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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: Andrew Rogue Wrenching.mp3
00:00 SPEAKER_00 It's frustrating for me for a multitude of reasons. I'm not one foot out the door, but it's like, I know that I'm not gonna be in this shop long-term, and I've had this conversation with the shop owner that I work for. And so I happen to know that if I wasn't moving, he would really like to have me basically buy him out and take over the shop, which is hard because that's what I wanna do. The position that I'm walking away from here as a way to step into shop ownership is something that I've been working towards
00:30 SPEAKER_01 basically since I was a mobile mechanic. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to another exciting, thought-provoking episode of the Jada Mechanic podcast. My name's 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 wanna share my perspectives and hear other people's thoughts about our industry. Support yourself with strong coffee or grab a cold Canadian beer and get ready for some great conversation. ["Jada Mechanic"] With me tonight, I got a young man, Andrew Clement from Rogue Wrenching. Now, Rogue Wrenching is a YouTube channel, so his name is not Andrew Rogue. If you see him talking in the ASOT group or changing industry, it's actually Andrew Clement, but Rogue Wrenching is his YouTube channel and for all intents and purposes, his business.
01:43 SPEAKER_00 So without further ado, welcome, Andrew, how are you? I'm doing pretty well. It's a very generous introduction.
01:51 SPEAKER_01 I'm getting that. Oftentimes that's not the whole episode
01:55 SPEAKER_00 is the introduction just giving you fair warning. That's okay, that's okay. Yeah, I'm good. We're very warm if you listen to my episode with Sean over on the Automotive Diagnostic podcast. We are coming off a little bit of a heat wave today. Wasn't too bad. I think we only got up to like maybe 105 today. We're cooling off. But we did in July, we did 31 or 32 days over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. So I don't know how you guys measure that up
02:28 SPEAKER_01 in Canadian maple leaves, but we use Fahrenheit. Yeah, well, and it's weird up here because some people use Fahrenheit and some people use Celsius. I use Fahrenheit to me, Celsius, because I was in the public school system when they started to switch and then they switched back. And to me, it's always not made a whole lot of sense. Yeah, exactly. Because it's like up here, everything's in kilometers, right? Instead of miles. But for instance, if you're still, people are talking about, like if you wanna order a thermostat or you wanna look at about like scanned out on a scan tool in a lot of information, it's still printed as like 180 degree thermostat. You know what I mean? Same with tire pressure is still, most people refer to it as pounds per square inch. And everybody's like, well, shouldn't you know that in KPA? Nobody says how many kilopascal. I'm sorry, I was on PSI. Yeah, I had an interesting conversation. I actually did an episode with Cody Gotti of Cody's Auto Diagnostics. He's in Arizona and he was saying the same thing. Like he had like 30 some days where it was above 108 and he tries to go out early in the morning and yeah, come in. And so he's out in the parking lot doing a lot of his stuff, right? So he said, if he could get where it's like, yeah, he's gone to where he's pretty much just doing programming when it's this hot and not actually getting diet. Cause he says like, you'll touch the tools and the tools are, well, you know what it's like, can be 120 or 130 degrees to the touch.
04:00 SPEAKER_00 When you pick the tool up and it burns your hand that kind of, just, I don't wanna say it, it reduces your will to live, but it definitely makes you wonder like, why are we doing this? Like, you know, it's like I burned my hand on the tool. It's yeah, it's bad enough. It's bad enough to burn yourself on a hot engine. But then it's like, when you pick up the tool to fix the hot engine and that tool burns you, it's just like, it's just adding insult to injury
04:23 SPEAKER_01 at that point. You start questioning life choices at that point. So, yeah. Right, and why am I here smashing my knuckles? So you are, I was, again, we were listening to the podcast that just got dropped with Sean Tipping and you're predominantly a diesel tech or that's your specialty, right?
04:41 SPEAKER_00 You work on everything in it. Yeah, so I'm, I like to say my specialty is in light duty diesel. So think your pickup truck diesel is, I don't know if you guys call them pickup trucks if you guys are weird up there. Pickup truck diesel is what I specialize in and that's kind of where I got my start as far as the first, I guess we'll call it a real job that I had. I worked, I started my career as a mobile mechanic and I was working for an outfit. I was just, I was a straight like 1099 contractor. I made a straight percentage of the profit margin on parts and labor. The way that it worked was the guy that owned the company had a, like a voicemail, basically a voicemail set up. There's like an 800 number and it just went to a voicemail. Even when he was working, it always went to a voicemail and then he had an app that would transcribe that voicemail and he could just hit a button and then send me a link to that transcribed voicemail from a customer and then I call him back, I schedule the work, I go out, I do the work, I source the parts. Like I am everything, I'm the service advisor, I'm the estimator, I'm the technician, I'm the quality control, like everything all at once. Which was really good, I think, life experience. Just dealing with people, learning to be able to interpret a customer's description of a problem from a life experience and also appreciate the job that service advisors do. And that was good for me. Now, as a technician, that is the worst possible way to start your career. Like there's just, there's no way. There are so many, I was a hack. Like I will freely and publicly admit that. I was like the worst hack that you could ever imagine was who I was and I hate that because I hate hacks so much now. Like it irritates me to no end and that was 100% me. Just to give you an idea of how much of a hack I was. Now, just also for reference, this is like now, I think about eight years ago. I've been full time in a shop for, I think I just passed seven years full time in a shop. I was mobile for about a year before that. And the hackiest thing that I ever did, or I think I ever said, because it wasn't that I, I don't know what I screwed up on the job. It was a Jeep, I think it was a Jeep Patriot starter that I put in. And the complaint was a no crank, no start. And my boss had gone out and done the dyag and called the starter, but it was a friend of my bosses. And so he had me go do it, but he gave the guy a discount, which is great, except for I make a percentage of profit. So that discount comes squarely out of my check. So I was already a little, I was not happy about that to begin with, but I put the starter in and it made it like a nasty grinding noise when it engaged. And I am ashamed to admit this publicly, but with a straight face, sold this guy that that was a starter break in noise. And about 30% of all the starters that we put in have this noise. It's nothing to worry about it's still there in two weeks, give us a call, we'll come and swap you out a new starter. Which basically meant I'm not coming back because the starter was a pain. Like it just, that one worked me. Like I don't, for whatever reason, that one was really hard. I struggled with it. And I was like, if I can get this guy to wait a week and then call my boss, I'll come deal with it. And I don't have to deal with it. And yeah, it started breaking noises. Yeah. As a professional technician now, I know that that is not a thing. I knew it wasn't a thing then to be honest with you.
08:26 SPEAKER_01 So not the interrupter cut. I've done a fair share of road service as well. And I mean, when you say hacky, I wanna reiterate that for some people, when you're going out, what the big thing is, is to get the thing started or to get the thing running or to get it off the road or get it, they can get it home, right? So that's when we see some stuff sometimes and it's like, who did that? You know, the driver or the owner or the operator is gonna say, oh, you should have seen the guy. He won't admit that, yeah, it was three in the morning, it was blowing snow.
08:58 SPEAKER_00 Like I was, nobody was there to hold the light. Yeah, yeah, there's a time and a place for, you just gotta get it done. You know, we've gotta get this thing back on the road. No ifs, ands or buts, it's just gotta be done. And like I get that, but most of what I did was like, the, not, first of all, when I was working mobile, I thought I had all the tools that I ever needed. And they all fit into the back of a Ford Bronco. Like behind the back seat of the back of a Ford Bronco. It was like two toolbox, it was like a, or wasn't a craft store, what was it? We have a, Home Depot's our big box home improvement store in here and they sell Husky, which is a fabulous, in fact, if any of you guys are listening and you're thinking about getting into this, Husky tools are a great place to start. That's where I started, I still have a ton of them. But I had a Husky tool kit, it was like a $200, you know, 198 piece whatever kit, you know, some deeps and shallows, just your basic stuff. A $20 set of screwdrivers. I think the most advanced diagnostic tool I had was I had a code reader and an annoyed light kit. And that was kinda it. And I didn't know how to use either of them. I mean, like I thought I did at the time, and now that I know, now that I'm actually, I would argue, pretty good at this job, I cannot believe the amount of cars that are still running after I worked on them. But there were a lot of bad habits I picked up working mobile, and I think that was huge. I remember that really hit me. My first real job was in a diesel shop or a shop that worked on, they worked on pickup trucks. They were well known in the area. I worked in Southern Oregon, it was a shop called Wolf Performance. They were the go-to shop for everything diesel. We had people, customers that would drive hours, like coming up from California, coming in from the coast, two to three hours away, drive past all the other diesel shops to come to us because we got stuff done and we did it right, we did it right the first time. And so I got a job with this shop, which is mainly because the young lady that I was marrying, her dad was a service advisor for this shop, and he lined me up for an interview and somehow I talked the owner into hiring me. Which he may have regretted. But anyway, our first, I remember the first big job I did, it was like a weekend. I was doing cylinder heads on a 93 Ford diesel. And I was going back together, everything felt great. And there was one wiring clip, and I just, I couldn't for the life of me figure out where it went. Like there was a little eye and a bolt went through it, but I couldn't figure out what bolt or where, and I'm like, it's on the back of the engine, you can't see it, I'm like, who cares, just leave it off, because that's what I had been doing for a year. Anyways, the next morning, the truck's done, it's sitting outside, little bit cold up there, and the truck won't start. And it's just white smoke out the exhaust, which is usually on this particular vehicle, is a glow plug issue. There's not enough heat in the cylinders to get the diesel to ignite. So my boss comes out to take a look at it, and I mean, I'm not exaggerating with this. His hand comes up on the hood, and before the hood's all the way open, he's like, why didn't you put that bolt on? And I was like, how did you see that? It just blew my mind. Now, knowing what I know, that little wire tab is the ground for the glow plug controller. And if you don't have that attached to a ground, it doesn't work. But that clicked in my head, I'm like, oh, there's a correct way to do this stuff. And there's a right way and a wrong way to repair vehicles. And I've always been like, well, if it was broken when I got there, if it's not within the realm of what I'm fixing, if there's a missing bolt or something, it's like, yeah, who cares? It was like that when I got it. And that shifted my mindset to being, to more than moving away from that wire was broken, that component was broken, that bolt was missing, whatever, this wire was routed wrong when I got here. It shifted from that to, it needs to be as close to how it rolled off the showroom floor as possible when it leaves my hands. When someone comes in here behind me, I want them to look at this and go, wow, no one's been in here before, this is still all factory. Yeah. And I've definitely shifted more to now, you can't always do that. Customer budget is a real thing. But I don't do that sort of hack stuff anymore. Now I'm very particular with how I go. I mean, I'm the guy that on a six liter Power Stroke, so your 2003 and a quarter through 2007, I'm the guy that opens it up and I open the hood and there's a couple little details. There's one spot where a wire harness routes behind a fuel line. But if you don't know that, the way you would normally put this thing together, you'd end up with a wire harness in front of the fuel line. Doesn't affect it at all. But I know that's how it's supposed to be. And so I open a hood and you see that and you go, okay, so somebody didn't know what they were doing. You look over here at these nuts and these nuts have a captured washer, the other ones don't. They're both 10 millimeters, they're both the same thread, but you can switch them around. But it's like those nuts aren't the right one. And it's the little details that you pick up on. And what I've, in my experience found, is that the guys that pay attention to those little details, you got five, 10 millimeter nuts in your little tray, and you know that these three that match each other go on this component here that has three nuts and these two go on this one. You know, when you have guys that are paying attention to the details like that, they're typically, I mean, generally speaking, very thorough technicians. You know, they're not just throwing stuff together. And so I'm talking-
15:00 SPEAKER_01 Yeah, because that mentality, that mentality translates into their own process, right? How they approach starting the job, finishing the job, how they attack the job, how they attack the problem. It's all a detailed thing, right? It's, yeah, I wish I was more like that. I've got some bad habits too, because it's just, and what I find like, if you work on stuff that is like, I mean, I spent the better part of this morning working on a 96 Yukon that is like an end of life trash pile. Nothing is worth, nothing was ever like, I mean, it's probably on its third set of doors, right? Like you're putting window regulators and, you know, there is no factory rivets to drill out. There is no push pins left in any of the panels. Like the panels have all been already screwed on with wood screws, like it's just a mess. And it's very hard sometimes when you get those kinds of things to hold yourself to a better standard, because you're just like, you know, me, I'm already like scratching my arms up, I'm doing a door regulator in one of those, and then I just hate it and nothing fits. And it's just like, grr, you know, and you just wanna get.
