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Shop Talk Her Way is where former shop owner and coach JeanAnn Saint Grace opens up the books on what it really takes to run a profitable, sustainable, and well-balanced auto repair business.
With decades of experience in bookkeeping, operations, and leadership, JeanAnn brings an honest, no-fluff approach to shop management — all from a woman’s perspective. From financial systems and staffing to communication and culture, she shares insights that help shop owners (and especially women in the industry) take control, build better businesses, and enjoy the ride.
Whether you’re turning wrenches, balancing the books, or scaling to your next location, you’ll find encouragement, strategy, and a healthy dose of “you’ve got this” in every episode.
Shop Talk Her Way is an AutoFix Auto Shop Coaching production — helping shops thrive, her way.
Thanks to WorldPac and the WorldPac Training Institute (WTI) for sponsoring Shop Talk Her Way. Visit worldpac.com for the latest in auto parts distribution and wtitraining.com to explore training programs that can take your career to the next level.
Jeff Compton [00:00:00]:
I've been so amazed when I've gotten to meet some of these coaches, Genan, how many of them you talk to them are like, oh, I have a degree in psychology too. No friggin wonder you're so good at this because you actually get it. You actually get how to deal with people. That's how they're able to be empathetic. But at the same time stay on the task of this business has to make money. This is shop talk her way with Jean and St. Grace. We get talking about the survival mode in the survival headspace of technicians on the incentivized pay or flat rate or whatever you want to call it.
Jeff Compton [00:00:39]:
And I a long time ago gave up caring. After my diagnostic, time was spent on what was actually wrong with the car. I gave it up a long time ago, didn't care. Right. It was, you were investing in me a certain amount, a lot of time. And if I didn't know, it never hurt my feelings or my ego to push it back outside or drive it out. Oh, that's all the customer wants to spend. And I had lots of advisors that were irritated with me.
Jeff Compton [00:01:03]:
It's like, what do you mean you don't know? Well, here's what I do know, right? Like it, I can, I can jump the starter and I can make it crank and it doesn't start. The ECM is offline. I checked the fuses real quick for the ECM and the fuses are good, but the ECM is not turning on. So now I would have to access the ECM and start to do my pinnouts there. We've only got 36 minutes authorized for this. So now I've pushed the car back outside or I'm doing a brake job now in the bay next to this car while you call your customer. I gotta call them and get more time. Yes, you gotta call them and get more time.
Jeff Compton [00:01:38]:
My ego never, like it doesn't hurt me anymore to think about the cars that I don't know what was wrong because somebody pulled the plug. And I'm not talking like I had five hours and I pulled the plug. I'm talking like we had an hour in and somebody had made really inaccurate expectations to the customer that we can solve anything within an hour. And I spent my hour and they didn't want to spend any more and I kicked it outside. You know, that's how the survival mode, Jeff, of flat rate incentivized pay things the straight time Jeff, you give me a set of keys and say go, this car has A problem. You might come to me in two hours and go, where are you? And I'll be like, I'm 95 there. Now, if you say to me, why didn't you come to me after the first hour? I'm going to be like, because I didn't even know how much you quoted for this. Like, did you only quote an hour? That's probably on you then, sister, and.
Jeff Compton [00:02:31]:
And go that way. So it just depends on how I'm treated as to what kind of. I don't want to say dedication, Gina, but it's. You'll get a different version of me. You'll get. You really will. Right. I think that's what the young people that are trying to come into this trade, that we want to steer them towards diag because I want to steer all tech stores diaga.
Jeff Compton [00:02:55]:
Let's just cut to the chase. I'm not impressed by the guys that are swing men for transmission or, you know, heavy line. Do I respect them? But like, I want to see the next Brian Pollock and the next Brandon Steckler and the next, you know, Hawk and Light and all these amazing guys that are really good with die. I want to see the next generation generation of them. I'm not like heavy line guys and production guys. I didn't see it. But you can show me that you fixed something that was really complex and I can see that. And I can believe it.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:03:27]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:03:28]:
Hours that you turn, like, you can show me a paycheck. But yeah, I don't know what your quality looks like on that point. Right. Whereas I know the quality of a good diag because I can see it. That's the difference for me.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:03:42]:
Right. And, and there's. There's an argument to be made that all, not all technicians are created equal. Right. There's going to be guys who are going to be geniuses at the nuts and bolts stuff, and then there's going to be somebody who's awesome at diag, but isn't the nuts and bolts guy. And the question would be how do we identify them early on and get them put in the right flow of training?
Jeff Compton [00:04:05]:
Yeah. Because it's not like, I'll tell you in class, coming up through my technical college, I was terrible. I almost failed electrical and drivability. I didn't get it. I didn't get it till I had my first employer that took all that theory away. Well, he didn't really take the theory away, but he, like, I had seen the Ohm's law triangle until I was blue in the face. And I just, it didn't sink and just taught me how to actually build a circuit on a car and then prove that that circuit was actually able to flow current and turn on what it needed to turn on. After that I was good.
Jeff Compton [00:04:40]:
I was off and running. So it's not test scores that, that determine where some of these people want to go. I think we need to talk about what do you really enjoy doing? Oh, I really enjoy taking transmissions out and, and overhauling them and seeing that. Okay, cool. Or I really enjoy, you know, having an engine locked up and taking the cab off and you know, putting an engine in and watching that thing drive away. I really like that. It's a weird kind of tech. Not weird, but it's a different type of technician that says like, I want the card that comes in that makes everybody pull their hair out because it won't start or intermittently it's down on power.
Jeff Compton [00:05:22]:
And three other places have tried it and they couldn't get it. It's a very, very specialized person that says, I want a crack at that. And this industry is, is dropping the ball because it's like we just look at it from a numbers build and a number's produced and that's how we determine the value of that. It's two very different people, right?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:05:44]:
Yes, it is.
Jeff Compton [00:05:46]:
You can't. Here's the thing. If you don't have somebody to diagnose why that engine won't start, the guy in the back that's really good at swapping engines out, he doesn't get that work.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:05:57]:
Right, right.
Jeff Compton [00:05:58]:
Because eventually 100%, if you don't have that person that they're known to be able to fix things, people won't bring their cars to you. You know, now you can run a quick lube or you can run a basic shop and oh, you got an oil leak there. And you know, but in terms of being able to. The known person that can solve the problem, I don't know us, how they fit into this dynamic of how do we calculate their value and how do we pay them. And that's the big problem now in this industry is the young people that are coming in. They're not choosing this high tech stuff. Not at all.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:06:32]:
Right, right.
Jeff Compton [00:06:33]:
Because of the way they're paid. They're choosing the easy, low hanging fruit, you know.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:06:37]:
Sure, yeah, we, we are. My shop, our stock in trade was. And, and I can almost always tell you what people said, they're not the cheapest, but they can fix this or they can fix that. And so I think some people had the, they were already primed because they'd been to the dealer, they'd been here, they'd been there, and somebody said, oh yeah, that guy at Colony, he can fix anything. And so it was like, then they were predisposed, I think, to paying, you know, at least two hours to start with diag and then whatever the repair was going to be. So they already knew like they weren't just going to pay an hour or it wasn't going to be free. And, and then you won them over and then you got their oil changes and then you got their 30k services and then you got the this and then they told their family. Right.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:07:33]:
And so for every, you know, 10 that I turned away or, or chose not to come in because they didn't want to pay for two hours of diag, that one that did, that was the money maker. Right. And so, and, and also people value what they pay for. So if, if on the front counter they don't value, or even as an owner, if they don't value that technician's time, then why would the customer value that person's time? So we're setting, we're setting the tone that they should be eating fully mignon for McDonald's prices. And, and we're setting the stage for that.
Jeff Compton [00:08:15]:
Well, and that's the thing. When you have somebody at the counter that's really sympathetic, just your body language and the words that you use can really seem like you're not, you're on the customer side instead of being on your coworker side. Who is the technician out in the bay? That's your co worker.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:08:33]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:08:34]:
And when they say, oh, I know it really sucks that it's taken this long and, and you know, I'm sorry that we got a, you know, a two tiered labor rate system. And actually it's not 150 labor rate, it's 210 because, you know, that's our diag rate. And I'm sorry that you're up to $630. Like when they start to say sorry all the time, it divides the team.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:08:56]:
Sure.
Jeff Compton [00:08:57]:
And, and you know, when I feel like all the time, like I'm divided, then I feel go back to the survival mode, Jeff, which is just like, okay, we're gonna make this about me. Right. And I'm gonna, and I hate to say this, there are technicians out there that when they're on and this, I don't want it to be a flat rate thing, but when you're on incentivized thing. I'll make the example if I lift the hood and I see that something chewed the harness right there. Now I can do two things. I can go in and I can fix just that harness right there. But say it's causing a misfire code and it's got 90,000 miles on it. I could sell a tune up too.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:09:34]:
Sure.
Jeff Compton [00:09:35]:
And I could do the tune up because it might pay better along with the fuel injection service and all that kind of stuff. And I can fix the harness in three minutes. An incentivized technician is going to pick b more times than he's going to pick a.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:09:48]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:09:49]:
Because that's what he's rewarded with. He or she is rewarded for doing that. Where. What would you want if you took your, if your mom was going to bring the car in? Well, I would just want them to do that repair. What's the value of that repair?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:10:01]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:10:03]:
That's where we get into this whole thing. Because it's like I can sell you a tune up and a fuel system cleaning and it's $600 and the car leaves fixed.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:10:12]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:10:12]:
And I can fix these two little wires.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:10:13]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:10:14]:
Or I could just fix these two little wires and you go, it's only two wires. I don't want to pay $600 for that repair.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:10:20]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:10:21]:
You're getting the same result.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:10:23]:
Right?
