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Confessions of a Shop Owner is hosted by Mike Allen, a third-generation shop owner, perpetual pot-stirrer, and brutally honest opinion sharer. In this weekly podcast, Mike shares his missteps so you don’t have to repeat them. Along the way, he chats with other industry personalities who’ve messed up, too, pulling back the curtain on the realities of running an independent auto repair shop. But this podcast isn’t just about Mike’s journey. It’s about confronting the divisive and questionable tactics many shop owners and managers use. Mike is here to stir the pot and address the painful truths while offering a way forward. Together, we’ll tackle the frustrations, shake things up, and help create a better future for the auto repair industry.
Sunil Patel [00:00:00]:
He takes it on a spin and he starts noticing smoke coming from the engine bay, thinking maybe it's like some spilled oil, maybe. Ultimately, the entire car gets engulfed in flames. It is completely torched down to a crisp. And ultimately the arson investigators came out and looked at it and they said that there was a leak in the fuel line that caused this to happen across the engine.
Mike Allen [00:00:23]:
The following program features a bunch of doofuses talking about the automotive aftermarket. The stuff we or our guests may say do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of our peers, our sponsors, or any other associations we may have. There may be some spicy language in this show, so if you get your feelings hurt easily, you should probably just move along. So without further ado, it's time for Confessions of a Shop Owner with your host, Mike Allen.
Sunil Patel [00:00:57]:
Okay, super.
Mike Allen [00:00:59]:
Well, hey, everybody, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Thanks for joining us for another episode. I'm excited today to be recording with somebody that a lot of you already know, Sunil from techmetric, Founder, CEO, Chief, Thinker. I don't know what titles you want to have, but Sunil, thanks for coming on, man. I really appreciate it.
Sunil Patel [00:01:18]:
Mike, it's a pleasure for joining you again. Thank you for having me again.
Mike Allen [00:01:21]:
Absolutely. So we are recording this on the week of Asta Expo just before the Expo starts. So this is the last thing that I'm doing before my whole week is Expo focused. And we're going to release it immediately after the Expo and you guys are releasing a new product at the Expo. So that's kind of what we're here to talk about today. And Sunil, I'd love for you just to kind of give me the rundown of techmetric Marketing. Tell me all about it.
Sunil Patel [00:01:53]:
So many of you guys know that we acquired a company called Shop Genie late last year, around October. And the intent of us building techmetric Marketing Solution was always to provide a stepping stone for the very company that we acquired into techmetric. While techmetric Marketing Solution is a new marketing product, it is not what Shop Genie is. Right. I want to be very clear about that. We acquired Shop Genie as a competitive takeout. They had some phenomenal metrics in the company with rooftop growth, and we just wanted to be able to acquire that user base and continue selling into that user base until we were ready to build our own marketing product. So over the course of this last year, we have built our own marketing solution within TechMetric.
Sunil Patel [00:02:37]:
And it is a unified marketing solution within TechMetric. And one of the big drivers for me was if you look at all of the marketing products out there, many of them require you to practically get a marketing degree to run the product. And for me it was always using one of our core principles and leadership principles is basically using first principles. And when you think about marketing ultimately like what is the need of a marketing product within a repair shop? And ultimately like the core should be bringing new customers or existing customers back into the repair shop. So if we use that as the kind of like the framework of what we're building, ultimately I wanted to make it as simple as possible with just an on off switch with no settings at all. Like you turn the switch on leads or new customers come into the repair shop, you turn the switch off and the customer stop. So if you use that as like the core basis of how we built techmetric marketing solution, it is like a very simplified marketing product, although there's a lot of magic that happens on the back end. But we wanted to create a very simplified marketing product for repair shops to drive.
Mike Allen [00:03:44]:
That's, that's awesome. And that's when I talk to people about Techmetric. And I was at a 20 group meeting last week actually in Michigan and about half the room were techmetric users and then the other half were scattered between some of the other players in the marketplace. And that was where the conversation went is if you are a rapidly growing business and you are onboarding lots of advisors, multiple locations, that kind of thing, you can have an advisor up to speed and functional and tech metric in less than a day and the tools that are available are just getting more and more efficient and it's that ease of use that has not been there in my experience in the CRMs that I've used over the last 20 years. And it was that way with the SMS that I used as well. But the idea that your CRM integrates perfectly with your SMS and that it's super easy to use and it does not require a degree in marketing to be able to execute on it, it's pretty appealing. I'm sure that I use turnkey auto marketing and I'm sure they're excited to have access to it also. But for those smaller techmetric users out there that maybe don't have a third party marketing manager or a onboard marketing team, you think it's going to be easy for a shop owner or shop manager to get in there and get it set up and execute and kind of set it and forget it?
