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Confessions of a Shop Owner is hosted by Mike Allen, a third-generation shop owner, perpetual pot-stirrer, and brutally honest opinion sharer. In this weekly podcast, Mike shares his missteps so you don’t have to repeat them. Along the way, he chats with other industry personalities who’ve messed up, too, pulling back the curtain on the realities of running an independent auto repair shop. But this podcast isn’t just about Mike’s journey. It’s about confronting the divisive and questionable tactics many shop owners and managers use. Mike is here to stir the pot and address the painful truths while offering a way forward. Together, we’ll tackle the frustrations, shake things up, and help create a better future for the auto repair industry.
[Mike Allen] (0:00 - 0:26)
There's a lot of shops that'll post generic media because they've hired a professional company and it's AI images, $49.99 oil change, or a happy holiday. Don't shit on my cheap oil change. I love me a cheap oil change.
And they think, you know, oh we talked to many shops, oh I'm already doing social media, I'm already doing marketing, and I go look and I'm like holy shit really? Like this is posted at a hundred other shops.
[Kamran Rahman] (0:28 - 0:58)
The following program features a bunch of doofuses talking about the automotive aftermarket. The stuff we, or our guests may say, do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of our peers, our sponsors, or any other associations we may have. There may be some spicy language in this show, so if you get your feelings here easily, you should probably just move along.
So without further ado, here's your host, Mike Allen, with Confessions of a Shopowner, presented by Techmetric. Simply the best software ever made.
[Mike Allen] (0:59 - 1:15)
So, I mean, was it the worst day of recording that you guys have ever had? It was pretty close to it. Who was worse?
Nah, just breaking your bones. Jeff Buckley was worse. Greg Buckley was worse.
[Saurav Kumar] (1:16 - 1:20)
Jeff Buckley? You haven't worked with Jeff yet. I was like, who's that?
Greg's gonna kill you.
[Mike Allen] (1:23 - 1:27)
I know, Jeff Buckley's in Texas, is a shop owner in Texas.
[Kamran Rahman] (1:27 - 1:27)
Oh, okay.
[Mike Allen] (1:27 - 5:52)
Yeah, no, we don't know. He could be the worst, possibly. Well, I mean, you gotta go record with him and find out.
I had a lot of fun today. So, I feel like I probably did you guys a disservice because I didn't call you and be like, hey, what should I do to prep the environment? I was intentional with the team.
I didn't tell them because I didn't want them like, I'm getting their haircut and trying to be all like nervous about it, right? Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it was a mistake, but we didn't clean up the shop at all.
There was no like trying to put lipstick on that pig. It was just, well, let me show you what it's really like for better or for worse. So hopefully it wasn't the worst place you've ever been.
And you just lied to me and told me it wasn't the worst day of recording you've ever had. So that's good. But I'm interested to see what comes of it.
I'm excited to see the finished product afterwards. This is your first time out. And so when you're working with clients at the higher level, one of your higher packages, how frequently do you need to visit to get new content?
You know, it really does depend how much media we capture on our first onsite, right? Like in our first session here today, we did close to, I think, 12 videos that we captured alongside with probably 12 plus picture carousels. And so that's enough media to cover three strong months.
And then we still have tomorrow left where we're going to hit the floor running and capture more. We're always about quality over quantity, right? As we get used to the shop a bit more, it just speeds up.
How do you feel about marrying the content that you guys create and produce and release at your cadence? If I wanted to be creating like some goofy, silly videos in the shop and also releasing them, does that work counter to what you're trying to do or can it work together? You know, as of right now, we haven't had any clients do that, right?
Um, what we do is an all-inclusive, you know, service that we provide to all of our clients. And so it's pretty much hands off for them. So keep my sticky fucking fingers off of my social media.
I just let you manage it. You know, you're more than welcome to step into it. What we'll say is send over the piece to us so we can take a look at it and maybe put some magic behind it a little bit.
We don't want to, we want to keep the image, the quality and the execution proper, but we're open to you goofing around with the team on there. Well, I can guarantee you that the quality will not be what you guys brought because seeing the professionalism that y'all came in with and the equipment that you came in with, this is not hobby level shit. This is real deal.
And it's to be expected. You know, that's what you do. So that's right.
I was super impressed. You know, we'll step back a little bit. We first met at Elite's Ignite event and I didn't know you from anybody.
And I was like, who the hell is this dude? He's dropping all the industry buzzwords and I've never met him before. I don't, what is this?
I don't even know what his business does. Like we integrate and funnel. And I was like, I don't know what the fuck you just said, bro.
And I was like, where's your name badge? And I thought you were just some dude who had come into the event who wasn't registered, who was trying to drum up business without being a registered vendor at the event. And if you know me, you know that I love Elite and everybody there.
And I was like, no, no, no. We're going to go up front right now. I thought I was like being the hall monitor police on your ass or something.
Yeah. It turns out that you actually were legit. You just hadn't got your badge yet.
I was like, let me bring in Hannah into this. Hannah, can you talk to this guy that I have no clue who he is? Let him know that we belong here as well.
And then you knew right away. It was easy peasy for them. I tend to forget my badge anytime I go to any events.
And ID. And ID as well. I don't have my ID on me right now.
It's at the hotel. I find that traveling around the country without ID is problematic. It definitely can be.
I'll keep my passport close to me when I go to the airport. Outside of that, I've just been living freely. I have my ID on my phone.
If someone wants to look me up, you know.
[Saurav Kumar] (5:53 - 6:08)
We'll definitely go to stores that require an ID. And he'll be like, go get this and this and this from the store and go by yourself. I didn't bring my ID.
And that happens like 9 out of 10 times. It happens very frequently.
[Mike Allen] (6:08 - 6:21)
I just hate carrying things on me. And the only two things I'll ever carry is my phone and maybe my car key. Maybe.
