]:
Stuff and stuff, stuff and stuff.
Chris Cotton [00:00:03]:
Okay, so Lucas.
David Roman [00:00:05]:
Lucas connects me to these Rando people. Chris.
Chris Cotton [00:00:08]:
Okay, I appreciate it.
David Roman [00:00:10]:
I don't know how you would. I'm not implying you, but, yes, very much. You.
Lucas Underwood [00:00:16]:
Okay.
David Roman [00:00:19]:
I want you to tell me how you would handle this. He connects me with these rando people, and I say a lot of stuff on the Internet. I get on the Internet and just talk, right? And some of my opinions sometimes get a little spicy right now. They are always from the heart. And I have very grounded beliefs with certain things and not everything, but, like, there are, like, three or four things that I'm just, like, 100% rock solid. Like, these don't change with me because they're grounded in what I believe to be absolute truth. Okay? And I get these randos. Like, he connects me to these randos, and they're like, hey, why are you saying this about this? Now, if I get into it, I am going to tell them that their religious beliefs are bunk, that what they believe to be true about God is a complete and total farce, and that they have built their business and their identity around lies.
David Roman [00:01:20]:
Okay? Now, I have everything to back it up. Now, I could get into it, and I'd be like, here, I'm gonna lay everything out to you. And I believe, and I understand that I am going to rock your world, that everything you believe to be true will be a lie. And I had to deal with this exact same thing. I had to face the exact same reality. But guess what? I did. I changed because I had to. I saw the evidence in front of me, and I could not.
David Roman [00:01:43]:
I could not just walk away from that information and say, yeah, it's fine. The cognitive dissonance was not going to be acceptable to me, all right? I just said, no, I have to go with this. I have to go with this. I can't. Now, most people don't do that. I have found that 99 per 99% of people that I introduce stuff to just go, yeah, it's fine. And then they go on living their lives because they don't want to change. They realize that this has all these implications, and it's going to require them to completely up in their lives, and they don't want to do that.
David Roman [00:02:15]:
And I get it. I get it. But he connects me with these people, and they ask me, they're like, hey, why are you saying this? What do I. What do I do? I can't tell them. Like, if I tell them, like I said, it's gonna upend everything. They're gonna get mad at me. I don't care. Yeah, that's fine.
David Roman [00:02:36]:
That's fine. I don't care that they get mad at me. That. That part is whatever. But at the same time, they're like the. It's the. It's the. Ah.
David Roman [00:02:45]:
David thinks he knows everything about this.
Lucas Underwood [00:02:47]:
That.
David Roman [00:02:47]:
Yeah, that's like it. Okay, well, I don't think you understand how much I've looked into these things. Like, you have no idea. But trust me when I tell you that I spent years and years and years and years digging into this. And that's why I'm telling you that what you believe to be true is a lie, a farce, and completely wrong. And here's why. And therefore, your business is built on a lie. It is selling a lie, and it is so egregious because the selling lie on the backs of religiosity.
David Roman [00:03:23]:
Did I get that out? I was. I was a little.
Lucas Underwood [00:03:26]:
What?
David Roman [00:03:26]:
To get that rather.
Chris Cotton [00:03:28]:
What the heck is happening now? Like, this is like. This is like David Soliloquy on life and whatever else. I guess this is like, I want to.
David Roman [00:03:36]:
I don't know what.
Lucas Underwood [00:03:36]:
Wake up to dogmatic David.
Chris Cotton [00:03:38]:
Right, right. Like, I'm just here watching. I'm just eye candy at this point. I feel like I should have somebody.
David Roman [00:03:44]:
What do you tell somebody?
Chris Cotton [00:03:46]:
You just. You just show them all the ways they've been screwing up. Right? Like, it's.
Lucas Underwood [00:03:52]:
It's.
Chris Cotton [00:03:52]:
It's fixing. It's fixing misguided belief systems. And that's how I came to be here. Like, I listened to the podcast you did where you were besmirching tires reputation, and I sent Lucas a message. Yeah, tires. Yeah. And I was gonna go back and listen to that podcast again and write down all the things you said, listen.
David Roman [00:04:16]:
Up to wrong, and you listen to me wrong.
Chris Cotton [00:04:20]:
Maybe. Maybe I was not in the right headspace. But anyway, so I was like, hey, I texted Lucas and was like, hey, let's do one on tires and whatever. And seems to me like this, we may be more whatever than tires, but it's fine, right? So we. You know, you start and you let it go. But.
Lucas Underwood [00:04:42]:
I do have to know what was wrong with this tire argument. I got to hear it from you.
David Roman [00:04:47]:
Honestly, I don't remember. Like I said, I just say things on the Internet. I don't know.
Chris Cotton [00:04:51]:
Well, so people are going to have to go back and listen to this, and I could be completely wrong, but the general feel I got was that you didn't like to sell tires. There wasn't enough margin in it, and then maybe we didn't know the process for some of it. And anything done correct makes money. And when you're looking at like, gross profit per hour, um, pardon my friends, you can make a shit ton of money in the tire industry if you, if it's done correctly. Now, there are a lot of people that don't do it correctly.
David Roman [00:05:20]:
Um, and that, that couldn't have been me because I talk about discount tire all the time. Discount tire makes all of their money just banging out tires. And they have such low margins. They're selling them for nothing. They're buying them for nothing, but they're selling them for nothing and they're set up for speed. So if you're banging out tires in 40 minutes over and over and over again, yeah, I mean, you're going to make a ton of money.
Chris Cotton [00:05:45]:
And I heard that. I remember that. But my thing or my rebuttal to that is like, great, let discount tires sell their tires. But there's no reason that we can't sell tires as well and make money on it and keep them in house. And I will tell you, if you are in a program, a tire program, and you're working it properly, you can make as much margin or more and sell the tires for the same price discount tire does and keep all those customers in house. As long as you're, as long as you make a margin on the tire, you have a road hazard program and you're using the backside money, you can make a ton of money.
David Roman [00:06:25]:
What I would push back on you on that is that assumes you're selling or have the opportunity to sell x amount of tires, because a lot of these programs require certain amount of tires to be sold. And if I'm not selling that many tires, we, we sell a lot of tires.
Chris Cotton [00:06:42]:
Right?
David Roman [00:06:43]:
What we do, I sell tires, I quote tires out on every vehicle that comes in. We follow the 300% rule. So if the car comes in, needs tires, we quote tires out. And I tell the customers, I'm like, look, I'm not, I'm not going to be able to sell a Michelin at what Walmart sells Michelin's for.
Chris Cotton [00:07:02]:
Right? It's not the same. It's not the same tire.
David Roman [00:07:04]:
Yeah, it's not the same Michelin. They have their own flavor. Same thing with Costco and the, the forever tire rotation. I tell them you're, you've got kids doing it that don't know how to do anything other than Ugaduga the wheel off and Ugaduga the wheel back on and they have to do it as fast as possible. Cause they're doing it for free. And they really just want you to come back in the three or four times a year so they can sell you more tires. Like, that's the only reason why they're doing it. And I tell the customers all this and they still, I would only.
David Roman [00:07:36]:
I sell maybe 20% of the tire that I quote. And it's not a price thing. A lot of times it's, it's. Yeah, but I already get my oil change done at Costco and they're going to do my tires and I get this great discount. They're going to put Michelin's on for less than what you're selling your mid tier kumos for. I get that. I don't have a problem with that. And I tell them, look, if you want.