Jeff Compton [00:10:24]:
Right. This is why the, the, the incentivized thing doesn't work for me. And anybody that argues and dies on the hill, that's. You got to have skin in the game. That's horseshit, man. That's, that's, that's to line pockets, not to advocate for customer.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:10:40]:
Right. And I would argue in that situation, that's when we give the customer a choice. So we've spent, you know, we spent the first hour of diag and we found these couple wires that need to be fixed. We can just fix the wires or we're at 100k and you're due for a tune up. And so to do this, you know, job complete and have you move forward with your oil changes for the next, you know, three to four years and not need another one. Let's, we can do all of this now. This is the price over here or this is the price over here, Mr. Mrs.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:11:16]:
Customer, what would you like to do and give the customer the choice? And, and I, you know, I get to, I do get to train some service advisors and I try to tell them we have to be compassionate with the customer because they're in a tough spot. But we can't be so compassionate that we hurt our team member. Yeah, by, by, by doing that. It's got to be a win for both sides. And it's, it's like you have to have a heart, but your heart, you've got to have heart with boundaries because you can't like say you can't hurt your team or your, or the business by giving something away that we should be charging for or, and we shouldn't hurt the customer by giving them what I call half a pair of pants. Right. We can, we can put a new spark plug wire on and that'll fix it or we can do the complete tune up that it's due for anyway and we'll get a complete new set. And that's where selling features and benefits.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:12:09]:
Right, that's where your sales, you know, not even sales, it's information. Our advisors, I try to tell them they're not, you're not really selling. You're informing the customer of this and then you're also informing them of the investment to complete that repair or the, the investment to fix it. And I think I might be wrong, but I feel like if we get them out of this thing that they're selling, we're not selling customers anything they don't need. We're giving them options. We found this. The fixes could be A or B or a B and C and that's how much it's going to cost. What would you like to do? Because it's not our place to judge.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:12:49]:
You know, like you said, it's a 2010 Traverse and it needs X, Y and Z that all I'm here to do is tell you this is how much it's going to cost. Would you like to do that or not? And if we feel it's going to be a bad outcome to say, you know, maybe you don't want to, maybe we should take this money and invest it in another vehicle. That's an option too.
Jeff Compton [00:13:10]:
And see, that's the unpopular option. Right? Because like let's, let's be real. There's a lot of people that instruct or coach or advocate that you don't ever do that. And, and I mean I've, I've seen lots of shops that like they, they would tell the customer, like listen, don't put any more money into this. And, and the customer thanked them. Oh my God, thank you so much. I'm coming here for the rest of my life for just my oil changes. And I never do anything but oil changes.
Jeff Compton [00:13:41]:
And then I've seen those shops and it's like, you've seen them. You're shaking your. Because you know exactly what happens. So. And why is that? Because it's like, we. We want to hope that that's all it needs and want to hope for them for that. And that's great. I got no problem with that.
Jeff Compton [00:13:58]:
But the reality is, is like. Well, like our engine job that we talked about before we got on here, right? I changed that engine. Now, have I been doing this long enough that I know that if you bring me in something misfiring that hard, probably by the time we fix the engine at some point in the very near future, it's going to need a catalytic converter, right? It's almost a given. Should I sell the cat every time I sell the engine repair? No, because a lot of people would say, what are you doing to me? Like, I just want my engine fixed. I don't need the catalytic converter. I don't even have a code for a catalytic converter. And you go around the sun 10 times, explaining to them how sometimes when it's misfiring that bad, it's not going to run the cat monitor. But they don't hear all that.
Jeff Compton [00:14:37]:
So, you know, I put the engine in, and then the customer comes back and he says, hey, now I got to check engine light back on. And, hey, let's cut the. Here. They've been driving around for three months with the check engine light on, but all of a sudden, the sky is falling because I just spent $3,000 for an engine repair, and the check engine light's back on.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:14:54]:
Right?
Jeff Compton [00:14:55]:
The wedding bells. Like, we're. We're married to this car now. No, that's. That's where all that at the front counter has to stop with communication and say, this is a very real thing that happens. Like when you drive a car misfiring that long, we're going to have other cause and effect. And do we should. They made them aware of it.
Jeff Compton [00:15:14]:
Yes. At the beginning of the thing when it's misfiring at heart, every service advisor should know by now, car's misfiring for an extended period of time. It's probably gonna hurt the catalytic converter. And to prep the customer for the very reality that they might have a check engine light return, the car will run normal. You'll have your power restored.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:15:31]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:15:31]:
But you're gonna have a light on. Are you right? Is the light on the killer for you? Yes. Well, then you're gonna need a cat, sister. Do you want to do it right now? We got the engine out. I'd rather do it now. It's easier to change. Right, but you can't do that.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:15:45]:
Right. Well, especially now I was, I keep thinking about a CAT being not part of the engine, but if it's in the intake or in the exhaust manifolds, you know, if it's integrated, then, you know, and, and like you said, okay, we've got freeze frame data. What monitors have run and which ones haven't. So we don't have a CAT monitor run. We have a problem. This is, and like you said, this is very real.
Jeff Compton [00:16:11]:
And that goes back to the difference of when they come to us with a code printout versus when our person looks at it as our person looks at and goes, oh, look at this all. Just had this cleared three weeks ago. Right now all these monitors are still incomplete. Plus I have the code that they've been trying to fix is returned right now immediately I have to document and have more conversation at my front counter with the customer that the very real thing is we don't know what the rest of the stuff is going to do after. Because you went and cleared the code.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:16:42]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:16:42]:
And now we're. Or your dad or your grandpa or your uncle or your brother or whoever, first cousin Billy Bob up the road. And now we're screwed because it's like we don't know.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:16:52]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:16:52]:
You can't see the freeze frame data for 420 or I can't look at. Because the monitor's been suspended. I don't know what to do.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:16:59]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:16:59]:
And so should, should every service advisor out there be taking tactical training? Oh, hell yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:17:07]:
Yes, 100%.
Jeff Compton [00:17:08]:
You know, they should all be on Scander Dan or premium, the same as every technician out there. And you know, today's class and all this kind of stuff, like they should all be taking that and learning the stuff because you don't learn it from having the conversations with the customer and you don't learn it by listening to the technicians because you're right in the middle of the fray at the moment. Yes, you should be going home at night just like the technicians. I need the technicians to do 40 hours, you know, training a month. Well, I need your advisors to become better advisors and better understanding of the technical differences of what we're trying to sell here. Yeah. So the next month they sell more labor, right?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:17:45]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:17:46]:
You know, yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:17:47]:
And there, and it's, you know, it scares me, honestly. I don't, and I don't. I. One of the things that I tell people is, is that, you know, people Ask me, well, your husband was sick. Did you have to sell the business? And I'm like, yeah, because without him to bounce information off of, I didn't have the confidence in myself to trust a technician to be telling me, you know, this is what's wrong with the car. You know, I didn't have enough technical skill to be the arbiter of that conversation. And so if you don't have somebody who's at least 10% smarter than your best technician, what do you do? And I think that is a conundrum, Right. That is a challenge for just about anybody is if you're an owner with no technical background and you've got a problem, well, was it our fault or was it the customer's fault? Who makes that decision?
Jeff Compton [00:18:46]:
And here's the other thing that's going on every day in shops right now. And this is another unpopular opinion. There's a lot of technicians snowing a lot of advisors every day. And in turn, your advisor is then snowing the customer.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:19:01]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:19:01]:
Because you don't know better. Right. Like we all see the conversations and it's like, well, my good friend Brian and I, and you know, had one this week and it's like all this work was done and it didn't fix the car. Well, who do you blame for that? Well, everybody wants to immediately blame the technician and they're not wrong if it's from the sense that they don't know or they're lazy.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:19:24]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:19:25]:
But at what point do we, like, why is it all the advisors always got a free pass? And Nate, because I've worked with advisors that like, especially a dealer, you know, who's got it and who doesn't, they would carry a big estimate up to that advisor and that advisor might have had no faith in that technician's ability to solve that problem. He's still going to sell the whole damn job.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:19:47]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:19:48]:
Well, how do you punish people for that?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:19:51]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:19:52]:
You know?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:19:53]:
Right. Yeah, yeah. And everybody made money, but it still didn't fix the problem.
Jeff Compton [00:19:58]:
And that's what young people, Gina, when you teach them that, what are you doing to them? Right.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:20:04]:
Yes. Yeah. 100. It's, it's crazy. So I, I have a, I have like a fifty thousand dollar question for you. Might even be the fifty million dollar question. So what is your opinion of. Well, first of all, I personally think we need to be like the other trades where we have a mentor, apprentice type situation where we don't send an apprentice out to do a journeyman's job.
Jeff Compton [00:20:31]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:20:32]:
And the question Then is how do we recruit them and what do we, what do we promise them as far as training? My opinion is we should have some kind of a year over year training schedule for them. We should have some kind of a measurement of, of that training and then there should be a reward for that, whether it's an increase in pay, a tool allowance, even like, you know, buying the tool cart with seven drawers. And it's like, year one, the first drawer is yours, year two, the second drawer is yours. You're, you know, you know, if you stick for the seven years, you get the whole shebang.
Jeff Compton [00:21:08]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:21:09]:
What do you, what's your opinion on training? Recruiting? Promising what, what's your opinion on all of that?
Jeff Compton [00:21:18]:
So I had an interesting conversation this week with somebody actually just yesterday, and it's my same shop owner friend and he talked about how he has a really established technician, he's bringing in a younger tech and he's like, how does that mentoring thing work when everybody's on an incentivized pay, they're on a hybrid plan, you know, and he has to maybe help that technician with some part of the job. And I said, well, you have to come to the decision if the technician that needs help every time he goes over and asks the person he's instructed to ask, if every time he goes over and asks something, he's deducted pay, docked. How many times do you think he's going to do that before he's going to be like, I'm just going to figure this out on my own because it's costing me too much to go and get my foreman to come over and help me. The other thing is they go, so you have to come to that decision. I either can only dispatch this to them, which nobody wants, because in a perfect world we'd be able to dispatch to anybody in the shop. And if we're all teammates, we'll all get through it. The very reality is that Specialized senior master, whatever, they shouldn't be penalized for helping the young people. It shouldn't affect their pay from a production standpoint.
Jeff Compton [00:22:32]:
They should be able to go over there and go, okay, I'm going to show you how to get this bearing race off with a torch instead of grinding with it. I'm going to show you how to use the scan tool to tell if the engine is in time or out of time. I'm going to come over there and I'm going to show you. When we introduce, you know, a lean condition, what the oxygen sensor, I'm going to show all you that. And I'm going to show it all to you because I'm not losing pay when I'm over there helping you.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:22:55]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:22:56]:
That's the key. The young person has to go to that person every time, feel comfortable and be able to say, what do you think about this? And if we do it that way, I don't see how it doesn't work. Because everything I learned, I learned from a mentor whose job it was to either that was to bring me up. He was. His shop. He was trying to bring up technicians in the shop. That was just part of it when he signed on. I'm hiring apprentices.
Jeff Compton [00:23:25]:
I have to teach them. Or I learned from coworkers that weren't gracious enough to help me with what I was weak in. And in turn, I could help them with what they were weak in. It always had to be reciprocated.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:23:39]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:23:40]:
People that, like, I couldn't, like, wouldn't help me. Do you think I wanted to help them? No.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:23:45]:
No.