I guess you got Apple Pay or whatever your device is so you can pay.
[Saurav Kumar] (6:21 - 6:32)
And I tell him, I'm like, dude, you always have to carry your wallet with your ID and like some form of payment. And he was like, dude, you know what? I think it's just because you're old.
You're saying that?
[Mike Allen] (6:34 - 6:37)
I stopped carrying my wallet a long time ago.
[Saurav Kumar] (6:37 - 6:39)
And I was like, oh, well, that's valid feedback.
[Mike Allen] (6:39 - 7:11)
Maybe that's true. I mean, I used to carry like the big fat ass trifold. I think I'm trying to dumb it down a little bit.
But that still is kind of a pain in the ass sometimes to have that. But I feel like you need like ID, insurance card. Like I've got a company credit card from each of the companies, one for the podcast.
I don't know, man. I could put all of that shit on my phone, though, is what you're saying. If I just wasn't from the 1970s.
You could try it. Yeah, I think it'll work well.
[Saurav Kumar] (7:12 - 7:30)
Yeah, I was going to say, going back to Elite. So after, so there's, you met, you know, Josh Hammerling. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So like we had been just kind of following what he's working on, on Facebook, of course. I think we actually had dinner the night that I met you.
[Mike Allen] (7:30 - 7:32)
He lived in Phoenix, right?
[Saurav Kumar] (7:33 - 7:56)
So yeah, that's right. And so when we were coming into Elite beforehand, we're like, hey, let's meet in person. Just come in at the tale of Elite Ignite.
Yeah, we briefly met him. And then when we got back to Seattle, Josh is like, yeah, I was talking to Mike Allen. And I'm like, which guy is that?
Because there's like a Mike Allen and a Matt Allen.
[Mike Allen] (7:56 - 7:57)
Yeah, right.
[Saurav Kumar] (7:58 - 8:07)
There's a lot of us running around. Yeah. And so Josh is like, yeah, he was, Mike was mentioning something about you guys.
And he has no idea what you guys do. I'm like, well, good feedback.
[Mike Allen] (8:08 - 9:47)
I tried to understand. I failed to understand. I'm not sure if that was your messaging or my comprehending.
I may have overcomplicated it initially, right? This is just, I think, Ignite was just a few weeks, maybe a month or so after we had visited San Francisco, right? Oh, you had all the buzzwords.
I had all the technology buzzwords in my head. And you know, those people talk different, right? Silicon Valley folks, they understand things in different lingo.
And so I think I was just stuck in my way there. And then after our meeting, after we met that day, I was like, you know what? I got to take it back a bit and keep it very, very simple.
So my dad used to, he loves to tell a story about, he met with a rep from some company. I don't know what the company was. And it was a similar situation to that first interaction we had.
But my dad has a way with words that I've never been gifted with. And he said, sir, do you see how fast I'm talking? That's how fast I'm listening.
Like, city boy, slow down. But no, it was, I'm glad that you guys were pleasantly persistent and bulled your way through me putting up that initial barrier that I totally did. That's right.
It's all about leaving impressions, you know, positive ones or whatever that experience was. Positive ones or, it was memorable if nothing, right? That's right, exactly.
And you know, God willingly, we're going to keep trudging forward, right? And one way or another, here we are, you know, sitting down doing a podcast.
[Saurav Kumar] (9:47 - 9:47)
Here we are.
[Mike Allen] (9:47 - 9:55)
There's always a greater plan when people meet, you know? What do you think of the confessions of a shop owner, lounge and studios?
[Saurav Kumar] (9:56 - 10:18)
This is the best non-work related thing we've ever seen in any shop ever. We actually, hope you don't mind, took some pictures and sent it to one of the shops we work with because she's really into this stuff. And it's like, this is exceptional.
This is, if a shop was in Silicon Valley, like this is what it's supposed to look like.
[Mike Allen] (10:19 - 11:36)
Well, you know, so it's, for those of you who don't know, we're at my downtown store and there's a second floor here that is aloft over the shop space. And it's really hard to make it productive square footage. And I mean, you can do tire storage, but there are three distribution centers within five miles a year.
I mean, it used to be a machine shop up here that used to build Carmagea and VW Motors, right? And so it's a heavily reinforced concrete floor. There's a crane behind the curtain that you can lift blocks off and stuff.
But, you know, I don't do that shit. And so ultimately, it was just becoming a place that was accumulating my extra crap. It was like storage.
Well, I don't need that because I'm just going to accumulate more crap than I need. I'll have to throw away one day, right? So when Confessions hosted the hospitality suite at ASTA Expo last year, I was like, you know what?
I'm not just going to use hotel furniture and make it a boring room that has, you know, bottles of water and beer. We turned it into like a party lounge. And this is all the stuff that was in the party lounge.
And so now it's the Confessions of a shop owner, studio, and lounge. Presented by Techmetric.
[Saurav Kumar] (11:37 - 11:42)
One of the first things I noticed was that, I don't know, King's chair.
[Mike Allen] (11:43 - 11:43)
Yeah, the throne.
[Saurav Kumar] (11:44 - 12:00)
And then I was like, oh, so that's the chair in the cover for the podcast. That's the throne from the logo. Yeah, I had always assumed that was just a picture you took at like a liquor store, like at the Crown Royal section.
He must have just sat there and he's like, take it here.
[Mike Allen] (12:00 - 13:00)
Every man needs his own throne, right? So funny story about the actual picture from the logo. I was in Uvalde, Texas for a Continental Tires ride and drive event where they take you out into their proving grounds and let you take different cars out on the track with different tires and that kind of stuff.
And there was a rooftop bar across the street from the hotel we were in and it had a throne. And a couple of guys got there early and I was like, hey, it was just that. It was like sunglasses, you know, flip flops and a glass of whiskey.
Take my picture, you know, I'm going to slay king. And it turned into that. But what we didn't realize is it was the drag bar in Uvalde.