16:09 SPEAKER_00 Oh yeah, it's extremely frustrating when you come in to a vehicle like that, that's been well used or overly DIY'd. I don't know if any of you guys, people that DIY their stuff, half my YouTube channel is extro-ing people how to do repairs on their vehicles. And I'm all like, I DIY everything, but the difference is like, I do this for a living. When I do timing chains on my wife's car, it's like, I can do timing chains and know they're done right. That's not like, that's not a DIY type thing. But like, when you get into these cars that have just been used and abused and not taken care of by someone that has the same professional standards as I do. And I'm not trying to be arrogant in saying that, but just the difference between a vehicle that has been serviced by a qualified technician its entire life versus the vehicle that has been serviced by the cheapest guy its entire life. You know, you get to 200,000 miles and they're very different vehicles to work on. Even if it's the same car, you know, the guy that is always the cheapest guy, he's always complaining about how his car is always breaking down. The guy that spends money to repair the vehicle thinks he's got a great car. And the difference is not the vehicle you started with, it's what you did with it and how you cared for it over the life of its, I guess, over its life. So that's, I think, a big frustration for me, especially in the diesel world, because, so like six liter power strokes, that 03 to 07 range is kind of what I cut my teeth on as far as getting into this field and like getting my foot in the door of a niche that not a lot of guys can do and I can do it and I can do it fast. You know, guys are pulling cabs to do these, to do cylinder heads on these things because they blow head gaskets all the time. And in my, back in my heyday when I was doing, I mean, I was doing a couple a week, like head gasket after head gasket after head gasket. I mean, I had a process down. I'm a lot slower now because it's been four or five years since I was almost exclusively doing six liter heads, but the book calls for 25 hours. I was paid hourly at the time and I could get from the time you turn the key off, pulling the truck into the shop, to the time the cylinder heads hit the bench in less than three hours. And there's not a lot of guys that can do that with a Honda, much less a 20 hour head job on a diesel. So it's like, I got really, really good at that. And that's kind of what I've kind of specialized in, but so many people don't understand the different, you know, I mean, like the engine is an assembly, right? But there's different systems within that engine. You've got a cooling system, a lubrication system on these trucks, you've got a high pressure oil system and there's a method to repairing them that it costs money. It's a decent chunk to do it right. It's what people traditionally refer to as bulletproofing with a few tweaks, but it's like, if you do it all and you do it right, you can make these trucks really reliable. And I ran this a couple months ago with a guy and I said, dude, this is what we need to do. And we need to do all this other stuff. And he goes, well, that stuff's not broken. No, it's not. Like you're one of the things I do when everything's apart is we put a cam sensor in because the cam sensors have a, not a high failure rate, but they like, usually they leak is more of their issue. And the cam sensor is $35 and it's 20 seconds to pop it out when I've got the heads and the front cover off and everything's apart, right? Or it's an hour and a half to do it when it's all put together. It's like, yes, we're spending more money, but then we're doing it right. And we're not having issue come back. And it's frustrating when you try to sell a customer on, do all of this stuff, and then you're gonna have a great product and they go, no, I'm gonna do this piece and I'm gonna do that piece. And that's all that I wanna do. Yep. And you do those two things and it comes back with a problem. And now they're going, well, you didn't fix my truck. It's like, no, I did. I fixed this piece and I fixed this piece. If you did what I recommended, you wouldn't be here. And like I said, I understand that money is a thing, right? I'm not a motive technician, dude. I get money. But sometimes I feel like customers, and this might be a breakdown in the service advisor role. They look at trying to sell you on a package deal as just a shady mechanic trying to take advantage of you. Not someone that genuinely cares about a positive outcome
20:56 SPEAKER_01 for this vehicle and wanting to fix it correctly. Yeah. And that's frustrating. Well, see, my biggest argument is always seen is that advisors, it's like traditionally, from my experience, not painting them all with the same brush. They always look at it as if the right repair is gonna be $7,000 and the customer has a budget of 5,500. It's better to get 5,500 than none at all, right? And I understand where that thinking comes from. And sometimes they do it two ways, right? They leave repairs off, like you said, that are gonna improve the quality of the repair, or they wanna start shaving time or look for overlap or take money off the tech. The reality is, is that the way I see it, and I talked to my friend, Brian, Brian Pollock and I, we talk about this all the time. Everything is a process, and it's my process and our process. It's not the customer's process. The customer doesn't dictate the process. Now, the customer's budget may dictate what they are hoping to achieve, but it doesn't dictate the process of what the proper repair is, right?
22:02 SPEAKER_00 Yeah, we shouldn't, as the professional, we shouldn't let, this is something we've run into in the shop that I work for quite a bit in the last few months, is a customer comes in and they wanna steer the boat with where they wanna go with this repair. And as professionals that know, that understand these vehicles, we understand what's going on with a vehicle, and then being like, okay, Mr. Customer, that's fine. You want us to go this route? We can definitely go that route for you if you want. But then it's like, we know this isn't gonna fix it. We're spending his money for no reason because he wanted to try it. And so often it ends up where we end up not charging for repair because we feel bad or whatever. The customer doesn't wanna pay for the repair because the car is not fixed. And you wouldn't go to the doctor and then tell him how to figure out what's wrong with you. Right? You go to a professional for their expertise. So why should we, as professionals, let someone who is not a professional,
23:05 SPEAKER_01 who doesn't understand the system, steer the boat? So let me ask you a question. Why, you mentioned how it's happening pretty recently. So why is it happening? It's not your business.
23:19 SPEAKER_00 It's not your shop. Now I say your shop, your place of employment, it's not your business. I was gonna say, let's be clear, I don't own it yet. Someday, someday I'd like to own a shop. But right now it's just where I work. So why is it happening? They're coming in like that. Where's the breakdown? We have, well, it's the front counter. We are running right now. I've talked to him for like 30 seconds. I don't really know him. I know he's really slow and he's not very attentive to detail because he almost cooked the card today. It was sputtering because it was getting so hot and overheating, it was vaporizing the fuel and it wasn't running out of fuel. It was like glowing red. Anyway, neither here nor there. But we've got, let's see here. We've got five, with the new guy, we've got five full-time techs and we have one tech that's like half, honestly, he's probably three quarter tech and a quarter foreman. The thing is, he's never gonna listen to this podcast because he's not into any kind of education. I'm not gonna talk bad about him. But he's a, obviously, I'm a younger guy. I've only been doing this for about eight years. But I've been in a lot of different shops that are like magnets for problem cars. So every shop that I've worked in has been the shop that all the surrounding shops send their problem cars to. So I've been in shops that are seeing hard, challenging vehicles all the time for the majority of my career. And so I think that I have a really well-rounded experience because I've seen a ton of problems. I've worked in high-volume shops that see all the stupid stuff. My shop foreman, he's young. He's younger than me. Now granted, it's by like 30 days, but he's younger than me. We have a shop full of young guys and we've got five and three quarter techs and one service advisor. We have one guy that works the front counter and then when he goes to lunch, the shop foreman sits in at his desk for an hour while he's at lunch. And… There's no… We don't have any processes. We don't have a process for a lot of this stuff. It's just kind of the way we've always done it. And there's kind of this like, I guess, seat of your pants feel as far as what we're doing, but there's no like written down, this is how we take in a car. These are the steps that we do take in a car. This is how the car comes in. It gets dispatched to a technician. The technician looks at it. We order parts. There's no set process. It's kind of jokingly thrown around the shop, but it's kind of how we operate. It's you break, I fix. And that's like the extent of our process. And so we have a lot of stuff that breaks down with our one, because we have one guy that works the front. And so he's answering the phones, he's taking appointments, he's talking to customers, writing up estimates, he's doing all this stuff. And stuff gets dropped or he forgets about it. And because he's rushed when a customer says, hey, I wanna do this, he goes, okay, sure, we can do that. And he ends up, I think, taking some pressure from customers that whether or not the customer should be applying that pressure, we could have that discussion. But customers come in and they say, I want this. And he's very much the type of person that wants to help everybody and fix everything. And the owner who was, so this shop, the shop that I work for has been around. So I've been there for two years now, a little over two years. And the shop had only been a shop for like a year and a half before I was hired. So very, very young shop. And the guy that owns it came out of like heavy trucks. Like over the road trucks and like heavy diesel stuff as he did before. And so we don't have, there's not a really good system that's put into place. It's just kind of been like people came in with broken stuff and we started fixing it. And the owner's view has always been, we get it done. That's like, that's our slogan on our t-shirts is we get it done. And he doesn't say no to anything. Like nobody calls and he'll get a call and it's like, hey, I got a wood chipper trailer and it needs a service. Can you guys do it? Yeah, absolutely, bring it down. It's like, dude, there's a tractor sitting in our back parking lot that we brought in. We split the, I don't even know what it's, we'd split the tractor in half, took the engine out, found there was a hole in the cylinder wall and it sat in our shop for like three months. Then we pushed it outside because we can't find an engine for it and it's been sitting there for a year now. It's like, why are we doing this? Why are we taking in- Great waste of resources. The stuff that is taking away from the cars out in the parking lot that are and we're taking away from that just so we can feel good because we can fix anything here. Yeah, he sounds like he needs some training. See, I would agree with that. And I was, so I started listening to the changing industry podcast when I found it was called that. And then I'm like, okay, I'm out of stuff and I keep going back to older and older episodes because I need something to listen to. And I'm like, oh, it was the ASOG podcast. I didn't even know that until I got back to episode 99 or whatever they changed the name. But there was stuff that I'm hearing and I'm just like, huh, that makes sense. Because I'm a very observant person. I watch what's going on. Always aspire to end up in some kind of a management role. And little things that I've noticed in listening to the podcast and listening to different guests on the podcast, specifically they had Cecil on as a guest. And it was like all the stuff that they're all saying makes sense and I'm like, guys, what if we change this? And I sat up my boss and he was like, oh yeah, all those guys, they've got their own way of doing things, it just doesn't work like that here. And I could hear Lucas in my mind going, yes it does.
