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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.
Swell AI Transcript: Episode 4 With Justin Porter - Ready For Publishing - No Outro.wav
00:00 Justin Porter When you talk about you didn't poach him, I see it like this, if you hadn't offered that young man another opportunity, we'd have probably lost him in the industry, right? He probably would be out of it. Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to another exciting thought-provoking episode of the Jada Mechanic podcast. My name is Jeff and I'd like to thank you for joining me on this journey of reflection and insight into the toils and triumphs of a career in automotive repair. After more than 20 years of skin knuckles and tool debt, I want to share my perspectives and hear other people's thoughts about our industry. Support yourself a strong coffee or grab a cold Canadian beer and get ready for some great conversation. Welcome Justin. Welcome. So you were coaching your kids baseball tonight? Yes, junior high baseball. Right on, right on.
01:10 Jeff Compton Yeah, yeah, yeah, a bunch of teenage boys. That's a lot of fun. It is. We got 26 kids. Have you been out fishing yet this year? Yes, I went to Missouri, done some blue cat fishing and we went up the river to try to catch some white bass and they were not generating water. So you know what river fish do whenever the water is not moving. Yeah. Now tell us, for those that aren't familiar, where are you located exactly? I am 27 miles west of Bloomington, Indiana. Okay. I am in the middle of nowhere. I am in the middle of nowhere. I am between Bloomington and Terre Haute. Okay, and did you grow up in…
01:52 Justin Porter Yes, I've been here my whole life within the area. Yes. I'm 43, so 43 years in the area. Yeah, we had some friends. We've got our early season bass season up here, which is only in one zone. So you can fish lake and river, you can fish in the river, you can fish in the river. So you can fish in the river, you can fish in the river. We have our early bass season up here, which is only in one zone. So you can fish Lake Ontario, you can fish Bay of Quinny for bass right now.
02:22 Jeff Compton We had our warmest day, I do Fahrenheit, so we were probably almost 80 something on Saturday and Sunday. What are you today? Because it's cold down here today. We're probably back down to 50, a little high, I would say high 40s, low 50s and damp, cool, wet all day. We played baseball all weekend and it was 80 on Saturday when we played and it was 45 on Sunday. With nothing but misting rain.
02:54 Justin Porter My one friend was out so he could fish where he legally could fish the bass, he caught himself 40 largemouth. That's a pretty good day up there this early in the year. Yeah, they're up just getting upstage and ready to spawn, right? So he said he was whacking them on a crankbait and a chatter bait, so he had a good time.
03:11 Jeff Compton They don't get no better than that. No, that's pretty easy fishing, eh? They say here they were spawning, I'd say this cold snap's pushed them back off. I think the big ones have already spawned.
03:22 Justin Porter None of ours are even close to that yet. But if the weather stays like this. How long has the ice been off? So on that body of water, less than a month, I'd say.
03:33 Jeff Compton I'd say in some of the back bays, three weeks maybe before all the ice is gone. That's crazy. We didn't see hardly any ice this year down here. We had lots of ice. How long you been at this shop? Since I was eight. Since I was eight. So the name of it's Bill's Auto Repair. Nice. Bill would be my stepdad. Him and my mom got married when I was eight. So in the summertime, I would sit out in the driveway and take small block Chevys apart. At eight years old. I have no idea why. I don't know what we'd done with the parts. We put them in a shed. Back then used parts were, that's what we used. I remember going to the junkyard when I was a kid. But yeah, I sat out in the driveway with an impact taking heads off of small block Chevys and front covers and oil pans. And that's kind of how I got started. Yeah.
04:32 Justin Porter They're so much easier back then, eh? They were such a… Virtually unchanged, right? From 55 to 85.
04:41 Jeff Compton Yeah. Yeah. There's not a lot of difference in a small block Chevy versus the new, the valve trains that are… The cams are moved up and down and all that. There's not a lot of difference. But I actually went to school to do bodywork. When I got out of high school, I went and done bodywork at a local two-year school. In the process of me going, I wasn't going to graduate. Let's just be blunt. Yeah. Too much fun. One of the guys that was working at our shop was 70 something. He fell and broke a hip and we were short guys. I was ready to be done with school. I told my stepdad, I'm like, hey, let me quit college other than my automotive classes. I'll pick up the slack during the day. And then when you hire somebody, I'll go do bodywork.
05:30 Justin Porter So it was kind of, you didn't think automotive mechanics was going to be your full-time gig or you just kind of as a temporary thing, right? Your passion was bodywork.
05:41 Jeff Compton Yeah. We, I thought so. The sanding and all that stuff was, had kind of done me in. We were going to add it to our shop, do bodywork and repair. So when I started filling in, then our alignment guy decided he was going to quit and go drive a truck. So I was asked if I wanted to stay on and learn how to do that until he found somebody else. So 25-ish years ago, I'm still there. I started out with the front ends and I got really good. I was known because we had race cars. That's kind of what got me in college. My stepdad put me in a race car and I decided I needed one.
06:21 Justin Porter So I was more worried about how fast I could make money to go fast. So are we talking like a circle track? Are we talking like a direct car?
06:28 Jeff Compton Yes. Circle track. Circle track. There's five or six local dirt tracks around here. Back in the late 90s, it was mid to late 90s, it was big. Jeff Gordon's raced at Bloomington, which is just down the road. Okay. Tony Stewart's from Columbus, which is about an hour 20 or hour 40, hour 50 from where I'm at. If you want a dirt track race, Southern Indiana is where to go. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Nice. What I learned there, kind of transferred over into the alignment business.
07:00 Justin Porter I was just going to say, because that's, you know, most guys I know that are still kind of dabbling in circle track really, really understand alignment better than, you know. Yeah. I don't want to say better, but I mean, it goes to a different level of, okay, it's green and it's good, right? It's, what can I actually make the car do? So yes.
07:20 Jeff Compton Castor, I learned a lot about Castor real quick. Yeah. Camber and just the way it all worked and how it even affected the rear end of the car. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It, I got to where I was doing a lot of drag cars for guys and old cars and just because we got known for that. Yeah. Which helps drive the other business too, right? Yes. But when you do front end work for, I don't know, 15, 18 years, just where your hands don't move well, your back hurts, your knees hurt. Yeah. And I told the old man one day, I said, we're going to have to find somebody or I may have to do something else. Mm-hmm. Is it just beat you up? So we started looking for another guy because there's, at the shop now, there are, there's three techs and my stepdad. And then we just hired a lady for the office. Mm-hmm. We're a four bay shop. And your stepdad's still working away? Yeah. Yeah. He's, I don't know how old he is. I'm sure if he listens, he'll be upset, but he just had a birthday, the 13th this month. So I think he's 58. Wow. Man, that's sad. I don't even know. Yeah. Yeah. He still, he still likes to do it. He kind of falls in that technician first, business guy second category. Yeah. You know, I read the, I'm still trying to finish the E-Myth revised or revisited or whatever it is that Lucas talks about. Yeah. That's on my list as well to get done. My stepdad fits that pretty well. It makes a lot of sense after you think, and most of the shop owners around here fit that.
08:52 Justin Porter They were just technicians that went out on their own. Yeah. I think that's, I mean, I would, I dare to say that that is easily 60 to 70% of the industry. Right. Oh yeah. Business is that exact mentality and that exact story. You know how I've networked with so many different people and it just resounds so much with me because I think that's, it's so, you know, we get frustrated sometimes with the way things are, but for so many of them, they built it from nothing. Right. And they built it with just a passion to get away from the way they were treated. Right. And it's so hard for them to relearn or relinquish some of the control or to rethink, you know, whatever old analogy, old dogs, you know, old tricks, whatever you want to talk about. So it really resonates with me, especially the last year, getting to know more and more owners, how hard that is that's that to tackle that, you know, because I've worked for people that are not car people, right. That are not mechanics that are, that have just got into the business and they sometimes that comes, that comes with positives, but sometimes there's a huge disconnect there too, right. What is the reality that you and I face every day, right. As a tech if they've never done it.
10:09 Jeff Compton So those guys have to really rely on shop manager. I mean, right. Cause they don't know. They get out there on the floor. They're just, they're lost, right. They're good with numbers. Yep. Bad with cars. Yep. Good people still sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of the opposite of the rest of us. Yeah. I, I always wondered what that would be like working for somebody that was a business only. Yeah.