So when we got back from our day at the track and went back up there, there was a party going on, man. And it was one, the best music in town for sure. And two, the most entertaining in town for sure.
Drag bars might not be your scene, but man, was it funny. It was a good time. Those dudes know how to party.
[Saurav Kumar] (13:00 - 13:02)
Oh, so it was like a bar with drag queens in it?
[Mike Allen] (13:02 - 13:04)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Saurav Kumar] (13:04 - 13:05)
In Texas.
[Mike Allen] (13:05 - 13:49)
Yeah, in a small town, Uvalde, Texas. But what are you going to do? Just roll with the flow, have a good time?
Yeah, that's what I thought. I thought this chair was a bit smaller than the one in your picture. Well, the one in the picture is gold, right?
And so that's not quite as gilded. But the faux gold one's one day maybe. But you got to move up to that.
I'm starting off with just oak. You can dip this in gold, man. I'm sure there's a service out there to do that.
You just got to ladder up every time. Just got to move up my throne game each year. So now that we're like 20 minutes into this, let's do my standard thing.
We're 20 minutes in. I'm going to say, who the hell are we actually talking to? Why don't you guys introduce yourself real quick and your company?
[Kamran Rahman] (13:50 - 13:50)
Sure thing.
[Mike Allen] (13:51 - 13:57)
My name is Sarv, and I'm the co-founder here at 47 Consulting, also known as 47, also known as 47C.
[Saurav Kumar] (13:58 - 14:17)
And my name is Cam, the other co-founder, 47. And we always have this debate. In this conversation, is it 47?
Is it 47C? Is it 47 Consulting? And I think that we just need a lookup table that just tells you that all of these equate to 47.
[Mike Allen] (14:17 - 14:39)
But yeah, that's- In my mind, you're 47C. I don't know why. That's just how it settled in my mind.
That's probably from the Facebook branding that has been pushing out. We're trying out different, various ones. So you can see which one's more sticky.
Yeah, people remember. So why 47? 47 is actually the latitude of the Pacific Northwest, Washington State specifically.
All right.
[Saurav Kumar] (14:40 - 14:40)
Yeah.
[Mike Allen] (14:40 - 14:42)
That's home then. That's home for us.
[Saurav Kumar] (14:42 - 15:43)
That's the idea. And Washington State is our home base. We've got a really supportive community of shop owners there.
And they're really trying to do things to a certain degree for the ACA and whatnot. And so as we're traveling around the country, just seeing the rest of the shop world, we're seeing everything that's possible. What can different communities of shops do when they come together?
Or how do shops work in a specific community? What's it like in the shop? And the one conclusion that we drew, and this is one of those petty goals that you have, but it's not really the business goal.
But one of the things we're like, man, people in Texas are doing really cool things. People in the Southeast are really doing cool things. And why the F isn't Washington State on the map for automotive?
And so we've got 47. And one of our side quests is to make Washington put it on the map for automotive.
[Mike Allen] (15:43 - 16:36)
Northwest ACA had a really good thing going for a long time, I thought. I thought they were very well thought of. I mean, I've been to a couple shops in the Tacoma area for my 20 group with Elite.
But that's about the extent of my experience. I think you were in the group with Pete Bristow, I think. No, name didn't ring a bell.
Pete Bristow is Bristow's exclusive auto repair in Tacoma. So Elite is much more heavily centered on the West Coast. So they've got a lot of California and Pacific Northwest and then into the Rockies.
And there aren't as many East Coast shops. I don't know why Dad got linked up with them way back when, but he did. And I'm too lazy to do anything other than stick with what I know and love.
And that's what I know and love. So that's what I've been with the whole time.
[Saurav Kumar] (16:36 - 16:44)
I would say the NOACA has a good thing going for it, but I think it can always be elevated.
[Mike Allen] (16:45 - 17:09)
If one of your petty goals is to elevate the industry in your area, that's not very petty because I have some pretty petty goals. I'm not sure that I should share the petty goals, but I mean, I'm a pretty petty bro. So if your petty is, let me help our industry in my entire region, it's pretty strong.
Well, I mean, it's happening. So why automotive, Cam?
[Saurav Kumar] (17:10 - 18:32)
Well, good question. TLDR, the short answer is the people are great. And the culture in the industry is, to us, it's pretty great.
Now, you ask different people, they might feel a certain way about it. But we came from completely different backgrounds. We weren't in automotive.
We weren't even remotely in the field that we're in now in terms of what we do. So we had been exposed there. And then before niching down into automotive, we had experimented with 12 or 13 different verticals, including really large market cap regional companies.
And the two things that stood out to us is people in automotive, to us, once again, are normal, down to earth people. Two, generally speaking, they know how to run a business, run the numbers, manage the numbers. They have metrics.
They really track like every bean, really, in a lot of cases. And that was a level of sophistication that we found were lacking in other parts of whatever, the working world. And so it was a lot easier to, one, connect with people in the shop.
Two, talk business with them because they understand it. And they understand numbers. And that was just a good fit.
[Mike Allen] (18:33 - 20:05)
I think that's interesting. I think that tells me the caliber of shops that you're getting in front of. Because I would argue that one of the reasons that so much private money is coming into the industry is because, on average, we're really bad at business.
And knowing the numbers. And so big money comes in and they know that, they think that they can come in and turn a quick improvement in a quick profit. And in some ways they can.
In other ways, they screw things up pretty bad, right? But for you to say that, that tells me that you're in the right rooms in front of the right shop owners. And the guys and gals that are out there trying to learn how to run a business and take care of their people and take care of their community and still be profitable.
So that speaks well. We tend to work with the best of the best shops. We call them the gems of the industry already.
It's something that we're personally just attracted to. And so we've seen these individuals execute at very optimum level. And that's all we're personally aware of what's out there in the industry, right?