30:05 SPEAKER_01 Yeah, and Cecil will tell you of all the coaches, or excuse me, of all the shops that Cecil's ever coached, he's only seen two examples in 20 plus years where somebody could legitimately say that won't work here. And he said it had to do with because they were already in an oversaturated market. And it was just like there was already too many shops. So Cecil hates that excuse, right? We joke about it because it's the same thing. Even starting with the other text, joke about it too. Oh, it won't work here, and it's such a stupid answer because it won't work here. Well, who is in control that is keeping it from working? Well, you ideally, you're the one that's your business. So then it becomes a stupid thinking ideal of it's the situations around me that stop it from working. That's BS. That's, you know, the shop down the road is not caring what you do or how you do it, right? If you're caring what the shop down the road is doing, you're already losing because they, I guarantee they don't care. They may gripe and complain about customers or your rates or whatever, but they're not having a direct impact on how you do your business. That at the end of the day is still your choice to charge what you charge or take in the client, tell that you take in and it's nobody else is responsible for you. So if you think that you're forced to do it,
31:33 SPEAKER_00 you've already lost. Yeah. Sorry. We have a, we have, no, no, by all means, that's why they call it the Jaded Mechanic Podcast. We have a, there's a chain, I guess, franchise chain that is kind of, I don't know if taking off is the right word, becoming more popular, at least in this corner of the world. It is the Christian Brothers franchise. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them. I've met some technicians that worked for them and I was not impressed. I've heard of the way that some things are done and I'm not super impressed. However, my father-in-law was, worked as a service advisor for a Christian Brothers location. And he had a job that was done for about a year and the amount of money that they make is, like, in my head, it seems ridiculous because I've never worked for a shop that charged like that. And they have a high labor rate, they have a labor rate that moves, they have multiple different labor rates and technicians are paid very well. Their services are paid very well and the franchise owner makes a ton of money and the customers love them. And that's kind of what I've learned, which is maybe just because I listened to David and Lucas too much, but what I've learned is there's a difference between cost, and half of our problem in the shops that I've worked for is that we're not giving the customer the value that is proportionate to the cost. So for example, we had a truck the other day that was unable to duplicate customer concern on an intermittent problem. I got into the car, we changed the codes, there were no codes. I listened to the customer's description, visual inspection of the hood, did 45 minutes of driving to try to get this thing to fail, tried all the different, there's a whole, I wrote out a story of all the stuff that I did and at the end of it, the advisor to the customer was, we couldn't figure out here's your car back, no charge. Now I get paid hourly so it doesn't come out of my check, but it's like, dude, we did the work. We had a highly skilled person time using our expensive diagnostic equipment to try to find the problem and your car didn't have the problem. It doesn't mean it's free. It shouldn't be free. You go to the dentist for a cleaning and they do an x-ray and they, oh, you don't have any cabbage, great.
34:37 SPEAKER_01 They still charge you for the x-ray. They're still doing a service. And unbilled time is my nemesis in this industry because unbilled time is what is always not calculated into the work that's performed versus what somebody is entitled to get for compensation. Do you know what I mean? So it's like, well, your production wasn't good, but we also did 10 jobs for charity last month, right? Where we didn't bill, we had 45 minutes here, 15 minutes there. The idea that that's still happening, and for two things, the idea that tech still allow it to happen, and I don't care because it's, well, okay, you're getting into the flat rate thing. No, it shouldn't. I think where my goal for 2020, the next year, is to try and get people to understand that everything needs to be logged, the time, the minute that you spend on it. Whether you charge for it or not, I don't give a flip. I don't care. If you wanna run yourself out of business doing charity, that's your prerogative, good for you. If it gets you into heaven, gets you into hell, whatever is the end goal, I'm proud of you. Good for you. But I leverage, and I'm evaluated on how many hours I turn. If I spend an hour in a car that we don't bill for, I don't have that to be able to say, this is what I'm worth, right? So it's a situation of, it's a double-ended sword that's always been used against techs when we feel like we need to give charity away. But what it does is you feel really good because you didn't perpetuate the myth that we charge for stuff we don't do. Meanwhile, what you did is you just turned around and flushed the techs efficiency because I don't have, well, that hour that was lost, that hour that was lost that we didn't charge for is lost for the day, right? And then at the end of the month, they're like, there's eight hours there. Well, where did that go? Well, you gave it all back to the customer.
36:47 SPEAKER_00 You shouldn't have done that. We have, so occasionally, probably every month, our owner sits down and runs the reports and looks at billed hours versus payroll hours. So the shop that I work in, everybody's paid an hourly wage, with the exception of, I think the owner who was kind of like half tech, half service advisor for a while and now he's kind of stepped out and back as into more, except for he just bought a heavy truck shop. And so now he's doing the same half and half deal over there and trying, it's a mess. The man needs a coach, but he doesn't think he needs to know, like he's young. He's, I think, I think he's 35. So it's hard, cause I'm like, dude, like just listen to this podcast, like nothing else, put it in your work
37:40 SPEAKER_01 and listen to this podcast. I don't need that. So I would say by the sounds of it, that your owner definitely needs some coaching. And you're saying the secondary owner, I guess we could call him that,
37:51 SPEAKER_00 he's now onto a business number two. He just said he bought a heavy truck shop. Yeah, yeah. So our owner is now owning two shops and kind of jumping back and forth between them. And it's frustrating for me for a multitude of reasons. But the first is that I am with any luck, six to eight months out of relocating about a thousand miles east of here. And so I'm not one foot out the door, but it's like, I know that I'm not gonna be in this shop long-term. And I've had this conversation with, it sounds weird to say my owner cause that feels kind of icky, but like the shop owner that I work for. Yeah, yeah. I've had this conversation with him. And so I happened to know that if I wasn't moving, that he would really like to have me basically buy him out and take over the shop. Great. Which is hard because it's like, that's what I wanna do. Like the position that I'm walking away from here as a way to step into shop ownership is something that I've been working towards basically since I was a mobile mechanic. It's something that I've wanted and want to work towards. And it's hard knowing that I'm walking away from that. I was pretty sure I walked away from it when I left my last job and came to where I'm at now. Not an ownership role, but at least a management role. This one would be an ownership role, but this isn't where I wanna raise my family. It is entirely too high here. And so we're moving. There's a lot more that goes into that, but that's not a conversation for another time. So it's hard because we'll hear about like, okay, well your efficiency was, over the last six months, your average efficiency, I had the second highest in the shop at like 69.9% efficient. So that's clock time versus build time. And which is weird because the last time that I was working full-time flat rate, I was averaging 45 to 50 hours a week for a 40 hour week. Yeah. For a year. You know, like I know that I can produce it. And if you look at a single, like a snapshot job. So for example, I did a water pump and a serpentine belts on a 2005 Ford diesel today. And that job pays two and a half, three hours. And did a AC evac and recharge for an hour. So the whole ticket was like three and a half hours and I did it in like an hour and 40 minutes, the whole thing. Right. And that's pretty typical. But then there's all the in between time and the what am I doing next and hunting down parts and all this other stuff that fact, and it's not to mention all the free work. Hey, so and so is here with an engine to drop off. Can you grab the forklift and go unload that? And it's like, I guess, I mean, I get paid the same either way. But then when I want to go to my boss and say, hey, I'd like to make some more money. And how can we do that? He looks at the efficiency and goes, well, shoot, dude, you're not even 70% efficient. How can I pay you more money? Exactly. And it's like, okay, it's cause I'm doing all this free stuff. And it's, and so in the moment, it's like, I get paid by the hour. And so it doesn't affect me. But then on the other hand, when it comes time to talk about what that hourly rate is, he looks at that number and goes, well, you know, like you're not doing great. Now, if you stack me up against all the other techs in the shop, there's one of the techs that flags more hours than me. And it's because he's young. Sounds weird to say it's cause he's young. He's young, he's gung ho, he works hard and he doesn't do any diag work. And he's just going to say it 1% more efficient than me. So it's like, it's not that I'm not a skilled tech. It's not that I can't work efficiently. It's that I get stuck on these unlike stupid diag. Cause I've got to, we have an intermittent concern on this truck that only occurs when you're towing. And so like I drove, the guy says that sometimes does it when you're not towing, but it always does it when you're towing. So, okay, cool. I take it, I drive it. And now I'm an hour and a half into a one hour diag. And it's like, dude, I got nothing on this thing. Nothing at all. It doesn't do anything. Like I hear a tire noise, he's complaining of an engine surge at highway speeds. I got nothing. So the advisor calls the customer, the customer, he's a dirt work company. They've got equipment and trailers and multiple trucks. So he brings down a trailer and we hook to the back of this and I go for ride with this guy. I'm like, dude, show me what it's doing and we'll see what you figure it out. Okay, we proceed to drive around for an hour and 20 minutes to get this thing to do it. And it kind of does it, but it's like a, it's a short enough event. It's like a misfire, but it's on a diesel and it's so fast that nothing on the scan tool is catching it. And it's like, okay, I was already an hour and a half into a one hour diag line. And then you just ask me to go ride with this customer for an hour and 20 minutes. Now we're three hours into a one hour diag. We're a little bit closer to an answer because I've experienced the problem now. But are we gonna charge for that time? No, I'm not charging for that time. So what was the point of doing it?
