Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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.
Brad McAllister [00:00:00]:
The median tech quote that we saw was 1482, $1,482 and 254 cars per month. If you raise the close ratio that by 6 points, that would increase your ARO and then that would be $24,475 more a month for 6 points.
Mike Allen [00:00:18]:
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 we may have. There may be some spicy language in this show, so if you get your feelings hurt easily, you should probably just move along. So without further ado, here's your host, Mike Allen with Confessions of a Shop Owner presented by techmetric, the best software in the history of ever.
Mike Allen [00:00:55]:
Alright, so here we are, we're at tectonic 2026. It's day one, day one and a half.
Brad McAllister [00:01:02]:
A lot of us, a lot of
Mike Allen [00:01:03]:
us got here yesterday and had the party on the pool on the roof, the, the Texas shaped lazy river.
Brad McAllister [00:01:09]:
You noticed?
Mike Allen [00:01:10]:
Has anyone actually been in the Texas shaped lever lazy River?
Jay Power [00:01:13]:
I tried to get Jay too, but I have not.
Brad McAllister [00:01:16]:
I have not. It was close though.
Mike Allen [00:01:17]:
The lines at the bar were a little bit long for me to have enough alcohol to be able to do that last night. Yeah, try again tonight. My previous guest,
Jay Power [00:01:26]:
Rochelle got center was
Mike Allen [00:01:27]:
one of the women on the panel. Actually both of the women that were in my previous episode, but her father was here and they I guess listen to the podcast. Awesome. Thank you for that. But he knows that I'm a big whiskey fan, so he's brought a bottle of bourbon that he wants to share tonight, so.
Brad McAllister [00:01:42]:
Very cool. So we might see you in the pool tonight is what you're saying.
Mike Allen [00:01:46]:
About 10:30. Look for me slowly drowning in the pool, flapping around in this blazer.
Brad McAllister [00:01:51]:
What part of Texas in the pool
Jay Power [00:01:52]:
will you be at?
Brad McAllister [00:01:53]:
Southeast or.
Mike Allen [00:01:55]:
If I get in on the panhandle and come around with that direction of flow, I'll probably drown by Houston.
Brad McAllister [00:02:00]:
There you go. Smart. Yeah, smart. No, the party was great. Really awesome. Great event. It was really, we were very impressed.
Mike Allen [00:02:08]:
Everything so far about this has been incredibly top notch. I mean next level production value and organization. Food's been great. So I'm really impressed with it from start to finish. I will say last night I did like a 30 minute breeze through at the party. Yeah, I love small social gatherings. Like 15, 20 people love it. That's, that's my element.
Mike Allen [00:02:30]:
A couple hundred people, I get a Little overwhelmed.
Brad McAllister [00:02:33]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:02:33]:
And I'm just like, I'm gonna go sit in the corner.
Brad McAllister [00:02:36]:
So. Had to take a little break.
Jay Power [00:02:39]:
I did, actually. Went back across the bridge and sat
Mike Allen [00:02:42]:
down over by the little fire pit.
Jay Power [00:02:44]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:02:45]:
Talked to my kids for a little bit and. And then I. Then I went to the turtle races last night, so.
Brad McAllister [00:02:50]:
Say that again.
Jay Power [00:02:51]:
Turtle races. Turtle races.
Mike Allen [00:02:52]:
It's funny, you might think that I stuttered
Brad McAllister [00:02:56]:
so I thought I heard you wrong. I thought I had to hear you. I thought it was me.
Mike Allen [00:03:00]:
So the promotive team invited me to go with them. And there's a place called little Woodrows. I guess there are five or six of them around the Houston area. But the midtown bar, it's like a neighborhood bar. They've got lots of port swings hanging up everywhere and cornhole and giant Jenga and all that. But this specific location in midtown, every Thursday night for 18 years, they have turtle races. And they paint numbers on the back of the shell of 10 turtles and they each have like bios and like cheesy name. Like Timothy Chalamet was one and shellame.
Mike Allen [00:03:40]:
Yeah, they're all different turtle, you know, puns.
Brad McAllister [00:03:42]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:03:44]:
But you go get your ticket and you pick your. Your horse, right. And then it's like stadium seating. All people screaming and yelling and cheering for their. For their turtle. And they all start in the middle and it's the first turtle to get out of the circle.
Brad McAllister [00:03:59]:
Oh, okay.