10:30 Justin Porter Didn't know anything about cars. Yeah. I, I, it was, you know, most of my experience of that is people in dealerships and you're like, well, if they're in a dealership, they know about cars. But I mean, you know, people within the industry know that there are tons of people that work in a dealership that knows zero about cars, right. But they've got HR skills or they've got management training or something, such as economics majors, whatever. Right. And they, they gravitate into that business or people snap them up and they go, oh, they're going to be able to change, turn it around. I've seen more than one dealer principle that was never been a tech. My, some of them were never even salespeople, right. They're just business people. I believe that there's, you know, it's, I say it all the time. It's not like selling an iPhone, you know, it is, it's so different. Like it's, you know, such a unique set of challenges, right. And it's so hard, I think for us when we're seeing this industry evolve and we're trying to, you know, you want to keep the people, the good people in it. You want to help them, you want to see them prosper and succeed. But then you see some of that, the old, what's the word I want to use, kind of the old problems. And we just keep going in the same cycles, right. With the way we do business and the way we treat our people and the way we sell this industry to our young people and the way that we represent ourselves. Tell me some of that, what you've seen, what you struggled against. I know, big question.
11:55 Jeff Compton I struggled more. I never really thought about a whole lot of it until I, Facebook. Yeah. Like I just thought that what we done was normal. I thought, you know, cause we're kind of rural and I know five or six of the shops, there was two or three of them that were considered the best of the best when I was younger. They're not that anymore. They didn't change with times. The struggles I had when I was younger was I never thought I could make enough money. And this is funny because we kind of chatted a little bit today about flat rate. But when I was in my twenties, I thought that I needed to be a flat rate guy because I was doing nothing but ball joints and breaks, right. And I would literally keep a tally in my notebook of what I'd done that week and what I should have got paid. Secretly, I'd done it for myself, right. It got to the point where I'm like, man, I'm not I should, he's making, everybody's making all this money off of me, right. It's a family business. So you're not being paid flat rate at the family business. You're being paid. No salary. Yeah. Yeah. And all everybody there is salary. But when I was younger, I thought I was getting screwed. Yeah. I mean, but I was young and dumb, right. And the older I've gotten, the more into the business side of things I've gotten. I realized that out of that, let's say $80 an hour then or whatever, $50 an hour. And I was getting paid 30. In all reality, I was probably getting paid more than I Yeah. Yeah. Or finance, maybe it's not about dessert, but financially, it might not have been the smartest breakdown, right. Right. You know, I, I kept thinking once I got through it all, I got older and more mature and realized how business worked. I realized that it was not, that I was not getting paid. I mean, that flat rate was not a good idea either,
13:48 Justin Porter but I was well taken care of. Let's put it that way. I was being a very selfish kid. Yeah. I've, I've been fortunate to work both in my career. I know you're not a flat rate guy. You know, see, I've had some years where it was really good way back, you know, so 2003 through 2010 at the, the one crisis that I stayed the longest at, it, it was very good for me. I made good money. I learned the product really well. You learn to play the game, right? So you kind of learn how you kind of learn to spot the low hanging fruit. You kind of learn the pattern failures. You live and die by that. Right. So I mean, but it was the culture always of like, you never knew when you got in the next day, you could fix the, I've said it a hundred times in the groups and everything else. You could fix the most complicated complex problem. You could take the car that's been kicked around to three different dealers. Like I was in Ottawa. So, I mean, we had six dealerships within 10 miles of my dealership, all Chrysler dealers. So it was nothing to see cars sold at a different dealer
14:59 Jeff Compton wind up in your service bay for warranty work. Right. It had happened daily, hourly. But most dealerships are now like around here, one of them will be known to sell the car cheaper, but one, two towns over will be the one that everybody goes to get it fixed because it's known for whatever, whoever it is back there that fixes it. There'll be that one guy that everybody wants
15:21 Justin Porter to go to. And my dealer was terrible for sales. Awful. Their sales department was one of the lowest scoring in the province. They just, they didn't have good leadership. They didn't understand that, you know, you've got to move the inventory for the inventory to make money. And they're all about, well, listen, if we sell it for this price, we only made X on it. Yeah. But if it sits there for over a year on the lot, it never sells. The interest you paid to the bank on that, right. Ate all your profit. There's nothing there. So we were known for being good at fixing the car. We were known good at getting, you know, we didn't say, oh yeah, we're three weeks out. You know, we never said no to anybody. It was not uncommon to get, see a lot of different cars come in, sold at other places that had been around the horn that were still broke. And you had to learn then, okay, well, let's fix these cars. And you learned if you didn't see one, we rubber stamped a lot of estimates, put it that way, right? You kind of knew with your problem failures. And I mean, I'm not saying we were rubber stamping against the customer. We were, you know, if you had a caravan and you knew X amount of kilometers, it probably had a steering rack that was leaking. It needed some tie rod ends. The sway bar links were falling out of them all the time. The brakes didn't last. You know, there was a battery service to clean back when they still had, you know, spark plugs that only went 40,000 K and they would start to miss. Like it was, it was awesome. We'd make lots of money. And you know, the customer, as long as you fix the car when it left, they were happy. They did not, when you're fixing it under warranty, they were good. But it's the culture of always not knowing that the next day may hold. It was hard some days to really handle. At the dealership, that was the toughest part for me was trying to figure out how to budget for the lean months. And then how to keep my attitude positive. When you would see, some days you wouldn't make four hours, right? And then other days you'd have more work than you could get done in a day. And then when you were backed up, you'd watch some of the work that really you were the one who should be dispatched it and it would wind up in somebody else's hands. And then when that would happen, and if it came back, you still got it to be fixed. But they, of course, just, you know, they hit it with the rubber stamp, gravy train, you know, passport. You're stuck doing, you know, I say the analogy all the time, you know, it got the fuel injection service and the spark plugs and the ECM update. And you were the lowly bugger that had to put the warranty GR valve on, right? Like that sucked. You didn't get any upsell. That really was hard for my attitude to keep that right. Because it's, to me, it's a, at the time, it's a very easy remedy problem. Stop dispatching it to the guy that either doesn't want to do it properly or can't. And more work for me. See, that's customers don't want to. We don't have that problem. Yeah. I don't, I don't know how, you know, I didn't know there was another world outside of what we had. I didn't know that that existed in the dealership. I've never worked anywhere else. I mean, I've never really truly had another job. Even I've worked some side stuff, but never, I mean, I've always just been where I'm at. So I don't know. Yeah. I don't know any of that. Never felt it. Don't know that I could have stayed in the industry long dealing with that. And that's the thing. Like I don't know how guys, well, I mean, I know how to do it, but I've never, I can't say that, oh, I've done flat rate outside of the dealer environment, right? I haven't done it. I mean, flat rate just seems, seems awful. It seems like a lot of work on the front of the house too, trying to figure out guys are getting paid right. And like you said, you got guys taking jobs they didn't need or just doing the gravy train. That's my job. Now is the gravy train. That's what everybody tells me. I get the easy ones. Yeah. But see, from what I hear, you don't though, right? You're the kind of, I don't do a lot of you. You're in the flashing thing.
19:26 Jeff Compton You're into, you're doing, you're touching on EEPROM stuff. Yeah. I do some EEPROM. I mean, I'm, I'm not good at it. Um, yeah, but you're humble. That's, um, I've been to, uh, Michael Christofferson and Pedro's class down at Brandon deals place. I learned a lot. Like every class I've ever been to, I went back and got better at it. They, I got enough information to understand what I didn't understand and then go back and figure it out myself. I like EEPROM. I'm not sure there's money in it yet. I've saved my own butt a few times and other shops a few times. And, and I got a locksmith buddy. I met in a class that has helped me a bunch with EEPROM because those guys are good at it. Right. I mean, they, they're real good. He's helped me in the situations. I mean, I'm a phone to friend kind of guy. I mean, if it wasn't for Matt Scuddy, I'd probably still be trying to program a Chrysler a year and a half ago. Yeah. He's the dude is, yeah. Let's not give him a whole lot of credit. Okay. Let's know we all know how that's going to go. His head won't fit through the door for a little man. He has a huge, I adore him though. I like Scuddy. Me and him got to talk in one day because we ended up in a message in Facebook that blew up and he wrote me on Facebook and we kind of had a common ground and he wrote me and said, you know, we were just discussing it. And then he found, I found out he liked to fish. And then the next thing I know, that's how I met you. Right. Next thing I know, I'm like, who the hell put me in another group or message?
