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My name is Jeff, and I'd like to welcome you on a journey of reflection and insight into the tolls and triumphs of a career in automotive repair.
After more than 20 years of skinned knuckles and tool debt, I want to share my perspective and hear other people's thoughts about our industry.
So pour yourself a strong coffee or grab a cold Canadian beer and get ready for some great conversation.
Jeff Compton [00:00:06]:
You know, there's a legacy in this industry that we have to preserve but at the same time we have to do better every day. So I keep saying, you know, just shoot to be 1% better tomorrow than you were today. You're not going to do it every day. But at the end of the month, if you're 10% better at something, 10 is incredible. That's a major milestone. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another exciting episode of the Jaded Mechanic podcast. We are running right into the Christmas break and you know I, I've got, I worked really hard yesterday and I got all my work done and I was able to like take a day. So we're recording this on the 23rd of December and I'm sitting here with somebody that everybody will probably recognize by now.
Jeff Compton [00:00:54]:
He's repeat guest, very, very popular individual, very the kind of people we need in the industry. Mr. Sherwood Cook. How are you this morning, Sherwood?
Sherwood Cook II [00:01:02]:
I'm doing fantastic. How are you? How are you doing? You ready for Christmas?
Jeff Compton [00:01:06]:
I'd be lying if I said I'm ready now.
Sherwood Cook II [00:01:09]:
Are we ever ready until the morning of.
Jeff Compton [00:01:11]:
I haven't even put my tree up yet. So I mean I'm gonna. No, I know, I know.
Sherwood Cook II [00:01:17]:
My wife does all that. So.
Jeff Compton [00:01:21]:
Now when I say I put it up, it's a pre lit little four foot tree. I just live with myself and my little dog, right. So she, she, she's. And that's pretty much all I do. And then I'll travel to my folks. When I say travel, it's only like a 20 minute drive. I'll be there for their place Christmas morning and do the whole presents thing and all that kind of stuff and they'll probably, we're not sure yet whether I'm going to cook Christmas dinner or they're going to cook Christmas dinner. But we'll do breakfast at one location and dinner at another.
Jeff Compton [00:01:49]:
It just depends on how, how active I feel about cooking. So. And then pretty. It's a small get together. We don't, you know, I don't travel anymore. It used to be when I lived away in Ottawa the Christmas holidays were a lot because it was always like we were traveling two hours to, I mean I drove an old Cherokee through some white out blizzards to get home and to get back. So I mean it was pretty cool. Now I don't miss those days.
Sherwood Cook II [00:02:16]:
Yeah, I imagine it's.
Jeff Compton [00:02:18]:
You've been up here for a couple of Canadian winners probably once or twice.
Sherwood Cook II [00:02:21]:
And you know, well, I, I've been up There what I would consider winter, but you guys consider it spring. I was in there in April and driving in snowstorms, right. Going up from Toronto to Barry. And. Yeah, I guess there's a snow line right there or something. Or something that they say is the snow line where above it. Which Barry is above it and Toronto's below it.
Jeff Compton [00:02:42]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:02:42]:
So, yeah, I hit that. And it's like. Yeah, just snow everywhere in. In April. And I'm thinking April, man. We're at the beach. We. What is this? So, yeah, it was.
Sherwood Cook II [00:02:52]:
It was. It was different.
Jeff Compton [00:02:54]:
We had it. We had a ton of snow like two weeks ago, and then we got a warm spell here and it all melted yet. You know, you drive over to, like, just over to New York State and they're sitting in deep, deep snow banks still. It's. We're so close to the Lake Ontario right here that it has a real effect on how our. How much snow we get and then how long it lasts. We just take a one little light, you know, warm spell and it all just goes away. It's.
Jeff Compton [00:03:18]:
It's pretty good. So I fixed my. I fixed my coworker snowblo store for him, and he got to use it one time, and now it's like, put away again. So, you know, I'm sure he'll have.
Sherwood Cook II [00:03:27]:
Plenty of use for it up there.
Jeff Compton [00:03:29]:
So we saw you guys talking. You had your. Your tech. Your junior technicians night, which is now, I want to say, probably the second or third time we've kind of shared that with us on the, on the Internet. And I mean, it's. This year was a huge turnout for it, wasn't it?
Sherwood Cook II [00:03:42]:
Yeah. I want to say it was our eighth or ninth year doing it. We had 125 kids sign up and we had 88 show up.
Jeff Compton [00:03:53]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:03:54]:
Which always happens. Right. And we were supposed to cap it at a hundred. But my. My daughter. I think it was my daughter. Like Sherwood's, I think. I think Sherwood blamed it on his wife.
Sherwood Cook II [00:04:04]:
It's like we can't figure out how to turn it off, how to turn the sign up, the registration off, so. But we had 125, which worked out fine. And. Yeah, it was. It was. We actually added some. Some stations. We added, I think Tuesday, one station.
Sherwood Cook II [00:04:20]:
One station, maybe two stations. We added a tire removal, so R and R tire, you know, dismounting and mounting. Actually, we had three stations. We added a station where they took them. Took it off the car. Yeah, and so they took out the tire off. They were jacked the car up, took the car, the tire off, put it back on that. We volunteered Sherwood's Prius for that.
Sherwood Cook II [00:04:39]:
And he's like, well, we'll see how many. How many lug studs he's going to have to have later. But that was a good station. And then we had the tire dismount, Mount Balance. And then we had Tom, you know. You know, Tom, he did an electrical station.
Jeff Compton [00:04:54]:
Very cool.
Sherwood Cook II [00:04:55]:
And we had a. And actually a tech that flew in. She flew in from Arizona to help us with it, and she did the electrical station with Tom. So it was really, really cool. And it was. It was. The kids like that. I did an electrical station.
Sherwood Cook II [00:05:12]:
I think it was a first year. It was the first year. And had the scope and was showing them the scope and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, they had zero interest in that.
Jeff Compton [00:05:18]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:05:19]:
Tom and I kind of put our heads together and went, how can we make them, like, see it and like it? And so we had them actually build a circuit, right. We had the battery there, and, you know, just had. They just had to connect the wires up. And. And some of the older ones that the. The teenagers we were. Because we did have some that were middle school age. You're supposed to stop at 12.
Sherwood Cook II [00:05:39]:
We had some older ones, but they were really into, well, what. Because we had a. For a fuse. We had a load light.
Jeff Compton [00:05:48]:
Okay.
Sherwood Cook II [00:05:49]:
So the fuse, we. We did this last minute. Literally, my handyman guy was here, and we're like, hey, we need a wooden table. And he built that wooden table in 45 minutes. Literally went to Lowe's, got the stuff, came back, built the table so that we could put this. Because otherwise they're gonna be sitting on the floor, Right? Yeah. So we had a load light in the place of the fuse. And so the kids were really asking real good questions, like, well, well, why is that light lit up? And why isn't this light lit up bright? And, you know, so they were.
Sherwood Cook II [00:06:16]:
They were basically asking why. Why we had a voltage drop. They didn't know that, you know, but it was really, really cool because it shows that they're thinking, you know, they're. They want to know.
Jeff Compton [00:06:28]:
So, yeah, sometimes before they even know the terminology, they know they can spot that there is a problem, but they don't know necessarily even how to vocalize it. Like, I see that that pro. The way this is working. Why is it not? You know? And that. That's the coolest thing. If we can sometimes just get the. The terminology out of the way and just go, what's what's the end result you want to see happen here? And what are you seeing? It makes it so much easier, you know, I know I struggled a lot with just the language on some of this stuff of when I was first starting out of trying to learn it. Like, I knew I needed to turn a light bulb on, but I'm like, oh, like, you know, it's.
Jeff Compton [00:06:58]:
It's a lot for kids, man. And.
Sherwood Cook II [00:07:00]:
And there's so a lot for me we talking about. If anything, I think that might be one of the reasons people like me is because I try to listen. It's got to be simple for this brain to process it. And so I just simplify everything that I possibly can. I don't try to be, you know, more than I am capable of.
Jeff Compton [00:07:19]:
I gotta ask, what's the volume level like on Junior tech night in the shop? Does it get pretty?
Sherwood Cook II [00:07:24]:
It's, It's. It's loud.
Jeff Compton [00:07:27]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:07:27]:
I mean, I don't know if you watch the live, but I mean, when I do, when I say so, it comes over the intercom. We have somebody timing it. We have a client, he loves coming out here and he times it right. But he couldn't make it this year. So we had one of. One of my girls inside the intercom. Time to switch. Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:07:48]:
And I got to go into hockey coach mode. And it's like. And I forgot I had the mic on the first time.
Jeff Compton [00:07:53]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:07:53]:
And so we're live on Facebook and I'm like. So sure was like, Mike, Mike. Yeah, I'm sure some. Some computer speakers or something there, so. But no, it's. It gets very loud. I mean, it's, you know, you imagine that's, you know, roughly 90 kids. Not just the children, though.
Sherwood Cook II [00:08:15]:
Yeah, because parents are there. So it's 88 kids plus all the parents that are following the kids around. Right?
Jeff Compton [00:08:22]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:08:22]:
And it's, it's. There's a lot of people in the building. A lot of people in the building.
Jeff Compton [00:08:28]:
Did you. Did you see any future superstars this time?
Sherwood Cook II [00:08:31]:
So we did something different this time because we had. Matco got involved and sent us some. Some cool prizes to give away. They sent a remote control car and they sent two really cool little Nerf guns that look like impacts.
Jeff Compton [00:08:45]:
Oh, nice.
Sherwood Cook II [00:08:46]:
That was pretty cool. But we had a subscriber that sent us five fully stocked Craftsman toolkits. Said it had a value of like 847 bucks. I don't know what they were selling for, but I mean, a lot. They're full of tools.
Jeff Compton [00:09:03]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:09:03]:
So we had five of those stacked up. And so we had eight. Eight, what we call big gifts to give away. We gave a whole bunch of other stuff. I mean, Mako gave us a bunch of yo yos and I mean, you know, just. And Grip Edge gave us a bunch of stuff. I mean, of course, Harbor Freight gives us a bunch of stuff. So kids were just leaving with booty, right? They had all kind of stuff.
Sherwood Cook II [00:09:23]:
They were leav. Giveaway, right? But we had. I went around and I had some stickers, right? And I said we talked about it beforehand and. And talked to the text that if you see, you know, anybody that's like, really standing out, I was like, really paying attention, that looks like they're engaged, then, you know, let us know. And so Tyler, one of our younger techs, actually, he was like, oh, that. You know, he actually pulled me over like two or three times. Like, you know, this. This kid's really, you know, and so we went around and we gave those stickers to those eight kids.
Sherwood Cook II [00:09:58]:
Actually, little, Little funny story with this. I gave eight stickers out. Let me say that. I gave eight stickers out. Understand, there's 88 kids in here. It's a. It's a mad house, all right? And we know it. Every year.
Sherwood Cook II [00:10:09]:
It's like, I always tell everybody, all right, we're 10 minutes, this place is going to be, you know, a mad house. And then. And then it just like, when it's done, it's like, you know, but I mean, it's fun, but when it's. When everybody's out, it's like, you gotta take a breath, you know, because you're going steady for that whole time. But we had eight stickers. I gave eight stickers out. And then we had all them coming. We told them, save the sticker.
Sherwood Cook II [00:10:35]:
We had a little star on the back of it. Don't peel it. Don't stick it somewhere because the star was on the peel part, right? And we're like. And don't leave early. Make sure you hang around. And so those eight kids came over and we had a giveaway. Well, it wasn't eight kids. It was seven kids.