Mike Allen [00:04:00]:
So it's not like a straightforward racing a track. It's just escape. Escape the circle, I guess. I don't know.
Jay Power [00:04:06]:
How did you do?
Mike Allen [00:04:07]:
I. I am. It would. It turns out that I need to find a different type of degenerate gambling to become a millionaire on turtle. I'm not good at picking fast turtles.
Brad McAllister [00:04:18]:
Okay.
Mike Allen [00:04:20]:
I did learn that size does not necessarily equate to speed one way or the other. The small ones are super slow and the big ones are super slow. Medium sized hurdles. It's the way to go.
Brad McAllister [00:04:31]:
Who knew?
Mike Allen [00:04:32]:
Yeah. Now you guys know. All of our listeners.
Brad McAllister [00:04:35]:
All of our listeners know.
Mike Allen [00:04:36]:
I feel like that's a good segue to have you introduce yourselves.
Brad McAllister [00:04:38]:
Okay. With the turtles, Brad, are you the medium sized turtle or the smaller large turtle?
Jay Power [00:04:45]:
I'm not really sure.
Brad McAllister [00:04:48]:
That's a great segue. Oh, mercy. Well, I'll start. I took the bait on that one. My name is Jay power. I'm the CEO of octorocket.
Mike Allen [00:05:01]:
Okay.
Jay Power [00:05:02]:
And I'm Brad McAllister. I am the CTO of octorocket and
Brad McAllister [00:05:05]:
co founder and co founder. Co Founder.
Jay Power [00:05:07]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:05:08]:
How old is Octorocket?
Jay Power [00:05:10]:
Geez. How is within turtle years or what are turtle years?
Brad McAllister [00:05:15]:
Are they more or less?
Mike Allen [00:05:16]:
Anyway, it's PI times. Yeah.
Brad McAllister [00:05:19]:
Yeah. So the voice solution of the platform has been around what, 10 years? Nine. 10 years?
Jay Power [00:05:24]:
About 10 years now. Yeah. Yeah.
Brad McAllister [00:05:25]:
The analytics side of our business that we bolted on and put it all together really has been around probably three or four years.
Mike Allen [00:05:31]:
Okay. And have you noticed that. Okay, back up.
Brad McAllister [00:05:34]:
Yes.
Mike Allen [00:05:35]:
Explain what your business is to our listeners who might not be familiar.
Brad McAllister [00:05:37]:
Okay. So the way I break it down, and I break it down to kind of key three things, because there's a lot of features that we offer within the platform, which is what happens when you grow up in shops and shop owners ask you to, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? And you listen and you build those things. But it kind of breaks down into our why. And our why is we help our clients connect with their customers, cut through the noise and seize every opportunity. So that sounds high, lofty vision. What it really breaks down is when we connect our clients with our customers. We have a communication system that we built from the ground up. Voice, text, communicates through our platform.
Brad McAllister [00:06:12]:
Service advisor can get in it, handle all the customers, see everything about their customer.
Mike Allen [00:06:16]:
Right.
Brad McAllister [00:06:16]:
So it's the communicators, how they connect with their client. Our goal is to make our clients expert at their customers when they call in every interaction.
Jay Power [00:06:25]:
Right.
Brad McAllister [00:06:25]:
The second piece, cut through the noise. That's the analytics side. We all have data, we all have reports. It gets overwhelming, frankly. And owners don't have a ton of time to do a lot of things and figure out what things are going on. So our analytics really allows them to put in projections, goals. They can see whether or not they're going to hit their goals. We work with a lot of coaching companies and they use it with our coaches to help the shops do better.
Brad McAllister [00:06:49]:
That's the analytics side of cutting through the noise. We help them see their business in a new way. And they can actually go in and say, hey, I want to see these metrics, all comparisons, so I can see whether or not these things had any correlation to them. And the last part is the CRM side of our business, where we do campaigns, voice, email as well email, SMS and voice campaigns for us that give the advisors automated tasks, things like that, so you can follow up on with customers.
Mike Allen [00:07:13]:
And so to use any of your services, you have to, at a base level, use your VoIP service.
Brad McAllister [00:07:19]:
No, they're all in different packages based upon what the shop needs. We service shops that are, you know, a mom and pop. We actually just talked to one. They're using their cell phones literally for their business, which we see.
Mike Allen [00:07:30]:
That's a way.