21:05 Justin Porter And it says fishing. And then I realized that Scuddy really didn't know how to do it. And he needed us to show him how. Yeah. He's, he would, I would, every time he would rig me, I'm thinking, oh, he's going to ask me a question about a car or he's going to, you know, nope. It's like, I'm thinking about buying this rod or this reel or, you know, and I'd be like, well, that's not what I use, but I mean, I do know friends that use it and, you know, I can't say that it's a bad thing. And you've seen me rip on him, right? Oh yeah. He's, he's yet to get into some big fish, right? And he just catches them little 12 ounces down there. He lives in Florida. How could you not be catching seven pound bass? That's what I said. I'll show him a set of a video. It was like, well, Roland Martin says he caught another 10 today, right? That's like that poor guy. Yeah. And there's Matt on the bank and he's, you know, holding up a one pounder. And I'm like, I'm in Canada where we have a short season. My fish, you know, my five pound fish is 20 years old, right? His five pound fish is seven years old. Right. And I'm like, do you know how old this fish is?
22:08 Jeff Compton This fish is huge. And he's like, yeah, it's like, you're, you're a Dick. There's no way that you should be able to catch them. He did call me the other day and I didn't call him back for a couple of days. And I called him. I said, Hey, I'm just calling you back. He said, way to go. It's been two days. I said, it ain't like you needed advice, right? You're not calling me to fix cars. He said, actually I was. And I'm like, shit, man, what do you, he's like, yeah, didn't you tell me something about a radar and a Tahoe the other day, you had to do a certain button to make it work. I said,
22:37 Justin Porter no, it wasn't me. He said, nevermind. I don't need you and hung up on me. So that is such scudge, such scudge. When I was at Nissan, he'd be like, uh, he'd message me. He's like, I'm trying to program this, this Nissan. And he's like, it's a 2021. And I'm like, dude, I don't even have a 2021 to program yet. Like, what are you doing? And he's like, well, I'm at the body shop and he's like, can you find me this file number? And I'm like, let me go see. And I, never was able to come through with him with what he needed, but he was always so gracious.
23:11 Jeff Compton That's not in the last radius, just thanks for trying. Yeah. I know he's got a bad rap was, and he, I'd be honest with you. The first time I ever communicated with him on Facebook, he yelled at me. I was in the J the, in his Facebook J box page and I was in a hurry shop had called me and said, can you program an airbag module in a Honda Odyssey? And I'm like, shit, I don't know. Never done a Honda. Cause I was pretty early in programming at that point. And I met and I messaged, put a board or put a message on the board and said, can I use a Cardac three to program an airbag module in a Honda Odyssey, whatever year it was and scoundriage first comment was what the hell does service information say? And why are you writing on here without looking at it first? And I, and I thought, what an ass, you know, what a complete ass. And then I go look up service information. I figure out how to do it. Realize that I didn't really need a J box unless
24:07 Justin Porter I wanted to update it because it come programmed. And so now every time I call him, I'm like, Hey, I got a question, but service information says this, but it doesn't work. So what am I supposed to do? Yeah. Yeah. He's one of the guys that knows when the service information is wrong or, or when, you know, there is a shortcut, a workaround, whatever you want to call it. He knows it.
24:31 Jeff Compton Yes. Yeah. He, he, I've the hundreds of conversations I've had with them. It has always read the service information. What does it say? But he told me to stay out of EEPROM too, but he has all that. He has all that tool too. He's like, you're not going to make you money.
24:45 Justin Porter I'm like, yeah, but I want to save my ass sometimes. Yeah. He, you know, and that's the thing we, him and I have talked a lot about, well, you're not going to make money. You're not going to make money. You're not going to make money. But I think he's starting to, I think he's starting to really
25:01 Jeff Compton value himself at the level that he needs to. I think he had some, yeah, I think he's had some help with that. I think he's talked to some people and he's got it figured out. Cause he's like the
25:10 Justin Porter rest of us. I don't think he's a business guy. Nope. No, he's not. He's, you know, I don't want to say that he's well, he's called himself unemployable, but I don't think that's the case. I just think that it's like, he's very, now, damn it. If you own a shop, do you think you could put up with scuddy in your shop all day? Answer that honestly, Jeff, he'd be too smart. No, I couldn't be too smart. Cause he'd be right every time, right? He wouldn't be right on the business side, but you'd be like, he'd be like, go out there and put that in that car. He'd be like, that's not
25:39 Jeff Compton going to fix that car. Like just frigging do it, Matt. And he'd be like, no, I've called him before. And I'm like, man, I've run out of options. I'm like, well, it's this, I said, why do you need to prove it? He said, well, you proved this everything. It's not anything else. So it has to be that. Yeah. He goes, I see it all the time. I'm like, okay. But that's still not enough. He's like,
25:57 Justin Porter it's nothing else. Just go put order one and put it on there. Yep. Yeah. We've had lots of conversations like that where he's like, you know, you don't have to sometimes, you know, he, you've heard him say, we sometimes make it more complex than it needs to be. Right. Sometimes just because you didn't figure out that test, didn't show you that that suspect part is bad, doesn't mean that that test wasn't valid. It just means that it's one more thing that you've been able to disprove. Right. Yes. And he says, you have to remember that, that that's part of the process. And sometimes
26:33 Jeff Compton it's a long way around, but it, no test is, is a bad test. You know, no, I kind of found it in on a charger the other day. I got into a charger with an alternator light, but it was charging and I'm in some group messages and I messaged some guys and they started responding and the alternator had an internal resistor that we didn't think was working. So they're like, put the resistor in line and do this and do that. Let's figure this out. And then all my tests come
27:00 Justin Porter back kind of inconclusive, but we decided it was the alternator. Yeah. But when you got five or six guys on a group chat messaging you, I learned so much in like 20 minutes, it was unbelievable. I was like, Holy shit. I didn't think of that. Why did I do this? Why didn't I do that? I mean, you know, you got Tommy out there and PJ and all these guys that just are well smart guys. Yep. Smart. It's the smartest of the smart. Networking was changed my career. Going to Keith Perkins class was amazing. The guys I met. That's why I've done is so much that I've done for so many years in the groups and I've caught a lot of bullets and stabbed a few times with it, gotten a reputation. But I mean, it's because like all I ever wanted to do was to be able to bring the change that needs to happen, help the people that want to network with one another. Not just at the end of it to say, it's not about winning an argument or trying to show people, well, I'm better than you or that because I'm certainly not. I am not at the level of most of the people that I network with. The difference is, is that I've been able to help the people get to know each other, right? Get to be exposed to each other, to see what they're doing. And I mean, would they have found each other eventually? Yes. But there's a whole lot of people that maybe would have been too intimidated, right? To approach a Matthew Scudridge. If there hadn't been Facebook groups where it's like, okay, so I've seen that name, right? I know that he's smart and he seems like an okay guy. I think I'm going to ask him a question and I hope that he can help me. And that's all I've ever wanted. And I think that, you know, I've said it before, to go to AST and meet so many of these people that I, you know, like yourself and Matt and Brian and
28:56 Jeff Compton Paul Danner and to meet them in person after years of talking with them, right? Was life change. Right. And I left AST a little early because I promised my boy I would be back because he played that Sunday and it was his first game with this new team. And I was afraid the hurricane was going to keep me there. So I left a day early. Obviously the hurricane did not turn it. I mean, I wasn't worried about the hurricane itself. I was afraid that the, some guys had convinced me that the mountains might get bad and I would take me a day or two to get home. So I left, but I did get to meet Paul in person, which was amazing. And you, and I met Lucas outside the
29:37 Justin Porter elevator, shook his hand, said hi, thanks for what he does for us. I see David sitting out front, but he's doesn't seem approachable. So I just let him sit there. He is not as approachable as Lucas. No, he is not. I was actually, I was in a hurry or I would have stopped and talked to me, but they're different personalities for sure. I can't say that one is better than the other. It's just, you know, as working with the two of them as much as I do, I've learned that that it's, you know, they're, they're like yin and yang. You need them both.