Jeff Compton [00:23:45]:
I wanted. I wanted the job that they couldn't get through. Incentivized plan.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:23:50]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:23:51]:
So the mentor thing is, is we have to be. We have to go back. I keep saying we have to go back to that craftsman level of where we take on young people like the old trades used to. And it's like, I'm going to teach you how to make wagon wheels, and I'm going to teach you how to be a carriage builder. I'm going to teach you how to be a blacksmith. And we invest that time in them. And it's like you said, the toolbox analogy is great because, okay, here's your top drawer. There's some oil filter wrenches and some, you know, stuff like that.
Jeff Compton [00:24:18]:
Then the bottom drawer could be a picoscope.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:24:20]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:24:21]:
So by year seven, if I've done my job, not only should they know what a picoscope is, but they should be just like, I want to get my hands on that thing, and then I want to be able to share that knowledge with somebody else. If we just stop and say, at drawer four, that's as far as I want to go. There's nothing wrong with that.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:24:40]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:24:40]:
But the incentive has to keep doing that. Like, I want this tech to know how to use every drawer and be rewarded and paid well for knowing it. We don't do that in this industry because we put this big number for production, and that's value.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:24:58]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:24:59]:
And it is. It's the only metric that we know how to justify value. But it's not the True value of what customers are coming to get. They don't know when we come to the tire store that that really isn't the best place to get a check engine light diagnosed. Right. Even though it can be. Smartest guy I know works at a tire store. Right? Yeah, it doesn't.
Jeff Compton [00:25:21]:
We have to deal with them on an individual basis. And we can't say that just because you've got 10 years in the industry, you should know how to do these three things.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:25:31]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:25:31]:
That's a myth.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:25:32]:
100%.
Jeff Compton [00:25:33]:
That's crap. They're only as good as the people that have taught them.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:25:38]:
Yes, yes. And using that metric, will, how have you been a technician for this long and this is your skill set? Maybe that's all they were dispatched. Maybe they've been doing break jobs for the last 10 years and they're really good and they're really fast. But since they were really good at that and really fast, nobody took the time to put them on something that might challenge them and take some time that they could still be really good at, but they weren't quite as fast.
Jeff Compton [00:26:01]:
Yeah, Jeff, you've been doing this 30 years and you suck at air conditioning diet. Why is that? Because I don't care about air conditioned diet. I really don't care. Get a chance to do it. I'm not exposed to it. It doesn't interest me. It's like, but give me that car that won't start and watch me, you know, perform magic. When you're really good at doing air conditioning stuff, I'm going to be over there, you know, taking the, the dead and bringing them back to life.
Jeff Compton [00:26:28]:
Like, that's, that's what I get off on.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:26:31]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:26:32]:
When you, what's your theory? When you bring them into the shop, did you guys have an established kind of process of how you build one? Because that's for me.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:26:42]:
We did. We did not. I think we would start them with the basics, you know, unless they, unless we had like a full fledged tech. We would try to start them at the, the skill level they, they appeared to be at or claimed to be at or could prove they were at. I guess that's the best way to put it, and let them, you know, see what their competency was and then move them up or down depending. But even like my youngest tech would go with the guys to ATG training about learning how to use a scope or learning how to read this or that or do the thing. So we never was like, well, this is below your skill set. You're not going with the guys, everybody went.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:27:26]:
So they were exposed.
Jeff Compton [00:27:28]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:27:28]:
You know, and that. And then, you know, maybe that meant the next time there was a diag that came in they could either shadow or they could take a whack at it or something like that. But I never, I don't, I'm trying to think back, you know, some of this was 20 years ago. I feel like we never limited them. We always gave everybody the opportunity to learn. And then hey, come look at this. Right? Hey, you know, everybody gather around, let's look at this and take those opportunities to train. But we were, you know, we hosted Carquest to come in.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:28:03]:
They had a really good training program and at one point we did a whole day on and the pico guy came and they did pico scope for eight hours.
Jeff Compton [00:28:10]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:28:11]:
You know, so I think we were always focused on the ever evolving and even then we were still behind and even as like, you know, that was when like the Priuses were coming on hot. I went to class with them because I wanted to know the ins and outs at least so I could talk to the customer even if I couldn't put my hands on it. I knew the lingo and I, when the texts came back to me I would know how do I sell this or how do I inform them of what's needed next. So I think we were forward thinking in our training process and I think we were always interested in bringing along. We always had a shop helper out of the local high school coming in. They, I had a couple oil changes scheduled for them. Once they got their, their stuff done then they could go look over the shoulder of another tech or help them with whatever they were doing and that was their, their incentive and of course we paid them and they were welcome to the training that we had as well. So you know, and we were an AC Delco shop and we also had access to Motorcraft so they went to all those classes because it was free for us to send them.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:29:25]:
That was included, right? Yeah. So I mean my guys were probably going to training once or twice a month depending on what was available.
Jeff Compton [00:29:35]:
That's good.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:29:36]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:29:37]:
What do you think? Not to steer it too far away because it's kind of still on topic but what do you think about the idea that mandatory certification and the idea like because everybody says and the topic comes up a lot. Well if you did it like them Canadians and they have a licensing thing, you know, that would fix a lot of these stuff.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:29:57]:
I haven't really thought about that honestly and I guess my gauge was My husband took a lot of pride in the fact that he was an ASE Master Tech, an L1 Master. And we encouraged our team members to do that. And I was ASE certified as well. So, you know, I'm the leader, I must follow them. I got the ASCs that I was capable of getting, which was customer service and part specialist. Because if I'm asking my team to do this, then I should have some skin in the game as well.
Jeff Compton [00:30:32]:
Right.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:30:33]:
So, you know, and I was proud of that. Like I felt, you know, I'm still proud of that, that I used to be ASE certified. To me, that means a lot to me. And there are those people that are like, well, that just means you're good at taking a test. Okay, well, you still have to have the mechanical knowledge. You still have to know something, you know, so I, I'm on. I, I hadn't really given that a lot of thought. I don't think it's a bad idea.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:30:58]:
You know, like here in Texas, there's, in order to be an electrician, even if you're working for a licensed technician, you have to have an apprentice certificate and then you have to be able to press, press the journeyman. So. And you can't go out on your own on a job unless you are a journeyman. So we're, we're talking about people's safety, you know, I mean, electrical is a big deal, but you know, we're talking about cars. Maybe it's not a bad idea. My biggest problem is I'm an original. You know, down here in Texas we call come and take it. Should we involve the government or should we work with somebody like ASE to be like, okay, this is your next level of certification and you aren't, you can't move to the next level until you've got the next, you know, your A1, your.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:31:50]:
You know, I can't remember what all the, the certifications were, but maybe we need to be self regulating and encourage our people to getting some level of certification. So we know we're not letting somebody who's not qualified do certain kinds of work. I, I don't know.
Jeff Compton [00:32:09]:
And, and so a couple, you, you made some good points about that right there. I'm going to say this. If ASC was going to step up and do that, by now, they would have already done it. So I think we shouldn't be as an industry looking at them to do it or going, who's going to do it? Who's going to do it? I'll tell you Right now the government's going to do it whether we friggin like it or not, right? And I just an example. We're, we're all in the conversation of auto off right now, right? And here's the thing. Auto off is like okay, once you've invest vetted through them that you're okay, you're trustworthy enough to program this car and make keys for it. So you know you're not going to steal the car, steal all their information. Cool, we'll let you access that.
Jeff Compton [00:32:49]:
Imagine if the secure gateway needed an auto auth subscription to open and you had to show that you were L1 certified before you could even read the data in the car. A lot of people would lose their flipping mind, right? And say that's bogus, like that's crap. I shouldn't have to do that. I've been fixing cars. I'm not saying that's what we need and I'm not saying that's the solution. But it shouldn't shock anybody if in five years, that's 10 years, that's exactly what happens. Because the reality is if I want to go in there and start to do things or tune things or change things or look at things and I don't know what I'm looking at, I can put that car in a situation where it's not really running great, maybe I open up the purge and I keep opening the purge zone over and over and over and over again. I flood the engine.
Jeff Compton [00:33:42]:
Eventually I get, you know, some heat in the cat and I heard it. If I didn't know what I was doing, I could do that. If I do know what I'm doing and I've proven that, then they should allow me to go in and be able to control all the things and make it do all the stuff.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:33:57]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:33:58]:
I don't think it's that far to reach to think that they may eventually make us to that level. That's a scary thing because then if we've been going for so long where we haven't been doing it ourselves, the last thing we want is to make the government decide what's competency look like.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:34:17]:
Yes. And, and I don't know. And this is part of where I'm coming from so you know, to step back a few paces. So my shop was in California and we, we were a smog inspection station. So Bureau of Automotive Repairs, the California Oversight Commission for automotive in that, in that area. But they also regulate like if they come in and your paperwork's out of order, then they Go through your underpants store to find every place where you have not done the right thing and you are now on the hook for that. So we lived in relative fear of that.
Jeff Compton [00:34:59]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:35:00]:
And so there. And they could, they could hold you hostage essentially because they were, you know, and then you've got people in power that don't know what they're doing trying to tell you what your job is. So that's a whole other conversation probably. So, you know, just as an example, and I'll try to keep this a really short story. So in O2000 or 1, Ford had a split where you had to have a catalytic converter on a diesel at this date for this configuration. So in the smog machine, the technician had to. Depending on what the production date was and the certain model, it was up to the deck to the technician to decide if the inspection went down path A or path B. And if they chose the wrong path, then it was a fine for the technician and it was a fine for the shop.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:36:05]:
And so the, the bar was getting, you know, about $2,000 per trans, you know, per issue. Every time that happened, it was an automatic. Like the shop paid 1500, the tech paid 550. One of our techs. But it didn't flag, right? It didn't flag in our system. It flagged in their system. So a year after we sold the shop, on my birthday, I get this nice fat envelope from the Bureau of Automotive Motive Repair saying that we had this happen and I went on the war path because they know it's a problem. The Bureau of Automotive Repair at any time can come into the smog machine and do an update on the software.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:36:52]:
And all they had to do was say this production date, this configuration go this way, this date, this configuration go that way. But they didn't because they could charge you that $2,000 fine. So you can tell now why I'm like, I don't want the government in here. But maybe we need, you know, ASCCA or some, one of the big boys that's nationwide to step in and say, okay, we've created a training program, we have a certification that, that is accepted industry wide. And this is what it is. What do you guys think? Yeah, and I'd love for somebody in the industry to do that before we have to have the government step in.
Jeff Compton [00:37:34]:
Because going back to the, to the young thing, young people thing topic, if, if it gets that bad, we're going to have even less young people picking this. Like it's not even going to.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:37:45]:
Exactly.