David Roman [00:07:59]:
If you're gonna compare a kumo to a kumo, not that I would sell a kumo, let's say toyo. If you're gonna compare Toyo to Toyo, I'm gonna be very competitive into my price. And I mark it certain percentage on the GP. I get my full labor in there. Full labor. We eat the road hazard. Like, I make enough on tire. Like, it's whatever.
Lucas Underwood [00:08:20]:
Like a continental comes with road hazardous. And so we're in the continental program.
David Roman [00:08:24]:
It's.
Lucas Underwood [00:08:24]:
It's 400, uh, 400 tires a year, right? Is what it works out to 100 a quarter continental.
David Roman [00:08:31]:
Even though like a mid tier tire too.
Chris Cotton [00:08:34]:
I have a lot of, I have a lot of euro shops that sell a ton of continental as oe equipment and everything else.
David Roman [00:08:40]:
Um, if you're a euro shop, it makes sense. That makes a hundred percent.
Chris Cotton [00:08:44]:
So. So I'm going to, I'm going to stop. I'm going to. I'm going to put a pin in this right here. So the road hazard. Road hazard is great as far, as far as what they're selling. But there's also a way to go above and beyond, because most of those programs are confusing. They pro rate them.
Chris Cotton [00:09:01]:
You have to charge for mounting and balancing again and all that other stuff. I'm talking about next level service and value for your customers. And I don't want all your customers to buy, actually, I do want all your customers to buy tires from you. But some of them are not just because they want to go to discount tire. And that's great, let them go to discount tire, but the other people that want to do it and stay fine. And so those are the ones that I'm talking about. And so when we talk about road hazard the way I've always done it, the way we did it. And so when I had my shop twelve years ago, we used to sell $100,000 a year in road hazard.
Chris Cotton [00:09:39]:
And our adjustment cost was 6% every year. It never fluctuated lower than 5.8%, never above six and a half percent. So you figure $100,000 and your cost is $6,800 for the year, $6,500 for the year. So we did our. We did, we did our own in House road hazard program. But go ahead, explain.
Lucas Underwood [00:10:02]:
Break that down a little bit. Right? Because a lot of people, and this is something that I started learning, he's.
David Roman [00:10:07]:
Selling it for $100,000. It's cost him $6,800.
Lucas Underwood [00:10:11]:
I know that.
David Roman [00:10:12]:
Okay, what do we explain?
Lucas Underwood [00:10:16]:
We merged ASTA. It was IGNC, and it was the North Carolina Tire Dealers association. There was so much that I learned about the tire business and so much that I picked up and took away and said, oh, man, I've not been utilizing this. And this is a moneymaker, right? Not a moneymaker, but it keeps clients in house. Explain a little bit about the basics of setting this program up in house, because inevitably, like, people don't ask David intelligent questions. He's the smart one of the two of us, but they don't ask him questions because he seems intimidating. So they're going to send me messages and they're like, hey, how do I set up a road hazard? I have no clue what I'm talking about. I'm just talking some cockamamie that doesn't make sense about anything.
David Roman [00:10:56]:
The only thing, the setting up is, hey, we have it now. The problem is the terms and conditions. Cause you want to have iron clad terms and conditions.
Chris Cotton [00:11:04]:
And so let me back up just a second. So there used to be a company called Sancio, which you used to go through and buy, like a roll of stamps, and they charge you like, $4 a stamp, and you had to put the stamps on the invoices, and then you had to call them and do all this stuff. And half the time the customer was still sitting there when all the work was done because you had to cut dots out of the tire. So that was a pain point for us in our shop. And I see all these customers pissed off because it's taken time. Sometimes they pay just as much or more the second time because it's been prorated, all that. So I wanted to eliminate all of that from. From everything.
Chris Cotton [00:11:44]:
So it's a real simple one stage statement. And again, so you set it up to believe what you want to believe. So for us, a tire is worn out at 432 or less. So anything between the tread you roll out on and 430 seconds will replace the tire free of charge. No pro rating, no mounting or balancing. All you do is pay the road hazard on the one new tire you're getting. So if it was $100, you pay $15 for the new road hazard on that one tire and then boom, you're done. Now in your, I mean, and that's basically it.
Chris Cotton [00:12:21]:
If you wanted to get as crazy as enter entering a cost of goods sold and a sale line in your income statement for road hazard, you can I just put it all in the tire price and the tire cost. Now that way I, that way I know exactly how much I made on the tires.
David Roman [00:12:41]:
And are you making some kind of stipulation that hey, I need to see you at least every 10,000 miles for a tire rotation. I need to see every 10,000 miles for an alignment because people are going to shred through their tires so they're not rotating them and they're sitting on a front wheel drive car that's got an, well that when he split on.
Chris Cotton [00:13:02]:
Weight or whatever, that's not, that's not a road hazard, that's customer neglect. So if a customer rolls in and they've got a flat and you see it all wiped out because diagonal wipeout, whatever, for the alignment, then you're like, hey, these things are worn out, but it's not a road hazard. The other thing is, most of the time we're going to take care of our customers no matter what and we'll figure it out. But I'm telling you, the sales are so much and the replacement costs are so little typically that it's well worth it to do it in house. Now if you get some sort of a coverage on the backside from your manufacturer, then you keep those tires, you do it in house and you send them to them so they can give you credit back and you make the money off that as well. Like use the program to your advantage. So the other thing is free flat repairs for the lifetime of the tires. We did that the way we did tire sales.
Chris Cotton [00:13:55]:
And the way I tell my shops now is regardless if they get the road hazard or not, you still get a free rotating balance every six months or 6000 miles. That's included in the purchase of the tires because I still want them coming back in. Um, and, and, okay, so I see the wheels turning. So I'll stop and answer questions.
Lucas Underwood [00:14:16]:
So my two questions are, is situations I've ran into over the last two months. Yeah, right. All wheel drive vehicles, less than 230 seconds of tread variance.
David Roman [00:14:25]:
Right.
Lucas Underwood [00:14:25]:
Now, all of a sudden, I'm road hazard. But they expect me to replace or mill down one of these tires. Right. So that. That's one challenge. The other challenge.
David Roman [00:14:34]:
Is that a thing?
Lucas Underwood [00:14:35]:
Yeah, there's a place down the road that does it, and insurance requires using it.
Chris Cotton [00:14:39]:
Right.
David Roman [00:14:39]:
Well, yeah, I get it, but that makes sense because you have to have. They have to be even or whatever we tell the customers, like, hey, you have to replace all now.
Lucas Underwood [00:14:45]:
Yeah, well, insurance won't do that. And there's a lot of people, like, if you're doing road hazard, that's kind of like the standard practice. The other question, though, is that, you know, just a while back, and continental seems like to be a decent brand, they offer this nationwide coverage on their tires that has road hazard and all this other stuff. I couldn't get anybody to cover it. I called the. I called another shop, set it up, and explained, like, hey, dude, here's what's going on. Even if I have to pay out of pocket, I'll pay out of pocket, take care of my client, and they didn't do it. And.
Lucas Underwood [00:15:13]:
And I. So I call and talk to Continental, and they're like, yeah, nobody does tire warranties. Like, nobody's gonna accept this. So, like, you just. You probably just need to write them a check, and we'll reimburse you or something. But. But how do you navigate that if your clients out of town or.
Chris Cotton [00:15:29]:
So you're going to have to remind me what the first question was, because we'll have to go back to it. So on this, what we tell and what we state in the policy is just, you pay the. You pay for the flat repair, bring us the receipt, and we'll reimburse you. If you have a damaged tire, if you can't pay for it, let us know. We'll pay for a credit card over the phone. If you can pay for it, pay for it, bring it back, we'll reimburse you for it. And out of all the road hazards we sold in the 810 years we had that shop, it happened twice. Like, we had two people that one had a flat repair, and one, I think, blew out a tire on the road.