30:13 Jeff Compton So, but that networking is like the first class I went to was an, I was a Keith Perkins class that Isaac had put on down around Isaac's place. I had bought a laptop off Isaac. That's how me and him met. He was on Facebook. It was when he first started selling them, like 2018, he had just started and I needed one because I'm not a PC guy. I really struggled with that part of it. And I messaged him. I'm like, Hey, I really think I need one of these. And he said, here, call me. So me and him talked for like an hour and a half on the phone one day. Then when that class come up, he texts or he texts me and said, Hey, you want in on this? And I'm like, I've never been to anything outside of pizza party classes, but I could see, you can see the programming thing coming. Right. I mean, it just kept getting bigger and bigger and demand. And so I'm like, I struggle with Chrysler. I struggle with, I wouldn't even touch Nissan back then scared to death of them. And I went to that class and I met, I don't, I think there was 20, 20 guys in there. And I still talked to probably three or four of them on a regular basis. One of them I've become good friends with. He's like one of the locksmith guys that was there. And he got me into keys. He said, why are all them locksmiths were there. And they said, why are you guys not into keys? You already have the tools
31:27 Justin Porter other than the key cutters. So I got into that, which I really enjoy because it kind of goes hand in hand with the EPROM thing. It's something different, right? I, most of the guys that are your, what we call them, upper 5%, 1%, whatever you want to call them, the top of the class guys, I'm going to guess 99% of them get bored easy, right? Yeah. I mean, I'd say that that's, that's personality trait for them for sure. Right. I mean, I get bored easy and stimulation. Yeah.
31:58 Jeff Compton I have a, I have an addictive personality. I mean, you all see my fishing room. It's, I pour lead, I paint crank baits, I build fish. I mean, not as much as I used to, but when I do something, we do it full bore. My boy had, we play baseball. We, he will play probably eight games this week. Some of us travel. So we'll play two or three a day on the weekend. So may not have been the best decision of my life to get him into that, but we have a lot of fun
32:27 Justin Porter with it. It's good. It'll make good memories, man, for sure. Yeah. Would you, would you say in your little corner of the world that you've got your market kind of sewn up cornered in terms of your, your skillset? Like, or like, I guess what I'm saying, is there anyone else that's doing what
32:44 Jeff Compton you're doing? Not, not local to me. No, I, Bloomington being 28 miles away, I don't see a lot from there, but I'm seeing more and more starting to trickle to me, word of mouth. But as far as within a 15 to 20 mile radius, yes. I mean, I've gotten calls 45 minutes away to come program. The problem is, is when you give them a price to go, you know, it's an, it's an hour and a half worth of driving, probably 30 to 40 minutes by the time you get your stuff in, set a program, get out, get paid, you know, so you're looking at minimum of two hours, more like two and a half, you know, what kind of money can you make in two and a half hours in a shop doing breaks? Right. Yep. So why it's, I used to do it for fun. Like I would get that phone call and I would just quote them a price that I knew they would take because I wanted to do it. And then the business side, now you don't feel like you have to. Yeah, right. I don't feel like I have to. And then you start running numbers and you realize maybe you lost money, right? I mean, but the experience I gained, that's a question that I still haven't answered. No matter who I've talked to is do, how does that work? Like if I spend eight hours on a car, get my butt just kicked, right. And charge reasonably well for it, but probably not near enough. Is that training I got in the middle of that? Is that worth the money that we didn't get paid
34:12 Justin Porter for my time? Yeah, it's, it depends on who you're talking to, right? The number of crunchers and the bean counters, you're going to say, no, they're going to say you should have never touched that
34:20 Jeff Compton car. And I think Sean Tipping had a podcast on this the other day. I believe I, cause I think I listened to it. I don't think I've made it all the way through yet. I think it was the Matt and Matt
34:28 Justin Porter show. Yeah. Whereas I look at it as like, okay, so yes, you should have taken it because A, at the end of the day, that's still your job, right? That's what you're known to do. That's what the customer brought you is a car that needed to be repaired or diagnosed or whatever we want to call it. In a perfect world, it's not supposed to take eight hours that you maybe can only bill five for, but did you make it, you know, did you make it back to home plate? Yeah, you did. So, you know, you've got to see that as a win, right? It's not a perfect like a home run, but you did manage to make it in. And I think that that, you know, there's always, it's like Paul Danner was talking about last month, there's always training on the job. And sometimes you can get paid for it and sometimes you can't, but you still got to get that training, right? We still, at the end of the day, we have to learn the car. If you go home and at the end of the day, and you, you, you know it better than when you walked in something about your alternator, like you're talking about on your Dodge. If you're more versed in that system than you were eight hours
35:38 Jeff Compton before, it's not a loss. That's the way I see it. The next one, the next one I can charge well for and probably have way less time in it than what is working. And it's like most communication problems. I mean, I have a minimum on my communication problems for as far as price. If it's a no-com and it's more than one module, I try to start out at 300 bucks. Yeah. Because we all know what that's going to turn into most of the time. I mean, it's, you're going to have a couple of two or three hours in a minimal. Yep. It's- And if it's got an aftermarket, anything wired into it, you probably should go even farther up, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. We, that's one of the problems that we still are trying to work out is billing for testing. I try not to use the word diag. I, yeah. I keep trying to use the word. I tell the guys, there are the people in the front. It's testing, it's testing, it's testing. You know, we, I have, I'm blessed. We have a customer base that is amazing. We are in a very interesting financial area. We're very rural, but we also have a government naval base that's 12 miles south of town. So a lot of people here are paid. I mean,
36:48 Justin Porter we have nice cars around here. We have, you know, everybody drives Tahos and F250s and we have farmers. And so I'm blessed with most of my, I can be picky on my customers. That's good. Yeah. It took us a long time to figure out that we didn't want to work on everything. Quite possibly the hardest thing I think in this business is to learn to say no. Yeah. Lucas says the job's not to fix all the cars, right? The job is to get as many cars as you can get done within the eight hours of the day, five days of the week. You know, you don't, if you fixed all the cars, you would have
37:24 Jeff Compton nothing, you'd have no business left. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know that I'll ever get them fixed. They drop them off faster than I can take care of them. Yeah. Yeah. I got hooked up with a, they sell rebuilt, well, they sell, they sell storm damaged cars most of the time, hail damaged cars. Yep. They sell, I think they told me 1200 a year and it's all late model, like 21s, 22s. They're, I average three to five a week from them if I can keep up with them. They have their own mechanics, but they can't, they can't keep up with the goofy electrical or the, you know, they get water damage and got to have modules programmed or they get, I got one in there. Now it's been shot up. It was like 22 down the side of it, 19 or 18 renegade, but it's got a brake light switch code in and turn all the lights on on the dash. I'm pretty sure by one of the bullet holes I've got a wire into, I haven't dug into it yet, but there's a bullet hole that's almost perfectly perpendicular with the brake light switch. So I'm guessing I'm going to find either the body control module with a hole in it. It shouldn't have, or a wire into. Yeah. Pass through harness. Yeah. But I just can't, I tried to wiggle onto the dash the other day and I got stuck because, you know, I'm not a real small guy. And so I'm going to send my, one of my guys underneath there and say, Hey, pull this plug in out and see if you see any bull holes. So the, the, your co-workers at the shop, are they family as well? No, just me and the stepdad are the only ones that are family. Yeah. The lady we hired for the office, we've all known for years and years and years. One of the plus sides of her is that she knew Bill for a long time and I love him to death, but he can be hard to deal with some days. So she knew, she kind of knew that going in. So it was not, I mean, the other tech is the same age as my stepdad. They actually went to college together down at Nashville, Tennessee from the same hometown, graduated high school together. He's been there 34 years. Wow. Pretty much from the time we opened or my stepdad opened, he is, I would put him up for a guy that's 58 years old. I put him up against anybody on R and R stuff. He can take a motor out, put it in, and it looks like it hadn't been touched. Wow. I mean, he is, he's good. He doesn't like the electrical side real well. He's not dumb with it by any means. But it just doesn't bite him. Yeah. It's a job to him. I mean, he can put a distributor in better than anybody I know. I mean, but you give him a can problem and he's probably not going to get
40:02 Justin Porter through it. Yeah. Not many cars coming in with a distributor. No, no, no, but he's better than he leads on to be. He likes to get there and leave at five and don't call me in between unless we're just going to BS. So in a really short period of time here, you're going to be needing to find some younger people, right? Because you're going to, at some point, I think your
40:27 Jeff Compton bell is going to want to step away, right? Yeah. I think so. My mom tells him he is. Yeah. But he's that old school Dutch called it European culture, maybe where you just work. Yeah. You just work and work and work. So he's kind of, I used to be that way. And then I realized who the heck said I had to work all the time. And when did that become super manly to work 68 hours a week, right? I mean, who, and I want to know who the hell told me I had to work five days
40:55 Justin Porter a week. I'm thinking four. If I could get to four, you know, and really, I said, I've said it for years. If I could take off from like May until the end of September and not work, I would probably trade that to work six days a week for the rest of the year. And if I had to like, if I had to do
41:17 Jeff Compton 10 hour days, you can't do anything else up there, right? Then those time periods, you can't do anything else. It's freaking snow. You can ice fish, but I don't, that ain't for me. So screw that. I don't want to die. Sounds bad to me. Right? I mean, I get that. It's, yeah. I try to, I leave work early right now a lot for baseball and I'm very, but I don't, they don't, I mean, Bill doesn't say anything, but I work through my, I work through my lunch year round because I eat at my desk and look up information or just work. But yeah, I think four days a week
41:51 Justin Porter is nice. I enjoy reading that in the ASOG of the owners that have went that way. It intrigues me. Yeah. I think if you can get the customers on, like, I think there's a process there where you've got to get your customers qualified, the kind of quality customer that, you know, you don't need to be open six days a week or five days a week, right? You can make the money in four. I mean, I don't know where else, I mean, where's my customers going to go? I mean, we've got some shops around me, but they're just as busy as we are. Right. So I, yeah. That was the whole thing that drove me crazy about the dealership is like, well, we gotta be open on Saturdays. You know how many cars we're losing to who? Goodyear. Yeah. But that's it. But that's, you know, you got to remember the dealerships are like, well, we're getting slaughtered on tire sales because we're not open. Right. So we better open and we're getting slaughtered on oil changes because we're not open. And you talked to a lot of tax, those two things. It's like, if I never had to do another oil change, I had to do another set of tires. I'd be happy, happy.