43:20 SPEAKER_01 My days, yeah. Well, because I think what your boss's mentality is, is I can't charge them for a diag until I give them a definite answer. And we need to stop that BS because it's like you hear people talking about, right? They don't even like the word diag anymore because the implications of what it means, right? You've heard them talk about that. Matthew Skunt talks about that. It's hours of testing, not hours of diagnosis because diagnosis is the end result. I give the person the diagnosis that is the end. I know now what it is.
43:57 SPEAKER_00 That's the end of the line.
43:57 SPEAKER_01 That's not what we're doing. I got finished, yes. The testing is I'm still testing. I'm still duplicating. I'm still road testing, right? I'm gathering evidence as we'd like to say. Your boss needs to understand that if the customer doesn't, first of all, he sounds like he's busy as heck because he is not charging enough. And then second, yeah, great, you're busy. Yeah, you spent three hours too and you haven't charged anybody anything yet. You've gone on two different test drives for something that let's be real, one in 10 people wouldn't even probably find what's happening. Nine out of 10 customers probably would not bother to fix it yet because it is not causing a big enough issue. Yes, it might be worrying them. But it's intermittent.
44:46 SPEAKER_00 And talking to this customer, it's been doing this for a year and it hasn't gotten any worse or any more frequent in a year of driving. And it's like, dude, if I had a crystal ball, you think I'd be doing this for a living? Like, really? I like what I do. But if I had that magical ball, you just look into it and go, oh, looks like you need a fuel injector. Yeah, it'd be a different ball game. And that thing is, it takes time to figure things out. It takes time to test circuits or whatever your issue is that you're testing. All these things take time and we should be charging for that time. And I'll go and watch a scanner, Danner video and maybe it takes him an hour and a half, two hours, because he has to go and research a problem or he's doing extensive testing. And it's like, if Paul Danner, who is arguably one of the best dyad guys on the planet right now, if he struggles to do that, there is no reason. You can't look at me and go, oh, well, maybe that shouldn't have taken you three hours. That's a question my service provider asks and I hate that question. Well, how long should it have taken us? It's like, that's not a relevant question because how do you gauge that? No.
46:10 SPEAKER_01 You know? Well, you can't. How long would it, my radical answer, which has always got me labeled as a bad attitude is it's like, well, how long would it have taken you? Which of course is the same quality of, because they don't have an answer for that either, right? So it's not about how long it should have taken. It's like, how much time are we gonna charge? And we're gonna go up to that time. That's what we're gonna give. If you're only gonna give an hour, you can give an hour, right? If we're authorized for three hours, it's like Brian talks about, if you've got an authorization for three hours retainer for Dyad, like Paul talked about in his video, you give them three hours. Now, if it doesn't take three hours, you don't charge them the full three, but it's a commitment to the customer.
46:55 SPEAKER_00 Yeah, if you find an hour and a half.
46:57 SPEAKER_01 Yeah. It's the commitment between the owner and the commitment between the customer and the business that we're not in this to just throw darts at this. We're in this to actually get to the root of the problem. And we're gonna need a commitment. If you're not willing to come with the commitment, we're not your facility. Somebody else down the road will maybe only spend an hour.
47:18 SPEAKER_00 And that's, yeah. Until you probably- That line of maybe we're not the best fit for you. That's something that is just like pulling teeth to get our front desk to say that. We had a client come in with a 56 Willys, or no, I'm sorry, 1950 Willys, what was that thing? It was like a Willys Jeepster body with a small block Chevy powertrain in a Toyota chassis. Kinda cool. Fantastic. I mean, it's cool. It was not super well done, but it was kinda cool. But it's like, that's not what we do. It came in for, it had an overheating concern and an oil leak and I think there was something else, but I'm blank on it. And I got in and looked at this thing and the shop that put the engine in, put it in in such a fashion that you can't do valve covers on a small block Chevy because the engine is mashed into the firewall. It's making hard contact with the firewall. And I'm looking at this going, dude, this engine needs to be moved about an inch forward, which means we gotta lengthen and shorten drive lines, we gotta move tranny mount, we gotta move engine mount. This is not something that we can do. Me as Andrew, I can do this. I have the skillset to do this. But there is no way that we are, this is gonna take up so much time and there's no way you guys are gonna charge effectively for this. Like if I tell you this is gonna be a 30 hour ticket, you're gonna go really? And that's when we should have turned away and it's hard because the customer basically, what he asked us was he's like, I don't have anywhere else to take it. Can you guys just fix the oil leaks and reseal the engine? And I'll pay whatever it takes. I just, I need, you guys have a great reputation. You're the only people I trust to do this. You work on my other cars, can you just fix the engine? Just fix the oil leaks in the engine. And so in my head, I'm like, pull small block Chevy out, reseal it, put it back in. We can do that, right? So then I, at that point I like shifted and I'm like, okay, I advocate we should do this. It ended up being, it was weird. The shop paid or he paid the shop and then the owner paid me cash to come in on a weekend and do it. So it's like, I'm doing side work for my boss in the shop. On a week, it was a mess.
49:47 SPEAKER_01 What I would not do again for the record. The customer didn't even want to pay the full value of the ticket, right? Which is-
49:54 SPEAKER_00 No, the customer was fine to pay the, the customer didn't have a problem paying it.
49:57 SPEAKER_01 The service advisor felt guilty charging him the full amount. So that was the thing that got me. Yeah. And did the service manager, the owner, he was okay with the service advisor doing this? Yeah. Then they're one the same, right? He speaks for one, he speaks for the other. I know, I know. Right? It's an effort of pulling the plug out of the boat so the boat can fucking sink.
50:21 SPEAKER_00 Pardon my French. I know. And the point is that we don't want the boat to sink. We want the boat to float and we want to provide, that was something, there was something that I think it was, I think it was Lucas said in one of his podcast episodes. He was talking about you as a shop have to make money. You have to be profitable so that you can take care of your customers, right? If you have a customer that has a, if there's a problem with the vehicle or whatever, if you don't have any dollars to fix your mistake or whatever, you can't do that. So like we have to be profitable so that we can take care of our customers, so that we can take care of our employees, so that we can have half decent equipment. We can't do work for free. I'm not all opposed to, you've got a really good customer that is in all the time, they spend lots of money and they say, hey, I've got a check engine light. Can you guys plug into it real quick and tell me if I need to schedule it for a diag or if I'm safe to keep driving it? And it's five minutes, tech walks out and looks at it and no problem, schedule it for a diag, we'll see you next week. And then we charge them, we're charging for that time just not today, but it is getting charged. Like I don't have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is, hey, can you go and do a quick oil leak evaluation on this car? It's just sitting out in the parking lot and I'm not gonna make a ticket, but just take a look at it and see. This actually happened like last week or two weeks ago. I crawl underneath this truck. It's like, okay, your front crank seal slash oil pump is just dumping oil. We'll start with that. Customer brings, now again, this is like the truck is hot off the road. I crawl under in the dirt for 30 seconds. Give it a quick look. Go, okay, this looks like your big one. Fast forward two weeks, customer brings in for the repair. I do the repair and it's still dumping oil. Now that seal was leaking a lot, but it's still dumping oil. Well, why didn't you check that? Why didn't you see the other oil leak that was also pouring? And it's like, well, first of all, I don't know if that one was leaking when I looked at it in the first place, because I didn't look at this. I gave a cursory glance and it keeps biting us over and over and over. We'll do a quick look. We'll do something that's free. And then there's no record of it. There's no note that says, I gave this a quick visual inspection on this day, at this time, and I observed this was leaking profusely. This is at the front of the engine. I recommend we start with this and then clean and retest for other leaks. That little paragraph would have protected us for when we call the customer and say, hey, Mr. Customer, you have another giant leak.
52:58 SPEAKER_01 It's gonna cost you another four or $500 to fix. When we don't document things, it comes back to bite us. Sure, because here's what, if somebody was to send me out, it'd be like, okay, I'm gonna go it out there and I'm gonna look and make sure that the drain plug is not hanging out. And I'm gonna make sure that the oil filter is not falling off. And if it's neither one of those two things, you can probably keep driving and you need to schedule in for an engine shampoo and a leak evaluation, right? That's how it would proceed, whether we put UV dye in it or whether it's a known thing like a vacuum pump on whatever, what is it, six, seven, six, four? Six, seven. Six, seven, seven, seven, vacuum pump to leak. And it always looks like it's a crack deal and it's a vacuum pump. I've done a couple now. And if the customer doesn't wanna pay the $150 or $200, whatever, for leak diagnostic, then I don't need that customer.