Chris Cotton [00:16:05]:
That was. That was it. And then two, you can put a stipulation within 25 miles. It has to come back to us. Like, you can write your road hazard policy to be whatever you want it to be, whatever you believe in. And then. So that goes back to the original question. I think if you believe that you can't have these variances in the tires, then you need to put some sort of a clause or inclusion in there that if you're down to 630 seconds and you ruin a tire, we're going to pay to replace the one, but you need to pay to replace the other one or whatever.
Chris Cotton [00:16:38]:
People get too tied up in all the things that keep them from implementing policies like this instead of making it easier for the customer and everybody else and then doing it.
David Roman [00:16:47]:
Yeah, I think it's not a fear of what if. It's not that. It's the. The customer is expecting x. So I need to over communicate up front.
Chris Cotton [00:17:01]:
Right.
David Roman [00:17:01]:
We don't have a miscommunication on the backside. So on a vehicle that requires only a 232 variance from any of the tires, that's a vehicle where I'm going to stop and say, hey, we looked this up. Just let you know that we're going to be able to cover your tire, the one tire. But when these things get down to 830 seconds or under at 730 seconds, it's great that you have essentially three good tires that you could drive for another two or three years out of, but you're going to replace them all. Sorry. That's just the vehicle that you own. So. Sorry.
David Roman [00:17:37]:
So sad. Get a Toyota.
Chris Cotton [00:17:40]:
Right. So, I mean, there's always to handle it, you know, the other thing is, if you want to. If you do any used tires at all, offer them $20 a piece of tire on trade ins or something. But that's.
David Roman [00:17:52]:
That's. I mean, yeah, that is a sketchiest. I don't know.
Chris Cotton [00:17:57]:
Right.
David Roman [00:17:57]:
People do it.
Chris Cotton [00:17:58]:
I don't know either. But there are people like, there are people on like all kinds of corners in America that do that for cash and. And probably make money. More money than all of us combined. Everything. Everything's for cash. Yeah.
David Roman [00:18:13]:
So I only made $10,000 last year. Yeah, yeah.
Chris Cotton [00:18:16]:
Just, just the old guy sitting there. But so what I would say is, if you're not doing it, do it. And here's the other thing. I'm shifting gears on you. If you want to come back. We can. I can go into any parking lot in America, I've done this for years, and do a tire safety check. And 33% of those tires will need to be done by tread depth, improper alignment or dot codes.
Chris Cotton [00:18:40]:
So I just. I do a lot of on site visits with some of my shops, and they're like, oh, we're only selling ten tires a week. And I do the math on it, and I'm like, okay, you're selling ten tires a week, but you do 60 cars a week. So 60 times four is 240 times 33 is 80 tires a week. You should be selling now. At some point, depending on what your new mix of people is, that number is going to come down because you've sold everybody tires. But I tell them, I'm going to come do an on site, and I'm going to walk by every car and I'm going to punch you in the throat for every time I see a car that should be written up on an inspection. That's not, because we're skipping that part of the inspection.
Chris Cotton [00:19:20]:
And I just did one a couple of weeks ago. Every shop in America except for yours, apparently.
David Roman [00:19:30]:
How do you make money? Look, I miss an inspection, I don't make any money. You know how tight things are. I don't have any money right now, and I gotta, I gotta. I have to inspect these cars. I'm flooded with cars right now, which is great cause we've been slow for two weeks. I have to inspect the cars, and we don't make any money otherwise. Like, how do you make any money without the inspection? Well, a lot of them is operating without inspecting. I wanna meet these people.
David Roman [00:19:56]:
How you pay bills?
Chris Cotton [00:19:57]:
Let's. Let's go out in public and we'll shake hands and all I can show you. Well, they have an inspection. It's marked green. But then I walk by and I'm.
Lucas Underwood [00:20:06]:
Like, that is not green, bro. Those are belonging red.
Chris Cotton [00:20:11]:
Yeah, those are all red. And here's another one that gets me. I was in a shop in California, big heavy duty diesel shop. They had a tick. They had a job up there. They were doing like $4,800 worth of work on this diesel truck. And I walk by and there's a nail on the tire. And so I go back up front.
Chris Cotton [00:20:30]:
I go up and I asked him. I asked the guy said, show me the inspection. He's, oh, it was in here two weeks ago. That's when we wrote up all this work. We didn't do an inspection. I'm like, yeah. I'm like, I'm like, come here, come with me. And I go, look, I go, this is a fleet guy that has to have his truck.
Chris Cotton [00:20:49]:
He scheduled it out for $4,800 worth of work, and now he's gonna go out and have a flat in two days, and it's our fault. Like, I don't care if you sell it to him or whatever, but it needs to be fixed. It can't go out of here like that.
David Roman [00:21:03]:
No, no. That. You're 100% right. Two weeks in. I'm not reinspecting the car. Cause that's.
Lucas Underwood [00:21:07]:
Oh, I. Listen. I learned that lesson. I learned.
Chris Cotton [00:21:10]:
Me too.
David Roman [00:21:11]:
I'm eating the flat.
Lucas Underwood [00:21:12]:
No, no, no. It's beyond that. It's beyond that. Years ago, my initial business coach kept saying, like, hey, you have to do a cursory evaluation when it comes back. You got to check the things. Because the problem is, is you might see a vehicle that comes back, and you keep seeing a history of it having a cursory evaluation or that it was in here recently. So you keep skipping your full evaluation on the car, and nobody's checking it. And so, situation being that it comes back in and nobody's checked it for four visits because it had.
Lucas Underwood [00:21:44]:
It had been here so many times, they just thought everybody else did it. It wasn't documented in shopware that you had to click the button off, and so nobody had checked the f and all. And guess what it.
David Roman [00:21:54]:
Guess.
Lucas Underwood [00:21:54]:
Guess who it cost. Yeah, that's right. It cost me because it had been in the shop four different times. And they kept saying, well, we thought you were taking care of the car. We thought you were maintaining the car. We thought this was right. And so that car can come back to you, and you can have a brake line bus that you. That wasn't busted before.
Lucas Underwood [00:22:11]:
You can have low oil. Cars with low tension oil rings are burning oil so fast that it's low on oil by the time it comes back around in two weeks.
David Roman [00:22:18]:
Okay, then we're talking about, like, I'm talking, like, the full inspection by.
Lucas Underwood [00:22:23]:
No, I don't do the full inspection. What's called a cursor.
David Roman [00:22:26]:
We do fluid checks on every car.
Lucas Underwood [00:22:28]:
Is it documented that you have to do it?
David Roman [00:22:31]:
It's a documented that we have.
Lucas Underwood [00:22:32]:
In other words, is there evaluation on shopware that they have to click off on saying they checked it?
David Roman [00:22:37]:
No, we don't. So we.
Lucas Underwood [00:22:40]:
Okay, I have one of those because I learned that lesson was everybody thought everybody else had done it and nobody.
David Roman [00:22:47]:
On our shop, the policy is the very last person that touches the vehicle is. Is typically one of the two service advisors and one of the two service advisors. The last thing they have to do is check fluids, check the oil top off the coolant, the fluid, make sure the maintenance light got reset, make sure the vehicle's clean. Like, that's their checklist or whatever. I don't have a documented, it's just five things. Just do the same thing.