42:54 Jeff Compton We hit our, we hit our tire machine in the new shop in the far back corner so nobody can see it. Yeah. I mean, we, we still do, we don't advertise.
43:04 Justin Porter We take care of our good customers. We do a lot still at my shop where I'm at. I mean, and it's, it's a small, it's like, we're not a big facility. So it's, it's kind of a secondary thing, but we do, we do enough of them that I'm tired of doing them. Well, you guys get free rotation with new snow studs every other month or something. So in my, I'm in Ontario, Canada and Ontario, there's, there's certain parts of it where you're not allowed to run studded and then it's certain what we call townships, which would be like a county, certain ones you are. So if you are pulled over in my area with studded tires on, it happened just last week. Somebody was pulled over with studded tires and they got charged because they were living here, driving on studded tires. Whereas if they had just been from the other County where they were legal, they would have been totally fine. Because you know,
43:57 Jeff Compton your government's as goofy as ours. Oh, it's even goofier. But no back to the, back to the, so the four days a week thing. So we have a problem keeping young techs, right? Right. Or they say whatever, you know, so, you know, and you just mentioned you're going to have to find another tech, right? Yeah, too soon for you, I think. Right. So let's say, um, I advertised looking for a good tech and I said, Hey, we're only open four days a week. And guess what my shop has air conditioning. So it seems to me like it'd be easier for me to find somebody, right? You could probably poach some pretty good talent with a four day week. There's that word poach. I've talked to Dutch about that because I've got a couple of guys. I'd really like to just offer, but they work at shops that I have a business relationship with. Right. Yeah. I'm not that guy because so that leads me to our third tech or our, my youngest one. I think he's 30. His name is Zach. He is my front end guy alignment guy. He kind of took over what I was doing. He dabbles in programming. I'm trying to teach him more. It's I have to make more time to teach him because damn it. If there's a set of ball joints, he goes and does the ball joints, right? I need to get, I need to just cut time out of a certain day when I have a bunch of programming and teach him some more stuff. Right. I'm guilty of not doing that enough, I'm sure. But Zach worked at another shop that I program and do work for. And they bring me their problem cars and different things. I would go there and program and it'd always be for him. He would always be the one messing with it. So we got to know each other and he'd text me, Hey, I'm in trouble. This thing's doing this. I don't know what to do. You know, and I would help him, right? Cause that's what we do. I know what it's like to just absolutely get your ass kicked. So I would help and I would help. I can't remember if he borrowed a socket off of me or if I borrowed a socket off of him, but it was some kind of odd ball drive train, something I dropped it off to him one night. And I said, man, if you know anybody looking, I'd love to have a tech. So you got any buddies or anything, you know, just let me know. And I wasn't intentionally getting him. That was not the plan when I said that I was truly just looking for somebody. Yeah. You didn't go there to take him. No. And it wasn't two or three days later. He texted me and said, Hey, are you serious about hiring somebody? I said, I'd kill to have somebody do my alignments and front end work so I can move on to, I can't keep up with my diags and everything. And I said, but I just don't know where to go. He said, I'm tired of being here. And I said, Hey, easy buddy. I have a working relationship with your business. I still know this is a good idea. He said, I'm going to leave regardless of whether you hire me or not. He said, I'll go to the coal mine. I'll do construction. He said, this just isn't a good fit for me. I said, well, let me talk to Bill and let me get you some numbers. And well, I don't want you to leave if you're not going to make whatever money you're making there. Right. I don't want you to leave because he has to drive 12, 13, 14 miles now where before he was driving two blocks. So I didn't want him to do anything hasty because he's still young. Right. I mean, we all remember being young and dumb and doing stupid shit. So I, we got together and I give him a, we get talked numbers. He come over to our shop. That time we were in the old shop and it's dark and dungeon and it's damp. And I mean, it was clean, but it was not what we have now. It didn't have air conditioning. It did not have air conditioning. No, I had marks on the wall before we insulated one of the walls, 135 or 138 degrees on the tin with a heat gun. So yeah, we agreed. I said, now, when you go back to your shop, you tell them if they want a month, they can have a month. If they want two weeks, I said, I don't know how far booked they are with you. If it's you tell them, you'll give them whatever time they want. Because I, you know, I'm not poaching, you know, I understand that's respectable. I understand. I respect that, you know, scheduling and stuff. He said, okay. I said, and please let them understand that I did not poach you. Like you're, you know, I don't know how to do this, but tell them that, you know, you come to me. Yeah. You were going to go anyway. Yeah. So bless his heart. He went right over there and he said, Hey, Justin said for me to tell you that he didn't poach me. And I thought, damn it, Zach, you're not supposed to say it that way. But, uh, but they did ask him to give two weeks. And then they told him the next day that it's just going to be a week, but we'll pay you your two weeks. And that was on a Thursday. And this was in February because I was at the boat and travel show in Indianapolis on a Saturday. He called me, said we have problems. And I thought, Oh shit, they've offered him big money, you know, which is fine. Right. It sucks that that's what it takes. But he's like, first thing I thought of as well. We'll see what they offered. And we'll go from there. He said, they want my toolbox to be out before Monday. I said, damn it. It's Saturday and I'm in Indianapolis at a boat and travel show. He's like, yeah, they need to be out. Okay. So I called Bill and we have records. We have records and we have flat web, two flat beds and two records. And I said, not a problem. Let me call Bill. See if he's home. So we go get us to a box. We take it to our place. And that place was upset with me for a while. The front service rider was a little upset. I finally, after a week and a half, cause after a week and a half, I called him and I, cause I have a cell phone number, the service rider over there. And I said, Hey, we need to talk. He said, okay. He goes, I was going to call you. I said, look, man, this isn't personal. He said, no, I told Zach that if he ever found anything that would better him, he needed to go. And his words were, I believe he's better with you. So after it was all said and done, nobody was mad. I think it was more personal because we're rural. And the thing that Zach fits in with us so well is we're, we're family, you know, Jeff is the guy spending 35 years. And if working with a guy since, I mean, I've been there since I was eight. So if, and I've worked with him full time since I was 18. So if that doesn't count as family, I don't know what the hell don't. I mean, what does. Yeah. I mean, I, I see a lot of marriages last. I give him shit because I wanted to leave when I was younger, right? When I went to college and when, when, and the old guy that fell and broke his hip was actually Jeff's father-in-law. They had actually had a shop together. Dallas was the old guy's name. Dallas was a classic example of a damn good tech and a horrible business guy. They said they had to call it close their shop because they couldn't pay their bills. They had more work than they could handle, but couldn't pay their bills. Yep. So we're, Zach fits in that family thing. Like he, he thrives in it, right? I mean, he, we, we got a, oh junk Dodge, Cal or no Avenger with wreckers and stuff. We impound or we get wrecks. People don't have insurance on and we end up with the cars and stuff. We end up with an Avenger. So I think we give him the Avenger to drive back and forth to work because like any other dumb kid, he has a six, four diesel. So we not the best computer, right? So we got him a, we, we helped him get a car to get back and forth to work. It didn't cost him a hundred dollars a week in diesel fuel. Mm-hmm. We, we have a very nice shop, like employees, I mean, I mean, don't get me wrong. I told Jeff today that he was a bitch and that he needed to get out of my face and everything else. And Zach laughed and said, that's why I love working here. But yeah, I-