53:54 SPEAKER_00 Have a nice day, we don't need that customer. We're not starving for work. We don't have tech standing around going,
53:59 SPEAKER_01 where's the next job? Why are we taking in the free stuff? Because your boss and your service advisor team wanna help people is killing the bottom line because they're doing all this shit for free or discounted. And then you say, okay, but we're making money and we're busy, but you're not making a ton of money because he hasn't drawn A to B conclusion that I can't keep doing all this crap for free if I wanna make the note that I'm supposed to make. So he keeps thinking, so he's an idiot and he's gonna drive up with more car count. I need a bigger facility, more car count because of the way we do business. Instead of sitting down with a coach and going, stop that. You're attracting the wrong type of customer. Yes, you have a great reputation. Yes, you do fantastic work. People love to come to you because you don't whack them over the head with $150 die egg that is wrong. But what's the sense in telling somebody and giving them a free die egg if the die egg is still wrong? You might as well charge for the die egg. And then if the die egg is wrong, then you can have money to make it right. If I crawl under there real quick and I take a break and I go, well, for sure the vacuum pump is leaking because yep, that's common, that's what they do. But say the valve cover leaking or say it's got an oil feed line to turbo or something that's also leaking, but you can't see it because the whole engine's leaking. So you go and put your vacuum pump in, that's a 500, 600 dollar job, right? It's a big thing. And then you go and pressure wash that son of a bitch off and you sit there and fire it like Lucas will tell you, he was meticulous about this. He put a piece of cardboard underneath and it sit there and idle for an hour. And then he'd be looking at the cardboard to see if the car's still dripping off. You go and do that and find the oil turbo line is leaking. Well, heck, that would have been a lot easier to do when you already had the front of the engine off, apart, right? Fans are out and state all that to do that. Now what do you do? Now you gotta go get the customer another estimate. You probably got a discount that you got to or whatever. Right? And why? Because somebody didn't wanna do a proper evaluation in the first place. How is that your problem? Andrew, that's not your problem.
56:20 SPEAKER_00 You didn't make that decision. And that's the thing is like there needs to be a way a process with which we use to approach these problems. If a customer comes in with a, hey, my truck is leaking oil, especially if it's like puking oil. Like, I mean, there's just oil. Like when your back bumper is leaking oil because there's so much oil underneath the truck, like I can't really do anything. We have to start with cleaning this thing because I'm pretty sure your bumper doesn't leak engine oil and your fuel tank's got a drip under it, but it looks like engine oil. We have to start with it and say, we're gonna start with a cleaning. Once we get the cleaning, we're gonna do an evaluation. This is gonna cost you an hour for the cleaning and an hour for the evaluation. You're gonna be 250, 300 bucks. This is what it's gonna cost to figure out what your oil leak is. And then the answer is, well, can't you just take a quick look? Yeah, you got an oil leak.
57:18 SPEAKER_01 Like that's what you get for free. Right. Sorry. Or I can even give you one better and I don't even have to look at it. I can ask you the three questions. Have you ever done X, Y, and Z before? Which of the known three offenders to cause the leak? You haven't done any one of them? Okay, the first one's $500. The second one's $800. And the last one we did was three grand. Is any of those sound above your budget? Yes? Okay, let me shake your hand and get the door for you because you're already like, you don't have the money to resolve the problem. This is not the shop for you. You just wanna peace of mind.
57:49 SPEAKER_00 I think that concept, yeah. I think the concept of we are not the repair facility for every customer out there is one that a lot of shop owners are not quite ready to come to terms with. Oh, 50% of them are close. Yeah, like the way we have a Christian Brothers franchise that opened up and they are blasting everybody with, they get like, they mail out these oil change coupons and they're running an oil change special, all this stuff. And my boss looks at it and goes, that's whatever, who cares? And my service advisor, who at one point in his career worked for Christian Brothers goes, dude, this works. We should be thinking kind of more this way. And my owner's like, what other shops do, it doesn't matter to us. And that wouldn't work here anyway with our customer base. And in my head, I'm looking at that going, why wouldn't you want the best customers? Why wouldn't you want the customers, like we have customers that are, I don't care what it costs, fix it, fix it right, use the best quality parts, get it done. Like, why wouldn't you want all of your customers to be like that instead of, you know, hey, can you maybe do this for free? Or we had one today, dumb, the customer allegedly. Now, I'm human, I make mistakes. I don't remember like the specific action of torquing the wheels down on this car. I know I take out a torque wrench for every car that I work on and I'm like pretty confident that I torque these wheels down. The customer states that we left the lug nuts loose on this car, which is the car that I worked on. I put a power steering rack in a 2002, I think it was like a Dodge Intrepid, the one that has the rack like up in the engine bay. Really dumb design, really dumb design. Anyways, customer says that we left the lug nuts loose and that caused a tire separation. He wants us to buy him a tire. So he, I know, I know, you're thinking like, how does that, it doesn't, it doesn't. So we said, just bring us the car. We want to look at the car and see what's going on. So we get the car in, there is anti-seize on the lug studs because I'm thorough when I do this job and I put some anti-seize on so they don't break coming off. There is no damage to the studs from a wheel, you know, wallering against studs when it's loose. There's no damage to the wheel from studs being loose. And there is no scuffing of the little bit of surface rust that's built up on the brake rotor where wheel and brake rotor meet. There's no evidence at all that suggests that this wheel was loose or there was any movement between the brake rotor and the wheel while the vehicle was driving. That being said, the tire has a nasty bulge in it. The guy says that he took the, when he went to put his spare tire on so he could drive the car, that only one of the bolts was kind of tight and the other two were like almost all the way backed off, which I'm, that's a lie. That's a flat out lie because the evidence does not suggest that. But we look at this tire, so I don't know if you guys use DOT numbers on tires like we do here. But there's a number on the tire and I can look at that tire and I can tell you how old that piece of rubber is. I don't know if you've checked the calendar recently, the year is 2023. This tire was from 2014. So you've got a nine year old tire that has a separation that leads to a bulge and you're telling me that's my fault. And we comp the guy a tire and put a tire on it for him and have a nice day. And I know that tire is only a hundred dollar tire. Like we didn't get him a nice tire and it's not an expensive tire, but it's the principle of this guy is always coming back and complaining and trying to get stuff for free.
01:01:48 SPEAKER_01 Well, can you blame at this point, right? You can't. I mean, he keeps getting it. Exactly, why would you not? It's like me saying, I keep going back to that lake because the fish always bite. Well, hello, I'm gonna keep going back to that lake. It's just common sense. You're rewarding the customer for swindling you by giving him this shit for free. So then you get appalled when he comes back and asks for more free shit.
01:02:18 SPEAKER_00 I don't, it doesn't seem to make any sense to me, right? Why do we keep, and why do we keep doing this? And it's not just this customer. It's not just this customer, it's like multiple customers. And it's like, why don't we just say, look, we didn't cause this. Here's the evidence that we didn't cause this. You keep coming back, we are not doing this anymore. You need to take your car somewhere else. We're not working for you anymore. Does it seem like I get that maybe in the moment, that's a hard conversation to have when you're face to face someone saying, don't ever come back here again. But at the same time, we're running a business. We're not running a charity. I don't have any issue with being charitable, right? Like, if you wanna go and do stuff for charity, more power to you. But when we're talking about a shop, we're talking about a business and that business has to be profitable so that you can choose to be charitable.
01:03:10 SPEAKER_01 If we're always doing charity work, you're not a business. But see, it is charity work because to them, and this is the part that drives me, like I sometimes struggle with this. Charity for them, the way I was raised was charity was whatever you felt like putting the offering plate on Sunday morning when it got passed around. That was charity. Charity was, do I want to donate to the food bank at Christmas time, right? Do I wanna buy a family and need their kids some presents? That's charity. Charity has no place, here's the unpopular opinion. Charity has no place in business. Business and charity should be separate. What I choose to do with charity is should be what I choose to do with it, right? Now, I understand you can make it, and it's a marketing thing and it makes you feel good. It's good for the community. There's nothing wrong with that. But if your people that work for you are going without, that's a whole other topic. That's a whole different thing. Then you're not being charitable to the people that got you the funds to be charitable. You understand what I mean? Exactly, exactly. You have the money to put in the offering plate because of what your people do for you. If you don't look after those people.
01:04:29 SPEAKER_00 I worked for a shop that really had this dialed in, and they had a fund that the shop contributed to this fund that was the, I will call it a charity fund. That was this, there was money that the company set aside each month that said, this is money that we are going to put towards, if we decide we wanna do some charity work for somebody. And customers were aware that they, there were, I'm not exactly sure how they set it up, but there was a way that customers could round their bill up by a few dollars and contribute those dollars to that charity fund. And they had the system set up really well to where it didn't come out. It worked well to where we did one or two jobs that were free to the customer, but the company got paid for them because there was money in this pot that paid that bill. And it was really well set up. Everybody in the community loved it. There was one, this one guy, we'd been working on his car for a long time. He'd been a great customer. A number of things happened in his life. I don't wanna say his life fell apart, but went through a really hard patch in life, and his car broke, and it ended up being that his car was not worth fixing, and the shop was able to just give him one of our old loaner cars. And it was this big deal. Everybody in the community heard about it. This shop gave him a car instead of charging him to fix his car. It was great for their marketing. And they set it up in a way that the business made money, and the business, because it was profitable, was able to take a portion of those profits and put them over into a charity pot, and then use that to pay the business to do charity work. It wasn't, we're not charging for this. We're gonna do this for free. Hey, we're not paying you for this. It was, we have some money here, and we've elected to put that money to cover the cost of this ticket so the customer doesn't have to pay. And that sort of charity I am 100% on board with. But the idea that we should be going out and doing free work, especially when at the cost, if your employees have, if you're asking, if you as a shop owner are asking your employee to go do something for free, and then asking them to pay for their own time to go do that, that to me is just like, at best you're just taking advantage of them.
01:06:50 SPEAKER_01 I don't get it. Because it goes back to there's, like I said, I've said before, and it's again, another unpopular opinion sometimes, is that I feel like there's way more right now, there's way more owners, service advisors, and managers that need to be taking training than everybody talking about all the training that techs need to take. Because the reality is, is I haven't taken much training that's actually recognized training. Now, did I spend a lot of time, you know, watching Scander Dan or, yeah, sure I did. But in terms of like sitting down in classroom and tons of, no, I didn't do it. I have a fundamentals that allow me to get to the end of the result, I can fix the car. There's no question about that, I can fix the car. But I've worked for a ton of people that can't manage the business the way it really should be managed. And yet they always go back to, that will never work here, and it's, we've always done it this way. That's, popular excuses number one and number two. I can't tell you which one is number one and number two because it flips flops from week to week, but it's always one of those. Oh yeah, absolutely. Right, so there's way more people out there that need to be taking management training, business training, advisor training, coaching, than there are techs that need to learn how to do the job better. I mean, we can all bring our skillset up, but the reality is, is right now we have a technician shortage because people will not work for free. And we have a whole bunch of business owners that sit there and go, I expect them to work for free. Cool, you expect them to work for free. Where are they? Nobody else does. That's right.