Sunil Patel [00:05:09]:
Yeah, I mean that's the whole goal of the way we've created some of our campaign management and automations. It is a process guided workflow that we've implemented in the system that allows shop owners and service writers to basically, you know, figure out what they want to get out of the marketing solution. Like let's just look at automation. For instance. If you want an automatic reminder set to a customer 48 hours after the customer leaves, you set that automation and that reminder is going to tell them to basically perform a Google review and the link will be automatically sent and then we'll be collecting those. The feedback in techmetric it is hooked up to Google reviews as well. So you have a unified platform and dashboard to see what's going on. So yeah, that's exactly right.
Sunil Patel [00:05:51]:
It's set and forget it.
Mike Allen [00:05:53]:
So one of the things that I'm trying to work on to improve my business and my customer experience is cause we're trying to map out all the touch points for our customers. Right. And make sure that it's as smooth and friction free as possible and like leaves happy feelings as often as possible. Right. And I have over the years tried to and failed to execute on setting the next appointment. You know the dentist does it super well. Right. And that's that we all reference the dentist and how they do that so effectively and society has been taught to expect that.
Mike Allen [00:06:25]:
But to this point we haven't executed well on that. Will text metric marketing have the ability to, once we set the next appointment to automate the reminders and give the customer the ability to change their next appointment if possible?
Sunil Patel [00:06:41]:
Yeah. So we don't have the ability right now within techmetric to allow customers to change their appointments. That is something that our team is going to eventually build out. So you can remove a phone call in the process in case you have to change appointments. But yeah, you can set an automation for appointments in the system and there's a bunch of different types of automations that we've implemented in the system and we ultimately wanted to do that. Set it and forget it.
Mike Allen [00:07:08]:
I would, yeah. The idea that, you know, if Ms. Jones has her annual state inspection, safety inspection, that it automatically sets a reminder for 11 months out to remind her that she's due for it again and sends her a booking link where she can set her appointment, that'd be pretty dynamic and I'm hopeful for that.
Sunil Patel [00:07:27]:
So we'll eventually get there, Mike. But we don't capture that today because you would have to capture the inspection date for every vehicle that comes into a shop using TechMetric. We don't do that today. But that is something that's in our horizon and so one of the reasons why we wanted to just roll out to our non CRM customer base is because they don't use any marketing product today. And we want to prove to them, hey, use this solution and we'll guarantee you'll see results. Because if the marketing solution doesn't provide results and you're just paying for it month over month, then it's not really a product that you want to continue using.
Mike Allen [00:07:58]:
Yeah, for sure.
Sunil Patel [00:07:59]:
And then once we continue adding features on, we'll start getting some of the power users back on.
Mike Allen [00:08:03]:
Okay, super. So to that end, you know, we're talking about customer touchpoints. I assume this is going to be managing text and email. Is there going to be any direct mail portion of this program eventually or currently?
Sunil Patel [00:08:20]:
Eventually they will be Mike, but today as it sits, it's going to be text and email.
Mike Allen [00:08:24]:
Okay, all right, super. Can you tell me a little bit about the flexibility and that's built into it with reminders or deferred work reminders or trying to reopen lost sales, that kind of thing?
Sunil Patel [00:08:37]:
Yeah, so we have automations built into the product. So if there is deferred work or declined work as we call it in the system, you have, you actually have the ability to remarket to that customer based on that declined work that we have in the system. And you can set a timeframe whether you want it to come in, you know, 30 days or 60 days out, set a reminder to the customer. So yes, those are all opportunities to get customers to book appointments back into your repair shop.
Mike Allen [00:09:01]:
Awesome. Now I know that there are some limiting factors on text communication. As the laws around text communication continues to evolve, I'm sure that you guys have done your due diligence and opt out settings and all that kind of thing are going to be built in. So you know, the shops out there that are utilizing this product aren't going to be exposed to any, you know, undue concerns. Right?