51:42 Justin Porter It's a very, it's a, it's a very dysfunctional family some days, eh? Like it's-
51:46 Jeff Compton Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm, can guarantee you I'm probably one of the hardest guys to deal with some days. Cause I get, if I get that car that's just kicking my ass or something's not going right, I do not do well with people. I don't people well at that point. I had a Volkswagen, it was an all keys lost. And I was trying to program the cluster to get it in service mode. Turns out my EPROM clip was bad, but I spent three hours trying to get it to read it. And I was not in a good mood that day. So Zach had come over once and I just looked at him under my glass,
52:19 Justin Porter over my glasses and he just walked away. He figured it out, whatever he wanted. So what I take away from, from, from this, when you talk about you didn't poach him and I know, you know, it's, it's a subject that a lot of people, you know, you get mixed comments on, right? I see it like this. If you hadn't offered that young man, Zach, another opportunity, we'd have probably lost them in the industry, right? He probably would be out of it. So I want, this is, this is something I want to say for the, for the shop owners that are listening. And if you've had employees poach from you, a, I don't think it is ever personal from one shop owner to another. I don't think that we guys are out there maliciously trying to steal your talent because they want to see you fail, right? They need talent, right? And I think at some point, we need to stop being so hard on ourselves if we do do it, because we, if you're keeping that young man or woman in the industry, that is the key thing that we have to be doing right now. There's such a shortage that, you know, we can't be waiting anymore for the, they're not just going to walk in
53:31 Jeff Compton with a toolbox, right? There, there isn't enough of them anymore. We do need to do better. Like, I don't think it's money. I, I mean, I believe Zach come for close to the same amount of money with us covering his transport costs as far as back and forth. Most shop owners think it's money. I don't
53:49 Justin Porter know. I bet you at a 50 to 60% of this industry is money driven and the others not. Yeah. I, I, I've seen the change. So in the 10 years that I've been kind of messing around on Facebook with these kinds of groups and talking with these people, I've definitely seen the change where, you know, eight years ago, everybody was about the money and I'm seeing more and more people. And, you know, sometimes you think like, okay, yeah, you say that, you know, because you talk to some guys and it's like, Oh, I used to produce 70 hours a week at the dealer, but I didn't stay at the dealer because of the money. And, but then this, the rest of the story goes is that, well, a management change happened and they went from making 70 to 50. So they left, that still sounds like money to me, which, and I'm not faulting them for it at all. I've left every dealer job I ever left was because the money was starting to suck. But I think it's more and more that it's like the, the experts are saying there's more people are leaving because of a culture issue, you know, a personnel issue that changes the culture. And I mean, we, we as an industry need to do better. We still need to bring our pay up to a much more, uh, competitive wages and, uh, benefits and stuff compared to the other skilled trades out there. But I mean, I'm no longer, I used to be really adamant that, you know, uh, it's the money is the reason that we can't do this and we can't do that. Now I'm realizing that it plays a part, but I don't think it's the biggest factor anymore. I think we do. The industry does a less than stellar job of selling itself as a career. You know, there aren't any more guys like yourself, Justin, unfortunately that started out at eight in their, in their stepdad's shop, you know, um, tearing stuff apart and having fun. Is that even still a thing? I mean, I mean, I wonder how, I wonder what the amount of family businesses today versus family businesses in 1985 in this industry. Yeah. Be an interesting thing to investigate, eh? For sure. And we, you know, we can have a whole other talk at some point about nepotism and shops and, and cause I've been on both sides of it. And, I can see how it can be a very powerful thing when you have a bunch of family working with you in terms of, you know, it's like, it's sometimes it's a united goal. Um, then I've also seen where it can be like, it can be bad. It can be toxic and really toxic and it can, and it can just, it can push a lot of people out of shops because it's too much of a family element, right?
56:33 Jeff Compton Yeah, we've been that we've been close before when I was younger. Yeah. I think I was to blame probably more than anybody. I mean, I always thought I was, I always thought I was the best of the best. I'd be honest. I mean, I got that swag, right? I don't know. It's personality. My boy has it. I tend to think it's funny until he does it to me and then I want to beat him. But, um, yeah, uh, family's awesome to work for and awful to work for all at the same time or can be. Me and my stepdad have definitely had our, uh, our arguments. There's been screaming matches. I've left the shop at lunch because me and my little bro, my little brother doesn't work there. He was there helping in the winter when he were off for school or something. Me and him got into it. I left at lunch, did not have plans of coming back that day, but I had a very good customer's car tour apart and it was promised out. So I went
57:31 Justin Porter back. Yeah, we've had arguments in the middle of the driveway. I've thrown shit out in the driveway. I've cussed and threatened to quit. The older I got, the more that stopped. Yeah. I got my head out of my ass, so to speak. Yeah. But family thing is rough, right? Cause it's, everybody's got everybody's back. Sometimes you think you deserve more than you need or I don't know. It's, I'm pretty sure it's just me being a punk. What I watched happen more than once was it was like, you could see how that family member, say you're the non-family member working in that shop and you're watching the nephew. I'm thinking back to very early in my career, worked in a shop and then it was a, a gentleman and his nephew and his nephew was, uh, I don't know, eight years older than me, had a lot more experience, um, but not a good employee in terms of reliability. Um, but he got all the good stuff, right? Well, so he got away with a lot more than I would've gotten away with. Uh, put it that way, right? If I had been at so many, if I'd have missed as many Mondays for, you know, beer bottle, beer bottle induced sickness, I'd have been kicking my lunch field
58:50 Jeff Compton on the road in front of me. Wait, you know, and I've had a different mindset with that, with the family thing. I always felt like I had to be the best one there.