Sherwood Cook II [00:10:52]:
I gave one kid two stickers. I literally went up to one kid and twice, two times independently. And it's so crazy, I didn't even remember it was the same kid, right? That's how, you know your brain's going. And so. But luckily, right before I figured that out, we had a mom and a. A young girl come over and she said, can he. She, you know, the mom said, can she get a picture with you? Because this is, I think, was her third year or something like that, and she just absolutely loves working on stuff, and she's doing great. Well, she didn't get a sticker for some reason, so we, you know, she fell through the cracks.
Sherwood Cook II [00:11:26]:
It happens, right? And so she was leaving, and I found out the kid said, oh. I said, why do you have two stickers? Oh, you gave me two different stickers. And I'm like, oh, perfect. I took one. I ran out the door and grabbed that girl and said, get back in here. Right. And so. And then we ended up doing a drawing for the, you know, eight gifts.
Jeff Compton [00:11:48]:
Yep.
Sherwood Cook II [00:11:48]:
And it was hilarious. It was one of the funniest moments of the night was, of course, the remote control car. A lot of them wanted that, right? And the one kid really wanted that one. The. The Nerf guns, they were cool, but. But these kids are the ones that want to work. They want their. They don't work with their hands.
Sherwood Cook II [00:12:08]:
Right. They wanted the tools.
Jeff Compton [00:12:10]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:12:10]:
And so the tools and the remote control car were the two big ones. Well, the two oldest kids, they were. They were the teenagers. They were actually in my wife's middle school. They. My wife knew them from lunchroom and middle school, won the two Nerf guns, and they were like, oh. And they were all ready. They were the two first gifts we gave out, and they were already trying to say, oh, who wants to trade? Come on.
Sherwood Cook II [00:12:31]:
You know, they were trying to make trades right there. And then we gave out the. I think the remote control car was next. And it went. The kid that was thinking about trading for a Nerf gun, he was, like, on the fence, like, ah, maybe I'll trade for the Nerf gun if I. He won the remote control car, and he's the one that wanted the car. He's like, oh. Literally the instant that he wanted, he's like, trade deals are off.
Sherwood Cook II [00:12:52]:
Right. It was hilarious listening to these. To these, you know, kids that are just, like, talking like adults. Right. And.
Jeff Compton [00:12:59]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:13:00]:
Negotiated. And then the five kids that won the. The toolboxes, the older kids were like, come on, you want to trade? You want to trade? You want to. And they. They were like, nope. All of them, like, almost in unison. Nope. And then one by one.
Sherwood Cook II [00:13:12]:
This was not scripted. One by one, they walked over, and the boxes were sitting there, and they literally each grabbed the handle. Boop, walk, boop, walk, boop. I'm, like, watching this. Like, you could not. There's no director in the world that could have done that and made that any better than what that just was. And literally walked out with these two kids holding the Nerf guns like, come on, guys. So.
Sherwood Cook II [00:13:35]:
But it was fantastic that we were able to do that. And it was a little different, like I say, than we normally would do. But I loved it because it. I'm hoping that some of those kids down the road, you know, they'll take this stuff home and they'll work on stuff and they'll, you know, they'll piddle around. That's how I got in. It was piddling around.
Jeff Compton [00:13:52]:
Yeah. I mean, and that's the thing, like, we forget sometimes that, like our previous generations, there's always a set of tools somewhere in just about every house. Like, there's always a basic hand tool set. Now, you don't see that, right? Like, a lot of people, you know, maybe live in an apartment, don't. Even if you go underneath their sink, there's nothing there. You know, there's no tools or a junk drawer. Everybody want a junk drawer. Junk drawer that had, like, a claw hammer and maybe some slip joint pliers and a couple of screwdrivers.
Jeff Compton [00:14:17]:
And that's when whatever the dryer needed to be fixed or the lawnmower or, you know, you had to go and whack on your starter in the morning. You know, you always had that stuff. And now the modern day is being lost by that. Like, we have all this information, but we don't necessarily have the hardware to get some of these basic problems. And that's what gives people confidence, is just being able to say, like, hey, I fixed my dryer, or, hey, I fixed. You know, I put a new spark plug in my lawnmower. Now it runs better. Like, it's.
Jeff Compton [00:14:43]:
That little stuff is being lost on people. And I think it, you know, I think too many.
Sherwood Cook II [00:14:48]:
I think the desire.
Jeff Compton [00:14:50]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:14:50]:
I think the desire from people, just general and. And listen, there's a good side to this and there's a bad side to this. Right. The good side is to. To what I'm about to say. I kind of need to finish the thought, I guess. Sherwood is, you know, there's. There's a loss of wanting to do things like that.
Sherwood Cook II [00:15:09]:
Right. We. We've pushed people, Kids to begin with, and then they become adults as we've pushed them so far away from wanting to work with their hands that they don't want to do anything. Not only do. And then. And then. Because they want to do anything when they're a kid, right? They're. They're you know, playing video games or doing anything other than.
Sherwood Cook II [00:15:28]:
Than working on stuff. Right. And, you know, I don't know. I haven't. I haven't seen a kid build a fort in forever. Right. I mean, I'm out there with. Back in the day with, you know, sheets of wood and whatever I could find anywhere and building a fort together.
Sherwood Cook II [00:15:43]:
You know, I built a submarine one time where we had a hatch going down the top of it. I mean, it was, you know, but you don't. You don't see it anymore. Now I'm starting to see some kids across my street. I have a big field next to a church, and there's a nice tree for climbing and stuff over there. And I've lived in this house for 26 years, and very rarely do you see kids over there. And here recently I'm seeing kids over there. I saw.
Sherwood Cook II [00:16:01]:
I see a kid with a little dirt bike over there. I haven't seen somebody riding on a dirt bike. And, you know, little tiny dirt bike, you know, like we used to have. So it's coming back around, but we lost it. And so these. A lot of people don't have even the. The skills to. To maneuver their hands in a way, to even use tools.
Sherwood Cook II [00:16:20]:
Right. And the good side of it is that it brings a lot of work into the shop because nobody's out there. Very few people are out there working on their own car, you know. Yeah. You know, but. Which is fine. But the downside is, like, where are we going to find people to do this stuff? You know, and it's. It's becoming a.
Sherwood Cook II [00:16:43]:
It's becoming a big problem. I mean, we've always been able to hire and stuff, and it is becoming, you know, you're up against. At least for us. We have a. We need you to be good at what you do, but we also need you to understand what we're trying to do, which is make people's lives easier, you know, and that might mean not just fixing a car. You might have to do some other things that are involved. Involved in this stuff. And.
Sherwood Cook II [00:17:12]:
And, you know, generally speaking, technicians are. You know, we're not built like that. We're built to fix things, you know, and so it's a really hard find to. To get. There's lots of great guys out there that are super smart, but they just don't have the. We don't. We. A lot of us don't have people skills.
Sherwood Cook II [00:17:31]:
Right. We fix cars.
Jeff Compton [00:17:33]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:17:33]:
You know, and so I think that this is going to be a bigger problem. I feel like not just in the automotive world, I'm talking about in the trades, period. Yeah, this is going to be a far, far bigger problem than, and I'm not a doom and gloomer guy, you know, but this particular thing I think is going to be a big problem. Come, you know, coming up.
Jeff Compton [00:17:59]:
Well, look at your, your little, your little shorts that you did on your chat. Well, they weren't shorts, but your chat GTP and your AI using it to actually, you know, you did a couple videos there. Sherwood showed how it walks through the process of what would be causing this Honda not to start. Right. And I sit back and I watch that and I think, okay, so that's a really neat tool maybe for a customer to understand better about what's going on when they just asked a question. But I don't think it's ever going to take over the way some people are saying, oh, AI is going to fix everything for everybody. Like they're going to be able to go and get a toolbox and it's going to walk them through. I don't believe that is, we're going to see that in my lifetime ever.
Sherwood Cook II [00:18:41]:
You're not, I don't know, you, you might see that when, I mean, when they, when the AI starts building the robots. Right. Maybe at some point. Right. I mean, which will happen eventually, I guess. I mean, I'm a firm believer. I, I listen, I watch Terminator, read it very, you know, pretty young. I, I, that's what I believe is going to happen.
Sherwood Cook II [00:19:00]:
That's just me. Right. But, but until then, we can enjoy the benefits of AI until it figures out that we don't, it doesn't need us anymore. But no, I, you know, I was having a discussion actually with somebody the other day and he said that he had watched a video with one of the creators of AI and one that that person had said the only jobs that are going to be secure, that are, that people are going to need are going to be mechanics, plumbers, electricians. Right. Framers, carpenters. You know, he said everything else, a lot of everything else is going to be AI. Yeah, you're not going to need a cpa.
Sherwood Cook II [00:19:45]:
This was him, not me. You're not going to need a cpa. That stuff can all be dumped into an AI model and be, and be done in, in literally a minute.
Jeff Compton [00:19:52]:
Right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:19:53]:
You're not going to need lawyers. You know, it can all be dumped in an AI. A lot of the lawyers are actually, some more lawyers have gotten in trouble because they actually let the AI build their, their Briefs or whatever, you know, So, I mean, if they're doing it already, clearly AI can do it. So you might need somebody to sit there and argue it. But it's just what the AI has come up with.
Jeff Compton [00:20:14]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:20:14]:
So. But nobody. Yeah, that Honda, I'll say AI fixed it. Right. But it actually didn't. It missed a step. Now. It didn't.
Sherwood Cook II [00:20:26]:
In that particular instance, the step didn't matter because it got us to the problem. But, but for me, as a human being, technician, knowing is like there was another one more step we should have done before we just put the part on it. Right. And that was the thing is like, well, potentially somebody could have put that ignition switch on there and it not fix the vehicle. And then what would you have done? Well, you go back to the. Didn't fix it, right?
Jeff Compton [00:20:49]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:20:49]:
And then I wouldn't know what, what it would have done then. But now the other one was a BMW and it failed miserably on that one. Right. But I, I do. This is another thing that I'm. That, you know, I think for the future and we may have a hump that we have to get over. We may have this, this, you know, no availability of technicians in a certain age range. Right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:21:11]:
In a certain generation, we'll call it. But then I think that we will, because I think, I think we're starting to see a little bit of it now where we don't all have to be like, you know, college and, and go and want to work in an office job. Right. We, the, the trades are, are a viable option. I think what we're going to find in the future is I think that we're going to see technicians and, and, and, you know, other trades making the money that, that a lot of lawyers and, and other people are making today. Right. You know, because, because you're going to have such a shortfall of personnel to do it and you're gonna, and the demand isn't going anywhere, right? I mean, the demand's not going down. The cars.
Sherwood Cook II [00:21:59]:
Honestly, for me, the cars are. I hate to say this again, I feel like I do a doom or gloomer on this one, man. It's like right before Christmas, what's going on? You know, but to me, the cars are getting worse.
Jeff Compton [00:22:08]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:22:09]:
100. They are.
Jeff Compton [00:22:10]:
The, the ideas that we've come in with. The, the idea of increased efficiency and, you know, more horsepower and smoother drivability. You know, you don't even feel a car shift anymore.
Sherwood Cook II [00:22:23]:
Right?
Jeff Compton [00:22:23]:
Because technically, really, CVT doesn't really shift, but it's all been at a compromise of, of what I say is longevity. And you know, we have to remember a lot of time like you know, our old small block Chevys, they used to get flooded so much like it caused engine wear. But I mean if you knew what you were doing, you could always get it to start and still go. You know, you could make it to work. Now this stuff that people are being told, yeah, you can go 10, 12 miles and never change the oil in it until then. And yes, you got to lift the hood constantly and add oil to it. But that's perfectly normal, don't worry about it. That's not progress for people because I mean if we haven't, you look at the typical motorist out there that wouldn't even be able to find a dipstick on a car or the car doesn't even have a dipstick.