Sunil Patel [00:09:27]:
Yeah. So FCC has really cracked down on text based communications because there's been a lot of companies that are just taking a texting number, blasting thousands of text messages out to customers and trying to get them to do things and there's no liability anywhere. And so the FCC has mandated a couple of things. There's something known as 10 DLC compliance which is natively built into Techmetric. And what that is basically is the FCC wants to know if you are sending text messages out to customers. The FCC wants to be able to identify who owns that texting number and the LLC that's responsible behind it. Meaning the corporate documents or the C Corp or whatever. It is basically the corporate structure or the company behind that texting number and they will crack down on it.
Sunil Patel [00:10:12]:
If they find that we are not, we are enabling shop owners to do mass texting without following the compliance and the rules of the fcc, they are going to crack down on it. So we have implemented a bunch of strategies in techmetric for instance, opt out, that is you know, if a customer opts out they should be removed from any kind of marketing list. And it actually there's a switch in techmetric that turns off for marketing.
Mike Allen [00:10:38]:
I am a happy Shop Genie user right now, but I am excited about switching over to techmetric marketing when, when, when appropriate. So we've got the built in two way texting with customers in techmetric and then we've got two way texting with customers in Shop Genie. I'm assuming with Tech Metric Marketing it will be the same number sending and receiving the marketing text and your two way communications while their cars in the in the shop. Is that right?
Sunil Patel [00:11:03]:
That is right Mike, but let me expand on that a little bit more.
Mike Allen [00:11:05]:
Okay.
Sunil Patel [00:11:06]:
Because as marketing continues to evolve it kind of it you're overlapping another area which I'm happy to talk about. Actually one of the things that we are going to, we are working on actively which is VoIP, voice over IP or phone systems within TechMetric. Right. And it's kind of like a VoIP and marketing are very intertwined especially when you're trying to check dollars being spent in marketing and what is your roi. So we are going to be rolling out what we call vanity phone numbers. And in case you want to use a vanity phone number for marketing purposes, on a postcard or something like that or on a Google Ad, you'll be able to track the calls that are being received using that vanity number. So you'll be able to actually correlate the dollars that are being used on a marketing strategy. So that's one area that we're going to be implementing.
Sunil Patel [00:11:53]:
Voip or Voiceover ip. But like you said, unified inbox is something that we're very big on. And so we want to have a unified inbox for the texting number and the voiceover IP phone number a repair shop uses. So a vehicle owner is only having to deal with one phone number and that phone number can be used for texting as well as voice communications.
Mike Allen [00:12:15]:
I like that. I wrote that down. Vanity numbers. I don't know why I haven't thought to do that yet. That's great. So my customers can call 9194 CARFIX anyway. And we have a vanity phone number for the podcast too. So 704 confess if you want to call in and leave a confessional, and we'll play it on the air.
Mike Allen [00:12:37]:
That's awesome. So the VoIP conversation also leads to another conversation that I would like to have, and that is something that we're researching actively, and that is AI tools to help monitor, grade, and coach inbound and outbound calls for your service advisors. I got to imagine that you're looking deeply into that type of technology. I'd love to hear what you have to say about it.
Sunil Patel [00:13:03]:
Yeah, we are very deeply actually looking into that. We eventually want to create a scorecard for every call that's placed within Techmetrics VoIP solution. So what happens is you, as the shop owner, Mike, are going to have certain criteria. For instance, you may want to make sure that all of your service writers greet the customer by their first or last name. Right? That could be like one of the scores that you're measuring on. You may want to end the call saying, thank you for calling. So, like, there's a bunch of criteria you could actually set in place. And what we're going to do is basically take the call, recording, analyze the voice, convert it to text, check sentiment before it's even converted into text, and then marry the requirements that you have on a conversation to what actually happened on the conversation, and then score the customer, or I'm sorry, score the service writer.
Sunil Patel [00:13:56]:
And then it's a coaching opportunity for you, Mike, so you can sit down and you can actually have a full view of the entire conversation. Who spoke most, who spoke least? Did the service writer, you know, give a time for the customer to do to talk, and then you're going to get a scorecard. And then ultimately you're going to use this scorecard with your service writer and say like this. This is an opportunity to improve call quality with customers. And like, what could you have done differently?