Jeff Compton [00:37:45]:
And you Know, Canada kind of looks back at it and goes like, all the technicians, they, they kind of know by the time they get out of high school if they want to be, be a mechanic, to use the old term, they know that there's an apprenticeship involved. They know that a tradesperson is. Whereas like you guys, you know, except for a couple of states, it's, you want to be a mechanic? Okay, just buy some tools and, and go start, go start learning.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:38:11]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:38:12]:
I, I appreciate that and I like that. And I want to think that, like, there's some that can speed up the process for some young people because they don't necessarily have to like, traditionally like what happens up here, they get stuck in a, in a loop bay and they're in a loop until three or four years is done and they've got all their certification, like their training done, and then we turn them loose in the dealership or their shop and they're flat rate and they starve and they wash it and they go pick another skilled trade.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:38:40]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:38:41]:
That's what happens. Yeah, but.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:38:42]:
And my argument. Go ahead.
Jeff Compton [00:38:45]:
And the argument for me for that is that sometimes the regulated apprenticeship system keeps them from getting the really gifted natural unicorns. It slows their trajectory down. But at the same time, I see a lot of technicians that at the end of year four, their owners are still like, I can't get him or her to get some of these repairs done because it didn't take, it didn't sink, it didn't. You know. Now who you blame on that? Do you blame them for what? The kind of work and exposure that you're giving them. Yeah, because they weren't mentored. You were using them to fill a role. But filling a role is not the same as mentoring your young people.
Jeff Compton [00:39:29]:
So go ahead. You were gonna say 100.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:39:32]:
So here's my feeling is that, you know, I don't know how it is up there, but down here it's like, if you go to do a job with your name on a shirt or your name on your shirt, there's some kind of a stigma or a judgment on that. And a. I don't personally believe that. I believe that the men and women who do those jobs are the men and women we can't afford not to have in our lives. Right. We can do without our AI, but if our plumbing's not working, then we need a guy with a name on his shirt to come and fix it. Just end of story. And.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:40:08]:
And cars are basically the same like that. We, if you take away our vehicles Most of us are stranded, confused, disoriented and completely non productive. Right. If you take my wheels away, I'm stuck. So we should be in, we should be forcing our way into career days. We should be standing in front of the advisors in high school saying this is a viable journey for young people if they have the aptitude and the desire. And we should be making this a very organized pathway to a career. And back to the toolbox, right? That means we put in front of teachers, the students, the teachers and the parents.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:41:01]:
We're going to take your child and put them into a seven year or six year process, whatever it breaks down to, we're going to provide them with a starter set of tools, the tool cart, you know, with the six or seven drawers. And by the end of year one, they will be this proficient. By the end of year two, they will be this proficient unless they're accelerated and maybe we can move them faster. But instead of being $200,000 in debt for a four year degree they're never going to use, now they have a career path where they can almost write their own ticket if we've done it properly and if they're properly supported at home.
Jeff Compton [00:41:41]:
Yeah. And that, and that's because, you know, you hear some people talk about the stigma of, of trades, but I, I haven't run into that in a long, long time. Like most people I know when I, when I run into them and they say, oh my, my husband's an electrician or my husband's a, you know, he builds homes or my husband is a plumber, there seems to be no stigma anymore about that. That there used to be. And I think that's a good thing. Now when you still say you're a mechanic, there's still a price because they're like, oh, where's they work? And then it becomes. Or where do they work? That was good English, Jeff. And then if you tell them that they work at a dealership, like you see the eyes roll one way, roll it.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:42:24]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [00:42:24]:
In store, they work in another way. And then if they say, you know, an independent shop, they go, oh, where's that? Or oh, I've heard about. And then whatever it is, is what it is. We have to make this career for the young people a lot more enticing than what it is. Because I know, right? If it hadn't been for the fact that I was raised in it, in the sense that my dad was a collision guy and I was raised around it and I knew what I was getting into when I got into it. I would have never taken it. I would have never picked it.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:42:56]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:42:56]:
You know, and it. And in a weird kind of way, it probably did pick me, but we. We don't know. And I'm not trying to say we need to make it sexy because, like, I don't want to dupe the kids into thinking that it's like, you know, you're working on hot rods and stuff. You're not. You're working on people's Priuses and people's, you know, minivans and trucks and like, in Texas you're working on a lot of trucks, you know, and that's just what you're going to be doing.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:43:21]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:43:22]:
We have to get them excited about the. The pay because that's the real thing. We have to show them. That's like, it's very, very, very. I don't want to say easy, but it's very likely that you will make six figures in this, you know, doing this. Will you top out there? No, you don't have to top out there, but we can't show them. Oh, crap. You're gonna start at a pay that is less than what Chick Fil A would pay, and then I'm gonna send you out like you said again on the tool truck.
Jeff Compton [00:43:53]:
Every week, you know, there's going to be an old guy barking at you that every time you borrow this from him, he's going to complain about that it came back with grease on it or didn't go back where it is. And until you feel like all of a sudden like I have to buy every tool that I can because it's such a obstacle to try and borrow everything. That's just another thing in the shops that we need to get our head wrapped around the culture of it and stop doing that. And that's where the providing tools thing, I think, is the best thing that I've seen take off in the last five years. Like it really considering the tax breaks that are available to some of the tech to shops, I think it's. It's a slam dunk. It's just a. It's a given that we do that, you know.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:44:29]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:44:30]:
There's so many options now. You get them set up with a harbor freight cart, you know, half inch, impact on three, eight, you know, electric ratchets, some sockets, you know, a decent torque wrench, good lights, safety glasses, hearing protection, ear hearing protection. Right. All that important stuff. You know, hammers, pliers. Teach them how to use good tools so that they don't hurt themselves so they're not breaking stuff because they had the wrong tool. I, I remember I, I took a pair of pliers from apprentice that I had a few years ago and whipped him across the shop because of the completely wrong plier for what he was doing and ended up breaking the part that he was trying to take it apart. Now I felt really bad because that was a pair of pliers his grandfather had given him.
Jeff Compton [00:45:17]:
Right. And I just heaven across the shop. But it was the wrong tool, right?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:45:23]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:45:23]:
And I was a little frustrated because he knew that it was the wrong tool, but it was all that he had. Now he was racing his money on other things. So that's where my headspace at the time was, was like, we, we don't want to be doing that. We want to be able to set them up and go, okay, go over there and get the torque wrench, get the 19, get the, you know, half inch gun, get these tires rotated. This is your torque spec. Go right. No, where do I find this? Where do I find none of that, you know.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:45:50]:
Right. And we, you know, our, our young, our young, young ones, they were all young men, worked out of my husband's toolbox, but they were also schooled on everything has a place and when you're done, you wipe it down and you put it back where you found it. Yeah, that was the, you know, they were taught to respect that, but that was like I said, you know, we were the owners. That was his toolbox. So we were giving, you know, we were, we were not expecting our, our technicians to put their investments, quote, unquote, at risk. Right. You know, and I, we, like in two weeks, we replaced two rounds of leads for our oscilloscope because, oh no, it was the timing, timing light because somebody who shall remain nameless let the, let them hang while the engine was running in into the family, sheared them, you know, and so, you know, that's, that's frustrating, but that's the brakes of racing. Right.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:46:55]:
That's, that's just life. But I think, and, and I think some people and this is, this is. I kind of hope this is going out with the boomer generation, for lack of a better term, because I think us Xers are in that middle where we're shifting, but we can't look at these young people and be like, well, I had it tough, so now you have to have it.
Jeff Compton [00:47:19]:
That's. That's crap.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:47:22]:
Yeah, it is crap. But, but you'd be amazed how many people that is their quote unquote leadership, slash management style.
Jeff Compton [00:47:30]:
Well, sure, and it comes back to, like you said at the beginning, you know, I can't believe that they want to get paid this much because, you know, when I walked out of the last place that I was an employee and I started my own, I was only making this. And they can't do what I can do. Okay, Right. They can't. They can't dial a carburetor in the way you could. But, like, let's be real. Like, they look at data and navigate OBD2 stuff way more effectively than some shop owners do. I'm just gonna say.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:48:02]:
Sure.
Jeff Compton [00:48:03]:
So what's really relevant day in and day out, what you used to do, it ain't relevant at all. You are now in the office. You're the owner. Your technical ability is great. It's yours. You can hold on to that. You can take pride in it. Good.
Jeff Compton [00:48:18]:
But frigg, like, if you walk out into the bay and you don't even know where the DLC is in the car, don't get in their way and don't disrespect them because of what you used to do. I used to, you know, run four miles a day. And I used to be 140 pounds. And I used to be. That's so freaking long ago. It doesn't matter.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:48:39]:
Right?
Jeff Compton [00:48:40]:
Young people don't. They don't. That doesn't lift them up, you know.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:48:45]:
Right. Yes. Yeah. And it doesn't. And it doesn't do anybody any good. And I would argue, too, you know, if you're an owner, maybe you should be the guy in the seat next to your team when they're going to technical training.
Jeff Compton [00:48:59]:
Oh, yeah. I. It always made me laugh. I would be like. I'd be at so many of these, you know, Napa and Carquest when they put them on years ago. And I can say that about my owner at the time. He was sitting there right there with us most of the time. But, like, you'd see all these people from all these shops and the owner wasn't there.
Jeff Compton [00:49:20]:
You're like, right, okay. Now sometimes the owner was there, and you could tell the owner was the most behind in the actual content that was being taught. And I. I can get that. Because, yeah, you're not out on the floor working on it every day. I mean, maybe you are, but you probably are not, and that's okay. But you have to have that understanding of it. The.
Jeff Compton [00:49:40]:
Just. Because it was tough for you, it was tough for me. And I could very well sit back and never start my platform and say, I Had it worse than anybody I ever do. And like hell am I going to get out here and try and make it better for them. Because God damn it, if I came up through it and survived, they can too. Look at what I'm doing every day. I'm trying to make this to where yes, you know, it's enticing and it's rewarding and it gives a better image to everybody. That's what I'm trying to do.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:50:07]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:50:08]:
You know, because it wasn't. I felt so hard done that I didn't want to see it done to somebody else.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:50:14]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:50:15]:
The answer isn't just to say, well I had it tough and go cry in the corner because it isn't going to get. But that's not right. That's crap. That's crap.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:50:24]:
So I'll ask you another question because I get this a lot from the coaching side. And I get shop owners saying, well, in the dealerships they're making 120% production. And I'm like, they're dealerships, what should we expect in the aftermarket?