Jeff Compton [00:23:04]:
And you're being told, yes, but you need to pull one in every week. They're not, they're not. We're, we're selling something to people that's less maintenance and easier to operate. But it's not a shortened lifespan. You know, these cars are not going to be worth. Look, I mean let's put the name out there. A lot of Hyundai's and Kia's especially up where I am, they're not worth putting an engine in from the standpoint of, you know what the rest of the car and condition wise is. We've got two of them sitting on my lot right now.
Jeff Compton [00:23:31]:
Both need that engine. Both are not being covered under the recall. Both junk gone. You know, they're not rotted away yet. They're not.
Sherwood Cook II [00:23:38]:
But they're just financially not, not feasible, not viable to put a motor in.
Jeff Compton [00:23:44]:
Yeah, worth it. And it's. We, we look at this, you know, direct injection and low tension oil rings and all this lower emissions when it.
Sherwood Cook II [00:23:50]:
First starts right there. You named the one that was the kicker right there.
Jeff Compton [00:23:53]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:23:53]:
And the oil rings are the big one.
Jeff Compton [00:23:56]:
I think that should be like we really need to look into our. What are we really doing to the customer when we sell that as a. This is, you know, greener for the environment. But at the cost of the car has. No, no, it's not sure. Would you.
Sherwood Cook II [00:24:11]:
I mean, and listen, I don't want to get. We're not, I'm not going to get political on here at all. Right. But let's, let's just talk about just a pure. Let's just, you know, like I always say on the, on our channel, we just give facts. You Know, I give my opinion on some stuff, but we're just going to stick to facts here. If, if we have low tension oil rings so that we have a better, better gas mileage, I mean, we all know that works, right? Yeah, of course. Because the ring is just scraping against the cylinder wall.
Sherwood Cook II [00:24:35]:
Of course, if you have high tension ones and you remember back in the day we, I tell people all the time we put pistons back in the day rings on. You're tapping that thing down with a hammer and it ain't wanting to move. Right. I mean, it took some today. You've put them in there and just, you know. Right. So I mean the things, you got to catch them from hitting the bottom. Right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:24:51]:
So I mean it's, it's. But that we understand that gets better gas mileage, but then at the same time, because of that same improvement, we have to add oil to it all the time.
Jeff Compton [00:25:03]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:25:04]:
I don't understand the logic of we, we are getting better gas mileage. We're keeping, we have obviously better emissions, but we're using, we're dumping oil into the atmosphere through the tailpipe, you know, and we're having to use extra oil that we wouldn't need to. I, I just feel like we're just playing a numbers game. It's just like, oh, all we care about is a number that we can come up with in the beginning. We don't care about the ramifications. And then. Yeah, on the, the long term is we're dumping a bunch. We're getting rid of a bunch, whole bunch of vehicles that in the previous, you know, lifespans would, would last a long time so you wouldn't have to buy a car all the time.
Sherwood Cook II [00:25:41]:
Now you've got all these cars ending up in the, in the junkyards or being crushed or whatever it is. It's still waste. Right. And you can't recycle. You can recycle a lot of it. There's a lot of computers in those cars.
Jeff Compton [00:25:52]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:25:53]:
And you know, that's, that's, that stuff right there is tough to recycle.
Jeff Compton [00:25:57]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:25:57]:
And I just don't know. To me, the, again, I'm a very simple, simplistic, you know, person. I just try to make things make sense and some of it just doesn't.
Jeff Compton [00:26:07]:
Now, I wanted to touch on, you know, because we talked about this a little bit, the, the parts issues because I know that that's, I, I go back to that Nissan that you had, right. Where AI is not going to fix that car no matter what anybody thinks. It's not going to happen. Right. Like, if it takes you that long to track it down, flesh it out and finally get it resolved, there's not an AI program built that's going to even come close. But what are you seeing? Because I know that the, you know, we know that certain brands and certain names and kind of stuff, but are you seeing a lot of the dealership parts even having like a lot more of the quality down?
Sherwood Cook II [00:26:41]:
I have, I want to say this, right. There's been, for a long time, there's been a lot of talk in this industry about you need to use only OE parts. Only OE parts. I mean you've got, you've got a lot of guys that just like, they just, you know, they've been beating that drum for, I mean, quite honestly, more than a decade.
Jeff Compton [00:27:03]:
Right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:27:04]:
And I was never a part of that. Right. I was like, listen, these other companies are not out there building stuff that are going to fail quickly and staying in business. Right. I mean, you know, I'll mention one name, Felpro. They've been around for a very long time. Right. And I've used it, I mean, my gosh, I would never even even know the number how many times I've used it.
Sherwood Cook II [00:27:32]:
Thousands and thousands of times. Right. And, and no problems. I was, you know, I am, you know, on the boat moving across to the island of, you know, of, of the. Gotta use the OE parts. You know.
Jeff Compton [00:27:50]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:27:51]:
You know, stand over there because we are just seeing so. And we do a 5 year 50, 000 mile warranty. I got to be sure that we're doing something that's going to last that long. And I'll, I'll give you a perfect example. There's a manufacturer of timing chain components that again, I've used my entire career. We won't mention the name here. Right. I don't know how that works on how you want to do that.
Sherwood Cook II [00:28:15]:
You know, be careful. But they've been around a very long time. I've used them countless times. And the forward timing chain is just, it's. We've had about four or five of them that the tensioners have failed.
Jeff Compton [00:28:29]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:28:29]:
And have, have cost us dearly. We didn't. We've done many, many of them. Right. But we can't have five failures if we've done 50 of them. Five failures is a way too big of a number. Right. So we are gonna, we're at this point replacing every one of those with OE parts.
Sherwood Cook II [00:28:51]:
So far we have had some failures with OE parts. I will tell you, in the beginning of my career, you just really never saw an OE part. I mean, if it was defective out of the box, like it was broken, the box was damaged and it was, you know, something damaged. That's what you saw with that. Right. Once it was on the car, I, I can't, I can't remember putting an OE part pulling out of the OE box, putting on the car and it being a problem. I'm sure I did at some point. Right, right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:29:18]:
But today, yeah, I can name a few of them. You know, it is happening and I think again, we are, we're in this race to see, you know, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, just build it cheap. And I don't care what the manufacturer is, I don't care who is the badge on the front of that car. They're all in that, in that same, Some of them are better than others as far as trying to keep it quality, but none, I don't think. And listen, you know, I, I, who knows, they might come after me for this one, the manufacturers, but I don't think any one of them is really looking at, can we make a car last a long time? Yeah, I just don't think that that's even, I don't think that that's honestly even in their thoughts anymore. No, I think it's, can we get the car out of warranty? Yeah, right. And then get them in another car. It used to be, it used to be, can we get it to a hundred thousand miles without big issues? Because that was the magic number.
Sherwood Cook II [00:30:16]:
Right. And then the hundred thousand mile number just went away for me. I mean, it's like, shoot, I bought a car with 90,000, 90,000 miles on it. A good car. Right. The 90s cars seem to be pretty decent. Late midnight, it wants OBD 2, 96, 97, 98, 99, good. 2000, you know, up to the 2000s, tens, eleven.
Sherwood Cook II [00:30:36]:
So now it's like, I mean, yeah.
Jeff Compton [00:30:40]:
It'S, it's like something changed, you know what I mean? Like it's after 15, something changed. Like I see the last 10 years of where we are in this industry and I look at 2015, anything 2015 caravan, I go, oh, like so many, you know, weird wonky electrical things in it and hard to get parts for. Now somebody was just talking to me and they're like, they're trying to get an electrical part for a car and it's eight years old and it's, and it's phase out, like, oh, no, that can't be because I thought it used to be the mandate had to be there to support for 10 years. That's not true anymore. They're not doing it.
Sherwood Cook II [00:31:12]:
You know, did you, I let somebody fact check this. I'm not saying this is a fact. I'm gonna say this. I heard this, somebody told me that. And now obviously you're in Canada so I don't know how it affects you. It's gonna affect everybody, honestly, I'm sure. Because. But somebody told me that when they did the cash for clunkers back and that was back when Obama was in there.
Sherwood Cook II [00:31:32]:
So that was probably his first term, I think first. So 2000, was that 10? Yeah, eight, 10, something like that. Somewhere in that legislation was. Again, what I heard was that the manufacturers don't have to support the vehicle after seven years. Yeah. Now I don't know if that's accurate or not, but that's what somebody. Well if somebody told me that and then I can see that stuff like this happens, you know. And I was talking to them, I'm like, yeah, I had a, a 68 Camaro was, was one of my, you know, cars that when I was growing up, right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:32:06]:
And man, I wish I had that 68 Camaro today. But you know, I, this was back in the, in the 80s, late, you know, mid late 80s and I could go over to the Ford dealership and buy window crank bushings and I mean anything you want. They pull the Microfish up and it's in stock in the building. Right. A 20 year old vehicle and they got it today. I mean you're lucky. Chrysler and they're like ABS modules. I mean if you need an ABS module for a 2012 Chrysler product, you're not going to have ABS.
Sherwood Cook II [00:32:36]:
You're just gonna, you're either going to park the car or you're gonna drive with no ABS on. It's just that simple, right? You're not getting one. Not that we've seen anyway.
Jeff Compton [00:32:43]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:32:44]:
We can't find anybody that can fix them or, or clone them. I would love for somebody to leave to tell me that they can.
Jeff Compton [00:32:55]:
My brain just did an immediate check and I'm like can. And I'm like, no, I don't think he can do ABS modules yet. I know he's had some luck being able to do the ECMs and stuff like that. It's the same as the tip of thing. We talk about Chrysler all the time about tipums and tip. I just saw. So here's the thing. 2008 Jeep Wrangler for sale on Kijiji Facebook Marketplace 3000 bucks.
Jeff Compton [00:33:17]:
Now, like everybody's going, well, that's not that expensive. I mean, in the pictures it doesn't look all that terrible. And then it says, been parked for two years. It's not running. Somebody diagnoses a tip and can't find a tip them for it. Now we know that you can, but it's an aftermarket tip them. So then what's the, you know, under there, people out there? But I'm thinking there's something that essentially was working one day and then all of a sudden it doesn't work for somebody and they parked it for two years. Now up here, that thing's destroyed.
Jeff Compton [00:33:42]:
Once it's been parked that long, it's rusted. You're not. You're going to be into probably fixing the frame and all that jazz. But I can remember changing tipums when they were cost 200 bucks and we had 10 of them on the shelf in the dealership and they were that problematic. I was doing five, six a week for different complaints. Now it's, it's BS to me that they've been completely phased out from the manufacturer and we have all these cars that essentially are working great otherwise, but now they just. This module can't be repaired, can't be replaced. I think that's crap.
Jeff Compton [00:34:13]:
I think it's terrible.
Sherwood Cook II [00:34:15]:
You know, So I was talking to a. I guess I can say this. I don't want him to get any trouble. It would be hard for them to find this person. I guess I was talking to. We've dealt with the same BMW dealership for forever, right? And the, the parts guy there has been around for. He's been there the whole time. I've been using the place, right.
Jeff Compton [00:34:40]:
Long time.
Sherwood Cook II [00:34:41]:
And one day we called, we had a guy, actually the guy who likes to do the junior tech night to talk on the mic, to say switch, right? He's got a 99, 99 or 2000 BMW 5 Series, right. He loves the car. I know a lot of people just.
Jeff Compton [00:34:55]:
Went, oh my God.
Sherwood Cook II [00:34:56]:
Yeah, I know. But, but he loves this car. He takes care of this car. So he needed a bezel and a knob for his headlight switch. All right? And this goes back several years ago. Not tons of years ago, but several years ago. And so we called BMW to get a price on those parts. And you know, you could see in the, in the thing online, the whatever that we weren't on ista, we were on whatever, one of those generic BMW deals.