Mike Allen [00:14:22]:
So one of the things that I get super nerded out about with that type of technology, I'm so excited that you guys are digging into that is, you know, the ability to say across my company, I can, you know, dig into the analytics and say, this service advisor is the best service advisor in the company at selling timing, chain jobs or whatever it might be. Or this is the best tire salesman I have in the company. And we can then direct that individual to help their co workers continue their development. The ability to get alerts to my Managers or even to me, when we have a really poor customer sentiment so that we can get ahead of that and get on top of it before it's a total dumpster fire. Right. I have a little dumpster fire model back here. So I think that is an incredible evolution and tool that will help us be even better at helping our customers and creating an incredible customer experience. And so, yeah, I'm pumped about all the people that are racing to bring that product like that to market.
Mike Allen [00:15:29]:
And as soon as it's integrated with TechMetric, even better. So that's super cool. Are you looking at, and this might be talking out of turn, but are you looking at just acquiring some other technologies or are you trying to build it natively inside?
Sunil Patel [00:15:44]:
No, we will be building it natively inside. We're not looking to acquire any kind of AI companies or anything along those lines. We have ramped up engineering efforts to start focusing on this effort.
Mike Allen [00:15:57]:
Okay, Total tangential conversation, total shift in focus. We last spoke at Vision. You and PJ sat down with me and we had a fun conversation. Do you know if PJ is going to be at the Expo this year?
Sunil Patel [00:16:13]:
I don't think he's going to be at the Expo this year.
Mike Allen [00:16:16]:
I've got my Miata. I was going to ride around with him and record in the Miata with him. I'm going to have it parked right up front in the hotel. But I've already, I've already bribed the valet guy. This is a total junker car. It's going to be right there with the Ferraris by the valet desk.
Sunil Patel [00:16:29]:
It's going to be perfect. Yeah, he's a pretty tall guy. I don't know if he's going to fit in the Miata properly, but you may have to cut a hole in the roof.
Mike Allen [00:16:40]:
Anyway, I think he's, he's upgrade. He had a track Miata for years. He's upgraded to, to a new Porsche now, I think so I've seen on his social media. It's a beautiful car, man. Anyway, sorry that for that tangent. Now we spoke at Vision. We're having this conversation right now about Expo. I know that we've got Apex and SEMA coming up.
Mike Allen [00:16:59]:
I believe you'll have a presence at both shows, Apex and sema. But the big shows, the, the biggest, the big presence is going to be at sema. Is that right?
Sunil Patel [00:17:05]:
That is right, Mike. You know, when we started the whole SEMA Apex circuit, we started at Apex first actually. And you know, when we first launched we got decent traction but Then when we actually tried sema, we're like, whoa, this is a lot. This is very different. And so we have focused most of our efforts at the SEMA show. We tend to do quite a bit better at sema.
Mike Allen [00:17:26]:
Why do you think that is? Because it.
Sunil Patel [00:17:29]:
So Apex is more along the lines for like, imagine a parts vendor or distributor wanting to find a manufacturer to buy suspension components for. That's where you're going to find those guys at Apex. SEMA is more the shops that are looking for new technology or new pieces of technology. You're going to find all those guys at sema.
Mike Allen [00:17:49]:
Awesome, awesome. And are you guys. Well, then you got Tectonic coming up next year too, right?
Sunil Patel [00:17:57]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:17:58]:
So that is shaking things up a little bit. I'm interested to learn about that. What was the impetus behind that and what are you trying to create?
Sunil Patel [00:18:07]:
We are trying to create a movement in the industry. And I want to be clear, Tectonic is not a tech metric conference. It is an industry conference. So we are wanting shop owners that don't use our product at all to come to this event because we want to provide a little bit of something for everyone. A lot of shops, a lot of conferences focus on a particular role at the shop. For instance, whether it could be a technician heavy conference or a service writer heavy conference or owner conference, we want to kind of combine all of those things and make a conference for everyone. And we've got some amazing key speakers that we're lining up for the event that we're going to be releasing here very soon. But we just want to have an industry conference and create that flywheel effect in the industry to help the adoption of techmetric overall, essentially is what it is, but also just be a voice in the industry to help shop owners.
Mike Allen [00:18:59]:
And so that's going to be next April, right, in Houston?
Sunil Patel [00:19:02]:
That is correct.
Mike Allen [00:19:03]:
Okay, so you know what, just go to my login page real quick on TechMetric, 4-9-11. I don't think that's conflicting with anything else going on. So you're all going to be there, right?
Sunil Patel [00:19:17]:
We'll all be here. It is. It is the biggest conference that actually, it is the. It is our first industry conference that we've ever done as a company. And so we're going all out. We've got. We've got a lot of exciting things that are. And.