Jeff Compton [00:50:45]:
So firstly, they're not making 120% on average in the dealerships anymore. I don't care. One person might be if you got 10, two might be. But I can tell you I worked a lot of years there and we weren't at 120% consistently. We had a few good months there where a lot of us might have been at 120%. But like my, my good buddy, like he was never much more than 110%. Like if it was a 40 hour week, a good week for him was 48 and, and he was like, he was ecstatic to hit that because he was doing heavy engine line all the time and he was slow at engines because he's good at engines. And for me, I was never the type where I was routinely 50 and 60.
Jeff Compton [00:51:32]:
I was like, I was 100 to 110 because I did a lot of diag. Now I'd have some like where I'd be, I'd have 20 hours sold in three days and then all of a sudden it would drop out. The back end of the week would drop out. Were people doing that intentionally now in dispatch? I think now when I think back, probably they were. And that's the other game that they play now where it's like this whole tiered system and a bonus and all that kind of stuff. There's why a lot of technicians, for the owners that don't want to necessarily trust the bonus thing, it's because we have played those games where we'll. We'll tell you that you can get one. But, man, we're going to dispatch, right? When you're looking like you're going to hit it, we're going to dispatch something that's going to kick your teeth in.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:52:16]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:52:17]:
Because we want everybody to stay about equal.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:52:20]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:52:20]:
And we don't really want to pay the bonus. We don't have to. Like, we got the work out of you.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:52:25]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:52:25]:
You know, but. And that's the rub with me too, Gina, when you say, I don't understand why you're also against flat rate. Because, like, if, if you're not making money, I'm not making money either. I think we can see now in this industry that there's a lot of owners that aren't making money or at least profit and are perfectly fine with it. Cause they haven't done a damn thing to fix that. So all of a sudden you've got a technician in the back that's going, well, my financial goal is to hit 50 a week, but I can't, because when I need that second hour of diagnosis, they didn't sell it. When I needed that extra hour to get all those broken bolts out of that manifold job, they didn't sell it.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:53:08]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:53:09]:
Well, you're sitting there and the person on front counter is going, well, listen, I want to take care of my customer. And the person in the back, the tech is going, I want to take care of that customer too.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:53:19]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:53:20]:
But you told me I could hit this, and yet this is the obstacle that I'm now running into.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:53:26]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [00:53:27]:
We. How do I say that in the right way? I don't know how to say it. We don't, we don't need the technician in the back involved in the customer's financial problem at all.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:53:43]:
Exactly. 100%. 100. And, and, and at the same. Yes, agreed. And I think there's a big, there's a big push to make one phone call and have the customer be fully informed. Right. You know as well as I do, we don't know until you've got a wrench on it exactly how that's going to go.
Jeff Compton [00:54:09]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:54:10]:
And if the first thing you find is a broken bolt or a shared lug nut, was that our fault?
Jeff Compton [00:54:16]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:54:16]:
Probably not. Right? Probably not. And so we have to embolden and train our advisors to be, you know, this is an evolving process to always put a little caveat in that with the client of, you know, this is an extensive repair and something could come up that we can't, we can't anticipate. I may have to make another phone call. We're going to do our very best to get these lug nuts off of here without breaking anything. But we can't guarantee that once we get this apart we are going to come back to you possibly with some additional repairs that might be needed. Or we pack the price at the front and say, you know, we tried taking one lug nut off, we've got five. And every single one of these that breaks is going to cost us X amount of money.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:55:06]:
So I'm packing the price up front and we might be able to save this if that doesn't happen. But we've got to embolden our advisors to do one or the other. But we can't pretend or can't put our blinders on and be like our advisors are only going to make one call and that's it. That's not real life,
Jeff Compton [00:55:29]:
that's bs. And here's the thing, we do a lot of work orders every day in this industry, especially now with this beautiful thing called the DBI where we film a bunch of things, we take a bunch of pictures and we send it off to the customer. And the customer maybe doesn't even talk to an advisor. The voice they heard was the technician on the video and they clicked on the forwarded link to them and it said, I choose this, this and this. And they go and they never maybe even talk to it. David Broman's shop, like hardly anybody is talking to the customer. He wants it very much. Like I send you the DVI results through a text, through an email, you click on what you want and you come back.
Jeff Compton [00:56:04]:
It's just like shopping. That all works for basic in and out kind of jobs. When we're tackling problems, that's where the ability to recount a person is just as important as the ability of the technician, sometimes even more. And I've been so amazed when I've gotten to meet some of these coaches, Genan how many of them you talk to them are like, oh, I have a degree in psychology too. No friggin wonder you're so good at this because you actually get it. You actually get how to deal with people, right? Like, yeah, you understand cars, but you understand psychology even more. That's the trick in this. And it's like that's how they're able to, to be empathetic but at the same time stay on the task of this business has to make money, you know, right? The Technicians are like, oh, you know, I don't want my technicians overselling.
Jeff Compton [00:57:02]:
I don't want my technicians like being so hungry. Well, what does that really look like? You know what I mean? We've heard that you and I've discussed this before. Sometimes the way they sell at month end is not the way that they sell at month start. You know, from a standpoint. And that's. How does that always then look to a customer? Doesn't look so good.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:57:31]:
Yeah. And, and I, so I'm a pro, I'm a proponent. This is, this is one of my soapboxes. So I'm going to try to keep again short and sweet. DBIs the A, they are important. B they should be strictly inspect and inform. We see an oil leak, we need to check it further. That's going to cost X amount of money.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:57:56]:
We the brakes don't look great, the rotors are cracked. We need to do a full break inspection. That's going to cost this much money. It should never be a fishing expedition until they have further authorization. The next step of that is whatever that looks like. Advisor should inform the customer of everything on that ticket on that dvi. Oh, did I, am I back? Can you hear me now?
Jeff Compton [00:58:27]:
Yeah, you're back. You're back now. Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:58:29]:
Okay. So, so the, the, the advisor at that point should then write up all their estimates. They should have them item, not itemized but prioritized. Customers concern. But we might have a safety issue that outstrips the customer's concern.
Jeff Compton [00:58:47]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:58:48]:
And they need to be able to make that judgment call. And then we have, you know, we have customer concern, safety, repairs and maintenance. That's how I think every ticket should be written up.
Jeff Compton [00:59:02]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:59:03]:
Then it should be presented to the customer from their concern down the line. And then it's. We can do all of this for you, you know, today, within the next couple days. And it's going to be this much money. And then if the customer says well I can only spend this much, what's most important then the advisor should fall back and be like okay, this safety concern, your metal to metal brakes are way more important than your air conditioned or yeah, whatever. And then make a plan. The plan is okay, so you can, you're going to get another paycheck in two weeks. Let's fix the air conditioning in two weeks and then we'll do the suspension work the next time and then after that we'll do your cooling system service.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [00:59:48]:
So we have a service plan. This is the advising part. Right. We have a plan for the next three months of your care on your vehicle. And that's an investment. Yeah, that's, you know, that's how we should as advisors. We shouldn't be like, well, if you don't do this, everybody's gonna die. We should never be selling from a fear standpoint.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:00:14]:
We should never be selling. You know, we might need another, you know, 10 hours to. To make our goal, but maybe this customer isn't the one who's gonna. That might help us get there. Maybe we should take the four hours we can get on the break job and be grateful and then hopefully something else pops in. But we can't be like fear selling to the customer to get them to spend more than they really need to or can afford or whatever that looks like.
Jeff Compton [01:00:43]:
And here's going to be. Okay, go ahead.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:00:46]:
Sorry, but we shouldn't be changing our sales process because it's the end of the month and we've been screwing around the first 40, you know, the first 25 days. Now we've got three days to make our quota. That's not fair. That's not right.
Jeff Compton [01:01:00]:
Here's the other thing. Service advisors are listening. Uncle Jeff's gonna give you this little tidbit, too, that drives them crazy when you guys do it. But if the customer comes in with three complaints and you find three complaints plus something else, and it exceeds the customer's idea of what the budget was, we don't then start looking for overlap so we can shave the labor. We don't start bolting on like crappier parts to keep it in the window of what they said they can afford. You do not do that. Ever. That is setting himself up for rework and pissed off technicians.
Jeff Compton [01:01:35]:
You work with them. Just like Gene Ann explained. This is the priority now. Okay, so you had a $2,000 budget and you had a failed AC complicity complaint and a brake job. And once in a while, when you hit a bump, you heard something. Well, guess what you need struts, brakes, tires, air conditioning. It doesn't mean that we try to get it all down to $2,000 so we can sell everything and satisfy the customer. That's bs.
Jeff Compton [01:02:00]:
Stop thinking like that.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:02:01]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [01:02:02]:
We have to look at what is the right way to do this. We got to keep the car safe first. We don't put on the cheapest parts that we can to make it safe for a little while. Because she didn't say she was only keeping this thing for three more months. She intends to drive this thing for two more years. Why are all of A sudden we putting on crap parts to be able to get this work order soldier. That's the. Stop doing that.
Jeff Compton [01:02:23]:
It doesn't make any fricking sense. You're going to rework it later, don't do it.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:02:27]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:02:28]:
If you haven't got an advisor that can break this shit down and said this is how we do this. You don't have an advisor that you should be having on the front counter. Get them to drive the shuttle van, get them to make coffee, get them to do your social media, but don't have them talking to your customer about how to advocate for the car because they have no flipping idea how to advocate for the car. The one of the best coaching advice I ever got was advocate for the car. And most of the time it'll take care of itself for the customer standpoint. That's why there's a lot of technicians walking around that we know what the best thing to do is. And you're going to say, no, it's not. It's going to whatever makes you the most money.
Jeff Compton [01:03:08]:
No, no it's not. It's what's truly going to be the best for the car. Because that's what we know is cars. You guys screw it all up. When you go out there and you get all involved and their feels and their financials and say that we can't achieve this or we can't achieve that because of a budget, it to the tech at the back, it don't matter. The right repair is just whatever it is. Stop getting in way now. You got me worked up.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:03:33]:
No, no, you're. No, you're. You and I are on the same page. Because my personal feeling is that if we do our job correctly, the byproduct is sales. And the sales will be good if we give the customer a consistent experience, if we've built trust with them, if they know that when we tell them they need something, by gosh, they need it, then the rest of it takes care of itself. If we've got good margin on our parts, if our labor rate is correct and we know how to sell the labor, how to price the labor, then this sales side will take care of itself. The profit margins, all that takes care of itself. And so we, we're not in the selling business, we're in the taking care of cars and people business.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:04:24]:
And you know, my big pet peeve is, you know, what's your DVI policy? Well, we do a DVI if we haven't seen the car in 5,000 miles or 30 or 90 days, okay, well, when do light bulbs go out?