And you got big money coming in. Because yeah, it's something that they haven't tapped into themselves, right? They're looking at money being earned, all these optimizations like they can do and come in for a quick win and for a large exit in the future for themselves as well.
[Saurav Kumar] (20:05 - 21:18)
Yeah, and this is coming from a perspective of somebody that's never worked at a PE firm or anything like that. But the thing about automotive that makes it pretty compelling, at least from our perspective, is it's not a subscription business, but it sure as hell is a recurring business. And so you can only skin a cat in so many ways.
You can only fix a car in so many ways. So it's kind of a somewhat at a high level, a repeatable thing, maybe not in the minutia of the variation of a car and the variation of its problem. But if you can kind of establish like a good EBITDA, as they call it, which I forget what that even stands for, but it's the qualifier for figuring out how many multiples am I going to buy this for, you can have a good exit.
And then private equity firms see, oh, this is undervalued and we can pump it up. But I'm not saying this about everybody with a suit. As someone that has worked with a lot of people with suits, most of those people can't find their way out of a cardboard box.
So when they come in and they don't do a good job and they go bankrupt or they close it.
[Mike Allen] (21:18 - 21:19)
They get the soul of the business.
[Saurav Kumar] (21:20 - 21:55)
Yeah, it's because you don't know how to actually run a business. Things on a spreadsheet look a certain way. And the most you're doing is you're just updating the spreadsheet on a recurring basis to see if things are working.
You're not out in the shop to see what's actually working, what's not working. You're not inspecting things. And so it's undervalued.
It's attractive to private equity. But because it's undervalued, it's also a great opportunity for any shop to really mature their business sophistication or their fiscal literacy or their software literacy. And they're all capable of doing that.
You can fix a car. You can learn anything, pretty much.
[Mike Allen] (21:56 - 24:08)
Well, and to your point of that, it's the gems, right? As you said, any small business owner that is looking to invest a not insignificant amount in their online presence and their image and their branding through video content, they're already, I would say, in the top 2% or 3%. So if they've already got enough revenue and enough profit to be able to justify spending to build their footprint and their image in that way.
So to that end, explain specifically, if you could, what it is that 47C does, because I'll butcher it. If I try to do it. Yeah, at a high level, we help auto repair shops build an emotional connection with their local community before that community ever has an issue with their vehicle.
A large portion of shops, the way they get their business outside of recurring customers that you build relationships with is people having an immediate need, going through Google and searching a mechanic near me or a brake job near me. And they're just trying to find the first shop, right? And these shops are competing with Google ads and LSAs for that space on there, right?
That one person might come one time and never come again. With the way that we do media, we're building a belonging, an emotional connection where somebody says and feels, I actually feel a part of the story there. I want to be a part of this.
I want to be a part of the Miata gang. I want to be a part of a shop that's open space for women, right? And so with the work that we do, we just tell the story of the shop, of the employees, put them in the best limelight possible.
And we're not here to change anything. And you texted us earlier, you're like, boys, do I need to do anything? We're like, no, there's no prep work.
If the floors are dirty, that's absolutely OK. If someone... It's not OK if the floor is dirty, but sometimes the floor is dirty.
[Kamran Rahman] (24:08 - 24:09)
It's just how it works out. Exactly, yeah.
[Mike Allen] (24:10 - 25:19)
And if someone doesn't want to be on camera, don't worry. Allow us to work with them and get it out of them, right? And so now without all that bluff there, pretty much we are a team that comes on site with our cameras and our gear.
We'll put the team on camera, employees, yourself, etc. And we distribute all of that media across various platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, TikTok. And then we run very specific targeted ad campaigns, hyper targeting your local demographic interest.
And we make sure that those people know that your shop exists. And there's some other things that happen afterwards where we actually are building human relationships with the shop and the consumer by implementing a real life person that actually has conversations with those people as well. So you're sliding into their DMs and offering to hook them up with some hot, hot car service.
That's right.
[Saurav Kumar] (25:19 - 26:44)
Building a relationship. But one of the points that Sarv mentioned was belonging. And that's kind of like what you achieve with a brand.
So take a shop owner. Maybe they have been in one coaching organization. Maybe they have been in two coaching organizations over a period of time.
And sometimes when they make the change, there's usually something about an individual coach, a specific relationship, or how they feel like they connect with the organization that keeps them there. Do you really need to be in a coaching organization for 10, 20, 30 years? I mean, if you figured it all out, I don't know.
Do you need to be? But some people do it anyways. And our hypothesis with that is people enjoy just being a part of something.
I think there's a reason people call things tribes or 20 groups. It's a group and you're a part of it. And so if that exists for a shop owner, who, by the way, is the hardest person to try and sell on anything, why would that not work on your neighbor?
They're going to spend the money on fixing their car eventually. And they're going to have to pick somebody. It's kind of like going to the doctor in an emergency.
Like, you're going to the ER. You're not going to figure out, am I going to go to that one, that one, that one? You're going to the first one that comes to mind.
And so that's kind of where the shop window is. You create an identity that other people can identify with.
[Mike Allen] (26:45 - 28:49)
Well, after spending a day creating some of that content with you guys and seeing kind of, I feel like I can see what you're producing in my mind's eye. We're doing multiple cuts that I know are going to be edited together for effect. And some of them are rapport building, informational, telling the story.
Some of them are fun, silly. And I like silly, right? But it can't all be silly.
That's right. There has to be some content that's a little richer and a little thicker. And there has to be some call to action, I believe, as well.
And so I have discounted social media brand building for a long time for the business, obviously, for the auto repair business. And I've finally been brought around to it. It's time to embrace that as the next level in my marketing growth strategy.
So I will tell you that Greg Buckley at Buckley's Auto Care in Wilmington has been a friend for several years. My wife's father actually lives up right by him and I think is a customer of his, actually. And so I knew that you guys were having conversations with him.