01:08:24 SPEAKER_00 Yeah, where, what other industry is asking their people to drive to work, to have, I mean, depending on who you are, let's call a round number, you know, 30 to $40,000 worth of tools of their own money they had to buy and then say, I want you to do this for free and I'm not gonna pay you for it. Like what other industry does that? And I just, I cannot wrap my head around that. If you want to pay me an hourly wage and say there's gonna be things that I want you to do that are not production, and I know those aren't production, but you're getting paid for them anyway, and I'm not like, you're still gonna get pay increases or whatever because you're bringing value to the company even if it's not in production hours. It's like, okay, that's fine. I'm okay with that. But if my job as a technician is to produce and I keep having to go and do these side things, which I don't mind doing, I really don't. Like go in and help another techs, which I think is the job of the shop foreman last time I checked was that his job was to like help the other people, make sure everything is staying flowing, not my job. Now, do I want that job? Yes, but that's not my job. And I got to a point of where it was like the shop foreman had the job title, but I was doing the job. With the exception of dispatching, I was doing the job. I show up early, I open the building, turn the air compressor on, you know, get everything up and running. I'm the last guy there at the end of the day. I close everything down. I'm making sure all the techs are working efficiently if they have a problem, I'm helping them with, like I'm doing all of the jobs of a shop foreman. And then I get this conversation that says, hey man, your efficiency is kind of dumping here. Like we gotta bump this efficiency up.
01:10:10 SPEAKER_01 And it's like, yeah, because I'm doing his job and my job. It's your efficiency in the shop foreman or I guess not calculated the same, right?
01:10:19 SPEAKER_00 Because he's a foreman, so it's not probably calculated. It's calculated the same as far as build time versus clock time. So we have, because all of our guys are paid hourly, they are, our time clock system is completely separate from our shop management software. And so we can pull from the shop management software, we use tech metric is who we're using right now. And we can pull a report of hours built within whatever timeframe. And then we can go and look at payroll and go, okay, we paid you for this many hours and then do the math as far as efficiency there. So efficiency is calculated there. And my shop foreman is good, is very good at two things. Not only two things, but two things that he's really good at.
01:11:08 SPEAKER_01 And that's front end suspension and dash. Surprising.
01:11:13 SPEAKER_00 Yeah, surprising. That's what I'm saying. He's like, oh, I just eat these friends up. And I'm like, great, congratulations. Like so can every other monkey out here. Like you can do a little faster than me, cool. I can do everything else way faster than you. There's a car. It's like, he does these two things. And so he'll get a front end that pays, I don't know, nine or 10 hours and he'll get it done by lunchtime. And he's like, look at me, I'm being deficient. We're making all this money. Like, why can't you guys be this efficient? And it's like, we'll do, because I'm doing a four hour diet. So why do I have to do pull-ups�
01:11:43 SPEAKER_01 with you guys, like five people across the street? Because I know that shots take proven lines. And now the Almighty Father ofounds is out there with me doing all of these contracts that I ended. But now two people facing them and you know no Because I'm the Lord of this world. Yeah. This is turning into a straight line trouble. So this is turning into chaos. Look at our way here, this is what we're. Like you don't know, this should ;) Fantastic. You're look at you swing them joints out. What a good boy. Now go out there and tell me why that won't start. You'd be out there all day. You'd be out there all week. Yeah.
01:12:19 SPEAKER_00 So remember that you remember that I know I know we're on this podcast not listening to tipping's podcast. But if you listen to my episode that I did with him on the automotive diagnostic podcast, the shop foreman and this new young tech spent a solid eight hours diagnosing this Malibu and they concluded that we needed to sell 27 hours to pull a cylinder head and inspect for a valving issue because they thought they had a valve train problem. Now I put an injector or we I looked at it. I made a bad call as an ECM. If you listen to the podcast, you'll get through all of why that happened. I made a bad call as an ECM to which to which my shop foreman comes over and goes, I told you we needed a cylinder head. And I was like, no, it does not need a cylinder head. And I can prove it. Let me poke this wire with the scope and I'm going to prove to you that doesn't need a cylinder head. And we go through that and I ended up putting a fuel injector in it and fuel injectors fixed the car and my foreman and our alignment and front end and dash guy, this guy, this stand up technician, this guy spent eight hours and concluded we needed to spend 27 hours of the customer's money to pull a cylinder head for a valving issue. Yeah. And yes, I spent two hours in diag to figure this car out. Yeah. Yeah. We kind of burned a PCM. I was a $300 PCM that we burned on it, but we got the car fixed without pulling the head and great. I'm so glad you can do front ends, you know? Yeah. And that's why I like it. Your taste. We get, we get, we're in, I'm not sure how big the areas that you're in. We're near, I'm near our shop is near Phoenix, Arizona. And so we get a lot of, I mean, our County has a population of like 6 million people. There's a lot of classes that get offered through different parts vendors. And I'm of the belief that I take every class I can get my hands on because I, I want to be the best that I can possibly be. That's why I spend time listening to, you know, the automotive diagnostic podcast or other things to like, to sharpen my skills and to educate myself so that I can be better. And so when we go to a class and usually I usually end up taking most of the guys are willing to go to the class most of the time, but then we get done with a class to where I'm, I'm done. Like I've been, you know, chicken scratching notes the whole time. And I know that everybody learns differently. That's fine. But I get in with the class and I go, wow, that was like some really valuable information. I had a question. I went up, I talked to the instructor. Like we had a good discussion. I learned a lot. And my foreman goes, that could have been an email. It's like, dude, you missed it. Like you missed all this stuff because you're so arrogant that you don't think you need it. Like, why would I go to training? I already know that it's basic. Okay. But it is so under head for fuel injector.
01:15:11 SPEAKER_01 He thinks it's basic cause he thinks basic, right? So it's just sit him down in that class. It's already wasted. Your boss, he wants to save some money. Don't send them because he ain't getting, he's not getting anything out of it. Right. So, and this is the problem is that like, I'd love to sit. So what would be a great episode of you to sit down with your boss and understand, try to ask him why it is that he does this stuff. Because two things either he never got bothered by the crap that he did for free,
01:15:42 SPEAKER_00 which means that probably nobody ever talked to him about efficiency and productions. So come up in this industry. He came up in the heavy, heavy truck world. And I've worked in that. It was, you just fix the truck. I would assume it's the same way.
01:15:58 SPEAKER_01 Yeah. It's same thing. I did it for years. So it's like, they don't ever, when it rolls in there, like, okay, yeah, there's a, oh, okay. There's a clutch. All right, cool. We're doing a clutch and a freight liner. Awesome. So there's a basic timeframe of what that's going to take. But then every truck out there, no two trucks are the same. They all have stuff added to them. You know, material underneath, whatever. Extra PTOs, all that stuff adds more time. So there is no flat rate that says this is what it should take to take the clutch. That lives in the dealership at the warranty time. And even still, the dealers, the OEs on the truck side are much better about just covering the frigging tax time to get the thing fixed under warranty than to worry about production. So now your boss comes over to our world and thinks that all of a sudden he must have taken a course somewhere from someone that said, these are the numbers you got to look at and your guys, I got to turn ours. And he goes, okay, dokey. I guess that's how it's supposed to go then.
01:17:01 SPEAKER_00 No, that's not how it goes. Because I just want to kind of say something is that like, when we talk about some of these things, it sounds like he's an idiot. He's not an idiot. He's just, oh, I'm not. This is the way we've always done it. And he's made money doing it. And he's a very intelligent person, but he thinks that all of the people that are all these coaches, all of these people that are doing training are only doing that because they couldn't hack it as a shop owner or they couldn't hack it as a technician. Guys get into training because they couldn't be a good technician. Now, is there some truth to that? In some cases, I'm sure there is. But. Yeah, definitely there. That doesn't mean that's like, so I, one of the things that I kind of do on the side is I buy and sell trucks from like auctions. My favorite auction says actually Canadians, the Ritchie Brothers auction. I bought a truck a while back, made some money, but there's this line about auctions. It says that, uh, that I think applies to coaches and instructors and stuff. And with auctions, it's not all the equipment at the auction is crap, but all the crap equipment is at the auction. And so it's like, it's a mixed bag. You can get some, you can get some, some not great instructors. You can get some not great coaches, but if you discount all of it, you're missing out. You know, it's like looking at freeze frame data, nine times out of 10, the freeze frame isn't going to tell you anything. However, if you're in the habit of never looking at that one time, when it'll point you exactly to where you need to go, you're not going to see it because you're not looking there. That's right.
01:18:33 SPEAKER_01 It's not part of your process. It's a situation of when you go by, I want to go touch on that. What you said about the people that coach probably are washed out as tech as shop owners. That's not the case. I can tell you that firsthand. Now, some of them, I think probably saw a much more lucrative. I can make a much better. Sure. Wealth pile for myself by going into showing people what I did and how I made my, my shop or my family shop successful. They can make much more. It's much more lucrative for them to educate people on how they did it. Cool. Great. Are there people out there that like probably the shop didn't do well? Yeah, maybe. And did they maybe learn after they got out? This is the thing. There's a lot of shop owners. I talked to a lot of shop owners even got out of it and they're like, once I got out and I started to talk to other people, I realized why it didn't work and it was me. Yeah. Right.
01:19:32 SPEAKER_00 Yeah. And that keeps happening over and over and over again. People keep saying the same things and it's like, maybe, just maybe, collectively as an industry, the knowledge from these coaches that see, I know one coach and I don't know how many people that person coaches, but it's like for each coach, they see all these different shops. They are looking at all these different shops, all these different processes, different, maybe different methods of doing things. And they're looking at all this and they have this really great kind of big picture. They have all this information because it's not just what they know in their shop. And then when you get coaches that get together, the collective knowledge of people is always going to be greater than a single person's knowledge. Right. And that's, I think, the hope or the goal of podcasts, maybe not necessarily this one, but like the Changing the Industry podcast, which is to kind of try and like boil down and distill some of that knowledge into, you know, digestible size bites. But the idea that I don't need any help, I don't need anybody else to tell me how to do this, I know how this works is just silly that you don't think that anybody else that collectively, nobody else out there has any idea that might be better than what you're doing now.