Jeff Compton [01:04:42]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:04:43]:
When do leaks start? When does a tire go down? So, you know, my policy is, and I'm a hard ass about this. There's very few things I'm a hard ass about. This is where my rubber hits the road. We should have a long form DVI for every time we lift the vehicle. We should have a short form DVI for when the car comes in and we're not lifting the vehicle. And it should be lights, wipers, tires, and, you know, dashboard.
Jeff Compton [01:05:15]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:05:15]:
Horn. Yeah. That kind of stuff. So that it takes. Those are the things the tech should be looking at anyway, to make sure it's safe to operate. And the DVI is just broken down to 10 items instead of 30. Yeah, but. But the minute, you know, we.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:05:35]:
And that creates a consistent customer experience. But one minute you're telling the customer, oh, we do this DVI to help you know where your car is at. But we only do it when it's convenient for us or when we want to sell you $2,000.
Jeff Compton [01:05:47]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:05:48]:
But, you know, between the last time we saw Mr. And Mrs. Customer last week and now when they're back for breaks, all of a sudden their coolant slow and the water pump blew. And now we've got. Now we've got something even more important than the brakes, because we're going to blow an engine over the car's not stopping.
Jeff Compton [01:06:04]:
Yeah. And why. Yeah, why didn't we tell them last week that we made a note of the coolant level? Right. And now we say, here's the thing. If they're in for a coolant, like if they're in for an oil change and I top off coolant, because cars right now, they. They're going through coolant. And so if I top off the coolant, I make a note that I topped off the coolant. Now if the next time I come in, there's a note saying I had to top it off again, I'm going to make the note with the.
Jeff Compton [01:06:33]:
Requires further diag. Right. That's just the right way to do this. If we had it in and the customer was just like, just check my brakes out. And nobody lifts the hood, checks the engine oil. They've heard my rant about, like when. When I get in and it's flashing me, telling me the service is due. The oil chain sticker is like, so faded.
Jeff Compton [01:06:54]:
It's go. My. My service advisor didn't even pick up on that. I'm pulling my hair out. I'm already losing my crap. But if I still get in and only road test that and I don't even look at the fluids under the hood. I'm setting myself up for a really. I'm not advocating for my customer.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:07:07]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [01:07:08]:
So when we sit there and we go back to this idea like you asked me about the dealers are 120 effective or 20 producing. It's because some of the best DBIs I've ever seen still come from the dealership guys. My multi point was awesome because why I was incentivized to find everything I could on that car. When we do a DBI now and we're not converting that to sold work or we just had it in last week and then they say, I understand that they're only here now for a light bulb and wipers, but go ahead and rack that thing again. Check the brakes, check the tread depths like you're now wasting people's time. Yeah, yes, I see that there's. We have to be flexible. I worked at the first place I ever worked at with a DVI like he.
Jeff Compton [01:07:53]:
It would change from week to week and it, and it didn't matter if I saw the car last month, they wanted another one done again. And I'm like, they're just here for the work that we sold them last month. This is how long it took to get the like and the brakes were shot last month. And they're not here for brakes because they can't afford it. They're here for tires. You really want me to check the bricks again?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:08:15]:
Right?
Jeff Compton [01:08:16]:
Like I'll do it but it just sounds like to me dumb mechanic like a waste of flipping time.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:08:21]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [01:08:23]:
This is. Oh man. Everything to me is like. Everything to me is like. It's the service advisors that really, really, really, really need this to bring their game up in this industry right now. Agree, you know?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:08:38]:
Yeah, no, I, I agree with you and worldpac. You know, worldpac Training institute. While we're here, I'll just go ahead and do my, my World Pack spiel. Worldpac is the kind sponsor of Shop Talk Her Way and they are an excellent partner in the space of bringing good quality parts delivery, those kinds of things to our industry. We're also sponsored by the World Pack Training Institute which offers training for your advisors, for you as an owner and for your technician. It's one of the great things I love about it is there is every week on Wednesdays there's an owner's class that is free. It's one hour. You get in, do your hour and get out.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:09:19]:
There's two options Two times every Wednesday to take that class. And then there's everything up to, you know, stuff that you pay for, for technical training and that kind of thing in a, you know, in an area near you. But they offer that kind of training and you just sign up for it. Some of it is free, some of it costs you money, but it's very clearly marked what you need, what you're going to cost and how much time it's going to take. But hey, it's great training and I encourage everybody to take advantage of that and I thank them deeply for being my sponsor because it allows us to have these conversations. So thank you to Worldpac and Worldpac Training Institute.
Jeff Compton [01:09:56]:
100%.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:09:59]:
But the, the, this advisor training thing, the, the gentleman that I work with out at wti, he said the advisor position is the least trained position in the shop.
Jeff Compton [01:10:13]:
Yep.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:10:14]:
And that breaks my heart like because the, the pinch point is the advisor. Right. They're there, they're getting it from the tech side, they're getting it from the customer side and they're getting it from the ownership side that they're the, they're the pain point. Right. And I think sometimes as owners we're expecting our advisors to be some kind of magical wizards who know how to identify their, their customers buying style, how to understand that this technician has this level of technical, technical skill. And this is how we dispatch and we. The fallacy that I lived under as an owner was that if you got an experienced advisor that you just plugged them into your system like a socket and they should just know exactly how to do their job.
Jeff Compton [01:11:06]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:11:07]:
And I'm going to tell you, I bet it takes at least six months to a year to get an advisor trained to give the level of service that you want to do it your way to know your customers because they're only going to see your customers once to twice a year on average. And to get to know Mr. Mrs. Jones has a dog named Scooter and yada yada, yada. Right. Or their kids are in soccer and their daughter's a violinist and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. We're asking so much of this position but we're not supporting them. It's the old that we're expected to do so much with so little but by now we have no idea what we're doing and we're just like floundering along and, and I think too, and this is one of my beefs is as coaches, a lot of coaches are telling owners you need to be as hands off as possible you need to be like, big picture.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:12:05]:
No, sir. You need to be sitting in that office listening to their calls, listening to them sell, helping them transition into your way of doing things. You cannot throw them into a counter and be like, go fly, little bird. Like, no. Just no.
Jeff Compton [01:12:27]:
And I'll tell you this, where I have seen the advisors have a lot easier transition time is when we have a foreman role or we have a working owner role in the shop who might be the foreman who takes a lot of the dispatch problem off of it. Because here's reality. It can take you a long time as an advisor. If you're the single advisor up front and you dispatch the work and you kind of decide who's going to do next, it might take you a long time to figure out that Jeff is not the guy you want to give air conditioning jobs to, or Jeff's not the kind of guy you want to give air, you know, exhaust repair to. Like, he'll get both done, but it is going to take way longer than the other guy over there. Meanwhile, the other guy over there is like, trying to figure out why that car is misfiring and Jeff can hear it across the bay and know exactly what's wrong.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:13:11]:
Right?
Jeff Compton [01:13:12]:
Like, that's where it comes down to. The foreman can alleviate so much of that stress on the advisor. If you have a dedicated one. If you don't have a dedicated one and you're the owner in the shop or the owner of the shop and you're trying to get out of the shop, you might better hire your next technician with the idea that they are going to be somewhat of a foreman role and not just a maximum production machine that I can put in to make all the numbers work.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:13:41]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [01:13:41]:
Because it goes back to. Do you want to mentor the next generation coming in? Oh, yeah, for sure. Yes. In this industry, we say it all. Yes. I want to build this next industry. I want to get, you know, these young people involved. Horseshit.
Jeff Compton [01:13:53]:
Most of you don't. You want to build this to a certain level of numbers where it looks good and then you want to sell it. And I completely understand. But here's the big problem right now. We don't have the talent in the base, and it's because we have failed to cultivate that talent. So what's that going to take? What's. Jeff always says everything's going to take money, right? We have to charge more, pay more, slow down, spend more time talking to the customer, working with the car, getting the job done. Right.
Jeff Compton [01:14:25]:
That's what we have to slow down and do that all takes more money.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:14:29]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [01:14:30]:
So you're not necessarily going to hit your, I don't know what the metric could be. It doesn't really matter. KPIs, let's just use a buzzword. You, they're important, but you need to realize that, like the number one thing right now is to see the steady growth of a technician's ability if you're going to have growth within your business.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:14:49]:
Right, right. Well, and, and we need to adjust. I think we need to adjust KPIs also. So I was very flattered that I got to teach a WTI class two weeks ago and it was about loaded labor cost. And even my seasoned coaching clients, a lot of them don't know what their loaded labor cost is.
Jeff Compton [01:15:13]:
That's crazy.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:15:15]:
And, and how do you, so, you know, how do you even figure that out? And, and you're throwing, you know, all these, the Alphabet soup of payroll and yada yada, all those things plus training, plus uniforms, plus benefits. And it's a lot of nitpicky work. I'm the key. I'm the queen of nitpicky bookkeeping. So for me it's like, oh, this is a puzzle. Let's fix this. But if you think that your, your tech costs you $20, but your loaded cost is 25%, then your tech actually cost you 25%. 20$25 an hour.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:15:52]:
And if you're expecting a certain gross profit margin without figuring that in your numbers are bogus and you're never going to hit your KPIs because you don't know what they are. Then from your loaded tech cost, how much do you need Jeff to produce at his labor rate plus his benefits to get profit, not to break even. We're not talking, we're never going to talk about breaking even the profit level that you want. Then from there, what do we need in hourly rate to make that work? That's what we should be basing our shop rate on. That. And because if we service our labor costs, we're probably servicing our fixed costs, assuming we don't have a bunch of crazy stuff going on in fixed costs.
Jeff Compton [01:16:40]:
Yeah. Like if you have a couple warranty jobs in a month to do, that can really mug your numbers up really quick. Right. And that stuff's going to happen. That's where it's important. That again, right off the top, we're charging enough that we can offer a warranty. That's when we're, we're using the part suppliers that can Help us out and kick some money back. If it's like, yeah, we did this, we did this, we did this oil cooler, and you know it's leaking, no problem.
Jeff Compton [01:17:06]:
I'll send another one over. Right over. You send the paperwork over, I'll give you a labor claim. Cool. When we don't do that because we're trying to be cheaper or we're trying to be fair. I hate that word, fair.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:17:20]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [01:17:20]:
We have now not been able to extend the customer the level of service that they deserve and be expect. And they're not going to. They're not going to care if you say, listen, I was trying to be cheap and that's why I couldn't help you with this labor. They don't effing care because they'll always roll over and say, if I'd have known you weren't going to stand behind this, I'd have paid more. Boldface lie. But it's still. It's going to bite you in the butt. You have to accept that some customers are.