Chris Cotton [00:23:12]:
If it's, if it's not documented, it never happened. First of all. Second of all, if you have to go to court to defend yourself, do it. If you have to go to court to defend yourself three years from now, and everybody that works there during that time that worked on the vehicle is no longer there, and you're the one that has to go into court. What document?
Lucas Underwood [00:23:34]:
Documentation?
Chris Cotton [00:23:34]:
Yeah, what document, what record do you go to, to look at and be like, excuse me, sir. Excuse me, your honor. This is, this is our process. This is what we do. And then you look and you hand it to them and they're like, well, you didn't do it in this case. And we're like, well, we do it all the rest of the time, you know, but please, please don't. Whatever.
David Roman [00:23:52]:
I'll put it on there.
Lucas Underwood [00:23:53]:
You know, it's final checks.
Chris Cotton [00:23:55]:
Check.
Lucas Underwood [00:23:55]:
I watched, I watched a, I watched a video this weekend. It was a court case, and I've been watching a lot that involve automotive.
Chris Cotton [00:24:05]:
Wait a minute. Of all the other stuff you go, you got going on, you had time to do this? I'm just going to say that. Go ahead. Okay. All right.
Lucas Underwood [00:24:11]:
It was, it was 11:00 at night. I was, I was tired of watching the fan spin in a circle. So I sit there watching this court case, and it's about a warranty, right? It's an extended warranty. And so the, the judge goes in and she's talking about this warranty case, and they said, well, but they told us it was 100,000 miles. They told us this. They told us that. And look, one of my biggest beefs with these warranty companies and with these car dealerships is they're selling warranties and they're selling them as a hundred thousand mile or 60,000 miles warranty, and they're charging the full price for them. But the consumer doesn't understand that warranty does nothing until the manufacturer warranty expires.
Lucas Underwood [00:24:48]:
And so their warranty was shorter than the manufacturer warranty, what they had sold the client. And so as the judge works through this now, she sided in some ways with the plaintiff. She gave them their $2,000 back. They paid for the warranty. But I, because this dealership had documented everything on paper. And they said the guy, they've got a video of the guy clearly admitting like, hey, this is, this is wrong. We made a mistake. We didn't give you the right warranty coverage.
Lucas Underwood [00:25:14]:
And it's not correct. The judge said, but the problem is you signed this piece of paper right here, and it says that this was the coverage. Now, I get that's not what you thought you were getting, and it doesn't make any sense to pay $2,000 for 700 miles of coverage on your car. But the point is, you signed it. Right? And so that really opened my eyes to something that is, hey, we're getting these signatures on these repair orders, and they're seeing this documentation sent to them. And when they pay with a credit card, they have to sign off on it. And that is the proof to the judge that, hey, we showed them this, yet we see so many shops that are skipping that process. You see so many shops that are taking it out of.
Lucas Underwood [00:25:55]:
And, you know, when. When I was first talking to Caroline or Carolyn years back, and. And she was showing me how shopware was supposed to work, she said, lucas, you don't. You don't decline the jobs unless you absolutely have to. You. The client needs to do that. And. But why? And she said, because if you ever have to go to court, it documents.
Lucas Underwood [00:26:15]:
They said, no, not you. And it wasn't a conversation of, did you tell them they shouldn't? It was. They said no to it. And so that's why we document the way we do, to prevent that.
Chris Cotton [00:26:27]:
So every invoice is a legal document, and if you don't have it filled out properly to defend yourself, then you're just hosed. I. You know, I see it all the time. No, no in mileage. No out mileage. Just the customer's name. None of the rest of the information. And I know David doesn't do it this way, but 90% anxiety.
David Roman [00:26:47]:
You're giving me anxiety. How do you find these shops? Where do you find these shops?
Chris Cotton [00:26:52]:
Everywhere. Every. Every street corner in America. Like, 90% of the shops out there. If I do an ro audit, half of those tickets are going to be incorrect in one way or another.
Lucas Underwood [00:27:02]:
Yeah.
Chris Cotton [00:27:04]:
And then. So in one of my peer groups, we did. We do. We do a group repair order audit every other meeting, and we were going through doing it, and one of the owners was like, crap. I know for a fact that we overcharged this customer because we. We thought we needed this one part, but we didn't. And some. Nobody took it off there and whatever.
Chris Cotton [00:27:24]:
So ro audits can be good, our audits can be bad. But, you know, somebody has to watch the employees.
Lucas Underwood [00:27:31]:
Right?
Chris Cotton [00:27:32]:
Like, there's got to be. There's got to be somebody watching this.
Lucas Underwood [00:27:34]:
Stuff, dude, I'm telling you. And I hate doing ro audits, right. Especially, like, the digital deal, because now I'm having to click through and move and adjust and go back and forth. And so that sucks. But. But I'm going to tell you, I know that mine are not where they're supposed to be right now.
Chris Cotton [00:27:51]:
Right.
Lucas Underwood [00:27:51]:
And my guys do a really good job, and they're trying really hard to get it right. But I know there's some things that I've not trained my new staff on that, hey, this is how this has to be. And the number of situations where we see and the argument that keeps coming up is just, like, unbelievable to me. Well, if I don't put it on there, there's no way the judge is going to side with them. No, that's not how this works. If you don't document it at all, the judge is definitely going to side with them, because you have no legal recourse, you have no documentation. And, you know, even so far as putting in notes about the conversation with the client, I tell my service advisors, if you get into a tricky situation with a client, document what they said and what you said to them. So that way it's on there.
Lucas Underwood [00:28:35]:
Even though our calls are recorded, even though everything's documented, at least you can indicate, hey, I was a little concerned about this, so I put on there what we were discussing, and. And I'm telling you, these shops that are saying, oh, no, man, you don't want to put it on there because that opens you up to liability. Use tires, right? Oh, no. If I. If I don't put it on, give them an invoice, and if I just take cash, there's no proof it was me. Oh, buddy, that is not the world we live in. Yeah, that will come after you.
Chris Cotton [00:29:01]:
Right. And so we can keep going on this, but also not to completely abandon the tire thing David earlier said about Michelin's, about being competitive and whatever else. I had a shop in the Florida Keys one day. The owner had a shop in West Palm beach. He's like, hey, Chris, I think I would like to retire to the Florida Keys, but I want to buy a shop so I can work a couple days a week and then fish the rest of the time. And so the magic of computer, I looked, and there's this little shop in marathon, Florida we bought for $65,000. No real estate, of course. And we sold that shop to tire kingdom five years later for $650,000, plus all the money we made in between.
Chris Cotton [00:29:48]:
So we ended up going from like $300,000 a year in sales to over $2 million a year in less than five years. But he sold enough Michelin tires, and he was on the program that for every Michelin he sold, he got dollar 25 back from Michelin. So every set of every set of four tires, he got $100 back. And all that went into his pocket because they did some of that on like a Visa debit card. And so the owner and his wife ate out every day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and that's the card they used. So. And I know that's a lot of tires, but also the reason we got bought out by tire Kingdom is tire Kingdom is like, how the hell are you guys selling all these tires? Because they're seeing, you know, Michelin and them are seeing everybody else's numbers and they know what we're buying and everything. So they just walked in one day and was like, hey, we want to buy you out of anyway.
Chris Cotton [00:30:39]:
So the backside money is huge co op funding everything else. So, you know, you can, you can sell done correctly, you can sell a $1000 tire ticket if it's got tires, road hazard alignment on there, and make 500 plus dollars on that make, and do it in less than 2 hours. So your gross profit per hour, it helps bump that number up as well. The other thing. Sorry, I bounce around a lot. It's my add, ADHD, whatever. This is where my brain takes me. Lucas, you'd mentioned about deferred work.