01:20:54 SPEAKER_01 And see, the problem with this industry is we could have shop owners that have failed, right? We could have shop owners that have come in and said, I did this, this and this, and it didn't work and I failed. I ended up going, who did I just talk to? And they ended up going back and they're now an employer or an employee because the shop that they're running didn't last. They couldn't make it go. Yeah. We could have those people step forward and tell the cautionary tale and it would all be wasted because somebody like your boss would immediately, I think, jump to, ah, they probably didn't know what they were doing or whatever, or they were probably good. They weren't fixing the car, they were charging too much. Instead of, and completely disregard the other stuff that they're saying. Just like he says, the coaches are coaches because they couldn't operate a shop is the same attitude he's going to have when somebody comes up and says, hey, my shop failed. They're going to say, yeah, but you were charging the customer too much. You were taking advantage of the customer. You didn't have good techs and they couldn't diagnose shit. The two are linked. Your quality of your technician, your quality of repair is linked to how much you pay those technicians. You get quality talent. They do quality repair. You charge the customer enough money to recruit them and keep them. It's not hard to comprehend if you keep it basic, simple stuff. It's when it gets screwed up is when people start to make excuses for why they can't have that. And then when you have the excuses, because you're letting the customer dictate how you should run your business. It's not their name over the frigging door. It's yours. Yeah. It's your business. You run it, right? But see, when you're running a business, we don't have this. Always I have to give away so much free shit to get the customer to spend money.
01:22:55 SPEAKER_00 That's the 100 year old century problem that this industry's had. Why? I just cannot wrap my head around why you would not want. Why? Okay. Like I get not everybody's greedy and I try not to be greedy, but like why, if you were told, if you knew that you could make more money and have less stress by changing the way you, you know, setting up better processes by charging fairly for all of your work, why wouldn't you want more money and
01:23:24 SPEAKER_01 less stress? Like if you just boil it down to those two things. I mean, the answer is because you have an ego and what I am doing works. And if I change what I'm doing, I'm admitting that what I was doing was not the best or was wrong. Let me tell you a story. We just saw a friend of mine in his shop. They've finally terminated the advisor that they had because he was literally crippling the business with not following processes, not doing, always wanting to help the customer, always wanting to not charging for lines of dikes, so on and so forth. I'll tell you the reality of that. What I think is, is that that owner will probably never want to do the paperwork to figure out exactly how much that nonsense cost him for the five years that the guy was employed there. Because then when you take that number and you write it out on a placard and you hang it around your neck and you stare at it every day for a year, it would probably make most people throw up. But here's the reality. We need to start doing that because it's just the same as when you make a mistake on your cart like that, Malibu. That wrong call is going to haunt you for years. You are never going to forget where you deviated from your process, where you went wrong. You're going to remember that car to your last day that you ever put a wrench on a vehicle, right? Well, why is it that the tech carries that around, but the owner doesn't? Now, I'm not saying all owners, but this owner is not going to. He's not going to carry it. He's going to know that he's never going to have the guts to say, shit, I should have listened to the other people in the shop that were telling me this guy was the problem. This guy was flushing the money down the toilet. And here's the thing from a… So I'll put my name up as a technician. I'll put my hand up. You wonder why some of us have the crappy attitudes we have? It's because when we see that money that you could have made and we get told, oh, I can't afford this piece of equipment or, oh, I can't afford a Christmas party this year or, oh, I can't afford raises. And everybody knows that somebody's not following the procedures and they're throwing money out the window. How many times… Leave the money on the table. That's right. Why does the mechanic then, technician, staff have to go without because of your pride? Well, you can say you have to go without it's my pride because it's my business. Cool story, bro. Right on then. Good for you. You break your arm, pat yourself on the back until your elbows get tendonitis. The reality is, is those techs leave those shops and they go
01:26:09 SPEAKER_00 somewhere else. And what are you left with? Whatever you can get. Yeah. Sorry. That's just… Yeah. And that's the thing. And yeah. And people, shops don't understand, I think… Again, when I say shops, I mean like generally speaking, generally not the people in like the ASOG group or people that listen to Cecil and Lucas and David and like all that, that type of people are not what I'm talking about right now. But shops in general, they just have this thing of not wanting anybody else to tell them how to be and they don't understand why they can't keep technicians around. And the thing that's kind of going around the internet in the last couple of years has been the company buys pizza for people instead of giving them raises. And it's like, that irritates me. Now that being said, love me some good pizza. We got a great pizza joint right down the road. Every time my boss buys it, love it. Now that is only a good thing so long as I'm being well paid for my work. And shops are losing good technicians because they're not willing to pay them. You look at the… I know you're up in Canada and so it probably is a little bit different. But here down in the US, it's like you look at how much inflation has gone up in the last 12 months or two years or whatever. It's like you look at how much more money I have to spend every month to put food on the table for my family versus how much more money I'm making now than I was a year ago. And it's like, let's see here. So from when I started… So in the last two years, my pay has gone up by I think $4 an hour in two years. But if you translate that to how much money per month that is versus how much more per month I'm spending on just groceries, forget fuel, forget insurance, forget everything else that costs money just in groceries, that raise is gone. It doesn't exist anymore. And if we look at how much the cost of everything has gone up, and my shop is of the impression that we really can't charge more money. And our shop right now, I think we're at 110 bucks an hour. Oh, you're too low. The little shop that's like three blocks down the road from us is at 135. The Christian Brothers that's 10 minutes up the road from us, they're at like 157. The dealership up the road, they're at 165. We are the cheapest shop with the exception of a couple of little
01:28:44 SPEAKER_01 shade tree shops. We are the cheapest shop in the area. And I would submit to you that that is not a good thing. Oh, you don't have to convince me. I've been saying for the last year, our door rate where I work is way too low. It's 120 bucks. And I see the people that are coming in, the kind of cars are bringing us, that it's like old, old stuff. It takes way too long. You can't make the book time on it because like I just said that 96 Yukon is an example. Other things, right?
01:29:14 SPEAKER_00 Yeah, because the doors help you with wood screws, not the original clips. Yeah.
01:29:18 SPEAKER_01 Exactly, right? So all that adds time. But when you try to tell these people that you need to put your door rate up to prevent some of that coming in, they go, oh, I don't, we need that. No, you don't. Because it wasn't effective. It wasn't lucrative to have that customer. Now, if you'd have brought that customer in and explained to them that, okay, we're only $110 an hour, but like, say we use the 5% rule. What is it? What's the guys talk about? Like every year that it is over 10 years old, they add 5% to the labor time. Yeah. Right. Or 10% people. So a 10 year old car, essentially you double the labor hour to perform the repair. So after that point, big deal. You're only a hundred bucks. Cool. You're working on 10 year old junk. Now your labor times are doubled. Tell me you can't make money at that point. Of course you can, but they don't do that. So when you're walking around, like you guys are at $110 an hour, you should have be at least what Christian Brothers is at least. And I would, the reality is,
01:30:21 SPEAKER_00 I think we're in a little bit like we're down, we're in the not as wealthy part of town as where Christian Brothers is. But I think we should probably be in the vicinity of like 135 to 140, I think is where we should be, which is like, let's see, we're at 110. I mean, so, you know, $30 an hour more than we are now. And that was something I was being irritable and I can tend to get kind of irritable from time to time when I get frustrated with stuff. And so I was sitting in the, or standing in the front office and the owner and the service vice was sitting there. And I just asked, I was like, guys, like I know maybe I'm dumb here, but if we bumped our labor rate from 110 to 130 for a week, what would happen? I'm like, are we going to lose customers? Like I asked, I don't know. I mean, you deal with customers, I don't, I'm in the back fixing cars, you know, and are we going to lose customers? And they both were like, well, no, but we don't want to do that. We can't justify that. And I'm like, what do you mean you can't justify it? Like that's the line my, the owner uses a lot is, well, I can't justify that labor rate just because they'll be charging. It doesn't mean I can charge it. And it's like, how do you, you know, we're scab, we are the like go-to alignment shop for everybody around here, all the other shops send their alignments to us. And we're rocking an old alignment machine from
01:31:42 SPEAKER_01 like, that's still running windows XP. Okay. That computer is almost 20 years old and we keep just kind of band-aiding along because we can't afford a new alignment rack. And it's like, cause you're only charging $110 taking all the customers at Christian brothers and everybody else doesn't want, and they're coming to your shop and you already have a stellar reputation and your boss says you can't justify it. You know why he can't justify it? Cause he's a flippin idiot. That's why he can't justify it. And you're that's, and that's your owner.
01:32:12 SPEAKER_00 I don't want to call him out on the off chance he ever listens to this podcast, but
01:32:17 SPEAKER_01 I agree. Give me his phone number. I'll call him tomorrow. Honestly. At some point in the hospital. I mean, he doesn't have to listen to me. Who am I? I'm nobody to him. Right. But the reality is, is that I speak for a lot of people that think exactly the same way I do. The difference is I'm not worried about any kind of fallout of what I say because there's a whole lot of people that think the exact same. Well, if I start to say it, other people are going to stay. And I can tell you after 10 years of doing this, talking to people online, talking about this industry, I can prove to you that it works because the changes we're seeing in the industry that are happening with more and more texts that are standing up and saying, I'm not accepting this and I'm not taking that. You know where that comes from? People that are in a group that hear somebody like myself say, you don't have to put your tools down,
01:33:14 SPEAKER_00 lock the door, go find somebody that will treat you the way that you should be treated. So I am pleased that you've got only eight months left. I'm excited to find a new shop and I'm excited even with a new shop that I'm going to be where I'm moving to. I'm hoping to find a really great shop, obviously. I don't want to work for a crappy shop. But I'm excited. We're buying land and we're building a house. The first year is just, I'm working for somebody. I'm not even going to try to do my own thing. But once we get our house kind of settled in and squared away, I'm hoping to start working towards either opening a shop or buying somebody out or in some way moving into an ownership role so that then I can provide this environment for other technicians. But, sorry, I had this great thought and it totally zipped up. Is that all right? I apologize. One second, this thought will come back to me. I promise. So dude, it was a really great thought. I knew it was great.