And then I saw that you guys were up there working with him. And y'all were trying to, you know, be pleasantly persistent. Just a little drip, drip, drip here trying to get me to open up a little bit.
And I called Greg and was like, these guys seem like they're the real deal, man. The guys just open up to them and really enjoy talking to them. And the content they're making, I really like it.
And I was like, OK, well, let me know how it goes. And then 30 days later, I was like, I really think this is good. You really need to look into this, Mike.
And then 30 days later, I was like, my follower counts up. My phone volume's up. People are coming and saying that they saw us online.
And it's like, it's working. It's driving cars, Mike. You should call.
I was like, OK, now I'll call them.
[Saurav Kumar] (28:52 - 30:11)
Yeah, well, did you want to say something first? No, no, go ahead. I was just going to say, my point of view is that right now the shops that are doing it are kind of early adopters.
Because technically, this whole thing about Shoreform becoming a thing really got popularized during the pandemic. And what happened was TikTok, which a lot of people are on that, like technicians and whatnot, that kind of spun things up. And then, of course, Mark Zuckerberg is like, China is doing something really interesting.
Let's just copy them and create these things called Reels. And then everybody else that's smaller just kind of followed suit. And so that really started to take off as a technology, like in 2020, 2021.
That's only five years ago. And then from about 21, 22, 23, during that period, they slowly started adding things that make it easier to monetize. Monetize meaning getting in front of people that are relevant to you or whatever you offer.
And then actually having a tangible result in the shop or in whatever you offer. And so really, like 2023, 2024, a lot of those features and functionalities became more prevalent. So it might seem like some people might think I'm behind the curve.
But really, technically, you're kind of an early adopter at this stage of things.
[Mike Allen] (30:11 - 30:51)
Well, I've always been scared of being a super early adopter. My dad was full of sayings. One of the sayings was being a pioneer is really exciting.
You're breaking new ground, right? But don't forget that pioneers were also the ones that ended up face down in the prairie with a back full of arrows. So I don't want to be the first.
I'm OK with being like third or fourth. So this is not a race at the track. This is let somebody else make some of the mistakes.
And then I'm going to get in early on. So I let Greg be the pioneer. And he didn't get any arrows in his back.
He didn't get scalped. So here I am.
[Saurav Kumar] (30:51 - 31:03)
It's like Christopher Columbus came here. He ended up somewhere. We don't know if it's the mainland.
But that's generally the right direction. Let's send more people there. Because those first guys made a back.
[Mike Allen] (31:05 - 31:20)
So I have a really important question. And this is something that, Braxton, this question is for you. Since you guys are experts in the field, landscape is shit.
And you should do everything in portrait mode, right?
[Saurav Kumar] (31:23 - 31:29)
Oh, what? Video.
[Mike Allen] (31:31 - 31:37)
There's reasoning behind each one, right? What's so funny behind that?
[Saurav Kumar] (31:37 - 32:00)
I mean, some traditional pure play videographers, they will die on the freaking cross about doing everything horizontal. Oh, yeah. The problem with that is when you obsess over that kind of detail, well, that's great because now you're being an artist.
But when you need to deliver business outcomes, you do things that do that.
[Mike Allen] (32:00 - 33:58)
We're not traditional marketing folks, right? We come in with our own dialect. And then we're very prone to assimilating with whatever the tides are pushing, right?
We're not going to fight them. And if vertical reels do much better for penetration, for visibility, then we're going to go that way. But now there's a storytelling aspect of it as well, right?
Like there's some video topics that we'll cover that'll be in the horizontal format, right? It allows for a lot more storytelling, a lot more room on screen to manage and add more oomph to things, right? Like when we did a video with you earlier today, the highlight video, it was horizontal.
Because it's able to tell a better story, right? It's going to live online for a period of time. You want it to be done really well, right?
Those are the type of media assets that can be used on your website, right? And people will go there and watch them and enjoy them. These short format reels, they're put up for today.
You build equity. But what's next is what's more important than what was in the past. So the root of that question, like much of my content, was very childish.
And then Braxton asked us to do some videos for a SDA Expo that's just coming up next month. Just some quick promotional clips. And I sent them to him in portrait mode.
And in our group chat of all the different podcasters in the space, because most of us are in one group chat together, right? He was yelling at us to do landscape instead of portrait mode. And then all of us started sending in only portrait mode or really obnoxious shit in landscape mode.
So I laid on my side in my office and took it in portrait mode so that I was sideways and you had to turn it up.
[Saurav Kumar] (33:59 - 34:01)
Like an orientation within an orientation.
[Mike Allen] (34:02 - 34:08)
Yeah, yeah. So that was just me being a child because that's what I do. I apologize.
But that was actually a legit answer.
[Saurav Kumar] (34:09 - 34:23)
So thank you for taking me seriously. No one takes me seriously. No, that's a good question because there are analogs for that in automotive.
Do I charge for DIAG or do I not charge DIAG? And then it just kind of depends which church you go to. Yeah, yeah.
[Mike Allen] (34:24 - 35:57)
Horizontal or vertical. Yeah, it's totally true. A lot of my haters online for the whole free DIAG thing are going to be hugely entertained to learn that at one of my three shops, I'm charging for DIAG now.
Part of the whole thing behind free DIAG is why do you do free DIAG? It's to overcome the objections and the barriers between you and a first-time customer that doesn't yet have a relationship with you. They don't know I can trust you yet.
And it drives car count. But if your business is running at Redline and you've got all the cars you can manage, why would you give anything away? You don't need more cars because you can't help those people.
And so one of the shops is running at Redline right now and we've got all the cars we can handle. And so we're charging for DIAG. And if something changes and we're no longer running at max capacity, then we'll go back.
But consumers are used to dynamic pricing and airline tickets and concert tickets and Uber, anything else. If the demand is high, it's going to cost more. If demand is low, you're going to get a deal, right?