Sherwood Cook II [00:35:26]:
And you could see the original price on they were like 20 something bucks and 30 something bucks. Right? Okay. So we called the dealer. Like, we didn't talk to our guy, we talked to another guy there and, and he's like, yeah, I can get them. And they're $250 for one and 300 something dollars for another one. This is a bezel, plastic bezel. Right. And nah, you know what I'm talking about.
Jeff Compton [00:35:48]:
Yeah, yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:35:49]:
And so I just thought, oh, the guy, the guy looked up something wrong. I mean, clearly it's got to be. And I jumped on the phone and of course my guy sees the call coming in and answers it immediately because I knew you'd be calling me. And I'm like, okay, yeah man. I was like, is he off? And he goes, no. He said, I checked it, it's right. And I said, you, you're kidding me. And I said, how is that even possible? And then he explained to me for the first time how this works.
Sherwood Cook II [00:36:17]:
The car is made. He said, let's say they make, you know, a half a million of a car just on a number out there. They'll make 750000 parts they have of whatever different parts. He said, that way they have 250000 spare parts.
Jeff Compton [00:36:35]:
Right?
Sherwood Cook II [00:36:35]:
Well, those are made when the run of the car is made. So 500000 of those parts went into building the cars. 250, 000 went into inventory. Right. And he said, so clearly those are way made, those are way cheaper because they made them when they made 750000 of those bezels.
Jeff Compton [00:36:53]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:36:54]:
But when they run out at this time now, this has been several years ago, he said when they run out, BMW still wants to be able to service those vehicles. And so what they do is they go and they do them in small batches. Small batches are exponentially more expensive, but you still can get the part, right? Okay, well that's great. And, and it worked for a long time. And if you want, you know, now our guy opted not to purchase that. And in a lot of cases a 3D printer or something could come along and somebody could do that. You know, that technology has gotten to the point back then it wasn't available. Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:37:27]:
But now I'm wondering if that still holds true today with the spare parts amount. Right. With who's calculating the number of spare parts that they're going to build. And then I don't think, I don't know about BMW and Mercedes. I mean those cars, they, those are Manufacturers that tend to want to be able to service their. They don't like their people to buy the cars when they're third owners and all that kind of stuff. But they also know they turn into classics at some point. So maybe they want to parts to be available, whatever.
Sherwood Cook II [00:37:56]:
But I don't think that anybody else is doing a small batch run on anything. I think that's dead and gone probably from everybody. Yeah. And I don't think that they're doing very many spare parts. Right. So then it becomes. And then here's the kicker. Here's when it goes real south, something's bad, something just sucks.
Sherwood Cook II [00:38:18]:
It just your tipums. Right. And then there and then they're like, you know, trying to figure out, well, how come we make them, we need to fix them, we need to make them. How many do we need to make? How many can we get away with? And they'll. They'll run out of warranty. How many do we are. We're going to end up replacing. Right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:38:34]:
And, and how many do we really want to put in so that people can buy them later? Because yeah, at some point they're going to fail. Let's just say they fail on everyone. Right. I mean it's like the old Nissan CVT transmission. It wasn't, it wasn't about, you know, if it was about when. Right. So how many are we gonna have? And, and then at some point they don't have it anymore. And, and then the car.
Sherwood Cook II [00:38:53]:
Unless an aftermarket. And that's. Here's the thing, people bash aftermarket companies. And I get it, I'm, I'm on that boat. But if an aftermarket company does not pick it up and say well we can build it your tip them. Right. Yeah. Well, at least there's an option.
Sherwood Cook II [00:39:08]:
It may not be a good option or a great option, but your other option is to park the vehicle and let it just literally rot into the ground.
Jeff Compton [00:39:17]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:39:18]:
So it's becoming a. If you would have told me in 2000 that in 2025 your hardest thing is going to be parts, I would have laughed in your face.
Jeff Compton [00:39:31]:
Yeah. We don't all said no, it's going to be right to repair and access to information. And that was the always the biggest obstacle I always saw. Oh, it's going to be tough man. Like you know, the, the service information now a lot of time written is even wrong. Wiring diagrams are full of mistakes and all kinds of stuff. But it's going to be like that's going to be the biggest struggle. I18 Everybody's right to repair.
Jeff Compton [00:39:50]:
Right to repair. You know, it's going to be hard to get this access you're going to need. Now we look at it and it's like, well the diag's done and I can't get the part I need for my customer. Like, and then we can't make that phone call, you know, and yeah, that's the, that's just, that's the tough part because they're, they're disconnected from our reality. Like they don't realize, they just assume that, you know, you just don't want to try and find it for me. No, that's not the case at all, ma'.
Sherwood Cook II [00:40:17]:
Am.
Jeff Compton [00:40:17]:
Like, it's just doesn't.
Sherwood Cook II [00:40:19]:
And what will happen is it'll be something that, because here and okay, let's put the other, let's lay another brick on top of this wall that's going against us. Right. Okay. They're trying to make everything, you know, a theft related part. Right. So, okay, so now if everything's going to be a trp, you, so you can't use a used one and you're not going to supply a new one. Right. That we can.
Sherwood Cook II [00:40:43]:
Listen, I have no problem going to a client and saying hey, it needs a module and it's going to be whatever the number it is. The number is what it is. I mean I, I don't control that. Right. So I don't mind doing that. At least it's an option for them. I feel bad sometimes because it's like, well, you need a five thousand dollar repair on something that's a module, you know, but, and if we could get a used one, if it would work, it would be a tenth of the price perhaps. Whatever.
Sherwood Cook II [00:41:06]:
I'm throwing some numbers out there, but you know, the, the problem is that they make those things, you know, where we can't you put a used one in it. And then if nobody can figure out like the Chrysler analyze brake module if, if nobody can figure out how to break that and so we can do it again. You literally don't have a car. Yeah, you're down. And so not only are they not making the parts, but they're making the parts where you can't put a used part in it. Yeah. And that's getting to be more parts that are becoming, I mean what a lot of even technicians don't understand is that could be a headlight. That could literally be a headlight assembly.
Sherwood Cook II [00:41:46]:
Right. You don't, don't think that's just an engine control module or a Transmission control module or a bcm. Yeah, those have been around. They've been doing that for a little while now. Bcms, they've been doing that forever, right? And now they've just started going oh well, you know, and so. But now they're starting to do a lot of stuff and it is again, you got some crazy smart people out there trying to, trying to, you know, hack into these things to figure out how we can make them, where we can put them in used, but they, I don't know that they're gonna be able to do everything, you know, and then sometimes the hacking part of it takes so long. Now we've priced it out of doing the job too. I mean hacking the module and getting it to where we could do something to make a use one work will take so much time that it would have been cheaper to buy the brand new stinking module and begin with it.
Sherwood Cook II [00:42:38]:
They would offered it and I, I.
Jeff Compton [00:42:39]:
Don'T mean to throw shade but a lot of those people that figure out the hack, they keep it so closely guarded to themselves that it never really gets out there to have the effect that we hope that it would have anyway. Like if, if you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy, he managed to hack it and, but that's, we're talking like in very tight knit circles that we run in, you know, we know of a guy that might be able to do that. But it's such a small scale Sherwood, that they can't get it out there to all the people. And then what was the point then to begin with? You know, like congratulations, you fixed three cars.
Sherwood Cook II [00:43:12]:
I can, I have mixed feelings on this because I mean, you know, you know, a lot of these guys that do this stuff, I know a lot of these guys that do this stuff and they spend an inordinate amount of time doing this.
Jeff Compton [00:43:28]:
There's a big.
Sherwood Cook II [00:43:29]:
This is, yeah, this is way more effort than people think sometimes because once the solution is found, that solution general, not always because like I just said, sometimes the solution is extremely intensive. Right. But a lot of times the solution is, is quicker. You know, it's fairly quick. You know, an hour, two hours, maybe three if you got to pull, you know, get it. But the, the finding of the solution might have taken somebody weeks of work. Weeks and weeks and weeks and countless hours. Right? Well, how do they recoup their money if they just immediately turn around and go oh well and post it on a forum or something and say here's how you do it, right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:44:08]:
And you know it's like, I won't. You'll see me do things like with a Mercedes, with the, with the steering, you know, lock. Steering column, you know, lock.
Jeff Compton [00:44:17]:
Yep.
Sherwood Cook II [00:44:18]:
Yeah, I've shown how to do that. Right. But, but in, in reality, you still have to buy the tool. You still got to buy the software and all that kind of stuff to do it. But you know, that, that's been around for a very long time. Nobody's. Nobody's losing sleep over that. But I would never, honestly, I mean, I, I want to share a lot of stuff with a lot of people, but I'm not taking somebody else's hard work that they've then been kind enough to show to me on how to, how to get into this thing and do this.
Sherwood Cook II [00:44:42]:
I'm not putting that out there. It's just for anybody and everybody to do that because that's not fair to that person, you know, because they need to make their money back on it. But then, like you said, at the same time, it's like, well, we want to take care of people. How do we do that? I think that the only way to do that would be. And I think this will turn into something. I mean, listen, what happened when Covet happened, you couldn't get modules. It became really big, really quick to be able to do these, you know, E proming and things like that. Right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:45:12]:
And it's. Now it's died off again. Yeah. But I think it's going to come back and I think that's going to kind of be its own. It could literally be its own industry, its own sect of this industry. Right. Where you got guys that just. I'm just going to do that and, and people like you and me who just don't want to.
Sherwood Cook II [00:45:29]:
I mean, this whole room is full of these kind of tools to do this with. Right. And quite honestly, every single time I pull one out, it's just a pain. I don't do it every day, all day. So I got to relearn it, you know, I gotta. Oh, oh, that's right. You know, which tool do I got to use for what? Because, you know, there's only 400 tools, you know, so it's like, you know, it to me, if I knew, like an entity that I trusted that I could go, I'm just going to send you this thing. Just do it.
Sherwood Cook II [00:45:53]:
Here's the two models. Just do it. I'm just passing that on to the client. And it's just probably going to be easier for everybody anyway. Right. But yeah, and those guys need to the problem is that not only do those guys not share, they share with me. I'm not saying anything bad about them because I got a lot of them that, you know, are, are great guys, great friends that share stuff with me, but a lot of times they don't share with each other. Yeah, right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:46:17]:
They, they know that that company will start doing it and they want to be. But I mean, how much can you. If you're one guy in your house doing this in your garage, how many can you physically do, you know? So it's. But, you know, it's a way, it's a thing there, you know, I don't know.
Jeff Compton [00:46:32]:
I had a really good conversation with a group chat that I'm in and we get talking about the real value of a job, you know what I mean? And everybody decides they're starting to step way forward from the idea that it's this amount of labor hours and this amount of parts margin, and they're just going to. Going, if I'm doing this, you know, high pressure fuel pump in this diesel, it's going to have a value of this and that's what I'm going to sell the value for. It's just because of the, what it ties up and all that kind of jazz we have to get, I think in going forward, when this becomes a much more specialized and Craftsman level, you know, repair versus just a job, we have to start thinking about what's the real value. And it's not like we're trying to gouge the customer, but like there's some things there that if you're the only one that can do. Makes me crazy when somebody says, well, that's not worth a thousand bucks. Excuse me? Like, you took a module that you can't buy and you took one from a car and you made it work again. And I can't. I'm not smart enough to decide what it should cost.
Jeff Compton [00:47:32]:
But I know that pretty much whatever it will support people will pay is where it should start. You know, that's the true value then at that. And people don't like to have that conversation because it's like, oh, you're taking advantage of the customer. But I mean, ultimately it's still a free, a free market. And if somebody is willing to pay, it's like a break job, right? If somebody's willing to pay $2,000 for a break job, then it's not to say that somebody won't pay 2,520 800 and 3200. We're all just Talking about, what do they really want you? Is there a market out there still for a $500 brick job? Sure there is, but I mean, it doesn't mean that we're not comparing 500 to 35 as being the same thing anymore. There's very different levels to this. The true value, I think, is what we have to learn how to sell and really show the customer what you're truly getting.