58:59 Justin Porter Like, I didn't want, I wanted to be better than everybody else in the shop. Yeah. Because I always felt like that was my role or my goal or I couldn't, if I was going to get something else, I needed to work twice as hard for it because I didn't want them to think I was giving that, that was get, give that because I was family. Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting attitude to have about it. Uh, what I saw was that he knew he wasn't the best because it was his uncle that was ran the business and his uncle was still one of the best mechanics I've ever seen, but he felt like I'm just as good as anybody else, even if they're older than me. And it distracted from the fact that, okay, you might be really good when you're there, but you're not reliable. And, um, yeah, it don't matter. It don't matter how good you are if you don't show up to work. Yeah, that's it. Right. He, he had a, he, he liked to gamble and he, you know, he, um, so he'd spend a lot of weekends, um, gambling, you know, having quite a few beer and it made it really hard for him to make it in on Mondays. And this is way back in the day when I worked at a truck shop. So it was like, it was a lot of road service calls. It was a lot of, like the first thing you got to do was to pull in the truck and trailer. And while it was still drifting snow, get underneath that thing and grease it. And then I mean like, you're thinking, well, that's not bad. We all grease trucks. No, like you actually have to like wipe the snow off the grease fittings just to be able to put grease in the truck and trailer. Like it was, you're, you were soaked and your hands were frozen by, you know, an hour in, it wasn't the most, uh, you know, appealing Monday morning that you could have. So what's the, what's the long-term goal, Justin? What's the kind of, I don't want to say exit strategy, but you know, for when kind of your more senior staff retires out or goes to three days a week. If we go to four days a week, we're all going right. And now that, um, I don't know, I need to sit down and talk with my stepdad more. I don't know that he has one. Um, I didn't even know that an exit plan was a thing, right. Until a saw again. Yeah. Hanging out with Dutch, like Dutch was at that EEPROM class I went to. It was an honor to set and meet Dutch. He is, yeah, he is the, I don't want to say non-tech cause that that's a dismerged to him, but I'll say this of all the shop owners that I met and interacted with. Uh, I knew Dutch before I was on Facebook. I didn't know him, know him. I remember him from IETM. So when I got to meet, when I got to meet Dutch at ASOG, he's like, who are you again? And he's like, I'm like, I'm the guy that did the, you know, the podcast for ASOG that everybody kind of, you know, he's like, Oh, he's like, you and I, you and I need to talk one time. And I immediately, my, my throat dropped into my chest. Cause it's like, I mean, I'm, I'm a pretty, you know, I can speak pretty well about my thoughts and opinions. And, um, but he is just a man at another level in terms of how steadfast in, in what he thinks, you know what I mean? And not only is he steadfast in it, like he's lived it and done it. Right. So you can kind of, it's all speculation. Dutch doesn't say it unless Dutch has done it right. Unless Dutch can actually show you. And that, you know, when he talks about shops that he's mentored them through, um, you know, that it's, it's, you're getting some of the best in the industry right there to be able to guide you. Somebody that has lived it, has seen it, you know, and will be 100% completely honest with you. And one of the most gracious people I've ever met and talked to in this industry, like the things that he is offered. I know of other people. I've heard those stories too. Yes. Yeah. Sometime you and I will talk about it and it just like,
01:03:10 Jeff Compton there's a lot of people that talk it. He does it. That man, he does it. He contacted me about, uh, ADOS equipment. Uh, Scuddy had put him in touch with me. Um, I talked to him on the phone. We probably talked for an hour or better. Um, 60% was ADOS and 40% was business. Cause I had questions and Dutch doesn't care to answer. And, but I told him that I did not want to waste any more of his time until I'd done more homework. Cause I felt like I was not ready with numbers. He's like, but you just call me anytime. I said, Dutch, I'm not, I don't have enough information to, I don't want to waste your time, but yes, I, we get that far Dutch. Well, I probably will call Dutch back and say, Hey, what do I need to do? I'm a tech. I'm not a great business guy yet. Don't know that I'll ever be great. I just hope to be good. My main goal is to semi have something that would be maybe a supplemental income from my kids or hell my kids want to run it. I don't care. So you're not, you're not one of these shop owners that doesn't see their children man. What a question. Yeah. It's, it's a loaded question. Isn't it eight years ago? No, there's, I wouldn't, I wouldn't want my kids to do this at all. The last three or four years, with some more changes. Yeah. I mean, my kids, a button smasher, my boy, I have a stepdaughter that could probably run it. Uh, she is, uh, I think she could be business savvy and ruthless at the same time and have a heart of gold. My boy is straight up techie and likes all that kind of stuff. He is not real mechanically inclined yet. Part of that may be my fault. My daughter does know how to put fluid in her Acura because you know, it's got 200,000 miles on it and the rack leaks on it. And I tell her that has to have Honda fluid. So she kind of gets all that. She can put
01:05:08 Justin Porter air in her own tires, but as far as, um, yeah, I mean, I'm okay with them running. I mean, I'm okay. There's, if you've made a good living at it, right? I, yeah. Well, see, I look at it, like, you know, I used to say a year ago, I said, and I still, when I meet people, I'm like, they're like, you're a mechanic. I'm like, no, I'm a fisherman that like fixes cars. And they kind of give you that weird look, right? But then you break it down from you go, well, so my passion is fishing. What I do for a job is I fix cars. And that was when I was saying that. And it was because a lot of the passion had left of fixing cars, of wanting to be, you know, I wanted to be the, the, the go-to guy in the shop. I wanted to be the best. I didn't have to be the one making the most hours, you know, but I wanted to be the one that everybody was like, if he doesn't have the answer, yeah, some days it ain't fun being that guy though. Yeah. It all right. More days than not. It's, it's, it's through, it's through getting involved with Lucas and David and that first podcast that I recorded for them and how I listened to that podcast twice, how many, so many people. Yeah. Yeah. So many people that I had never spoken to, uh, even in the groups messaged me and were like that, like I felt that in my soul. So I can see myself coming around now to where being a mechanic is, is part of my identity again. It's not just a job. It has been a well-paying job for me. I listen, I'm not getting rich at it. You know, I, I'm not, I don't want to say I'm shop owner rich because that's a stretch too. That's a stretch too. Yeah. But it's the boat that I have and the boat that, you know, we joke that the shop owners all want is, is like, I got a little 14 foot Harborcraft, you know, aluminum boat with a 10 horse on the back. That's, you know, and listen, it isn't about, you shouldn't judge a person by that, right? You shouldn't judge a mechanic by the toolbox and you shouldn't judge a fisherman by the boat that he shows up in. So it has been a good career for me. Uh, I'm still on, I want to say that, yes, I could recommend it now, uh, as an industry.
01:07:36 Jeff Compton And if I had a son or daughter, I don't, um, that wanted to, to get into this, I wouldn't deter them whereas like two years ago, I'd never would have never, I mean, four or five, six years ago, there's no way I even said my kid is going to have a four year degree. He's not going to be what I am. Yeah. And now I'm 43, I'm 43 going, you know, I don't have $180,000 worth of debt that student
01:08:03 Justin Porter loans and I don't, you know, I do have $30,000 in hand tools, but that's probably another, for another podcast of do we really need to buy our own hand tools? Yes. That's a, that's a topic that's in the notebook. So the, uh, the Jeff, the 35 year tech at our place, you know why he owns for tools in our shop flashlight, probably the least amount. That's it. That's it. Really? His deal. Whose tools is he using for otherwise? Uh, the shops. Wow. His sign on was I'll buy your tools whenever, when, when he came down with Bill, Bill said, I'll buy your tools. That was 35 years ago. That's lucrative deal. Hey, that worked out good for him. Yeah. If they don't have their own tools, they can't leave. See, maybe that's the flip side. I'm like, so many people are trying to go for that.
01:08:59 Jeff Compton You know, that is not that way. You know, they toolbox has got wheels for a reason, right? Well, if it ain't your damn toolbox, you can't, no, that ain't, that ain't, that was just the circumstance that it fell. And I, that Zach, my front end guy, my toolbox is big green and has a bunch of shit in it. Right. When you're smashing buttons all day, you just need a Pico and a test light and some laptops. Right. So I don't use, like I have a crash cart with quarter inch stuff on it and wire strippers. Zach has full access to my toolbox. It's never locked. That's good. Don't even know where the hell the key is. I hope it's on top of it where it is, but he doesn't need to buy a tie rod
01:09:42 Justin Porter tool. I have three. He doesn't need to buy a great big ass 22 inch or 22 millimeter wrench for whatever. I have three. Right. Use my stuff. It's stupid to have yours. Now I do think that some techs need to buy some stuff because like I said, if it ain't yours, you can't go somewhere else. And how many shops pay for tools for their techs? Right. I mean, I think it's more popular now than it's ever been. But, but I wonder if that's, I want to say that that's not so much a culture change as it is a maybe driven by necessity from the fact of what the prices of the stuff has gone to, right? It's, it's, and I mean, you hate to be that, but I mean, let's, let's talk Turkey. I mean, they can write some of that off, right? So whereas the young person getting in can't, I can't claim my tools. See, I could, but you can't, they've changed it here now where it has to be like, I think 20,000 now. I don't know. I'm not an accountant. So up here at when you're doing what we call your apprenticeship. So before you become a licensed trades person, you can write off, it might be 5,000 a year that you spend on tools. You can claim that once you become a licensed trades person in the automotive trade, you can't other trades for whatever reason, if you're a drywall or electrician or yeah, Oh yeah. You can write that off because they have mechanics
01:11:08 Jeff Compton because they have way more tools than we do. Right. Oh, for sure. I mean, look at the tool belt. Our industry has definitely been shafted for years. Yeah. But I mean, back to the whole exit plan or what the, my, so my, like I'm a bigger is better guy. Like I have big dreams. Like I would like to be multi, multi, uh, you like to have multiple locations. Yeah. Yeah. I think that would be cool. I also think it would be awful at the same time, but what they say on ASOG, they're changing the industry. You gotta have three, right? Two's two's a headache. Three's where it's at.