So that's kind of the direction that we're going on that front. And it'll be interesting to see the results through there. But I'm sure Braxton will cut some clip where it just says that I admitted I was wrong and that we have to charge for DIAG now because I'm an idiot and it'll get lots of rage bait engagement.
[Saurav Kumar] (35:58 - 36:18)
So it's funny, we're talking about dynamic pricing. So when we were driving here, somehow ice cream trucks came up. So yeah, I won't give the story away, but it was a lesson about dynamic pricing at a very young age.
[Mike Allen] (36:18 - 37:35)
So I've been hustling since I was a young kid. I remember when I was in elementary school, I would go and sell ice creams with my mom. And initially, there was those magnets and we had sticker pricing on every single ice cream.
At one point, I kind of had an epiphany that, hey, some people are willing to pay more. If you go into the rich kid neighborhood, you charge them a dollar or more. And so I took off all the pricing.
And then whenever we'd go into each individual neighborhood or meet a certain type of person, I would just jack up the pricing. And mom told me, I can one, have a hot bag of Cheetos when I go with her and she'll buy me any drink. And then also I get to keep all the coins.
And so here I was charging $1.25, $1.50, $1.75, so I could pocket that extra. So I was living off a commission. And I'm having a good time with that.
I knew my clientele. I was like, this person is going to be fine with it. Is this a crying baby?
$2 extra, sorry. Not taking dollars, only change right now. Hey, man, it's a free market economy, right?
[Kamran Rahman] (37:35 - 37:35)
That's right.
[Mike Allen] (37:36 - 39:51)
If they were willing to pay that price, then that means that was what it was worth to them. So that is a big problem in our trade. I find from, first, you should never, as a podcaster or, I don't think it's healthy to spend time in the comment sections online, right?
Call it, one of his favorite things is, by definition, half of the population is of below average intelligence. And that half of the population is overwhelmingly represented in comment sections, right? But in the automotive space, comment sections, it's always, we're underpaid, we're undervalued, pay us what we're worth.
That's one. I'm not going to go to training unless my boss is doing it, is paying for it. But if your boss is not paying for it, you're never going to learn more in order to be able to earn more.
Right? And then it's, I went out and opened a shop so that I could help out folks because the boss is ripping them off. Right?
So you want to make $150,000 a year for average level technical acumen. You don't want to invest in your own betterment. And you think that the labor rate should be $75 an hour.
If you want an owner who can pay to send you to ASTA Expo, or to Vision, or to STX, or whatever it might be, and can pay you $150,000 for middle of the road skill level, and can give you health insurance, and paid time off, and paid all those benefits, that's why the labor rate needs to be $225 an hour, $250, whatever that number is. And so, sorry to get on a soapbox, but I spent some time in the comments as a mistake last night, and you should never do that. And every now and then I fall off the wagon and I get into the comment section.
I'm like, these guys are fucking stupid. Or maybe they don't recognize they're in a bad position.
[Saurav Kumar] (39:51 - 41:17)
I don't think, you know, well, each one of those complaints or whatever you want to call it, represents a different kind of person, or maybe the same person under different circumstances. The one about, yeah, the labor rate, they don't know what goes into a business. And I'm not just talking about what goes into running a business.
I'm also talking about what was required to get there. And so, you know, the one comment about we're underpaid, and, you know, being a middle of the road in any profession, and making what is well above the median salary in the United States. There's really, there's no shortcuts.
So some people might say, oh, this business owner is really successful. Well, were you there the first 10, 15, 20 years when they weren't at that point? That's the tip of the iceberg.
Or you might think, oh, doctors make a lot of money, or dentists make a lot of money. Well, did you do the 12 years of schooling after your first 12 years of schooling? Then work 80 to 100 hours in residency and rotations, having to do like these insane clinicals.
Like, you get to pick on what timeline you want to compress the difficulty level. You can choose to do it over your whole life and never really get anywhere, or you can choose to condense it. And sometimes that means investing in your own training, investing in your own learning, and showing the result.
But not everybody understands that.
[Mike Allen] (41:18 - 43:20)
Well, and, you know, not everybody needs to own a business, right? Like, my wife has zero desire to own a business, or she has said that historically. Conversation this week's been oddly different.
But so, I don't know, it's just the entrepreneurial spirit, the desire to go out and forge that path on your own is not in everybody. And it is exciting and terrifying and wonderful and horrible, and you don't get to sleep. You know, it's a roller coaster.
How has that been for you guys? You know, for us, one thing that we did when we kicked off 47 was that work-life balance has to be utmost at a high priority for us. We want to enjoy what we do on a daily basis, and we do enjoy what we do on a daily basis, because we have a segregation between work-life and home-life, and anything else that pertains to that.
You know, one of my strong contributors to that side was my wife, right? She's like, honey, I'm home. You should be spending time with me and the family.
Work is always going to be there, right? And initially, it was, you know, I was like, hey, I got to put in these hours and whatnot. But then you notice all these hours that you're missing with building a relationship with your wife or your kids or your family and whatnot.
And that, watching other people go through the cycles of it, it's kind of terrifying, right? And so sometimes Cam's online after five and I'll message him, like, Cam, get the fuck off, bro. We're not supposed to be working right now.
Oh, I'm going to do this one more thing. You know that he logs on to shenanigans calls. Oh, yeah.
He'll be on like from 9 to 11 or 9 to midnight. Oh, yeah. Watching us get steadily more shit faced while he's walking on his treadmill being healthy.
That's right.
[Kamran Rahman] (43:21 - 43:22)
That's right.
[Mike Allen] (43:22 - 44:25)
This guy, we walk into the hotel and he's like, dude, did you know they had ice cream? I was like, what? They had ice cream?
And then I'm like, looking through it. I'm like, which one are you going to get? He's like, oh, I'm not going to get that.