Brad McAllister [00:07:30]:
And we have franchises, we have MSOs, we have lots of different types of organizations that use different pieces. So a lot of times what we say for the shop owner, if they're coming in, they say, hey, what do you guys do? And we ask them more about their business. What are you using? What are you doing? What do you need? And sometimes just having analytics to actually see the data and what it's doing gives them an idea what they need to do next. So we don't advise a bunch of irons in the fire. Don't throw everything at it like, hey, start with something first. At least get visibility. Visibility shows you a lot of what you need to do next. And then we can figure out the other pieces.
Brad McAllister [00:08:03]:
But everything is modular. You can add it on, select it in a package. And then we also do a lot with our solutions where we also provide to different, like marketing companies, coaching companies, analytics, call tracking, inbound. We do a lot of marketing conversion. We give a lot of visibility into the actual communication you're having that also connects with all the marketing you're doing. So we, a lot of shops will give their marketing company access to our software so they can go in and say, wow, okay, this is how the marketing's actually working and here's what we can do with your campaigns and settle this up.
Mike Allen [00:08:35]:
So I work closely with turnkey marketing. I assume that you guys work with turnkey clients.
Brad McAllister [00:08:41]:
100%. Carolyn's great.
Mike Allen [00:08:43]:
So two of my shout out to
Brad McAllister [00:08:44]:
Carolyn, by the way, turnkey marketing, isn't she just a total badass, the director of marketing service?
Mike Allen [00:08:49]:
She is a total badass. Yeah, I mean she's, she's an impressive individual. Absolutely. Two of my best friends in the whole industry are big songbirds for you guys. Harrison Rusk and Henry Roge and Hartford, Connecticut love those guys and they've been telling me that I need to get on board with Octo Rocket for a while now. And I'm yeah, dumbass and slow to make decisions. I get an analysis paralysis on almost everything. It would probably be really bad for me to have access to more data and more analytics.
Mike Allen [00:09:21]:
But of the analytics that you provide that might not be available in my primary sms, what are kind of some of the key things that are a really big feature? Like for example, Harrison and Henry, we have a group chat, the three of us, and we talk pretty much every day. They're always talking about inbound call conversions and I don't have the ability to track that. And also outbound sales conversions, I think. And I can kind of quasi track that with my closing rate. Right. So. But tell me more about those statistics and how that works.
Brad McAllister [00:09:55]:
Okay, so we're going to talk about it, but I'm also going to ask you some questions as an owner because this is an ongoing topic for us because of what the industry really calls. Like I said, we get a lot of our feedback from shop owners that say, hey, can you do it this way? Do it this way? Because everybody runs it a little bit different tweaks and things. Right. So when it comes to the topic of conversion, it definitely comes, Brad, this is the hot topic. So we can do the inbound call conversion from your tracking numbers and all those things, but in terms of what the reporting piece, that's a little bit different in the analytics. And I can't talk about analytics without talking about Rick Buffington, who really did a lot of the development. I know Rick is our kind of data scientist, mad scientist. We keep him locked away.
Brad McAllister [00:10:42]:
He doesn't get to come to events.
Mike Allen [00:10:43]:
Primary nerd.
Brad McAllister [00:10:44]:
Primary nerd. Okay, he, Rick, I apologize for this, but he doesn't like being at the booth. But he, if you get him in a room with a thousand people and talk about data and analytics, that guy lights up like nobody else. So he loves this stuff and he loves figuring out how it needs to be displayed for the shop owners to improve. But that's a little tangent. Thanks, Rick, for all that.
Mike Allen [00:11:08]:
I support tangents.
Brad McAllister [00:11:10]:
They're important. We gave a shout out with the analytics. It allows you to put in your goals, allows you to put in your numbers. So we can do things where we set that up and we actually project that out. I think I mentioned that to you. But also do things like outrunning your overhead. We can show you when that's going to happen, things like that nature and also with the comparison. So one of the things, a lot of shop owners come to us and say, hey, I made these changes.
Brad McAllister [00:11:31]:
I want to see how it's compared to last quarter, last month, annually. So they can do that, set timeframes, but we also allow you to pick the metrics that are important to you. So if you want to say, hey, I need to see if there's a correlation between these things or these things really matter for me to track annually and see, we actually do that and we give you the ability to select on Those. And then it will depict those in a graph for you as well, stuff like that. So there's different ways of using it and different ways of seeing it, frankly. You know, there's also leaderboards. We can show your advisors and techs and all that stuff what they're doing and how they're doing in their shop. Sometimes shops will have it up on a big board so they can actually see what's going on and kind of get, you know, a little bit competition.