Jeff Compton [01:17:49]:
You're going to be too expensive for. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:17:52]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [01:17:53]:
You know, the balancing act is getting enough customers in that value you that pay you that you can take care of your team. We, when we don't do that, we're just, we're shooting ourselves in the foot. I want to ask you real quick, and this is getting long, but real quick. Let's try to keep it shorter. Maybe this will be a part two. How do we get young people to come in as advisors? Jeanne, how do we do that? Like, do we go and hire the best waitress we've ever had at the restaurant? Or
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:18:24]:
here's my. Here, I think, is my secret super sauce for hiring across the board for automotive. Okay, we'll see how this lands. And I welcome everybody's feedback. I think we go after farm kids. I think we go after the kids who have been in 4H and FFA because they know all of those roles. In every one of them, they have to present something about their project. They've had to keep records.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:18:54]:
They've had to get up early in the morning and feed their cows before they go to work, to school in the morning. Then they have to go home and exercise them, groom them, do all the things. These things take dedication, time and effort. And at the end, there's a payoff, Right? And at the end, there's also a presentation that says, my, my cow Josie. I spent this much money on her feed and on supplies, and I Took her to the fair and we got this much money per pound for her. And now this is, was my profit. They understand this, this thing. They've had this conversation.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:19:35]:
They've had to talk to people. Chances are too, they might have been exposed to welding, ag mechanics. They've, you know, they've been around things that need to be fixed if they're broken. So they're already kind of mechanically inclined. And sadly, the only industry probably worse for opportunity than automotive is ag, because the small family farms are falling apart. Not falling apart, but they're being eaten up by larger conglomerates. And unless you have a family farm, there's probably no, there's probably no move into agriculture unless you go to work for Monsanto adm. Yada, yada, blah, blah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:20:19]:
So if we can capture these kids, capture. If we can bring these kids in, they know how to talk to people. They understand mechanics to some level. Depending on their skill set. Either they go to the base or they go to the office, and then we start to train them.
Jeff Compton [01:20:37]:
That's very cool.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:20:38]:
And so I think, you know, yes, the waitress idea, the bartender, the person who's awesome at your local, you know, parts supplier, but they have to have this natural curiosity. They have to have the ability to speak with people. They have to have this motivation to see a job from beginning to end and, and understand that process. They can't quit in the middle, right? They can't get halfway through their steer project and be like, oops, I'm done. Yeah, you can't do that. So my, my thinking is the untapped resource is these kids. And there's ag programs in high schools, there's ag programs in junior colleges, there's ag programs in college, college. And I mean, I'm one of those kids.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:21:35]:
My degree is in agricultural business, right? And I just, we, I always had accounting, I always had, you know, project. This project that. My biggest challenge was they taught us how to work, to break even instead of to profit. And that was the, that was the, that I needed. The next gear that I needed was to profit. So I think we've got to find places, you know, kids who are in, in high school, in like debate, if they still have such a thing, you know, and give them a career path. Like I said, get, get to know your local 4H club, get to know your local FFA, get to know your local ag teacher, whatever level that's at, whether it's high school, junior college, or college, you know, get in there and get to know those people and make them part of your network and be like, hey, I need X, Y and Z. These are the things I'm looking for.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:22:28]:
Send me those kids.
Jeff Compton [01:22:30]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:22:30]:
And I'm sorry, some of them are young adults, but to me, they're kids. Right. And then we raise them in our culture because. And we have an intentional culture of growth and education to bring them in and let them grow within our business and within our culture. That, to me, I think, is one of the big keys. But we've got to get ourselves into, you know, the local career days. We've got to actually go out and make those connections because they're not going to come to us because we're not in ag.
Jeff Compton [01:23:04]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:23:06]:
But, you know, maybe you find a start. Believe me, I tried everything from the Advisor with over 10 years of experience, the advisor with 5 years of experience, the customer service rep with 0 years of experience. My expectations were wrong. I'm going to tell you I was wrong. Capital W wrong. And I'm not going to say that was my coach's fault, but I'm going to say my coach presented expectations that were not realistic. And that's why I try to be much more realistic. It's going to take a year for anybody that you put in that position to hear your words coming out of their mouth for them to know in any situation.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:23:50]:
Because we can give them all the rules that we want, but the rules last. It's like a battle plan. Right. The minute the first shot is fired, the battle plans out the window and everybody's improvising. So we have to get them thinking like us or out of their ego to stop and say, I'm over my head, Please give me a minute. Let me talk to my advisor, shop foreman, whoever I need to talk to so I don't. Pardon my language, screw the pooch and tell the customer the absolutely wrong thing. Cost the shop money, cost the tech money, whatever that looks like.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:24:22]:
And so we all. That's another thing we need to foam in in the shop is everybody leaves their egos at the door. It's not about ego, it's about service. If you want to know your why, our why is service, and that's why we're here. If you can't get into a service mindset, then I'm sorry, you need to get out of my shop. Sorry. And that sometimes means, you know, you're going to take one for the team. Hopefully, as an owner, I'm going to step in and be like, that wasn't your fault.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:24:51]:
Put down your hours. You're going to get paid for that well. And none of my team would be on flat rate. They're always going to be hourly and they're going to get taken care of. So, long story short, we're going to have to raise them and we're going to have to go out and find just the right person. And if they turn out to not be the right person, we need to say thank you very much for your time. Hopefully you've learned something. This isn't, it's not you, it's me, whatever it is.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:25:16]:
Or maybe it is you, and you just need to get out. We can't be afraid to cut our losses. I think a lot of owners hold on to people too long when they're a bad fit.
Jeff Compton [01:25:27]:
Yep.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:25:27]:
For fear of saying, I made a mistake or even if they suck, even if they're not a good fit, we've kept them because we're afraid of what might be out there. We can't be afraid to cut somebody loose because we made a bad decision. We have to own that. And I think if we as owners own our bad decisions and tell the team, look, you know, this one's on me. I'm sorry. We're gonna keep looking for another team member. And, and. But that in that gives your team a moment to be like, okay, our boss isn't fallible or is fallible.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:26:04]:
That means I can be fallible, too. Hey, boss, I screwed up, right?
Jeff Compton [01:26:10]:
Yeah.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:26:10]:
I broke a lug nut. I broke a frozen bolt. I was putting the air filter in and I stripped it. Whatever. You're creating this culture where it's okay to make mistakes. We have to be careful about them, and we have to try not to. But you're not going to get, you know, your ass in a jam because you made a mistake. Now if we start to make mistake after mistake after mistake, different story.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:26:38]:
But, you know, the honest mistakes as we have to kind of suck it up as owners and be like, okay, then let's move on from this. How do we fix it? How do we keep it from happening again and make them part of the solution?
Jeff Compton [01:26:50]:
And that's the honest mistakes thing is, like, if they keep making repeated mistakes, I can tell you that I have seen technicians that made a lot of repeated mistakes. And then when I catch up with them years later, they don't work with me somewhere, they're killing it somewhere else. And what that often comes down to is the pace of what they, you know, where they wound up was a much better fit for them. They weren't at a level where they could get 12 oil changes done in a day. You know what I mean?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:27:18]:
Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:27:18]:
And, and everybody's like, well, they're, they don't have it. No, they got it. And they got it. And not only they got it, like, I can, I can teach more to them. But frig, like if they're not, if we've got such a ridiculous, ridiculous expectation of what they should do, it's probably not real anymore. Like, it's like the idea that like, well, we used to get 10 oil changes done a day. That's fine. And then what did we do? We added this multi point inspection with it with cameras and it took a lot longer.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:27:52]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [01:27:52]:
Well, they're not getting 10 done anymore. No freaking crap. They're not getting done anymore. We changed the whole game here. Right, but see, we don't, we don't shiv it and we don't shift and pivot enough in this industry to realize, let's talk real turkey about what time actually takes. And that goes back to my thing. This isn't about time. This is about performing a repair, performing a service.
Jeff Compton [01:28:14]:
And it should. I have a window of time. Yes, it should. But the reality is this stuff is not. It has to be fluid, it has to be concrete. It's just like you said, you can go in there and the air filter box screws don't come out. What do you want your tech to do? Write down that he checked it even though he didn't.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:28:31]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [01:28:32]:
Do you want your, your tech to come to you and say, hey, what do I do with this now? And then if you say we don't have time, don't bother checking it, Everybody's on board with that.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:28:43]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [01:28:43]:
But if he's coming to you or she's coming to you and saying, we've run into this obstacle, I always want them to be. Feel like I'm approachable.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:28:53]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [01:28:53]:
We don't have that a lot in this industry because we have people going, oh my freaking God, like, if I don't get this car done, we're going to be two cars behind tomorrow and then three cars after that. And like she's driving around in a loaner, dude, I'm just trying to get the air filter apart.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:29:09]:
Right. Yeah. And that's, you know, and that's back to my theory on the dvi. It should be inspect and inform. So if the minute your tech gets a hold of an air filter and let's face it, they have made air filter containment systems like, ludicrous, like, why does it take more than Two screws to take apart an air filter housing. That's ludicrous. So the minute it's stripped, they stop and write down screw is stripped, cannot inspect, needs further inspection, go on to the next thing. They should not be trying to fix it in that moment.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:29:45]:
That is a charge. That is something we should charge for now. Was it because we were the last one who touched it? I don't know. So you know in a way that's out of our control. If the last time we looked at it, it was good and now it's not. We don't know what happened while it was out of our custody.
Jeff Compton [01:30:07]:
We shouldn't assume blame because there's a lot of things that we still write up every day in these DVIs. And the customer goes home and she gets her dad, boyfriend, brother, whatever, to go and put the air filter in. Because there's no way they're gonna pay you $50 to put another filter in. I'm going down to AutoZone. It's $14. I'll put it in for you. He may cross thread every freaking screw. He may forget to plug the mass airflow in.
Jeff Compton [01:30:30]:
Here's the thing. If he forgets to plug the mass airflow in, a little Susie Q brings it in tomorrow and there's a check engine light on. Don't assume blame that your guy left it off.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:30:39]:
Right?