He's like, I'm not going to get that. He's like, now that I think about it, I shouldn't have brought it up to you. I was like, yeah, come on, man.
What the hell? Well, speaking of bad influences, I was like, we're having nice cold bottles of water because it's a little bit warm in here. It's a shop environment was probably high 70s in here.
And I was this close to bringing out the whiskey and see if you guys wanted a whiskey or not. But one, I don't know if you are drinkers or not. And two, you struck me as very professional.
Like maybe when you're working, you wouldn't want to imbibe. And so I'm just going to lay out here now. While we're working, no booze, no cocaine.
Okay. And what happens after the cameras are off? I mean, zero judgment zone.
Nobody's going to know. Exactly. Yeah.
But we do not do cocaine on Confessions of a Shopowner.
[Saurav Kumar] (44:27 - 44:46)
We absolutely do booze. Yeah, the professionalism part. That's another thing why we like automotive.
Because for the most part, we can be our own variation of professional, which might not be other people's variation. You don't have to be a stick in the mud, man.
[Mike Allen] (44:46 - 44:52)
You can make money and run a good business and take care of your people and take care of your community and still have fun. 100%.
[Saurav Kumar] (44:52 - 45:51)
Now, the thing about the roller coaster thing, I would say early on when you do anything, it's going to be a roller coaster. And it's kind of like if you're going into entrepreneurship, I mean, I'm sorry to say, that's just a part of the process. There's no avoiding that.
And actually, I don't know if there's ever a true way to get away from that. It's just over time, the highs are a little bit more decelerated. It's not like a parabolic 10x type of ride.
It just kind of happens at a slower pace. And so I would say early days, definitely a roller coaster. The period now, it's definitely less volatile.
And we don't know what the future may hold because that's just the nature of entrepreneurship. You don't know what the future holds. You can project all you want, but you really don't know.
[Mike Allen] (45:52 - 49:55)
How many clients can you guys serve at your current level if they all wanted to sign on at the high level? You know, we don't have a static number in mind. But what we do do is we only add one to two clients each month.
And that's the cap. And they get scheduled out, you know, X weeks, X months out. So that way we go on site, we can execute.
Cam and I do the fulfillment. We have a whole team behind us in the back, systems created and everything to execute on it. We want to we want to ourselves be invested deeply into it.
Right. Leave a leave an imprint, a strong impression on folks. We're not we're not personally, you know, we're not obviously for a profitable business.
Right. For profit business. But we're not in it for the money.
We're here to actually have an impact. And it's it's less about making the owner more money. And it's it's more so about the community's benefit from what we do.
They get to be exposed to a shop that actually cares about them and is actually going to do them justice because everybody and their mother drives a vehicle. And sometimes it's those car keys are to drop off their kids. Sometimes it's to pick up a family member from the hospital or is to go to work.
The real winners for us are our clients, customers. That's where the real money is made. And we've it's just left such a big imprint on on the community.
And like we have a shop, Easy Street Auto Repair. We started working with them three years ago. That was the first shop that we work with with Amanda.
And people are so thankful that they found the shop. And how welcoming it is and how other shops are just out to get them. And we have the pleasure of of one, decommoditizing the industry itself.
It's no, it's not just another gas station that you can go to any one of them. And then, too, it's being able to actually build lasting relationships that these people on the other end are professionals at what they do. And they're here to take care of my vehicle.
Obviously, they charge a price for what they do. You know, one cool thing on our side is that we see is people are less likely to be window shopping and they're ready to spend the dollar because they trust they trust what you said on camera and they're ready to be a part of it. Well, and if the content is not stale and generic content, it makes a huge difference.
Right. And so I think that's a huge part of the value that you guys are bringing, because it is actual people that you will if you go into that business, you will meet those people and get to talk to them and laugh together about a silly video or, you know, already have that sense of connection because, oh, I didn't know that he was from that part of the country. I'm from that part of the country or whatever it might be.
And creating, like you said earlier, genuine connection. I never put stock in that when I heard it in years past and the podcast has taught me otherwise, because I'll meet people at events and we've got a whole series of inside jokes and stories already because they've listened to the show and engaged with us online or in the content. And we've had back and forth, you know, over messenger or whatever it might have been or even they've never even reached out to me.
But they come in and they know me and they ask about the shop and they ask about, you know, this service advisor or that technician or this customer because they've engaged with it and they feel like they know me and they have a relationship with me already. That's right. And it's crazy how powerful that is.
[Saurav Kumar] (49:55 - 52:54)
Yeah. And I just wanted to add to that. If you mentioned that one point that it's not really about money.
So really, how do you make an imprint on whatever communities or for Carfix, it's going to be like this immediate community. But for our community, our community is shops. It's not a city.
And so essentially, you got to figure out, you know, what are like the actual pains for your community? And it's going to be different for you than it is for us. But the three pains that we see are kind of there's a division amongst shop owners in any way you splice it.
They're super fractured. Super fractured like F you, I'm with, you know, this group and they're right. And you're stupid for being in that group and things like that.
There's also a devaluation of like internally. It's like endemic. So, you know, we complain about, you know, customers have a hard time paying the money.
But at the same time, we have a hard time paying ourselves. We have a hard time paying each other. We have a hard time making sure we're charging enough.
There's a general devaluation. And then three, there's just a general underappreciation for what the skilled trade is, what it does, the intelligence that is required to do that. And so our angle is we don't talk about marketing.
Shop owners couldn't give a fuck about marketing. And so and we don't intend to offend anybody. But like if you're a marketing company, what makes you think that talking about a very specific marketing thing is going to even be interesting to shop owners?
Those are not like those are not the breaking neck pains for them. OK, for the most part, it's not. It's it'd be like if you're a shop as a driver.
I don't care about how you pull this transmission together and what it does in the car. It doesn't fucking matter. Make it work.