Chris Cotton [00:31:14]:
We see a lot of stuff or declined work. We see a lot of shops where the service advisors go in after it's been declined and delete it out. What's. What's the point? Like, how do we try?
Lucas Underwood [00:31:25]:
I know they're trying.
Chris Cotton [00:31:28]:
They're everywhere, David. They're everywhere, I tell you. Um, I don't know if they're purposely trying to make their numbers look better or whatever, but if you look at, like, techmetric, shopper, whoever, you know, your, your closing ratio, it changes. But then if you do follow ups, like, what are you following up on? Like, I get a lot. I get a lot of shops in Techmetric, it says we presented 250 hours this week and we sold 250 hours. Well, great. What about the 750 you didn't sell because you're slap dicking around and you're not doing your job, and then. So you just, like, delete it out and make yourself look better.
David Roman [00:32:04]:
That's a red. I don't see that as a red flag.
Chris Cotton [00:32:11]:
Because they're not looking. They're not looking.
Lucas Underwood [00:32:13]:
And. And, you know, I think part of.
David Roman [00:32:16]:
Shop owners that are posting that garbage on the Internet, they're like, screenshot.
Chris Cotton [00:32:21]:
We have. We have a hundred percent.
David Roman [00:32:23]:
Yeah, look, our close ratio is 99%. It's like, what are you doing? What are you talking about?
Chris Cotton [00:32:31]:
If I was allowed in those forums, I could be like, dude, you're 100%.
David Roman [00:32:36]:
There's only one recognized forum. You're on the podcast. There's only one. The rest of them can go to hell.
Chris Cotton [00:32:41]:
I don't know if I'm. I don't know if I'm in your forum or not. Here's the other thing.
David Roman [00:32:45]:
100% you're on there. And Lucas will argue with them. He's like, what do you mean? You're at 88% close ratio. There's no way. And they're like, yeah, we're just really good at sales. We have great customers. Blah, blah, blah. It's like, you're not doing a good inspection.
David Roman [00:32:59]:
You're not doing a good enough inspection. You're fudging the numbers. I don't know why you would, as a shop owner, intentionally delete recommendations out there.
Lucas Underwood [00:33:08]:
That seems scary, dude. That's scary.
Chris Cotton [00:33:12]:
And so I'm going to have to look at that because I don't ever see any of your stuff on my Facebook feed at all.
David Roman [00:33:18]:
You don't like sharing comment?
Chris Cotton [00:33:20]:
Well, you know what? Half the time I get, you know, I get up at 430 in the morning and I see dumb shit on the Internet, and I start typing. I start typing a couple of paragraphs in and I'm like, you know what? What's the point? And just delete it all out. Yeah, and just stop. So, hey, so I don't wake up.
David Roman [00:33:39]:
If you want to wake up, like, really fast, you open up Facebook and you look for something political, some. Something to set you off on, because you just want to read it and go. And then your head is like, oh, man, I'm gonna. Man, you stop now. You don't comment actually wake you up.
Chris Cotton [00:33:58]:
You're like, you know what?
David Roman [00:33:59]:
I'm ready to go. Let's do this.
Chris Cotton [00:34:01]:
I think the last time I commented on one, the guy got on there and he's like, well, what do all these coaches know? Blah, blah, blah. And I kind of defended myself a little bit. And I'm like, well, if you're not worried about the coaches too much, I can put a shop right across from the street from you and we'll see what happens because I'm not afraid to do that. And anyway, so neither here nor there.
Lucas Underwood [00:34:27]:
Look, here's the deal. Is that the people that are posting this in the groups, right, this is an ego thing for them, and this is about. Right, the best. This is about winning. It's not about being successful. It's not about doing it the right way. It's not about helping the shop down the street or the shop across the country. It's all ego.
Lucas Underwood [00:34:45]:
And. And the. The hope behind the groups was, is that we would bring them information so they could see it in a different light, that. That it might help one of those, if they ever had to go to court, it might help avoid that situation. Right. Give them the information they need, whatever it may be. And. And unfortunately, you know, those that are in the group that.
Lucas Underwood [00:35:04]:
That kind of take it the other direction, you have no choice, but you just have to ship them out. Right. That they can't stay there because they're. It's never going to be productive conversation.
Chris Cotton [00:35:13]:
Well, yeah, half those people shouldn't. I mean, they shouldn't be commenting on anybody else's stuff. And this is. This is a. An interesting thing in the industry we have. I don't know. I could blame it on other coaching companies. I got one in mind.
Chris Cotton [00:35:28]:
Like, the big thing is to buy as many shops as you can and blah, blah, blah, show everybody how great you are and do all this where half of those people can't run the shop they have, they don't need deserve a second one. And we get a lot of clients that are like, hey, Chris, my 20 group, my other coaching company, convinced me to buy this shop, and I'm just tanking. I'm getting my teeth kicked in. What do we do about that? And I'm like, well, we got to get started. We got to figure it out. But, you know, some people, they just don't need a second shop or third shop or fourth shop.
Lucas Underwood [00:36:06]:
Absolutely.
David Roman [00:36:07]:
And I think a lot of them are getting sold. The idea of, like, hey, you're making whatever, $250,000 a year out of this one shop. You could make in half a million if you just opened another shop or bought this other shop out. And then, you know, our system, just implement our system, and it's like, yeah, great. So you've got this nice little shop, it's humming. You're barely doing any work, and your staff handling everything. Why would you run out and go buy more work for you?
Lucas Underwood [00:36:36]:
Why?
Chris Cotton [00:36:37]:
Yeah. I mean, yeah, we have shops that are doing 2 million a year net and 35%, and the owner's never there. Why? Like, why? Why? Unless. Unless you're just a glutton for punishment. Don't know what to do. Why would you put yourself back in? And here's the other thing. We see a lot of them getting in trouble. They buy another shop and then they just leave it be.
Chris Cotton [00:37:00]:
Like, what I tell shop owners is if you can't walk out of your first shop and go to your second shop and spend every day there for six months, you got no business doing a second shop because you're going to have to do all your processes, procedures, everything else, make sure that they're taken the way you want them. And a lot of them are like, different.
Lucas Underwood [00:37:19]:
Be the same.
Chris Cotton [00:37:20]:
Yeah. Because every shop's different.
Lucas Underwood [00:37:22]:
Yeah.
David Roman [00:37:23]:
So anyway, like, you walk into my, well, you can. You can keep, like, 95% of it the same across two shops, four shops.
Lucas Underwood [00:37:37]:
It was going to be different.
David Roman [00:37:38]:
Is the people you put in there. The problem is like, hey, are you really, really good at hiring techs? Can you find no one else can? Do you have a, like, a giant stack of applications of fantastic technicians and service advisors, like, ready to go right now? No. Then what the hell are you doing buying another shop? Because that's what you're gonna have to do. You can have to flip and staff it or be the only person there.
Chris Cotton [00:38:01]:
Right.
Lucas Underwood [00:38:03]:
It was a rude awakening going to ten base. Right. Because there's a lot of stuff that doesn't work in ten days that worked in three base. Right. There's a lot of stuff that works in ten base that won't work in three base. And so finding that balance has been tough for me. And, you know, one of the things that Doug said when we were interviewing him is he said, look, you know, the first three, maybe four stores is miserable because you don't have enough money to pay that person to take that operations manager role to handle some of that bigger stuff that you don't need to be trying to do. And that's one of the things I see these guys going out and starting multiple shops, and there's a couple that I've spoken with locally that went out and they started five and six shops.