01:34:20 SPEAKER_01 Hold on, dude. So what I can tell you is what I want you to take from this, not just this episode, but when you walk in tomorrow and go to work, realize that everything that they're doing wrong is still the lesson that you learn. It's the lesson of what not to do. So when you get to an ownership role, you get to a management role, this is the lesson that you take from this. I'm not going to repeat the sins of my forefathers. I'm not going to continue to do it the way that it's always been done and make the same old tired BS excuses about why it can't work and that'll never work here and I can't justify it and all that other bullshit that your owner tells himself every day. And it's sad. It really is sad because I mean, yeah, and I understand where it comes from. I'd love to talk to him and go, why are you not an employee and why did you become an employer? Because maybe if you talk to him and he can tell you that story, maybe you can get him to see why he's doing so much wrong. But I have a feeling that coming from the heavy truck background where a lot of guys just got paid, didn't matter if they took too long, didn't matter. The customer sometimes got the full bill. Sometimes they're just like, well, we had four days into doing that job. He's going to pay for two days worth of labor. That's still pretty good because you got to remember sometimes the parts markup on that stuff can be really good. Sometimes it can be crap because when you deal with a lot of fleets, people forget sometimes with the fleet you're buying the parts are coming from their account and they pay even less for say like, I know fleets in town, they get four parts at a better price than I can buy four parts for. I'm the one bolting them on the truck. But when they come over here, they got dropped off by FedEx for a FedEx truck and it's on a FedEx account because FedEx buys the parts cheaper than I can. That's some BS.
01:36:21 SPEAKER_00 We should be adjusting our labor rate for that, do we? No. There needs to be a certain amount of profit on each ticket and whether if customers are supplying parts, our labor rate needs to go up so that we can still make our margin on it. My thought did return to me and I wanted to circle back to it because I think it's an important point I wanted to talk about. I've always said that toolboxes have wheels for a reason and it took me a while in my career. The diesel shop I started at, I learned a ton. I'm not unhappy from my experience. I learned so much but it was sold and the new guy who bought it out was not a great, honestly neither one of the owners were great owners, but I learned a tremendous amount and there was a guy that had been hired as a shop foreman, him and I just clicked. We worked well together and we became friends and then they fired him because it was something dumb and we stayed friends and I remember him telling me like, you need to get out of this shop because you have never worked in another shop. You don't know how bad it is there. Literally anywhere is an upgrade from where you're at and when I finally pulled the trigger and moved, I ended up moving to knowing what I know now is the best shop in the region, if not the state. I went from not a great shop to a fabulous shop and as I've gotten more confident myself and my skills, I'm much more confident in being able to say, if I tell my owner to pound sand, a couple weeks ago we had a vehicle came in. It's a Chevy Express van with a box truck on the back of it, had a pinion bearing in the rear end that just, it wasn't there. All the bearing rollers were gone and the whole pinion was flopping around in the housing and it was this giant mess that another technician started and he took it apart and it was all in pieces and somebody had to put it back together because he went on vacation, which anyway, I'm a little upset about that because that was dumb, but my foreman was like, the Dodge Intrepid that I had to do a rack and that same tech had started that job and then ended up going on vacation or he got something in his eye, I don't know what happened. He wasn't there to finish it. So I had to clean up that job for him, which was a pain and then they were talking about making me do this rear end and I told my shop foreman, I said, dude, I'm not doing that job. And he's like, well, and I said, no, if you tell me how to do that job, I will lock my toolbox up. I will drive home, get my truck, I will come back and I will load my toolbox up and I will leave. I am not doing that job. And he was like, oh, you know, boss doesn't like it when you talk like that. And I'm like, dude, I'm not like, I'm not doing it. Give it to this guy or make the other tech do it. Like, that's not happening. Like if I'm at a point in my career where I'm very good at what I do, I have a very unique skillset when it comes to diesel stuff. And even irrelevant of that, I'm a fantastic automotive tech, just like on automotive stuff. If I load my tools up in my back of my pickup truck and I drive around, I'm going to be making more money by the time the sun goes down than I was making when the sun came up. Exactly. The boxes have wheels for a reason. If you have a skillset, there's no reason you should put up with this kind of BS that some of these shops do. And again, fortunately, my shop foreman decided not to push the issue and I really didn't want to have to go look for work when I know I'm leaving in eight months, but I really don't want to quit. I really like my job. I've got a great environment. There's a couple of things that need improvement, but I really like my job. And I'm going to be here as long as I can. But the idea that technicians can't go find other work is something that I think a lot of technicians have and it's just flat out not true. Like everybody is hiring right now.
01:40:13 SPEAKER_01 Let me remind everybody that's listening right now, you make a very good point and you talk about skillset. Right now, here's the reality. If you can show up on time consistently, five days a week, showing up on time, it's not even going to be like your obstacle here for a lot of people, right? They will find work for you to do and you might get into the right place where they'll set you up for learning more and you'll develop the skillset to be just like Andrew here or myself or whatever. But right now, if you could show up on time, don't sleep for your frigging alarm clock, come in the five days a week that you're supposed to be there, I guarantee you wherever you leave today, you will have another job by the time you go home if you do the work to find it. Just ask the tool driver, tool truck driver who's hiring right now and he'll tell you to go over. You decide you're going to get fired. You decide you're going to quit. Stop there on the way home.
01:41:13 SPEAKER_00 Tell them, can I bring a resume tomorrow? And you probably, they'll probably say, don't even bring the resume, just bring your tools. That's how bad it is right now. Okay. That's a show and show up on time and work hard while you're there. Like if you do those two things alone, you are ahead of like, I don't know, 80% of the people out there, which is, yeah, it's frustrating to say that out loud. Right? Like the, the way that I was raised is that showing up on time and working hard was like the absolute bare minimum. Like that was the, the very bottom of the barrel. That's what you did. And, and now it's like, if you do in my head, what's the bare minimum? You're like the star guy, which is on the one hand convenient for me. It's convenient for me. Cause like, I already do that and more. And so I'm like, no, I'm the favorite guy, but I feel like technicians so often get comfortable where they're at. And it's like, there's things that annoy them. There's things that kind of get under their skin, but hell, you know, it's a job and I need to make a paycheck. And it's like, I understand that. And, and you do, but everybody needs, everybody needs technicians right now. There's not, there's not a single shop that I'm aware of anywhere around me that if you walked in and said, I have, I have some experience, I have some tools and I will show up on time every day. And here's people you can call to verify that that'll be, you know, vouch for me being on time and working hard that wouldn't offer you a job on the spot. You know, how much are you going to make? Obviously I can't speak to that, but there are, there are jobs out there. There is not a reason for you to stay in a horrible environment already, even a less than ideal environment. Like
01:43:00 SPEAKER_01 yeah, when Snap-on makes toolboxes, they put wheels into them, not blocks. Yep. It has wheels, roll that thing out the door, get it on a tow truck or whatever you've got to move it and move it. You know, you don't have to put up with this sort of stuff. Exactly. I, I want to thank you for coming on tonight. I really appreciate, you know, everything you've had to say. I know it's got, I've gotten ranny a couple of times in the, and a little worked up, but I mean, it's like, you're the first person I've talked to that really has, you know, is coming forth, coming with the reality of what the shop is. And I'm not trying to listen, I don't want to say that you're working in a bad shop. I just, at the end of the day, I wish better for all of everybody. I wish better for you. I wish better for your own. I wish better for everybody that is employed in this industry. That's why I'm doing this. So it's, if, if he should ever listen to it, I apologize if he feels like he's called out, but the reality is, is that he has a lot of work to do and a lot of things that he needs to fix. And I feel for him, because when you leave and take that skillset with you to go in eight months time, it is really going to have an effect on the kind of work that they can get done. I don't think the shop's going to
01:44:18 SPEAKER_00 close down. I don't think, no, I don't think so, but my, my, my absence is going to be felt for sure. And that's not, and that's not me being arrogant, although I have a tendency of being arrogant. So I apologize if that comes through, but it's not, it's not cause I'm so full of myself, but what I bring to the table as far as a skillset is valuable and not just what I bring to the table in terms of my technical ability, right? My ability to help other technicians, my ability to help, to work with other people, to solve problems is not something that is really matched with, by anybody else in the shop with, with maybe the exception of the owner. But if the owner has to step back into a full-time employee, you know, production role, that's not a good, the rest of
01:45:04 SPEAKER_01 the business suffers because of that. So I sleep well at night knowing that if I leave, I'll be missed. Yeah. And, and that's, so what I hope that we can do is that when you do get settled and where you head from here, that you'll come back on and you'll fill us all in on, on what is,
01:45:23 SPEAKER_00 what has happened. You know what I mean? How wild that transition is. Yeah, absolutely. I'm, I'm excited about it. It's, it's a little, it's a little, uh, it's intimidating. I think even, even for me, who's done it a number of times, I've, I've switched shops. I've worked for six or seven different shops, some of which were because of my own choice, cause they weren't great. And I chose to move on. And some of which were, I, I, I relocated four years ago. I moved about a thousand miles to where I am now and low and behold, the desert's hot and I don't like the heat I've decided. So we're moving somewhere. It's not quite as hot.
01:46:01 SPEAKER_01 And so I've, I've changed shops. It's still intimidating to, to try to find a good shop. It's like in a perfect world, you know, I mean, the problem is I'm where it's funny where I'm, where I'm moving to is like about two and a half hours from where David's shop is. And I'm just, and I'm like, Hmm, two and a half hour commute. Like I don't, ah, I can't quite, I can't quite swing a two and a half hour commute, but maybe, maybe there's somebody I can find that's got a shop near where I'm going. Yeah. I think he, he can trick, like, I think the way he approaches the business and the way he will, it's like Lucas, right? We, we joke that North Carolina is like the epicenter of really well-run shops. You know what I mean? A people forward thinking and whatnot. And it's because the whole industry after market wise seems to M and M, you know, it seems to come out of North Carolina for whatever reason. And I think that's great. I think, you know, David will have the effect in his area too, that will be felt. And I think that's a good thing. So, 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 ASOG group and to the changing the industry podcast. 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.