Yeah, just make it work. And so figuring out what matters to your community. And from our perspective, those are the big pain points for shops.
And so, you know, anything that can help remediate those. And this is not a one to one thing with a shop. It's like at an industry level, anything we can do to remediate that, like we want our fingerprints on that because then that's what we're known for.
And for a shop, we have our three pillars, you know, fun, personal, professional. And those kind of remediate certain types of problems that customers have when they think of a shop. And so it's a long way of saying it's not about the money.
This is kind of we're taking what we teach you guys and doing it for ourselves just in a different context. And when you do that, it's about having an impact. And people remember that people like Greg Buckley didn't come through because we called him.
He came through because he saw like our video of one of us just yapping at a camera. And he was like, this is interesting. And then he made a video about the video.
And we're like, wow, Greg, never met you. But thanks for making that video. And then next thing you know, we were in Wilmington.
So that's kind of the game is impacting.
[Mike Allen] (52:55 - 58:33)
Well, and, you know, to your point, I enjoy a conversation about marketing. I don't enjoy the execution of marketing, which is why I have a company like Turnkey to handle that for me, right? Which is why I hire a company like you guys to come in and help me create it.
Because I'm not going to have the creative juices to think up or the skill set to produce or the equipment to capture it in a way. That is visually appealing in that capacity, right? So we don't want customers, we don't want DIY customers for the most part.
Because they fuck stuff up or they half-ass it. Or they get the wrong part or they get cheap parts, whatever it might be. We want them to hire a knowledgeable and skilled professional to do it right the first time.
Yeah. Right. And so if you are serious about wanting to do video content and grow your footprint and your connection with your community, hire a professional to do it right the first time.
If you are serious about growing your business through managed kind of marketing across all channels, hire a marketing management firm to manage it for you. I use Turnkey. I use 47C, right?
If you're serious about taking your software to the next level, right? I mean, this is not just a go-through-Mike-sponsors bit. But focus on what you're really good at and hire out the other shit to people that are really good at it and just focus on what you're excellent at.
And if you're not good at any of it, maybe you're not in the right gig or just hire a bunch of people. And to add to that point, things shouldn't just be a checkbox, right? You shouldn't.
Well, there's a lot of shops that will post generic media because they've hired a professional company and it's AI images, $49.99 oil change or a happy holiday. Don't shit on my cheap oil change. I love me a cheap oil change.
And they think, you know, oh, we talked to many shops. Oh, I'm already doing social media. I'm already doing marketing.
And I go look and I'm like, holy shit, really? This is posted at 100 other shops. You have to know how to vet out your professional partners as well, right?
Because one thing that really grinds my gears on the side of marketing is when people are one, creating generic media, right? Using AI. But then the one that Cam and I always laugh about is these skit-based shit that they do that's just like a TikTok dance.
And in a video, a horse will kick a person. And then in the second scene, a technician will get kicked into a bunch of chairs. And that's all the media is.
They make themselves look like clowns, right? And I'm like, yeah, you're getting views. You're getting even followers.
But have you seen where those views are coming from? Who are these followers? Are these people even localized?
Yeah, there are other technicians from around the country. Or there are other shop owners. Yeah, I get that.
What we do is we're hyper-personalized for the shop and localized. We're not here to get viral. That is not the point.
If we go viral, I need to turn that shit off. Because the sales executive that I'm going to plug into the account, I'm going to be paying for them to be talking to all these people that are nowhere along the line of becoming a customer. Yeah, that are not potential clients.
At all. And then now I'm feeding the algorithm that, hey, I want more of these people. No, that's incorrect.
The first video that we had go viral, and we'll wrap it up after this because I want to be respectful of y'all's time. And also, we're going to the pit for barbecue after this. We have reservations.
The first video that we had go viral for Confessions was this really heartwarming, sad story from Darren Barney at Elite about when his father passed away and how he almost missed it because he was working late at the shop and refused to go to the hospital because he thought that he had more time. And like a million plus views, right? And share, share, share, share, share.
But it was being shared by 60-year-old women around the country because it was plugging the right heartstrings, right? And it was a moving story, but it was not shop owners. It was not technicians.
It was not service advisors. It was not vendors in our industry. It was grandmas, you know?
And then they get fed in the next week a video of me talking about splitting my pants open and my balls hanging out because I was commando, right? And so we got this spike of follows and boof, dropped off because it wasn't the right people, right? So getting the message in front of the right people is more important than getting 100,000 views.
Yeah, it's like- Because the algorithm will, if it starts to pick momentum up, it feeds it to more people that look like the ones who interacted. And if they're the wrong ones, then it's going to skew your entire- It's diluting the whole thing.
[Saurav Kumar] (58:34 - 58:40)
And it's going to make your job of doing business on that a lot harder because now you just have trash data in your system.
[Mike Allen] (58:40 - 58:57)
So the thing that I learned from this is that true, heartfelt, heartwarming, this change in my life and how I look at things is not what I need in confessions. I need more of my balls out to appeal to shop owners around the country.
[Saurav Kumar] (58:57 - 59:05)
So maybe we'll end it with this. There's three of us at the table and there's probably more than one of us that's commando right now.
[Mike Allen] (59:09 - 59:53)
Ah, it just got awkward. Thanks, guys. Thanks for listening to Confessions of a Shop Owner, where we lay it all out.
The good, the bad, and sometimes the super messed up. I'm your host, Mike Allen, here to remind you that even the pros screw it up sometimes, so why not laugh a little bit, learn a little bit, and maybe have another drink. You got a confession of your own or a topic you'd like me to cover, or do you just want to let me know what an idiot I am?
Email mike at confessionsofashopowner.com or call and leave a message. The number is 704-CONFESS. That's 704-266-3377.
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, or follow. Join us on this crazy journey that is shop ownership. I'll see you on the next episode.