Lucas Underwood [00:38:42]:
They had no system, they had no process, they had no nothing. It was just, I own five shops. I'm gonna be the best in town. I'm gonna, you know. And there was a chain around here that was a tire store. And the. The man did an amazing job of building a huge organization, sold it for a book who of money. And he just did a fantastic job, but it wasn't.
Lucas Underwood [00:39:03]:
I went out and bought 25 stores overnight. It was that, okay, let's build the system, and let's have the system in place. And now we have people who are endeared to us and employees who love what we do, and I need to create opportunity for them to grow into something bigger. And so here's how we're going to do this. I have the opportunity. I have the operating capital. I have all of these things in place. But they didn't just jump right in and say, I'm going to do this.
Lucas Underwood [00:39:26]:
That's what I don't like when I see some of these coaching companies going out and suggesting that, go out. Buy your second shop, man. We need to get you in your second. We need to get you in your second. We need to get you in your second. Now, I'm going to tell you years ago, and I don't know if it's true or not, but Dutch always used to complain. He would say, these coaching companies are trying to keep themselves in business. They're trying to make sure they put some of these shops in hard spots, so they always have to have them.
Lucas Underwood [00:39:50]:
The problem is, is that they would grow their shop outside of what that coaching company could accomplish. Right. And so it was like, okay, this is working beautifully. I don't need to do anything else. It's making money. I don't need the coach anymore. And so the coach would go out and make suggestions, and there was intent behind it to get them to where they had to continue to use the coaching services. Is it true? I don't know, but.
Lucas Underwood [00:40:11]:
But it does make you wonder about some of them.
Chris Cotton [00:40:14]:
Well, it sounds like. And, you know, Dutch, God bless him, it. It sounds a little tinfoil hat to me. Like, I can't imagine doing that. But, yeah, I could. I could. I could also see where some of them might be doing that. So, like, my daughter would say, she'd come in and be like, dad, I got a conspiracy theory for you.
Chris Cotton [00:40:34]:
So I don't. I don't know. That's very interesting.
Lucas Underwood [00:40:37]:
He had. He had some data that. That led him to believe that and had seen some things.
David Roman [00:40:42]:
100% happening. That's not conspiracy anything. It's 100% happening. It makes sense. But from a, from a business aspect, you cannot grow these shops and get them humming and then, like, what? What am I gonna do? So you got to have other offerings. So all of a sudden, you're like, hey, I have an entire suite for just service advisors because now you're not in the shop. So let us do the training for you. For your staff.
David Roman [00:41:04]:
Oh, we have an entire thing for technicians now because we want to be able to train up your technicians. So now you got to keep, you got to keep paying us because now we have the entire thing for your technicians. You don't have to do shit. You can just sit back and collect your cash and just keep paying us and we'll do everything for you.
Lucas Underwood [00:41:19]:
I love.
Chris Cotton [00:41:23]:
Well, that, that's fine, but I will tell you, it's just not exactly. That is not how autofix auto shot coaching operates at all. Like our, you can go out, we have a great video from a client a month ago, testimonial. Like, I get clients to a point and we fire them. Like we're, like we, we have taken you as far as we can take you. Go out in the world and go do something else. Like I tell people, like, our point is to get you to where you can run your shop on your own and you don't need us anymore. There's a stupid commercial and I can't remember.
Chris Cotton [00:41:55]:
I probably don't want to know. There's like a dating app that says we're the app that's meant to be deleted.
David Roman [00:42:02]:
Not anymore, buddy.
Chris Cotton [00:42:03]:
Not anymore. And so I think it's the last year or two, I'll look it up, but, well, and I, you know, I've been involved with some of the bigger coaching companies so I know some of the stuff that goes back and that's why I started my own. But definitely that's not how we think. Like, we're not, you know, that's because.
David Roman [00:42:29]:
Chris, that's because you somehow find all these shops that don't do inspections. They don't, they don't articulate anything that.
Chris Cotton [00:42:35]:
They find nations, they, they find me. And there's going to be a, there's going to be a group of them out there that listen to this and they're like, oh, I can't believe I've been doing this forever. And they're going to reach out or reach out to you guys or something. There's no shortage of shops that need help. And sometimes I wish the coaching companies would cooperate a little bit more amongst themselves because if everybody raised their hand and said, I need help, we don't have enough coaches in the industry to help everybody for sure. And one of the struggles coaching is, you know, we have a good, not even 20%, like maybe 7% of the industry that uses coaching and peer groups and things like that. So you have 93% of shops out there that have no guidance whatsoever and they're just, like, floating along and they can't figure out how they make it. You know, I have a great case study that's getting ready to come out on a shop in Virginia beach.
Chris Cotton [00:43:31]:
We've basically doubled their sales in six months just by doing the things we know needs done. Car counts barely changed, but doing an inspection, making recommendations, and selling it works. Like. Like all of these things work. There's no mystery. There's no. There's no magic, nothing to our industry. If you just do the things right that everybody knows to do and follow up on it, you have a great business anyway.
Lucas Underwood [00:43:58]:
No, I mean, you're right. And you know what? I have. I have seen firsthand in some coaching companies that. That drug the people along, right. And they weren't listening and they weren't taking action. They weren't changing anything. And. And some of those coaches would openly say, oh, no, if they do that, I.
Lucas Underwood [00:44:15]:
They're out of here. I don't. I don't keep them in here. If they do. But then you would watch them and they would stay there for months on month.
Chris Cotton [00:44:20]:
Yeah, because they're paying. Because they're paying every month. Yeah, yeah.
Lucas Underwood [00:44:23]:
And they're paying this bill and they're like, oh, no, they're just improving on their own time. No, no. If. If. Because at that point, to me, that's like theft. And I said before, it's. It's like somebody dropping their car off at the shop and me charging them storage. And they say, well, I could come get it, but, you know, if you're okay with it sitting there, it'll just sit there.
Lucas Underwood [00:44:43]:
Why would I do that? Right? Like, that, to me, that's taking money from someone if I'm not providing a service. And I, you know, David talks about the podcast all the time, and he says, look, if we're going to have sponsors, I want to make sure I'm providing value beyond anything you could ever imagine. Right? What's the same thing for me with my shop? Like, I take pride in the fact that I provide more value than I cost, right. And I think that those coaching companies give all the other coaches a bad name. Now, there's a group of you that are doing a really good job, that are really solid people, and it's about like, hey, that connection of, like, hey, this is a good fit for us, right? And that's what it's all about. Hey, does this person align with you? Does this person align with your beliefs? Does this person, can you talk to them? Do you, does their voice annoy you, right?
Chris Cotton [00:45:27]:
Right.
Lucas Underwood [00:45:27]:
And if you can work with that person and it fits, then by all means work with them. But if they don't and they can.
Chris Cotton [00:45:33]:
Pass you to somebody else, I would never hire David. His voice annoys me.
Lucas Underwood [00:45:38]:
But anyway, me too. Me too. That's why we're friends, right? That's why we're friends.
David Roman [00:45:43]:
At least making sense. My voice annoys you, but we're friends?
Lucas Underwood [00:45:48]:
Yes. That's the only reason we're still friends is you keep me grounded, David. You keep me in here, you know?
David Roman [00:45:54]:
So my wife made friends with somebody, and the husband, these are nice people. They're very nice people. But here's the thing. The husband's a hugger. He's a hugger. So, like, the first time we meet, I get it. Like, you stick your hand out, you shake. I go wash my hands immediately after because I know what you've been doing with that hand.