Jeff Compton [00:48:27]:
You know, let me.
Sherwood Cook II [00:48:30]:
I love that you just brought this up.
Jeff Compton [00:48:32]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:48:35]:
We have a lot of different people that follow us on social media. Right. I mean, a lot of different people. And I, I'm sorry, I keep looking up, but we're having some electricity thing. The lights are flickering. My, My backup power supply is beeping like crazy. So. Okay, as long as we don't go out, we don't go out.
Sherwood Cook II [00:48:49]:
So, I mean, we have. I've had two 80 year old women. One of them, the, the son said, can you. Well, both of them, the son one sent me a letter, said, can you call my, my 80 year old mom? She loves your, your, you know, watching you. And we just had one with where my, one of my service providers walked in and said, we got a weird request. You know, this, this guy called and said his mom's 80th birthday is. Is in a few days. He'd love for you to just be able to do a little video.
Sherwood Cook II [00:49:15]:
And so, so he can send it to her, right? Not, not me do a video and post it, but like send it to her. Right? And, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, of course we'll do that. Right? But we have a lot of different people that watch. And then of course we have technicians and we have shop owners and you know, but so, so yeah, I want to teach technicians how to fix cars. I love the fact that they watch and they go, oh, I see those techniques and I see the, you know, here's what you do and here's what a voltage drop is, or here's how you test a can network, or here's, you know, how do you use a scope? What. All this good stuff. I love that stuff. Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:49:48]:
I love being able to educate clients in, you know, what, what, what happens in a repair shop. What happens behind the wall. Right. You know, it's not just plugging something in and telling you what's wrong with it. I love educating that. You know, here's the thing that, that I will tell you that I have seen and I was guilty of it. With the exception of corporate run shops and with the exception of dealerships, Most small shops are opened by former technicians who are still technicians. And they're just, now they're just got a job in their own shop, right?
Jeff Compton [00:50:26]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:50:28]:
And we as a group do not value what we do, period. Yeah, right. I have had so many guys tell me, you know, when I say listen, you know, and we won't go in the numbers here, but you know, I tell them that you can charge this, you know, you're not, man, nobody's going to want to pay that. You know. We've got two guys here in town, I love them to death. They've been, they, they, their shop is in the parts store that I first started in in like 1984. Okay. It looks like a junkyard.
Sherwood Cook II [00:51:03]:
You can't get in the property, right. They, you know, they work outside. They don't go inside the, you can't get in the building. It's just full of junk. Right. We have torrential downpours here every June through August. Torrential downpours every afternoon. They've got a little pop up, little like, like tent things.
Sherwood Cook II [00:51:16]:
You know that there's skeletons of those everywhere because the, the fabric wears off. So they just buy new ones, right? Yeah. I love them. They're great guys. They were 75 bucks an hour up until fairly recently. And I, and I had a conversation when they bring me cars all the time for me to fix. Right. And it's like, and I send them clients all the time because people who want something inexpensive, I know they won't take advantage of them.
Jeff Compton [00:51:38]:
Yes.
Sherwood Cook II [00:51:38]:
But I told them, like, you guys can charge more. Oh, sure. Would you have your customers and we have ours and that, you know, ours won't pay that. I said they will. They like you. I, I see online they rave about you guys. They like you. Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:51:50]:
You're cheap. You think that you charge more and they won't come to you. They will. And honestly, you guys could go up a lot and not be anywhere near where everybody else is around here. Right. So don't think you're taking advantage of people. I've had guys say, well, you can't charge that much for a spark plug. Right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:52:06]:
They don't want to mark up a spark plug because they see it, it as well. I can go buy that spark plug for this much. Well, the person can walk in and buy the spark plug for this much. They are not in your building because they want to go down to O'Reilly's and buy a spark plug and put in it. They're in your building because they want the convenience of having you do it. Right, Right. And there's costs involved in that. There's the phone call or being on the computer to order it.
Sherwood Cook II [00:52:30]:
There's the getting it delivered and working out that pet, you know, the paperwork and all that, paying the bill later. I mean, there's a, you know, some point you got to, you know, balance your books and pay your bills, and that's time that you're sitting somewhere doing that. Right. So you got to do that. You, that all has to be factored in, you know, and, and as a group, we just don't value all that time. We just think, oh, well, somebody else, they could do it themselves and it wouldn't be, wouldn't be that much. Like, they don't do you. I don't, I don't want to do my plumbing.
Sherwood Cook II [00:52:59]:
Right. I, I, if a plumber's coming to my house, I'm like, dude, I don't care. You gotta dig that pipe. The drain, I mean, maybe the intake. Okay. But the, you know, the drain. Yeah, dude, whatever. I don't care what it costs.
Sherwood Cook II [00:53:11]:
I don't want to be in that. Right. So that person can tell me a number, and if I've got, if I've got the wherewithal to do the number, I'm just gonna let that guy do it, you know, or girl do it. But, you know, we as a group and that. And I hear it all the time. Oh, we're not. We're treated worse.
Jeff Compton [00:53:28]:
Worse.
Sherwood Cook II [00:53:28]:
You hear this all the time. As a trade, we're treated worse than plumbers. We're treated worse than electricians. We're treated worse than everybody. Right. Guess what? Electricians value their time. They don't give it away. Plumbers value their time.
Sherwood Cook II [00:53:43]:
They're charging you from the moment their butt hits the seat in the van to come to your house, not when they get in your driveway. Right. So they value their time and we don't.
Jeff Compton [00:53:53]:
Right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:53:53]:
And we don't value the fact that it, you can mark up the parts. It is part of the repair. You mark it up appropriately. That's what's going to get us to the point where we can then start making a change and a shift. You're not ripping people off. You're not ripping people off. It's, it's that quality craftsman work. You said it a minute ago.
Sherwood Cook II [00:54:14]:
We need to be craftsmen. When you. No, actually, you said, when this, what we do becomes somewhere where people think of themselves as craftsmen. Something. You just said something very similar to that. Right?
Jeff Compton [00:54:27]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:54:27]:
Okay. We should already be Craftsmen. I tell that to my guys all the time. I don't care if you're doing an oil service. Be a craftsman. Right. Make sure everything is just right. It.
Sherwood Cook II [00:54:38]:
That's just part. It should just be part of who we are internally. Right. Once we do that and everybody gets into that process. Yeah. The price is not going to be the factor. People are spending $80,000 on a car, are they not?
Jeff Compton [00:54:52]:
Yeah. A hundred thousand dollars for a pickup truck, you know what I mean?
Sherwood Cook II [00:54:58]:
But we can't charge 200 an hour to work on them. Come on, man. That doesn't even make sense.
Jeff Compton [00:55:03]:
Now, Sherwin, here's the. The thing. What about some of the people that said the reason that we've had this obstacle in getting into this is because of the fact that we always used to like, well, I would close that toolbox at five o' clock and I would go home, and then I would work till 9, 10 o' clock at night on my clientele has that. I've always felt that like. And listen, I've done it. I have. I have done side work in order to make a little extra money to. When I had a lean week at the month.
Jeff Compton [00:55:29]:
Month at the dealership or, you know, I. I had to put some money into my own car and I was already strapped, so I would do it. But I look at that and I'm like, that comes right back to the idea of valuing something. Because one minute, you know, royalty auto service has got a door rate of whatever, $150 an hour, just hypothetically round numbers. And all of a sudden then you've got somebody that goes out of their James. And somebody goes, I work. You know, here's my Facebook Marketplace ad. I work for $50 an hour.
Jeff Compton [00:55:59]:
And all of a sudden everybody goes, well, how. Why is 150. You know, we're talking completely different overhead. It's the fact that we've always done that as an industry, I think has what has been a major obstacle for us. But yet you cannot convince so many people that it's wrong because they go, listen, that's how I built my business. I built my clientele on that side work that I did. I know I got you thinking. I'm sorry.
Sherwood Cook II [00:56:29]:
I love, I love that I, I, you know, I always. I just, I love just seeing everybody's different sides of things, you know, because everybody's usually got some kernel of something in there that's good. You know, First of all, you get a lot of shop owners that will just absolutely say, no, I'M not going to allow you to do side work. Right, Right. You can't do side work if you work for me. And I look at that and go, well, you don't really have a say because that's that. That's that human being's personal time. Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:57:02]:
If. If that, you know, person wants to go, you know, jump on trampolines for the next 12 hours till he comes back to work, that's his deal. If he wants to work on a car or she wants to work on a car, that's their deal, right? Yeah. Where you would draw the line is you can't take clientele from your shop. Right. Somebody walks in the shop, says something, and then all of a sudden they're like, hey, man, here's my card. Give me a call, and I can do it cheaper. Okay? Well, that's.
Sherwood Cook II [00:57:23]:
That's dishonest. That's not moral. We don't do that. Right? Yeah, but. And. And it can turn into that, you see, because there's where the. There's where the. The problem is, is like, well, once people find out that that person is the same one that works in the shop and then he's got a little thing over at.
Sherwood Cook II [00:57:37]:
Or maybe he's got a little down here. It's. They use many storage places, right? They use little storage facilities, and there's shops just all over the place. Like Jacksonville is just filled with shops inside storage facilities, you know. Wow. And, you know, it's. It's. Then that becomes a problem because where, you know, they.
Sherwood Cook II [00:57:55]:
They're coming to you, but they would come to us, you know, it's. It's a problem. Right? Now, as far as from the technician side, first of all, I don't want my technicians to have to do that.
Jeff Compton [00:58:08]:
Right.
Sherwood Cook II [00:58:09]:
You know, I want them to make enough money. You know, think about this. Should the surgeon, you know, like, he works at the hospital for four days a week, and then, you know, he's like, well, you know, I need a little side cash. If you need that hernia done, I can do that over my. Got a little clinic set up over. I can do that. I mean, you know, it's not a thing. Right? I mean, but.
Sherwood Cook II [00:58:31]:
But it's common here. And, and it's because part of it. Listen, you're always going to have guys that are going to do it. You know, there's guys that make $200,000 a year and they want to go work on stuff on the side. Right. And make $230,000 a year. Right. I mean, you got And I have no beef with that whatsoever.
Sherwood Cook II [00:58:48]:
If you're just, you're that hungry and you just need that money, you go make that money. Right. But majority of people are just trying to make a certain level of money, you know, and it, they, that should happen in the shop, that should happen in the building where they're employed. Right. And then, you know, they wouldn't need to go do that. They could go spend time doing other things, whether it be family or hobbies or whatever it might be. Right. And I, I just, it does.
Sherwood Cook II [00:59:22]:
Again, it's, it's their own business to do. But, but it does kind of lessen the value of what the shop does. But what people don't understand is like, like you said, there's, there's less overhead. Yeah, yeah. That's a hundred percent for, I mean, we all know that if you're doing it out of your garage at your house, it's basically zero overhead. You're paying for the mortgage and everything anyway. And you used to always hear that, right? You know. Oh yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [00:59:44]:
If you just work out of your garage, you know, there's zero overhead. You know, it's like most municipalities are not really keen on you doing that, first of all. Right. But getting us away from that, it's like now people are going to come to your house and I've literally had it happen. Right. They, they don't know boundaries. They, they will show up there at 2:00 in the morning, they'll show up there whenever they feel like it. That, you know, and here's the kicker, here's where it goes real south.
Sherwood Cook II [01:00:11]:
Yeah. The overhead is less, the value is less. And I just have. You just had a whole bunch of guys, when I'm doing the same job, you know, they're doing it right. They're saying it right now. Now, hold on. When that vehicle. Because it's inevitably going to happen, none of us are perfect.
Sherwood Cook II [01:00:27]:
When there is a deficiency in that repair whatever caused it, parts, labor, whatever. You cannot, as a side work tech working out of your house or storage unit. You cannot provide the service that the shop can provide.