Jeff Compton [01:30:40]:
Ask how did that happen? Oh, right. My. Wait a minute. Dad, change your photo. Guess what? Susie Q is not owed a free diag and reflash and plug in and all that. She's not owed that.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:30:52]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [01:30:53]:
You don't assume that responsibility. You don't assume that guilt. You're not responsible. If you want to do it as part of your marketing, sure, whatever. But I look at what you're actually rewarding. There is my point on that whole thing.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:31:05]:
Yes. Yeah. And I would argue too, this is another thing that, that this might be a discussion. A whole different discussion is we need to start selling our. I'm going to use the air quotes so everybody who can't see me, I'm making the big bunny ears air quotes. An oil change is no longer an oil change. It is a 5,000 mile service. We should be changing the oil, we should be rotating the tires, we should be doing a dbi and it should take probably close to an hour of our time.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:31:37]:
And we should not be doing that for $59.99.
Jeff Compton [01:31:40]:
No, no.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:31:42]:
And I will die on that hill. Yeah, I, I mean I, I take my truck to the dealer because it has a, a lifetime Engine warranty. And so it's just easier for me. I take it to them. I have a, a diesel with a Cummings engine in it.
Jeff Compton [01:32:00]:
Okay, cool.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:32:01]:
They do my oil change and my tire rotation for $150
Jeff Compton [01:32:08]:
on a Cummins. That's awesome.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:32:10]:
And I'm like, thank you. You're crazy. Right? Thank you. You're crazy. But my GMC that I had, my 17 GMC that took six quarts of dexos oil was also going into the dealer for an oil change in a tire rotation and it was $150. So why in the aftermarket are we still living in 1995 of an oil change? Should be 60 bucks.
Jeff Compton [01:32:37]:
Because we have a whole class of advisors that don't want to have the conversation with the customer that it's going to cost this much. So we immediately then go, it's too hard. I'm not doing it because it's going to be too hard. I don't want to put. My service advisors are already under so much stress, I don't want to have them put through too get over that idea. That's nonsense. The reality is we're getting an oil change on Cummins and on a 5.3 LS for the same price. That's ridiculous.
Jeff Compton [01:33:07]:
It's stupid. But why is it? It's because you have advisors that go, this is just too much to remember. I have to then know what it is. And I quoted him on the phone, 150. But I didn't know when he rolled in here it was a power stroke with all this special oil diesel fuel filters. I didn't know. And, and now what are we doing? Right?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:33:27]:
And so the last shop I worked
Jeff Compton [01:33:31]:
at, we did, I don't know how many Audi oil changes for like where we lost on. Because when they called up and said how much to do an oil change? And we said it runs the gamut from, you know, 85 to 145. Well, Frigate was such a new Audi that we couldn't even buy the oil for under 100. So guess what? We lost money doing it. Guess why the guy's here. Because he didn't want to pay 145 at the Audi dealer. And he was hoping we were gonna, he's gonna catch us and do it for 99.95. Do you want that flipping customer? No, you don't?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:34:04]:
No. And, and the other, the other part of it too is we have these lube, you know, these fast lube places who have trained people how to drain the oil and refill it and how to sell fluid services based on mileage. And they're, they're owned by Valvoline, so they get, I'm assuming, stupid inexpensive oil, stupid inexpensive filters and, and low skill labor. And if we can get our advisors thinking our, our 5,000 mile service is the most important thing that we do because from that we catch fluid leaks, breaks, struts, shocks, and, and we get these customers, we exit schedule our customers just like Dennis do for teeth cleaning. Right? Because guess what they do. They catch you with a cavity. They catch you needing a root canal. They catch you doing the this and the that so that they can sell you more services and they're doing you a service.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:35:05]:
We're in the, we're not in the healthcare industry, we're in the auto healthcare industry. And our basic service, our, you know, 5,000 mile services is your annual biannual checkout. And we need to spend a little more time and a little more effort and it's going to cost you a little more so that you know exactly where your car is as you drive it to work every day. Put your college kid in it and go 500 miles away, whatever that looks like. But you're right. We're not training our advisors to overcome these objections. Well, why can't, why does so and so say, well, they can change my oil for 59.95 because they're going to get you in there and they're going to get it up on the lift. They're going to say, oh, you need a cabinet filter and an engineer filter and you need to this and you need a that.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:35:50]:
And they're hoping you're going to buy it.
Jeff Compton [01:35:53]:
Yeah, well, and they want you to because that's the whole reason that it's for sale.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:35:56]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [01:35:57]:
That place is because I can't, I can't make enough money to sustain it on just the oil change. The cabin air filter thing for me, like that's such a. I hate them.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:36:08]:
Yes.
Jeff Compton [01:36:09]:
Because like I, I'll tell you right now, I'm big and I don't crawl into the dash every damn time to check it. I turn on the vent and if it like. And if the one under the hood is dirty. Yeah, the one in the car is going to be dirty 100. But if the one under the hood is clean and I just checked it three months ago, I'm not crawling under the dash and pulling it again. There's no reason to. Everybody I talk to that goes to these quick lube places. They're so tired of getting a New cabin and air filter.
Jeff Compton [01:36:36]:
Cabin air filter and engine. Air filter. Every time they go in and they start to me, is it really go through the filter that often? No, it doesn't. Why do they keep selling? Well, what do you pay for the oil change? 79.95. I said they're losing money on just the oil change. They have to sell you the air filters and they go, what? Yeah, listen to what I'm saying here. Well, why do they do that? I don't know why they do it. I guess it's because they know if I'm charging a hundred bucks, because I need to charge a hundred bucks and I charge you.
Jeff Compton [01:37:02]:
They charge you 79, but they sell you $50 worth of air filters every time. That's the other thing. You have no flipping clue how cheap an air filter actually is. So you get one for $50. You go, air filters are 50 bucks. No, they're not. They're $15. Well, how come they're $50 there? Because the air, the oil change is only $60, right?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:37:24]:
Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:37:25]:
They're going to get it somewhere. I, yeah, I just. So.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:37:35]:
Well, I don't, I don't know how many conversations. Jeff, we're going to need to fix all these problems, but I look forward to them with you, so thank you. I, I really appreciate all your time today. You've been amazing and I, I value your input and your perspective so much. Thank you for being out there being a voice for the text. I know you're jaded, but I know you do have a heart of gold and I appreciate that about you. So, you know, before we close, what's your, like, what's your words of wisdom for today from the jaded mechanic?
Jeff Compton [01:38:11]:
Well, as jaded as I am and as jaded as a lot of mechanics that I've met that have gotten out of the industry, they've been in it 30 years. Like myself. When I talk to a career service writer, by the time they've got 30 in, they're like as angry and as, and as, like, as, as. They probably got like a two pack a habit, you know, two pack a day habit. They probably like bend the elbow a lot and they like, they might have been through two marriages by now. Like it is a, it's even tougher than the mechanic job in some ways in the way that they, like you said, they've got three people yelling on them all the time. So, you know, when I come on to them all the time about the advisors being the weak link right here and I think honestly for 20, 26, it's going to become my buzzword because I really believe that it is. And I could be just responding to the fact that, like, everybody's always saying the technicians are the problem.
Jeff Compton [01:39:04]:
And I would argue that in most shops right now, the service writer, be it your wife or your daughter or your son, is a bigger problem than maybe even we want to address in this industry at the moment. And it's not just a nepotism thing. I think it's just because we sometimes know that we have put so much pressure on them and that we don't pay them well. We let them get by with just mediocre performance. And the reality is we never tolerate mediocre performance from technicians for very long. But I have seen mediocre advisors make a career out of being mediocre. So let's all, like the Jada mechanic says, just try to be like 1% better tomorrow. That goes for the advisors that are listening to this too.
Jeff Compton [01:39:45]:
And there's going to be. You get way more advisors listen to you than they listen to me. Like, I get all the technicians that hate advisors, but you get all the advisors that probably, like, you know, aren't fond of mechanics and think we're all dumb. So, I mean, together you and I can really kind of get some of the communication happening and the perspectives can be shown. And I think that's the whole key thing because I'm not doing anything special, right? I'm just out here sharing my. My experiences. I lived all of this, but I'm also sharing the questions, which is what you bring. Well, what if we didn't do it that way? What if we had never done it that way? What would it look like? And everybody that says it's always been that flipping way and it always will be, it's always, listen, it was hard for me coming up like we talked about earlier.
Jeff Compton [01:40:36]:
It's going to be hard for you. Nah, man, that's. That's crap. That's why we're where we are. That's why we have nobody that wants this, right? So everybody go sign up for training. Sign up with, you know, Genan's company. Sign up with anybody you want. If you can't afford training, get on the flipping Internet and learn how to be a better technician.
Jeff Compton [01:40:58]:
See all the stuff that's out there on YouTube now from all the coaches that are sharing with you all this great stuff and start paying flipping attention to it. And if you don't and somebody comes in tomorrow and bites your head off, a technician says to you. You should know this by now. Instead of getting all offended, give it some thought to maybe you should know some a little bit more by now. And that means, again, we have to put that extra effort in every day to try and make tomorrow better. We're not trying to make next year better. I'm trying to make tomorrow better. I don't even want to think about next year.
Jeff Compton [01:41:34]:
I want to think about tomorrow for everybody else. And then before you know it, we're not having these same conversations about, like, my tech wasn't able to do this or my advisor failed to do that. We're just having these conversations where it's like, man, I've had so many people try to apply and get a job here that, like, I have a stack of resumes. That's the end goal people, right?
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:41:56]:
100%.
Jeff Compton [01:41:57]:
Janelle, thank you.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:41:59]:
Oh, thank you so thank you again. Like, I enjoy our conversations tremendously, but I also appreciate all the wisdom that you're sharing. You're not that guy saying, I had it tough, now you have it tough. And that's the end of the story. And that's what I try to do for advisors, owners, even technicians. Right? Like, I've, I've. If I, if I wasn't one, I've loved one. So, you know, you're all close to my heart.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:42:22]:
So like Jeff said, I am a coach. This is what I do. If you need help as an owner, if you need help as an advisor, if you need anything, I'm always here to do a discovery call, do a strategy call, see if I'm the fit for you or the company that I work for. Auto fix, auto shop coaching. We're a small company, but we pride ourselves on niching into what our tech, what our shops need. Do you need help with leadership? Do you need help with profitability? What do you need? And let's focus on getting that fixed for you. We, we pride ourselves on niching into what you need need. So please don't ever hesitate to reach out.
JeanAnn SaintGrace [01:43:01]:
The link to my personal, my business email and the the company are in the show notes. Please don't hesitate to reach out. We're always here to talk to you and let you know how we can help. So I am Jean Ann. This is shop talk her way and I am here to help you get your shop your way. Please, like subscribe, share the share wherever you feel this will be beneficial to someone and always, please give me your feedback. It helps me make me better and the show better and that ultimately helps get the industry be better. So thank you from Jeff and I for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.
Jeff Compton [01:43:38]:
Thank you, everybody.