Sunil Patel [00:19:28]:
And we're trickling out some marketing efforts on what's going to be at the conference. All the key speakers that are coming out, we're going to be releasing here soon. But yeah, I think there's going to be a little bit of something for everyone and we want it to be a fun conference.
Mike Allen [00:19:42]:
Do you have a target for how large you want it to be as far as, like attendees, that kind of thing, or do you not really want to share that?
Sunil Patel [00:19:49]:
No, we're trying to get about a thousand people over to the conference for that first year and we're expecting it to grow over time.
Mike Allen [00:19:56]:
That's awesome.
Sunil Patel [00:19:57]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:19:59]:
I looked at some of the sponsorship opportunities that were there, and I can already tell you're gonna have some super cool stuff there. I mean, I think there was a IV bar sponsorship opportunity.
Sunil Patel [00:20:09]:
There is.
Mike Allen [00:20:11]:
It's genius. Why haven't I thought about it? So, you know, you get the IV bar and the oxygen bar, you'll be set up and ready to again. You know how those conferences get in the evening. Actually, I have made a commitment that I will not be consuming any alcohol at the Expo this year because it's going to be so busy and there's so much to do and it's so out of character for me. I don't know, I've built this character where everybody expects me to be hanging out at the bar and I can hang out at the bar with a soda and lime. Right. So y.
Sunil Patel [00:20:44]:
That's true. There.
Mike Allen [00:20:45]:
There he goes. So, you know, maybe I won't need an IV bar, but I still think it's a super cool id, so. Super. Well, what else is going on, man? What. What else do you think that we should know about techmetric marketing and about what techmetrics got coming on the horizon?
Sunil Patel [00:21:00]:
Well, let's. Let's touch upon something that you had mentioned earlier, like the AI based repair order writing and whatnot. You know, basically using AI within an application. What we have found, Mike, is that there are a lot of applications that try to use AI, but they're almost hacked together approaches. They're trying to do something small. And essentially it's what we call a wrapper in our space. So you're putting an AI wrapper on something. And the question that we got to ask is, are we really solving real world problems with AI? And a lot of companies fail to do that.
Sunil Patel [00:21:37]:
So let's try to get an understanding of what we're trying to do. Writing a repair order is very, very complex. And the reason why it's complex is because the parts and labor vary so much from vehicle to vehicle. It's not just a cookie cutter job. Right. Like, even if you look at an oil change, it is not the same exact thing on every vehicle across the board. And so how do you leverage AI to help you build these repair orders? So it is a very large big data problem and in order, and there's a lot of machine learning involved in order to provide accuracy. Because what we don't want to do is come out with something really fast to the market just to say that we have AI and then ultimately consumers start using it and they're like this isn't accurate, like the repair order is incorrect.
Sunil Patel [00:22:26]:
I'm having to go in there and correct it so much. And so that is something we don't want to do. So we want to be very thoughtful on what our AI strategy is within TechMetric. Accuracy is extremely important for me. And so if we're going to leverage AI to build a repair order, it has to be accurate like a very high percentage of the time. And so we are, we have been, we have some data engineers in our company that we have tried to play with some of our models on because we have a, one of the other things you're going to need in order to do this is a large volume of data. And you know, even 6 to 10,000 repair shops is not enough data to be able to build out a machine learning model. Because.
Sunil Patel [00:23:10]:
And that to 6 to 10,000 repair shops, mechanical repair shops. Right. Because what you don't want is a large pool of, call it window tinting or detailing shops because they don't have the data of an actual mechanical repair. And so it is exciting for us that we're actually at a stage in our company where we can start looking at some of these big data problems and provide real world solutions. We're, you know, we just hired our chief product officer that's starting with us in a couple of weeks. So I'm going to be spending a lot of time with our chief product officer on what our AI data strategy is and how that plays into TechMetric. Being first to market is not important for me. We want to provide the best solution for our users.
Mike Allen [00:23:54]:
Copy that. Well, and I think you've got to be at a point now where you've got pushing on tens of millions of repair orders. So your data is, is getting larger and larger the, the volume that you have that I imagine there's a tipping point coming. But just thinking about the complexity of having a tool that will build accurate repair orders for you because what one shop deems to be the proper estimate versus what 100 other shops deemed to be the proper estimate vary so widely between timing of availability of parts and quality of part and price considerations and so I would think it's a huge problem to solve but good on you for attacking tackling it.