Jeff Compton [01:00:45]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:00:46]:
Because you're not available in that in all those times. Right. The shop is pretty much available. I mean, if they call, we can get the call. We can, you know, they can leave a message, we'll check. We can have something happen even if we can't fix it. We can get them a tow. We can get them, you know, something can happen pretty much right away.
Sherwood Cook II [01:01:04]:
Right. Whereas that guy's got away or girls got to wait till they get off work and then what if they already have something scheduled because they're only one man. What if they already have something scheduled for that night but now you got to come back.
Jeff Compton [01:01:16]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:01:16]:
What happens with that person? So there is a less value for that. There's, there's, it's far less value.
Jeff Compton [01:01:22]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:01:22]:
And, and yeah, there's no insurance. What happens if your car gets damaged while the person has it? Where is that? You know, we all heard those horror stories. Oh yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:01:30]:
Building burns, you know, cars lost.
Sherwood Cook II [01:01:34]:
Yeah. Who's gonna pay for it? Because the insurance for the car is going to be like, well, you had it in this, you know. Well, wait a minute now, they're not dumb. They're going to try to figure out how to get out of it. Right. And the guy's homeowner's insurance, he ain't paying for that. Well, you were doing work on the work, you know, on the professional work and you're. Oh no, this wasn't a commercial situation.
Sherwood Cook II [01:01:50]:
This is your personal house. I mean, and then who's, you know, somebody's got to come out of pocket with cash. Does that, does that guy got the pot, got the money in his bank to buy you a 30, $40,000 vehicle? I mean, maybe. But yeah, you know, that, that's probably not going to happen.
Jeff Compton [01:02:06]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:02:08]:
Yeah, that's a, that's a tough one there, man. You brought that. You kind of got me on the.
Jeff Compton [01:02:12]:
Out there because when, when I, when you mentioned your, your local shop that you know, that you've, you know, known forever and they're 75, just were just recently $75 an hour. The industry's always had a place for, for a shop like that. Right. There's a, there's a market for them. There is a customer for that type of customer. But when you look at them, Sherwood, what's some of the advice or things that you, if you could just say here's three nuggets. These three nuggets can turn your business to the next. I don't want to say turn it around but go to the next level.
Jeff Compton [01:02:45]:
What's those three things, Sherwood? Parts markup, You know, because some of the coaching companies will say, well to turn the corner you got to go, you know, flat rate pay or you know, you have to. What's some of the other things you have to spend X amount of dollars in marketing, you know what I mean? You understand what I'm trying to say?
Sherwood Cook II [01:03:10]:
Oh, I do.
Jeff Compton [01:03:11]:
Okay.
Sherwood Cook II [01:03:12]:
I'm trying to formulate at least one Thing. Because you asked me for three.
Jeff Compton [01:03:15]:
Yeah, let's start with one.
Sherwood Cook II [01:03:17]:
The number one thing. The number one thing is give great value for what you do.
Jeff Compton [01:03:25]:
Do.
Sherwood Cook II [01:03:27]:
You know, you can't. I think I told you in the first, maybe when we were talking some point or maybe in the, in the first time we did an interview. I've been with a lot of coaching companies over the years and, and they've all helped me in some way, shape or form, but I figured something out, thank God, very early, which was you can't just. Should you have the proper parts margins? Absolutely. What the proper parts margins are, that's fluid, right? I mean, it's, it's definitely changed since I've been doing this, you know, and, but, but you 100 should have the proper parts margins. You know, I just said a minute ago, you know, we, we can't charge 200 an hour. I'm not saying that shops need to charge 200 an hour. You might be somewhere in a, in a, in a community that will not support 200 an hour, but you need to know what your community will support.
Sherwood Cook II [01:04:17]:
And you do need to be not just giving it away. You need to be your, your labor needs again, you need to have the proper labor margins, which means that you've got to make a certain amount of money. And as much as technicians don't want to hear it, I can't give a technician flat a pay of half of what we sell. That doesn't work in today's business. It worked 30 years ago. Right. It doesn't work today, not with everything that goes with it. Because by the time you add in all the other stuff that goes with it, it does get up there pretty high.
Sherwood Cook II [01:04:47]:
It's just unfortunately, because of all the things that we have to pay that goes with it, the tech doesn't see the half. Right? Yeah, but, but you have to start with giving value to your clients, giving value to your vehicle owners. Number one, if you charge $1,000 an hour, just make sure that that thousand dollars an hour comes with a lot of value. What are you giving for that thousand dollars an hour? Right?
Jeff Compton [01:05:13]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:05:14]:
If you can make your clients desire your work because you, they value it, and then you can make a price that's commensurate with that level of value, they'll be more than happy to pay you. Right. The numbers are the numbers. The numbers are different for every. It's why when you, when I hear these cookie cutter things like, well, you used to be 150 an hour. You used to be what you Know, you should be 60 parts margin or you should be whatever the number might be, right. It's like, okay, well if you live, if you work on cars that you're going back to the dealership for a lot of your parts, how in the world could you ever be 60 parts margin that just doesn't work? Right. You know, that'd be, I mean that'd be fantastic if we could do that.
Sherwood Cook II [01:05:59]:
But now you're, you're going to be way more expensive than the dealership is and okay, I'm in cases we are more expensive than the dealership. What we do give some value that they don't get. We got 550000 mile warranty. They don't. Right. We, we have a very personal relationship with people. Most don't. Okay.
Sherwood Cook II [01:06:14]:
But from a shop standpoint, somebody that you, you asked me what would be one of the things you do give good value. Lots of ways to do that. Lots of ways to do that. So, so many different avenues you can go down. I mean I can sit here for an hour talking about just that. Right? Well, that would be the first one.
Jeff Compton [01:06:36]:
You know, when I, I liken it to this because I know you guys wash every car when it leaves, right. It, it's always going out clean. Are you still there?
Sherwood Cook II [01:06:46]:
We're done. We're done. We're locked down. Yep.
Jeff Compton [01:06:50]:
What happened? Are you still there?
Sherwood Cook II [01:06:53]:
Yeah, we're back. We locked down. Yeah.
Jeff Compton [01:06:57]:
But I noticed like you guys, you know, you do it as part of your young, young tech night and everything. But I mean every car that comes into. Right. Royalty leaves washed. Right. And that's just something that you've always done. And I worked at the, my tenure at the Nissan dealer, that was their policy. Every car didn't matter what it came in for always.
Jeff Compton [01:07:13]:
And at the time it was like, man, it was really backing up the workflow in the shop because they were washing them in the shop. It wasn't a separate thing. And it, you know, sometimes you had to wait for the car to be cleaned before you could drive out to get your next car into your bay. It was, it was a, it was a pain. But that little thing of five minutes of just spraying the car off, running it over with a, you know, some soap, clean it up, shine the tires, like it was worth so much more in retention back to the customer because like for some of them, they came in and the car ran fine. You know how to check engine light on. And it left with a check engine light on but or off. Excuse me.
Jeff Compton [01:07:48]:
But it never changed how it ran. But man, they were just glad to get into that car and it was clean again, you know what I mean? Like it was up here with the salt, everything right now, all over the roads, man, they would come in and be like, big deal, you know, huge thing. It was well worth the investment, I think.
Sherwood Cook II [01:08:06]:
So if I were going to give like just the, the tiny footnote version of some value, right? Okay, number one, before we get into that, you got to fix the car, okay? Yes, you got to fix the car, okay. I mean, that's, that's, that's a given you. For us again, for us personally, it's an ethical thing. We got to look the whole car over and we have to present everything. We don't have purchase, sale, anybody for anything, but we have to present everything, right. So that they can make an educated decision, the vehicle owner, on whether I want to put anything in it, right. They might say, well, I don't want to spend that much on this car. And I, and I know I'm going to have to at some point, so I'm done.
Sherwood Cook II [01:08:45]:
Now there's ways to make sure that they understand the value of the vehicle and the kind of stuff I can't get. That's, that's a long conversation. But you know, we got to fix the car, we got to look it over. But value stuff, pick up and delivery, make it, make it easy for them, right? Go pick up the car, bring it into your shop. I don't care if it's an oil service, go pick it up, bring your shop, do the oil service, do the other stuff, take it back, right? I mean, the mom that's sitting at home with her four kids, she don't want to pile them four kids into the van to bring it to your house, right? Anybody who had kids in, in the, in the car seats, right? You know, it's a, it's not like a two minute thing to get in the car and go, okay, all right, so that's, that's convenience. Yes, washing the car is convenience thing. Let me footnote that with something though, because I had a technician come in here and we were talking doesn't, you know, from another shop, and we were talking about washing cars. And he said, yeah, the shop I'm at, they want the tech to wash the car.
Sherwood Cook II [01:09:42]:
And, and that's a, you're a shop owner out there. You want to wash cars unless you're going to pay that tech, which I will tell you is probably not a real smart thing to do financially unless you want to pay that tech to wash that car, don't you need to hire a car washer? Right. If you're going to hand wash them, hire a car washer. Okay. And, and I would highly recommend hand washing them because you start running them through the machines and all of a sudden something gets scratched or whatever it might be, and that's a big deal. Right. So we hand wash. We.
Sherwood Cook II [01:10:09]:
We don't detail. We wash the. We wash the outside, we vacuum the inside, we do the windows. And people absolutely love it. Right? Okay. Car wash is a value. If you can give loaner cars, it's a value we had a big issue with that, won't get into that. But, you know, it's a big, big added value.
Sherwood Cook II [01:10:30]:
We do a rose at the end of the. When a car is picked up, it gets a rose on the dashboard on the instrument cluster. Not on the dashboard, on the instrument cluster. So a nice wrapped rose. It didn't start all like that. It started off with just, just literally a rose. Right. Then it was a rose with a water bottle, Then it was a rose with a water bottle with a little, you know, little tag on it that had our name on.
Sherwood Cook II [01:10:48]:
Then it was a. Then it was wrapped and it was baby's breath. Right. And I mean, so we build the roses here, we. We buy the roses locally, and then we, and then we put them together with the wrap and the baby's breath and all that stuff on it. But this has evolved, right? I mean, this is 20. This will be our 30th year on July 26th of 26. Right, right.
Sherwood Cook II [01:11:07]:
And this has all evolved over time. You know, you can do this in, in a smaller way if you're a smaller shop. But understand this. There. There's two arenas to play in, in my opinion. There's the arena of price. I'm just going to be. I'm going to.
Sherwood Cook II [01:11:24]:
I'm going to. To position myself as the price leader, whatever you want to call it. Right. And. And so I'm going to be the least expensive or at least I'm going to play in that. I, maybe I won't be the least expensive, but that's who I'm going against. Right? Right. I might be a little bit more, but I'm going to tell them I do quality work or whatever.
Sherwood Cook II [01:11:42]:
But you're still in that price arena, right? That arena is huge and full. And then there's the arena of I'm going to do craftsmanship, quality work, take care of, make sure I diagnose it properly. The first time not charge for things that we don't do. Make sure that we're doing this stuff ethical. Right. We're going to look the whole car over, we're going to have conversations, we're going to create relationships with our clients. Right, right. These are all things that are much harder to do.
Sherwood Cook II [01:12:09]:
Right. It's way easier to tell somebody, yeah, I can do your brake job for 99 bucks, all four wheels. And then they're going to just go, oh, well, man, okay. I mean, nobody else is going to tell me that price. Right?
Jeff Compton [01:12:17]:
Right.
Sherwood Cook II [01:12:17]:
Than it is to go, yeah, the brake job is like you said, $2,000. You know, they go, oh, let me, you know, let's go over the features and benefits before you give them the price, honestly. But, but you know, that arena is small and, and not very populated. Right. And, and to me, if you, if you have an area where it will support it, okay. And I think everywhere will support that arena. Just the price that you can charge will be different. Right.