David Roman [00:46:13]:
So I don't want to be, you know, whatever. Anyway, so I get it. But the second time, why are you shaking my hand the third time. The fourth time, this is now weird. Like your Andy, he's like half hugging. He's like half hug and handshaking. Like Lucas. Like I don't walk up to you and shake your hand every single time we see each other.
David Roman [00:46:35]:
That's weird. Like, that's weird.
Chris Cotton [00:46:38]:
Does it, does he do that to your wife?
David Roman [00:46:40]:
Yes. No, he half hugs. He's like, hey, hug. Because she's dude. Yeah, like the half hug side hug and he's patner. And why are you doing that? And my wife's like, oh, he's a hugger. What? What is that? No, no, I say these people are incompatible with us. You need to eat them.
David Roman [00:47:01]:
They're like, they cannot be around me. Do you want to hang out with them? Fine, I get it. You know, you want, you want to have friends or whatever without it? No, fine. But no, like, you know, you know what I'm going to start doing if somebody wants to like, hey, hey, I want these people to be a friend circle. Okay, great. I'm gonna show them my meme list. So I'm gonna like, go down and I'm like, hey, what do you think of this meme? And then they're gonna go, haha. And then I'm gonna go, okay.
Chris Cotton [00:47:26]:
Okay.
David Roman [00:47:26]:
I'll send them the next one and I'll just keep getting danker and danker until they get like really weird. Really weird. The funny, really funny ones. And then they, I want to see how they react and then if they.
Lucas Underwood [00:47:38]:
Get cold and moldy, you're gonna get cold and moldy. You know, in pop culture, they always called pot dank. And, like, the, the senior citizens in the room would always look at it and say, it's dank. It's cold, moldy. It smells that, you know, so, like David and his dank memes, this is devolved.
Chris Cotton [00:48:02]:
This is devolved. Like, way down. Like, I don't even know.
David Roman [00:48:05]:
Like, I don't deal with this guy. He's like, he's nice. I don't want to be rude, David.
Lucas Underwood [00:48:12]:
My wife's like, you're being rude.
David Roman [00:48:13]:
I need counseling. Oh, is that what it is? I need coaching or counseling? I just, like, I'm telling her, like, I don't know what to do with this guy. She's like, just be nice. I'm like, why? He wants to touch me. I don't want to touch him. I don't want, what.
Chris Cotton [00:48:32]:
You need to do is just telling, say, excuse me, sir, I have a bubble, and you're in it. Please step back. Like, like, if you get, if you, if you get in my bubble again, I will punch you in the throat. Sorry, I'm just giving you this morning.
David Roman [00:48:46]:
Now, I don't know, physically, he's very large and imposing. He's, he's probably 80% of Brian Pollock size. He, that's, he's a big boy.
Lucas Underwood [00:48:56]:
Yeah. David's not gonna say that to this guy.
David Roman [00:48:59]:
Yeah, I'm not gonna try to get into a fight.
Lucas Underwood [00:49:01]:
This is the guy that David actually shakes his hand while they're standing to the urinal. Right? Like, that's when this actually happens.
Chris Cotton [00:49:07]:
So. So you're telling me if we get.
David Roman [00:49:09]:
Into something, I think I can hang, because I think he's just physically, like, he'll throw his back out if he tries to swing a punch, so.
Chris Cotton [00:49:17]:
So do you guys know who Burt Kreischer is?
David Roman [00:49:21]:
Yeah.
Chris Cotton [00:49:22]:
Okay, so have you ever heard the story about the bear?
David Roman [00:49:27]:
Yeah, everybody.
Chris Cotton [00:49:28]:
So you need to, you need to look it up. So all I can.
David Roman [00:49:30]:
Comedian. Would. One joke?
Chris Cotton [00:49:34]:
No, no, this is, well, he, I mean, it's a pretty good joke. I mean, but anyway, if you haven't seen it or heard it, you need to go out, because all I can envision now is David with, with this bear, and this bear is going, huh, huh? But you have to watch the video to figure that out. So I'll, yeah, I'll send it to you.
Lucas Underwood [00:49:55]:
Like, his name's Jeff Comptone. Um, you know, uh, that's just how we roll.
Chris Cotton [00:50:01]:
So I don't even know. I don't even know how we got here again, but here we are. Right?
David Roman [00:50:06]:
So I guess Jeff Compton is cuddly. He's a cuddly bear. It's. Yeah, he needs to get out of Canada. And, you know, he comes down to KC. We have a very eclectic and community down here, and they embrace those.
Lucas Underwood [00:50:19]:
They love. They love David Roman's done with care auto repair or done with auto repair.
David Roman [00:50:25]:
We are. We are friendly to that community, let me tell you. We are very friendly. Hey, we got the bathroom and everything for it. We're set up. We're good.
Lucas Underwood [00:50:34]:
Love it. I love it. Chris, I don't even know what. Say this.
Chris Cotton [00:50:39]:
I don't even know what to do or how to move. Like, this is. This is interesting. So I will say one thing.
David Roman [00:50:48]:
I'm going to roll that out. I'm 100%, like, I'm going to come up with a. With a tire hazard thing. We're going to push that hard one. We'll see if I can improve my tire sales. I'm going to tell everybody and we're just going to mark up our tires and then sell free. Like, we're just going to roll it in. So that's what I did for the launch.
David Roman [00:51:06]:
Road hazard, you know, within 25 miles, will tow you back to the shop. We'll do whatever. Like, I do that already for my customers, but I'm just going to advertise the crap out of it. I'm going to jack up, like, tack $25 a tire or whatever with free road hazard. I'm gonna sell a slightly better tire. I'm gonna eat flats, free flats for life. And once a year, we will rotate and rotate the tire, and maybe we'll do a free alignment check once a year or whatever. So tires stay nice for freezies, for life.
Chris Cotton [00:51:38]:
So just make the money on it. You deserve it, keep it, do what you can. But again, everybody out there, the big thing is, is just make sure that you're working these programs. Like, you can make a lot of money on these programs if you work them. And as long as your technicians are writing up tires, like, I'm a big Ronald Reagan trust, but verify. Like, so walk through the shop and see all the cars that should be written up on tires that should be 400.
David Roman [00:52:04]:
Isn't that what the part number is? The part number?
Lucas Underwood [00:52:06]:
Lucas, the autel. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David Roman [00:52:10]:
Buy them all little tb 400. They gotta zap the tire and take a picture of it.
Chris Cotton [00:52:15]:
Right?
Lucas Underwood [00:52:16]:
Look, I'm just going to tell you that. That I think that walking and doing a double check on the evaluations from time to time is huge. And it's process creep. That's something that I've experienced in my shop terribly, is that. That we get a process. And unfortunately for us, it went in a way that you would never expect it to go. It was that they were putting in sufficient detail, and it was clear and it was concise before, and they. They creeped in the direction of more detail, more detail, more detail, more detail.
Lucas Underwood [00:52:45]:
Because they were always trying to cover something that we had this one instance where this one thing happened and we didn't tell them about it. Right. And so they got to the point that they were putting so much detail, it was taking too much time. So you can find things on either side of the process, either to make the process more efficient, or in the other sense, maybe you're not making the process more efficient. You're finding things that. That should have been on that ticket that weren't on that ticket. And. And, you know, look, even if you.
Lucas Underwood [00:53:11]:
If you don't even consider it as a sales opportunity, you consider it as a legal protection, that you make sure you told them about something that that can be the difference between winning or losing a major settlement in court. Right. And trust me, I've been watching these court videos. You don't. You do not want one of those major settlements in the wrong way. You don't want to be on the wrong end of that sucker. You want that judge to look at it and say, I can see exactly what they said here. This makes sense, right?