Sunil Patel [00:24:38]:
I like big hard problems to solve. So yeah, it is, it is, it is exciting stuff though.
Mike Allen [00:24:43]:
Awesome. I'm looking at kind of the, the overview of techmetric marketing that you guys provided for me to look at and some of the things that it's talking about. You know, we've already talked about centralizing communication and kind of one inbox, I, I love that, you know, if I could get my CRM, my SMS and like I'm a big repair pal user and so that's three different pages they have to have up at all times to monitor inbound messaging. So that's great. Calendar and RO sync. I apologize for being ignorant. What does that mean?
Sunil Patel [00:25:28]:
So we're getting into some of the features of the CMS solution and before we get to calendar sync, let's talk a little bit about like the demographics of our customer base. There is a shift occurring in the industry where vehicle owners are now wanting a experience on interacting or interfacing with the repair shop with using digital piece of technology. They don't want to call the repair shop. And in fact there's a, there's a survey that we did actually with vehicle owners just across the board, not necessarily tech metric vehicle, just vehicle owners. And 73% of those folks that were interviewed said they would prefer a digital online appointment booking instead of just calling the shop. And that number is continuing to increase as time goes on as more and more younger drivers start driving vehicles and needing to get vehicles serviced. They just want to get their car fixed and they don't want to talk to somebody. And that's just something that we can't fight it.
Sunil Patel [00:26:31]:
We have to adopt and adapt to it. So yeah, so that's something that our TMS solution does is it actually allows you to book appointments on the app itself. Now going back to your initial point of appointment, RO syncing, whenever we have this today in techmetric, whenever a vehicle comes in for service, we automatically create a time slot for it so you have better visibility into your calendar of, you know, all the cars you're working on.
Mike Allen [00:26:57]:
All right, that makes more sense. I just didn't understand that what you meant there, but that makes perfect sense. So you know, I talk about frequently about the new generation of drivers and just the evolution of how humans communicate. Right. And there's a push away from face to face communication and picking up the phone. Right. They want it to be text. And I, I think I'm tilting against windmills, you know, fighting an unwinnable battle for that because I feel like the quality of the relationship that is built is so better.
Mike Allen [00:27:34]:
And also I'm able to sell so much more effectively face to face and talking on the phone than I can through digital communication. But if I'm trying to grow to a real enterprise size and have a really large organization, I don't think that that's. Like I said, I'm fighting an unwinnable battle. So how do we maintain relationship based business as much as possible while giving the customer what they need? Because ultimately you need to give the customer what they need. And if they don't want to talk to me. Okay, so that's a, that's a question for me. And I don't know that you have an answer for it. I'm just putting that out there.
Sunil Patel [00:28:12]:
I actually do. So let me, let me rewind the clock a little bit, Mike. So back in 2019, when I was the sales guy for Techmetric, one of the things that I would show during my demo is, you know, we have a digital authorization process, meaning a vehicle owner comes into a repair shop for a problem. The service writer and technician group diagnoses it, builds the estimate, and then typically a shop is going to call the customer to either come in to see what's wrong with the car or to basically call the customer and talk them through the repairs that are needed. Right. And what I was trying to sell them is like, don't do that anymore. Just send them all of the facts with the pictures, the videos on our dvi and we have educational material on there too, including animations, and just send it to the customer and let them authorize it. And I got a lot of pushback.
Sunil Patel [00:29:04]:
Shop owners and service writers are like, nope, we can't do that. That is not how we operate. That's not how we've done things, and we just can't do that. And what's happened over time, since this is just 2019, what's happened is there's more and more adoption of our digital authorization process and not wanting to speak to the customer. And the, the approval rate is actually much higher. So if you actually break it down into why is that true? Why is that? Why is it that when a human is removed from the equation, the vehicle owner is actually more inclined to approve the jobs than not? And the reason, like you got to actually get into psychology now. And the reason for that is because when you, when you put a shop service Writer in the equation. You're creating a bias.
Sunil Patel [00:29:50]:
It is the job of the service writer to try and get as much approved as possible. And they're actually incentivized to do that. Right. Their commission plans are based on that and whatnot. Right. Well, newer vehicle owners are smart to that they know that that's the case. Instead what we'd recommend you do is just send all of the facts to the vehicle owner and make sure they can approve the repairs on their own. And we have been able to prove time and time again that whenever you adopt this methodology, the results speak for themselves.