Sherwood Cook II [01:12:45]:
But, but if the price has got to be lower, guess what else is lower? Usually your, your costs are lower. You know, you're, you're, you could hire a car washer for less than I can. I mean, I pay my car washers. It's, it's a large amount of money because otherwise I can't, can't. They won't come to work for me. Right. So, but that's fine. I mean, it's just part of the, part of doing it.
Sherwood Cook II [01:13:06]:
And don't be afraid to make money. You know, it's like, don't apologize for making money. A lot of us have spent many. And even if, let's say you've been in the business five or six, seven, eight years, right? And, and you know, you open your shop up and you've only been in business for two years and people, all, you see all these, these different companies are like, oh, you need to do loss leaders on oil services and you need to bring in these cheap oil services. Like, to me, it's like you're already inviting in to me the wrong clientele. Right. I want the word to get out there that we're good, they're good. Right? But I, I think that shop, when, when guys are in that range 5, 6, 7 years and they're just open their shop up and they're scared, they're scared to charge.
Sherwood Cook II [01:13:55]:
Right? And think about this. Let's say that, let's go back to that lawyer. He went all the way through regular school. He's at graduated high school Went to law school. Right. So he went to, went to college, went to law school. He's got I don't know how many years a lawyer has to go. Four, five, six, whatever it might be.
Sherwood Cook II [01:14:12]:
Six, seven years. I don't know. I mean, I know doctors got to go a lot longer and do a lot more than that, but. Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure the lawyers come out of there 25, 26, 27 years old, you know, and they're, and they're lawyer. They're lawyers. And those law firms that they go to work for don't mind charging a lot of money. If they go to work for some prestigious law firm, they charge a lot of money for that. Right? Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:14:31]:
You have the same amount of education. If you've done it right, that's that as that guy does. Right. And they're not afraid to charge. And you are.
Jeff Compton [01:14:42]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:14:42]:
You just have to get your mind right on what are you actually providing. Yeah, you're providing a fixed vehicle, but you're providing convenience for people.
Jeff Compton [01:14:52]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:14:52]:
And people don't mind paying for convenience. They really don't. I, I hate hearing. I mean, honestly, there was a guy that. It's a auto shop owners hangout on Facebook.
Jeff Compton [01:15:01]:
Seen that one, I'm in there.
Sherwood Cook II [01:15:03]:
Posted on there yesterday. Did you see the post yesterday he posted on there that he was test driving a vehicle and that there was no front plate on it, I guess. And I guess he's in a state where you gotta have a front plate. Did you see it?
Jeff Compton [01:15:15]:
Yes, I did.
Sherwood Cook II [01:15:15]:
And, and, and, and he got pulled over and the vehicle got towed and you know, and yeah, got impounded. And he's like, he told a customer that that was his responsibility and you know, blah, blah, and he got blasted. He got, I mean, he got completely blasted. Right. And of course, a hundred percent he was wrong. I mean, you, you got the car got towed because your license was suspended. Yes. And, and you had, you not had your license suspended.
Sherwood Cook II [01:15:46]:
The cop, because they gave him a ride back to a shop front. Out loud, I can tell you right now in this town, which I, I know the police here, but they're not gonna go, oh, Mr. Shop Owner, you had a, you had a, a suspended license. We're gonna tow the car, we're gonna give you a ride. They're gonna be like, hey, you got somebody can come give you a ride, man, because we're just gonna leave. You stay, you know, you're just gonna be sitting here. Right. So, so clearly the police probably would have went, all right, Tell them.
Sherwood Cook II [01:16:06]:
Tell your vehicle owner to put a tag on that thing. The reason that got towed was because of his license.
Jeff Compton [01:16:10]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:16:10]:
And, you know, I reached out to him. I. I messaged him, and. And I've talked to him a little bit. But here's the kicker on that. He's a. He's a young. He's a, you know, a new shop owner.
Sherwood Cook II [01:16:23]:
That is. I hate to see it. I'm broke.
Jeff Compton [01:16:27]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:16:27]:
See, the money made him make an immoral decision. I don't. I've watched. I looked at his. I went to his shop, looked it up on Google. Five stars. He only got seven reviews, but it's got five stars. And not only does he have five stars, but he got five raving stars because people are actually writing a bunch of stuff about him.
Sherwood Cook II [01:16:44]:
Right, Good. So he. He let money make him make a decision that he wouldn't probably know had he had the money. He would never made that decision.
Jeff Compton [01:16:55]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:16:55]:
Right. And it really bothers me because it's like, it's clearly a person who. Who is just struggling in this industry. Not because he doesn't. Can't do good work, because I can see from his reviews he can do good work. It's because he. He can't. He doesn't know how to run the business.
Sherwood Cook II [01:17:15]:
Right.
Jeff Compton [01:17:15]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:17:16]:
And. And that's the one thing that I think that if I could say anything to anybody, you know, you said three things. Be valuable. You know, give value, charge appropriately for that, whatever that looks like in your area. Right. And don't let somebody tell you you have to charge this or have to charge that. You figure out what your numbers. You know, there's plenty of stuff online for you to go figure that out.
Sherwood Cook II [01:17:36]:
Go figure out what your numbers are. What's your overhead? What do you look. How much are you. Do you want to make right now that might need to be a little lower in your beginning years. You know, keep your overhead low in your shop and keep your personal overhead low. Right. And. And I mean, for a long time, don't be, oh, man, I had a great year.
Sherwood Cook II [01:17:54]:
I'm gonna buy a boat. Let. Slow that down a little bit. Right. And. And just. Just treat people right, treat your employees right, that you hire, take care of them, take. And it will work.
Sherwood Cook II [01:18:07]:
But. But the. The key to that is give value and charge appropriately for it.
Jeff Compton [01:18:10]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:18:11]:
Really love it. Sounds easy.
Jeff Compton [01:18:14]:
What's the goals for 2026 Sherwood?
Sherwood Cook II [01:18:18]:
Who. And I'll tell you right now about. We talked about it yesterday, about four years ago, three or four years Ago, I was trying to retire. I actually wasn't even wearing work clothes to work anymore. I'm like, yeah, you know, I helped my guys a little bit here. There I was back, and I felt really good, you know, and then sure would put a camera in front of me one day, and all of a sudden I've got more of a job now than I've had in, in a long time. But, yeah, it's work. It's a lot of work.
Sherwood Cook II [01:18:48]:
I would say, you know, obviously we want to, we want all of our social media to grow. Our big goal, our biggest goal, which we underestimated massively last year, is to have our training website up.
Jeff Compton [01:19:02]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:19:02]:
And that is a massive, massive undertaking. And I do see why a lot of places charge as much as they do to have, you know, for those training, access to those websites. Because the amount of work that's going into this is just. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a lot. And it's just a lot because I think a lot of other stuff is happening too. Right. Because you got to do all this. You got to keep doing what you're doing.
Sherwood Cook II [01:19:28]:
Yeah, right. And then you gotta, it's just another plate, you know, we're, we're, we're spinning plates. Yeah, Right. So it's got a lot of spinning plates going right now. But that's our big number one goal, is that, you know, and I hope that we can get up to, you know, 5, 5 or 600,000 on YouTube. That would be, that would be fantastic. I think, I think we'll do that.
Jeff Compton [01:19:50]:
But what's, what's the next event you're headed to? Somebody was asking me yesterday, the Canadian contingent was asking me if you guys were going to make the, the Tool show in Pennsylvania in. I believe it's April, and that's in Hershey, Pennsylvania. And I'm like, I'm not sure if they come up that far north or not, but like, you, you came to Austin, you came to Apex, but do.
Sherwood Cook II [01:20:11]:
You in the summertime? Sure. I come up north all the time. You know, just though that white stuff is on the ground, I don't, I have no interest, you know, Although I will be in Indiana in January. Wow. Yeah. I don't know how that happened, but, yeah, I got to go up there and do some stuff.
Jeff Compton [01:20:30]:
Are you going to Vision?
Sherwood Cook II [01:20:33]:
You know, this was the first year that we didn't go to Vision. Do you want my honest opinion on this?
Jeff Compton [01:20:40]:
I, I, the scuttlebutt is that a lot of people I'll Just say this. A lot of people that I talked to didn't make the trip to Vision, and a lot of people that I talked to don't see themselves making the trip. I guess it's the most politically correct way I can. I can put it without, you know, throwing shade at people, which I don't want to do.
Sherwood Cook II [01:21:00]:
I'm not ever throwing shade at anybody. I think it's. Vision is a wonderfully fantastic event. I think that the. The level that that has gotten to is, I mean, unbelievable. I love it. Right. I'll say here, I'll tell you this.
Sherwood Cook II [01:21:20]:
So in Jacksonville, when there's training in Jacksonville, which there hasn't been in forever, right? It's the same 20 guys in the room every single time.
Jeff Compton [01:21:27]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:21:27]:
Right? You'll get the onesies and the twosies that come in for one or two here or there. Right, right. It's the same 20 guys. Okay. I think that h. That's happened with Vision. You know, we've gone every single year.
Jeff Compton [01:21:40]:
For.
Sherwood Cook II [01:21:42]:
I don't even know how long, a very long time. Right? And it's fantastic. It's great. It's the. But there's only. There's only. So. I love Bernie, but there's only so many times I can be in Bernie's Scope class.
Sherwood Cook II [01:22:00]:
Right? I mean, and there's But. But here's the deal. It's like, what's Bernie gonna do? I mean, there's not like they can. It's like John Thornton. John Thornton is obviously brilliant, right? And. And, you know, he tries to come up with a lot of new stuff and good stuff, but, you know, it's like, you've been to a GDI class, you know, literally 10 times. It's like, well, okay, there's another GDI class. What? And I always say, it's worth it.
Sherwood Cook II [01:22:20]:
If you get a nugget, get one thing out of each class, it's worth it. It. Right. But it's getting harder and harder just. Just because it's hard for. For instructors. I mean, I. I am one.
Sherwood Cook II [01:22:36]:
Right. It's hard to come up with new stuff, you know, And. And I think that that's kind of hurting. And. And on top of that, you've got other events that are growing, right? You've got the North Carolina one that we went to. You've got Apex that's been around for a long time, but it's trying to push itself out there and grow. And so you've got options for people that, you know, that don't have to travel and to to Kansas in March. Right.
Sherwood Cook II [01:23:02]:
It's like, you know, it's not the, you know, but I think that. I think they tried it to do it in Mexico, didn't they? One year. Wasn't. Wasn't that something that Vision did? One year?
Jeff Compton [01:23:10]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:23:11]:
I don't know how well that went over, but yeah, I think it's a great event. I think all of them are great events. I just feel like we need to get more, you know, the 20. The 20 guys can't keep supporting, you know, the, the however many go up there, you know, you can't. You need new, new, new, new. We need new. And where's the new coming from? You know, that's the kicker. And I'll be honest with you, the, the.
Sherwood Cook II [01:23:38]:
Some people that I've talked to, which I'll be able to talk about later, in maybe in a few months. Okay, I can't do it right now, but I will tell you that. That a lot of people have no idea Vision exists.
Jeff Compton [01:23:51]:
Yeah, that's a big, big part of it is, you know, like. And I go to these shows. I had a conversation right up here in Ontario, Canada, right in Toronto. There's a show held every year, and it's held like two weeks right before, you know, Aston, North Carolina. So it's a conflict interest sometimes for me to be able to make both shows. I could make it work if I had to, but you wouldn't believe the amount of people in my own province. It's essentially the largest show in Canada, don't even know it exists.
Sherwood Cook II [01:24:18]:
It's the vision of Canada. Nobody knows it's there.