Chris Cotton [00:53:39]:
So there's a great product out there. I think they've changed their name, but it's basically like a palm sized scanner that if your service advisors can do a walk around, start at the left front tire, and you reach down and scan the tires. It'll do tread depth, and it'll give you red, green, yellow, and it also tell you if, based on the tire wear, if it's out of alignment, and you just go through and you can either print it out or it'll add it to your DVI. So it's. It's a great thing. I've got a shop in Pensacola, Florida, that they used to sell no tires, and now they do about 75 to 100 a week based on what they're doing, just like, putting the process and procedure in place. The other thing I want to talk about is, asta, for a minute.
David Roman [00:54:26]:
I.
Chris Cotton [00:54:26]:
Really wish, like, just for me, like, you don't have to do it for anybody. Else. I wish we could get that week change, because it's. It falls on a bad week for me. The last time I was there was the year we had the tropical storm, whatever that was.
Lucas Underwood [00:54:39]:
Yeah.
Chris Cotton [00:54:40]:
And so, yeah, I have a peer group meeting that same weekend every year, but every third or fourth year, it's like I can catch up and make it. So that was the last time I was there. And that's one thing.
Lucas Underwood [00:54:55]:
That's what I was getting ready to say. This seems like a great opportunity.
David Roman [00:54:58]:
There's room. Lots of room.
Chris Cotton [00:55:00]:
The. I don't know, this peer group, the peer group has been meeting since 1990. Like, this is like one of the. Probably the oldest independent auto repair peer group in the country, and they're very set in their ways. It's a great group, but we travel all the time. So, anyway, if you're not signed up for Asta, formerly St sign up. Go. The last time I was there, I did a class, but it wasn't tire related.
Chris Cotton [00:55:28]:
And I really feel like somebody needs to come do a tire shop class geared towards selling tires, road hazard and all that. So I will try to make the commitment to be there next year and teach that class. I'll submit it and whatever. Um, and I just got to. I just got to figure out how to make that work because I'm, you.
Lucas Underwood [00:55:53]:
Know, as it seems pretty straightforward to me.
Chris Cotton [00:55:56]:
There we go. Maybe we can create another one, just start one and then do that or something. But, like, as Ron White says. But I'm only one man, right? So I can only do so much. I can't. I can't eat all the cows, but, no, you guys are gonna have a great time this year, for sure.
Lucas Underwood [00:56:11]:
Yep. It's gonna be a blast, man. It's gonna be huge. And I was just looking through some of the classes and some of the opportunities to do some of the fun stuff. Kim and Brian and the institute stepped up big to do the go kart thing again. So really excited about that. That's going to be a blast. And we're going to be there recording, so it should be phenomenal.
Lucas Underwood [00:56:30]:
So excited. Hey, hey. You're not going to be there, but sounds like you'll be somewhere sunny and warm and nice and.
Chris Cotton [00:56:36]:
Well, we'll be in Traverse City, Michigan, so. Yeah, I think it's. I. I think it'll be nice there. You know, this is like late September, so it'll be good. But then. So Kimberly and I are going on a road trip after that in our van. We're going to go up through Canada, up into Maine and then come down the east coast visiting shop.
Chris Cotton [00:56:59]:
So we're going to do like twelve shop visits in three weeks and then just make like a huge loop from Colorado all the way up around back through Texas to see our daughter and then back home. So nice. Look for us on the road. We'll be hitting the. Hitting the east coast there.
Lucas Underwood [00:57:17]:
Fantastic. Brother. Can't wait to see you soon.
Chris Cotton [00:57:19]:
Yeah, yeah. Well, and you know, this is a weird thing. I've never met either one of you in person. And I know we've been at events at the same time.
Lucas Underwood [00:57:26]:
Absolutely, Matt. You know, I see, I'm just not memorable. That's all right. That's all right. Like I thought it was just a David thing, but that's all right. I remember this.
Chris Cotton [00:57:34]:
If you remember, if you came up and hugged me and whispered in my ear like David would or this other guy, then maybe I would remember you. When did we meet? The only place. Tell me we. I think you're lying, by the way.
Lucas Underwood [00:57:46]:
We either met STX or we met at a ratchet. I want to say was an SDX meeting, but it may have been Ratchet and ranch. I can't remember. There was a big.
Chris Cotton [00:57:55]:
I've never been to ratchet. I've never been to ratchet ranch because I don't like Ratchet and wrench. But that's a whole nother podcast.
Lucas Underwood [00:58:01]:
STX in Orlando. You were there, right?
Chris Cotton [00:58:05]:
I was, I was there, but I.
Lucas Underwood [00:58:07]:
Don'T remember meeting you. Yep. No, we walked outside the bar. You walked right down the little stairs where the bar washing. Remember they had the outside bar and it was over top of the pool. Chris and Craig were there and we sat out like on one of the little patios right on the pool.
Chris Cotton [00:58:24]:
And that was where the lady fell and cracked her head and the other girl was up hugging her. Okay, I remember that, but I don't remember the first part.
Lucas Underwood [00:58:31]:
See, I told you, I'm not memorable. That's okay.
Chris Cotton [00:58:34]:
Well, I think. I think that. I think that other experience scarred me. And wipe that from my memory, but okay, I'll agree. Hey, I am, you know, I will admit when I screw up and obviously I screwed up, but that was the. That was the strangest, weirdest thing that's ever happened, I think at a thing. We're all out there talking, enjoying the sunshine in Orlando in February. And this.
Chris Cotton [00:59:04]:
She could be some technician's wife, shop owner's wife. I don't even know who she was. She was so drunk. She slipped in, fell and, like, then this other lady came up and, like, had her legs wrapped around her and was hugging her and telling her it's okay. And we're trying to get people to make sure. It was, like, one of the oddest things I've ever seen. It was. It was.
Lucas Underwood [00:59:24]:
It.
Chris Cotton [00:59:24]:
Now you know why I forgot. Lucas. I'm sorry.
Lucas Underwood [00:59:26]:
Like, if you was intense, if.
Chris Cotton [00:59:28]:
If you meet me or when we meet again without that going on, I'll be fine. Sorry.
Lucas Underwood [00:59:34]:
I apologize.
Chris Cotton [00:59:34]:
All right. My deepest regrets on that one.
David Roman [00:59:38]:
So, people. It's not good for you.
Chris Cotton [00:59:42]:
Yeah. And. And I will say you said I was at the bar. I don't. I've been sober for 30 plus years.
Lucas Underwood [00:59:47]:
No, no, no. I wasn't saying outside, right below the bar.
Chris Cotton [00:59:51]:
All right, that's fine.
Lucas Underwood [00:59:53]:
Yeah. You weren't at the bar. You weren't at the bar. David doesn't drink either, but one day, they're gonna find him after a few drinks, face down on a pool. But I. That's how he rest. That's how you rest, people.
Chris Cotton [01:00:06]:
That's how you rest. So. Okay. Well, I don't know if we did any good. Hopefully people understand something out of this and we'll go. Okay. I'll see. And so I don't know why we waited this long to.
Chris Cotton [01:00:19]:
Shame on you guys.
Lucas Underwood [01:00:20]:
Yeah, it's terrible. It is pretty bad. Just whatever you do, don't hang up when he clicks in.
Chris Cotton [01:00:26]:
Oh, I won't.
Lucas Underwood [01:00:26]:
Don't exit.