Sunil Patel [00:30:20]:
And it's something we're actually shifting into is we're trying to, we're going to prove the results to you. When you adopt techmetric and you follow our process, you will make more money and we're going to prove it to you.
Mike Allen [00:30:31]:
That's interesting. So that's awesome. I mean you've, you're pulling, I'm pulling anecdotal data based on three locations and six service advisors. And you're pulling big data, right? Or bigger. Right. Significantly. So, you know, I'm a firm believer that like a rockstar service advisor who, you know, has that incredible memory and you can remember your pet's name and what sports your kids play and that kind of stuff creates the key tossing customer, but you can only do that in ones and twos. And if you're trying to doing scale than, you know, finding a system that executes close to that level at a much easier methodology, I think that makes a lot of sense.
Mike Allen [00:31:14]:
So I've got one store where I'm struggling to convert and my closing rate is, has gotten pretty low. And my front office team are super friendly and super helpful and get great reviews, but they just don't get the yeses. So that might be a little petri dish for us to, to just adopt that methodology and see what happens for you know, 60 or 90 days and, and, and give it a shot. So that's, that's pretty cool.
Sunil Patel [00:31:42]:
Yeah, we'd love to.
Mike Allen [00:31:43]:
I would have thought that it would be exactly the opposite. So just shows that, you know, maybe I'm starting to show my age. I'm turning into the old man shouting at cloud to get off my lawn. I'm gonna do it the way that I've always done it.
Sunil Patel [00:31:54]:
Now Mike, one of the things you asked me is like how do you, if you're not going to get involved in the communication process, like what can you do differently? And so what we do differently is we want to Always make sure that the vehicle owner is presented with the facts of what's going on with their vehicle. Right now there is an educational component because not everyone understands vehicles to the depth that a shop is going to understand them. So that's where we tie in animations into the process. So if you attach an animation that quickly, in 30 to 45 seconds explains what the problem is, it's easier for the vehicle owner to digest that. And we actually do see an increase in clothes. Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:32:33]:
Hugely valuable. You know, animation explainer videos are a home run. And we're working to be able to, you know, take our video, our 30 second video in the bay, looking at the car, and then splice in that animation video so that they get one link and they don't have to click on two different videos. It just place back to back. But that's kind of. There's some friction there. It's a little bit clunky getting that executed. But no doubt if you have access to those animating animation explainer videos, you have to use them.
Mike Allen [00:33:05]:
Yeah, yeah. So Superman. Well, I, I really appreciate you taking the time to. I know you're a busy dude. To come on here and chat with me. Any famous last words for my listeners. This. On this episode, I didn't only have.
Sunil Patel [00:33:21]:
To talk about a confession.
Mike Allen [00:33:23]:
Ooh, you got a juicy one for me.
Sunil Patel [00:33:25]:
So this is back in 2016, I think.
Mike Allen [00:33:29]:
Okay.
Sunil Patel [00:33:30]:
Still had my repair shop.
Mike Allen [00:33:31]:
Okay.
Sunil Patel [00:33:32]:
We're servicing, I think it was like a six cylinder Porsche Panamera. And all we're doing on it is an oil change and an air filter. That's all we did.
Mike Allen [00:33:44]:
What could go wrong?
Sunil Patel [00:33:45]:
What could go wrong? Right. So we have a process that we had implemented that every vehicle needs to be test driven after service is performed. So my service rider, not my technician, but my technician, did the oil change and the air filter. And my service rider takes the vehicle on test drive because we want to make sure that any of the, you know, the service reminders are erased from the dash and there's no other issues with the vehicle. The doors are cleaned and whatnot. So he takes it on a spin and he starts noticing smoke coming from the engine bay. I'm thinking maybe it's like some spilled oil. Maybe ultimately the entire car gets engulfed in flames and it is completely torched down to a crisp.
Sunil Patel [00:34:26]:
And ultimately the arson investigators came out and looked at it and they said that there was a leak in the fuel line that caused this to happen across the engine. And so we were off the hook, essentially. Porsche North America got involved even though the vehicle was out of warranty, but because of where the leak originated from, Porsche North America got involved. And then I'm not really sure what happened after that fact.
Mike Allen [00:34:49]:
Yeah. Your car start burning down, and your customer base are people who can afford good attorneys. You fix it, you know?