Jeff Compton [01:24:21]:
And, you know, they bring up Lindertech used to come up, right? Like some Brandon Sechler has come up. Like some great people have come up and taught. Nobody even knows about it. So people, if you're listening and you run one of these kind of events, when you think you're doing enough to promote the event, you need to do like five times as much. And I don't know how to do it or how to get it into those channels. Reach out to the parts vendors or something and work out a deal because if it's not hanging on a poster in the part store, they're never going to hear about it because the tool guys don't seem to mention it. I do everything I can do to talk about the events that are coming up because I think it's pivotable, pivotal that everybody attends at least one event like that in their life because it changes your. It changes your complete outlook.
Jeff Compton [01:25:06]:
But if we're not. The people that are putting them on are just lackadaisia. Like, yeah, you know, we got a thousand more members attending last year than we had the year before. That's not it. And it ain't gonna work. It's not gonna survive that.
Sherwood Cook II [01:25:18]:
Okay, you say you have a thousand more new coming, but how many did you lose? Right? You know, that's the key is like, okay, did the numbers actually grow overall? Or did we just get a lot of new. New people? Which would be great, you know, if we had new people. That's what you kind of need. Right. But we also need to kind of keep some of the other people. Yeah, I think that. And I'm, you know, not. Not saying this from a standpoint of, of, you know, trying to promote myself here, but I mean that.
Sherwood Cook II [01:25:44]:
I think the easiest channel for a lot of these companies, and a lot of them get it, and a lot of them just don't.
Jeff Compton [01:25:51]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:25:52]:
The easiest channels and the least expensive channels, quite honestly, to reach a lot of people is social media.
Jeff Compton [01:26:00]:
Yeah.
Sherwood Cook II [01:26:01]:
And it's not your social media. You know, it's not. You know, of course, the Vision Social media, the people that go to Vision. No, Vision Social Media, they're on their. They're on their stuff. They've already been there. They already know you exist list. You need new people.
Sherwood Cook II [01:26:14]:
So people like, you know, Eric, with a million subscribers. Yeah, I understand that a million followers are not. Not all technicians. Right. But a lot of them are, you know, and. And, you know, Pine Hollow. And, you know, just all of them, right. Just.
Sherwood Cook II [01:26:29]:
Just name them. Just reach out to them. Because most of the time, you know, they don't mind. Now, I'm not going to speak for them. I don't mind. We don't do sponsored stuff, right? We do. We do for Apex. Apex.
Sherwood Cook II [01:26:43]:
We're fine with that because we believe in it. I would certainly do something, you know, if they reached out, you know, for. For ASTA or. Or mere Vision or. If. If everything aligned, if we could, you know, I'm not going to just put it out there. I'll be more than happy to. If everything aligned right, we could all come to an agreement on how the.
Sherwood Cook II [01:27:00]:
Because we're not gonna change how we do things, right? I'm not doing a corporate video, you know, I'll do it how we do it, which is if we like the product, if we like the event, of course we want people to know about it. That's how we do everything in this building. If I use the thing, I'm going to show you that I use the thing so you can. Again, like we just said, people don't know it exists. People don't know half these tools exist. Right? So we'll 100 do that. And I'm sure other, other people will. I'm not speaking for them, but, but I think that that's one of the biggest ones because, you know, part stores throw flyers on the counter on a weekly basis, right? And 99 of them are right in the, you know, in the, in the dumpster.
Sherwood Cook II [01:27:44]:
You know, I mean, it's just, I don't. Who's got time, you know, but we've got to get them excited about wanting to get training. We need to get this. So you again, going back to the Craftsman thing. How do we get technicians, first of all to know that training exists, right? Because it's incredible to me that I was having a conversation with somebody the other day and I'm like, well, do you, do you know who John Thornton is? Do you know who Bernie Thompson, do you know who Brandon Steckler is? And no, no, no, I never heard of them. And I'm just like, do you know what vision is? No, I, I don't know. I never heard of that. It's like, you know, and it just, it's mind bending to me because it's like I would not be where I am today if it not were not for those people, right? And, and how do we get that in front of people and then once it is in front of them, how do we get them excited about wanting to go there? Because once you go, like you said, you know, you said you should go once in your lifetime.
Sherwood Cook II [01:28:45]:
Well, I think if you go once, you're going to go back many, many times, right? You know, we got to get them in the door. And I don't know what that looks like from their standpoint. I don't know what again, what is their overhead, what, what happens there, how do we make it, you know, But I, you can't just be status quo. We got to get these, we got to get these people who have never been to training and don't even know what the training looks like to get them in the building, right? You know, maybe that's scholarships or something, man. I don't know. We need to all kind of get together and go, what can we do here?
Jeff Compton [01:29:16]:
You know, I mean, because there's some.
Sherwood Cook II [01:29:18]:
Really smart young tech.
Jeff Compton [01:29:22]:
Every day more and more on social media and guys that are just putting up little, you know, little six minute videos and they're showing their diagnostic process and something and I'm like, you're 22 years old and I was not as good as you are at 22. You know, smart. Oh, and, and it's, I thank the Internet for that. I really do. And I take pride in the fact if I can just be 1% responsible for somebody finding a Bernie Thompson or John Thornton or Brandon Steckler, Paul Dan or a Sherwood, you know, if I can be responsible for somebody finding that, I'm good, man. I've had the effect that I want to have. You know what I mean? Because it was only an algorithm that ever showed it to me. You know what I mean? It was just by fluke, you know, I hung around in itn, but I didn't get on the social media side of it until I was just sitting there board scrolling and a repair video pops up with, with Paul Danner.
Jeff Compton [01:30:18]:
If I'd have never seen that, I wouldn't have been where I am right now. There's no possible way. It wasn't going to happen otherwise. I wasn't getting exposed, it wasn't getting trained, it wasn't none of that. So if we can reach just 5% more people, these young people on social media, to show them, go back to the value of training, the value of education, the value of what it is really, you bring, bring, bring that career mindset, bring that, I want to be that craftsman again, then, then we're going to solve so many of these problems in the industry, it's not even going to be funny. We're not going to be talking and arguing about.
Sherwood Cook II [01:30:55]:
Should we charge and you can't charge that much.
Jeff Compton [01:30:57]:
And I mean like it's, we're going to have all these other issues already solved. It's going to be, it's going to take care of a lot of itself.
Sherwood Cook II [01:31:05]:
So, and, and you know, also there are a lot of options online. So like, you know, Keith Perkins, the L1 training, have you, you know, of course I know Keith and I mean, incredibly smart individual, right? I keep missing his Monday night things because I'm like, you know, I, I said we're talking about this thing and then, you know, we're talking about it. I don't forget where we were. Maybe we were at SEMA or Apex, wherever we were talking and he was saying he had this thing and I'm like, oh. And so I went on and I'm like, oh, I'm actually already signed up for the thing. Oh, but I didn't. But I'm not. But I'm not in the paid version of it.
Sherwood Cook II [01:31:49]:
Right. So I signed up for the paid version of it. And then I want to get on this thing, but it's like super inexpensive and, and some great information on just the things that I've gone in there and looked at. And you know, what's, what's. What guys need to understand is young guys. Will. Will. Gosh.
Sherwood Cook II [01:32:09]:
I want to make sure I say this right, because I. I actually had a knock down, drag out fight with a girl in a class. Live class, okay. Because I said something that her mentor, her. Her lead tech did not believe in. Right? I'll tell you what it is. I said, you need to take the bleeder loose when you, you're. When you're squeezing in the brake caliper.
Sherwood Cook II [01:32:32]:
Right?
Jeff Compton [01:32:32]:
Okay.
Sherwood Cook II [01:32:33]:
And she said, absolutely not. He's done that thousands of time. He told me, that's a waste of time. Don't ever do that. And he's never had a problem. And then we had, we, we. But she did come back to me at lunch and she's like, I'm really sorry. I'm like, no, I love your passion and I love the fact that you so respect that.
Sherwood Cook II [01:32:49]:
That person. Right. That you're willing to almost go to blows with me, you know, but, you know, the, the what, what, what? That lead tech, you know, what I would say to him is, I know you've been doing it a long time. I know you're smart. I know you got a lot of good skills and a lot of good techniques. That doesn't mean that you know everything and you have every skill and you have every technique. It doesn't mean that everything that you've done, your whole career still holds true today or that it was ever true. To be quite honest with you, maybe it wasn't the best practice and you just didn't know it.
Sherwood Cook II [01:33:20]:
You know, never stop learning, never stop taking classes, never stop, whatever it might be, never stop. Because, I mean, as long as I'm doing this, I'm going to be learning from people, right? And you have to be. I mean, I think I cannot. I cannot stress that enough for, for guys.
Jeff Compton [01:33:44]:
You know, I. I don't think we're going to see you go anywhere for quite a while. I don't think the industry is going to let you go right away, Sherwood. So, I mean, I know you want to dial it back a little bit in 2026, but I think. I think we're gonna be seeing just as much of you, so. Which is not a bad thing.
Sherwood Cook II [01:33:59]:
So I'm good with it. Yeah, this is looking to play golf. I get to play golf, you know, a couple of days a week. I'm, you know, Fridays and Saturdays, you know.
Jeff Compton [01:34:08]:
Yeah, that's it. I mean, everybody should be on a four day work week by now at the shops.
Sherwood Cook II [01:34:15]:
That's not true. I think it's a really good thing.
Jeff Compton [01:34:17]:
So, yeah, everybody, I just. This is my, this is my Christmas present to everybody. You're gonna hear it now after Christmas, unfortunately. But I mean, that's just. I wanted to do this and, and you know, this is Sherwood, somebody that I have so much respect for and I've been very lucky to be able to meet the man in person and shake his hand and consider him a friend. And. And I can't say enough about how cool their family is and what they're truly doing and where their heart lies for this industry. And, you know, we all have to do not more, but we all have to think about, we all have a responsibility when we every day, when we go in and do this as a career, about how deep that responsibility actually really runs.
Jeff Compton [01:34:58]:
And, you know, there's a legacy in this industry that we have to preserve, but at the same time, we have to do better every day. So I keep saying, you know, just shoot to be 1% better tomorrow than you were today. And, you know, if you're not going to do it every day, but at the end of the month, if you're 10% better at something, 10 is incredible. That's a major milestone, right? So just always keep pushing for that because, I mean, Sherwood's a guy that is still, like, he just finished saying, has never stopped learning. And that's the, that's the secret power. That's the superpower to this, guys. You know, your body's going to change and slow down and things are going to start to hurt, but as long as you keep developing your brain and your skills, you can, you can do this as long as you want. And it is a rewarding, fulfilling career.
Jeff Compton [01:35:44]:
And that's the whole thing is just approach it like that. Try to be a craftsman tomorrow, guys and girls. So anyway, Sherwood, Merry Christmas, buddy. It's always a good time to talk to you. So, you know, that tree up. Go ahead.
Sherwood Cook II [01:36:01]:
There's that tree up, man.
Jeff Compton [01:36:02]:
Yeah, there's a seat here for you anytime you want to be here. Say hi to Sherwood for us. I'm sorry he's feeling under the weather, but a lot of us are trying to kick that right now. So, you know, and thank you for everything you do, Sherwood, we really appreciate you.
Sherwood Cook II [01:36:15]:
Hey, I appreciate you everything you do.
Jeff Compton [01:36:17]:
Thank you, man. We'll talk to you all soon. I love you all. Bye. Hey, if you could do me a favor real quick and, like, comment on and share this episode, I'd really appreciate it. And please, most importantly, set the podcast to automatically download every Tuesday morning. As always, I'd like to thank our amazing guests for their perspectives and expertise, and I hope that you'll please join us again next week on this journey of change. Thank you to my partners in the ASA group and to the Changing the Industry podcast.
Jeff Compton [01:36:48]:
Remember what I always say, in this industry, you get what you pay for. Here's hoping everyone finds their missing 10 millimeter, and we'll see you all again next time.