01:11:46 Justin Porter Yeah. Anything more than three is just like, you might as well, you know, you might as well like you might as well you, you own them, own them, but you don't get involved in anything that
01:11:56 Jeff Compton goes on. You kind of. Yeah. I enjoy the manager side. Like I enjoy trying to build processes or we need to do this. We need to do that or watching the numbers and see where they get better or they get worse. I enjoy that because it's new to me and I have that, I can't get bored personality. So I may get bored with that one side in 15, 20 years and do something else. I would, I mean, we got a new shop. We just, it's, I don't know. We've been in it maybe a year and a half now. We done it out of necessity. Uh, when we hired Zach, we got real tight with room and I forced a, a DOS machine on the place and didn't have room for it. So we built a shop. Um, and I kind of wish we'd have done it 15 years ago, but I don't, but I don't think we would have built what we got now. I don't think we would have AC. I don't think we would have the 60 foot Bay for a DOS. I just don't think we would have it. I don't, I would love to see Bill's auto last another 50
01:13:00 Justin Porter years and Mike, somebody take it. I'd like to see that too honestly. Zach, I don't care. You know, my little brother's kids, I don't care. This industry needs like, and that's the thing we, we talk all the time about the barrier entry and you know, we're going to see this mass exodus of, of a lot of shops fall by the wayside in the next 10 years, five years, whatever, right? As the tech keeps going and there's, there's pluses to that, but there's going to be a lot of sadness from that too, right? Because it's just, you know, the, I don't believe I used to think that, you know, all these people that, that weren't up to date and wouldn't do the, the, what was needed to get there. I used to think it was just laziness or malice, right? And now I'm learning that it's just, they just, what they don't, they don't know what they don't know.
01:13:54 Jeff Compton Oh no. I, I learned that at a record class one time. One of the guys that was in my class was making fun of somebody else and the instructor goes, you can't make fun of him because he doesn't know what he doesn't know. He don't, I mean, you, you, but there's, is there an excuse to not know what you don't know now with the internet and with Facebook? It's that's really hard to say because it's like, you know, I've said that there's no dumb questions, right? No. And cause I asked one the other, well, I, when I was having help with that charger, I was using the dial resistor in the AES wave kit. And I'd never used it before because I didn't completely understand it. Cause when I got that kit, I was still dumb. I'm not that I'm not dumb now, but I'm less dumb. And one of the guys, I think it was PJ said, don't, don't ask us what the black one goes to. Well, I grabbed my ground off my power probe and I shoved in a test lead
01:14:52 Justin Porter and thought it was the resistor test lead. Turns out it was one of the scope leads. And I couldn't figure out why my damn resistor wasn't working because it didn't have a ground. So, I mean, we're all, yeah. The first time I used it to trip me up too. Cause I'm like, well, it's an inline resistor. Why does it go three, four wires? Yeah.
01:15:15 Jeff Compton And I'm like, wait a second. I got it guys. I figured out why it don't work is cause I hooked my ground up to my scope ground and not my resistor ground. I had, I like three leads off my scope and I had my power probe on it. And these guys were like, do this, do that. And even if we don't know if that's what it is, let's do that to see what this test done, you know? And it, it was really cool because I learned so much like in that 15 minutes, like I said earlier, it was, it was that that's what I enjoy about this industry. That's another reason that I don't have a problem with my kids getting in it because it's not the industry it was 25 years ago. Yeah. I mean, I was raised by old school gear heads that if you didn't smoke, chew, drink and cuss and you're asked better be here, I don't care if you cut a limb off, you cut two toes off and a finger, you got to be at work tomorrow. That mentality is, and if you ask stupid questions, you got made fun of, right? I still make fun of people. I have that. I'm sorry. Make fun of Scuddy for giving me a hard time. But I try not to do it on Facebook or anywhere else. Because we need to pick this industry up, but it has come a long way. Guys like scanner, Danner and Mario and all these guys with the YouTube channels, the YouTube heroes,
01:16:42 Justin Porter whatever they call themselves. But it's, it's drastically. Yeah. So many, I've said it before without YouTube, I wouldn't be still in this industry without Facebook. I mean, either,
01:16:56 Jeff Compton because I wouldn't, I was done. I would wait when I found scan. Of course, I was that guy that had the snap on virus with the scope lead still in the wrapper. Right. I was that guy and I can't remember if it was a communication. Something got tripped me up real hard and everywhere I kept reading said, we need a scope, scope, scope. And I'm like, I don't even know how to use this damn thing. So I turned it on and I started probing shit and I got squiggly lines. I'm like, I don't know what this means, but I got squiggly lines. And so I Googled it, found scanner Danner's Pico video. That's like an hour and a half long or whatever. Yeah. And it's like, holy shit, I kind of get this. Then it's like, Hey, this guy's got a pace site and you can watch all these cool videos. And I got addicted to it because I have that addictive personality. And my wife is like, why are you? She's like, what's wrong with you? All you do is watch this guy. It's the coolest thing ever. This guy's showing me how to be a mechanic. He is a mechanic. Like he's not talking over my head. Like he's dumbing this down for the rest of us dummies, drastically changed
01:18:06 Justin Porter my career. I mean, I, I think I would have got out. I think I would have burnt myself out and left. Well, I've talked to Paul several times. And when I talked to him in AST and I said, you know, more than once to more than one person, he still, he's starting to, but he still doesn't grasp
01:18:28 Jeff Compton how much he's done. And I don't think he ever will. So have you ever talked to a tech at a training event or on Facebook that wants to be better? That doesn't know Danner doesn't know. Paul, I mean,
01:18:41 Justin Porter that doesn't know anybody that I know that is forward thinking in this industry and wants to and I mean, really forward thinking, like I've met lots of people and they say, well, I want to be a really good tech and I want to be a master tech. And I would say to them, okay, so depending on the age group, I used to say, well, you know, have you ever been on IATN and the guys 10 years ago, that what, right. What's IATN, right. Now I go, well, do you know who scanner Danner is? And it's still amazing to me. Now, again, a lot of the guys that I talked to, they're dealer guys. So you know, they, they could probably tell you the names of the people that are in the videos that the OE makes, but they don't necessarily know who he is because they don't tend to go home and, you know, try to find answers on other cars or try to take other training on other brands after hours, right. I was one of those weird people that did, but you know, we're going to be talking about scanner Danner still 10 years from now. I honestly believe that even when Paul, whatever, and I don't know Paul's exit strategy at all, you know, I don't think he has one. Does he enjoy it still? Oh, he, yeah, yeah, he does. And I think what, well, so I could tell you what Paul, what the conversation is, what he's really enjoying now is spending more time with his brother, right. The best thing ever is him and Caleb, all that, that relationship is on another level, right. Of father and son. He loves being at his brother's shop. He loves seeing his brother starting to turn that shop around. Not that it was a bad, but it was like, you know, a lot of that other, the same struggles that, that you face day to day in a, in a, in the business that thousands do his brother, James face them too. Customers, how do I charge for this? Like I can't, you know, I've got five hours into this and we fixed it and it's been to 10 other shops. I can't charge it five hours. You most certainly can. Hell yes, you can. I mean, and when Paul came home from AST and as he's leaving, you know, when we're talking at AST, he's like, this is going to change my brother's life. It's going to change my life, right. With what he came home with, with just that. The industry, the industry owes him that. Oh, we can never repay him for what he's done for us is what, how I feel. Right. Like the it's he's guys like him, guys like Dutch. You know, we wouldn't be, the industry wouldn't be what it is without people like that. And you know, and it's, it's Dutch and Lucas and David on, on the, on the business side of it, right. And Scott and all the mastermind group. And then on the tech side of it, it's like, you know, guys like Mario, guys like Paul, guys like Scudridge, like guys like Brian Pollock, my buddy. I mean, there's just so much, you know, brain power there that has been that we've, we've been chinking away for years, trying to get people to just talk and try to get people to, to think in a different way, um, pushed for another level. And it's been tough, but I mean, I would not, when I look back at what I've spent the last 10 years doing, where I'm going with this podcast, man, I wouldn't trade one second of it. One second. I, if it wasn't for the podcasts, if it wasn't for Facebook, it wasn't for Paul Danner, wasn't for making, meeting people like you, Justin, I'd be doing something else.