Sunil Patel [00:34:54]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:34:55]:
So. God, what a nightmare that, that call to that customer.
Sunil Patel [00:35:02]:
Yep.
Mike Allen [00:35:04]:
I've had a couple of those calls where it's like, hey, Mr. Jones. So, yeah, it's going to be okay.
Mike Allen [00:35:13]:
Hey, it's me, Mike's kid. Want to tell us your wild shop stories? Or maybe you just think my dad's totally wrong. Call us at 704 confess and leave a message. You can tell us we're awesome, or you can tell us we're idiots. We're cool either way. That's 704 confess. Just don't make it too weird.
Mike Allen [00:35:31]:
We had, a couple months ago, we had a client came in for an oil service, and we identified a rear main seal leak, and they approved it. And we got them in a loaner car, and off down the road they go. And the transmission fell off the transmission jack when he was putting it back in and cracked the housing. So we got to buy a new transmission for that client, and that delayed us by a week. So the client, you know, is at that point being pretty understanding. We get it all back together, and he's got his new rear main seal and his new transmission that we paid for and take it out on a test drive. And this technician who's. This is the first car this technician ever worked for at Carfix.
Mike Allen [00:36:22]:
And something had gone wrong with the oil service, I. E. Something that should never go wrong with an oil service. And long story short, this customer ended up getting a free engine and a free transmission from car fix in exchange for their oil change. We didn't even charge them for the rear main seal at that point.
Sunil Patel [00:36:39]:
Okay.
Mike Allen [00:36:40]:
So it was a large step backwards on that client's car. And that was one of only a dozen cars that that technician worked on while I was at car fix. The other cars were all vehicles that he worked on while we were waiting for the parts to come in for the transmission. So it's just I, I, I, too, get to have those conversations with customers occasionally. At this point, to be fair, I didn't have to call that customer. Oh, so my guys called that customer. So do you still have a shop? No. You haven't had a shop in a long time, right? Do you have any desire to have a hobby shop or anything? Like that?
Sunil Patel [00:37:20]:
No. You know, a couple years ago I actually thought of it, but then the company, our company's grown so much that it just doesn't make sense for like, I want to stay focused on the, the company tech metric.
Mike Allen [00:37:31]:
Do you do anything automotive for fun?
Sunil Patel [00:37:35]:
I do, I don't do track days. I'll like, service my own vehicles. I'll, you know, do that kind of stuff or coding, programming, tinkering. But I don't really get any. I don't really get too deep into it anymore.
Mike Allen [00:37:47]:
Okay. What hobbies do you have? Any sports you like to play, anything like that?
Sunil Patel [00:37:53]:
Trying to pick up golf, Mike, but no, no. I mean, I do enjoy some long range shooting and learning to fly a plane.
Mike Allen [00:38:03]:
So like thousand yard type stuff.
Sunil Patel [00:38:06]:
Beyond. Yep.
Mike Allen [00:38:07]:
Nice. That's awesome. My father is a competitive shooter and we do a lot of pistol, but you get out beyond, like, you know, beyond 100ft, that's a problem for me, so I'd rather just run.
Sunil Patel [00:38:20]:
Well, if you're ever in Houston, I'd love to take you out.
Mike Allen [00:38:22]:
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate it and I will see your team later this week and then I guess I'll probably get an opportunity to say hi to you in Vegas.
Sunil Patel [00:38:32]:
Sounds good. We will be in Vegas for shop. Will be. We'll be there the entire week.
Mike Allen [00:38:37]:
Awesome. Super. Take care, man.
Sunil Patel [00:38:39]:
Thank you, Mike.
Mike Allen [00:38:40]:
Thanks for listening to Confessions of a Shop Owner, where we lay it all out, the good, the bad, and sometimes the super messed up. I'm your host, Mike Allen, here to remind you that even the pros screw it up sometimes. So when why not laugh a little bit, learn a little bit, and maybe have another drink? You got a confession of your own or a topic you'd like me to cover? Or do you just want to let me know what an idiot I am? Email mike confessionsofashopowner.com or call and leave a message. The number 704-confess. That's 704-266-3377. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to, like, subscribe or follow. Join us on this crazy journey that is shop ownership. See you on the next episode.
Mike Allen [00:39:42]:
Lo.
Sunil Patel [00:39:47]:
You know I said Jesse.