Mike Allen [00:12:11]:
I've struggled with that over the years because, you know, everybody read the Game of Work ten years ago and. And wanted to put a scorecard up. And I had dudes who are immediately massively motivated by that.
Brad McAllister [00:12:24]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:12:25]:
And other dudes who are like, oh, fuck, no. I'm just gonna be last every day. And, I mean, some of my listeners are gonna be like, well, then you should have fired that guy.
Brad McAllister [00:12:33]:
But I think it comes down sometimes to culture of the shop, too, and how you're using it and how you're motivating your people. I definitely have seen it both ways, coming from enterprise sales organizations where you see it, where every Monday you're putting the board up in front of everybody. And of course, you have your sales guy who's like, oh, man, I've seen this before, you know, song and dance, where, I mean, every month you're zero, every quarter year, zero, you. But yet he'll go out and just crush it and do his own thing. And so it kind of works both ways. Honestly, it comes down to me when I think about it with our team. How do I help them just be successful? And does it help them be successful, or does it take away from what I've already been developing in the culture and the personalities that I have in the business? So we've kind of seen it both ways. Some people love it.
Brad McAllister [00:13:17]:
They like that kind of competition on the board. And some people go, that's not going to work in my shaft if I put that up there. You know, it might be two different ways.
Mike Allen [00:13:24]:
Like, for me, I'm. I'm very competitive, and I'm driven, and I love seeing the score. I want to know if I'm winning or losing. Right?
Jay Power [00:13:31]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:13:32]:
And so when I was just a service advisor for my dad, there were five advisors on the counter. It was a big shop, and, you know, we're getting close to the end of the month, and I'm in second place. I'm, like, out in the parking lot, directing traffic into parking spaces and opening the door for them. That kind of Obnoxious stuff that makes other advisors hate you. Right. But at the same time, my wife is. My wife is a pediatric dentist. She works in an organization that has like 100 practices, and so they have several hundred doctors, and they publish the average daily production by doctor in their internal newsletter.
Mike Allen [00:14:13]:
And that includes like all the orthodontists and the pedagogist and the generalist.
Jay Power [00:14:17]:
And.
Mike Allen [00:14:18]:
And it's. It is a demotivator for her. She's like, I don't want to see that. I'm going to do the very best I can for my patients every day until I've seen every patient on the schedule, no matter how late I have to be. And so she's internally motivated by quality and pride and what she does, and she's demotivated by that. So I. We're the two ends of the spectrum.
Brad McAllister [00:14:41]:
Yeah. Well, so this is a bit of a soapbox, a bit tangent rabbit trail here, but one of the things that sometimes leaderboards can do is mask management. And I'm a big believer that management is you're fortunate to lead people, you're fortunate to manage people because they're putting their livelihood in your hands and you can either help them be successful or you can cause problems for them. And sometimes leaderboards don't show that because the leader themselves are ultimately responsible for what's on that board. Deming was one of the people I read a lot about, and the last stuff he breaks down is basically like, it all boils down to management process and management. And that might be the person doesn't need to be successful at your organization. They could be successful somewhere else. What do you tolerate? Right.
Brad McAllister [00:15:31]:
And so I think in that case, it really comes down to are you owning what's on that board as a manager, as a leader, as a gm? So that is not just their problem. It's how am I coaching them, how am I training them, where are they not being successful and how can I help them be successful?
Mike Allen [00:15:47]:
Yeah.
Brad McAllister [00:15:47]:
And that's what we all struggle with day in, day out is like, we just have to own that stuff.
Mike Allen [00:15:51]:
Yeah. I think maybe that's one of the things that's playing into it, because in my wife's situation, they are. They publish it and goes out to every employee of the company. And then they never talk about it. It's like this. It's like this passive aggressive.
Brad McAllister [00:16:06]:
Oh, really? It's like a white paper that you just shoot out into the Ethereum. Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:16:10]:
And right next to, you know, the recipe of the month, some crazy shit. So I'm sure that some consultant somewhere that they paid a lot of money to said you should do this.
Brad McAllister [00:16:23]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:16:23]:
And there was the lack of all the other follow through that you talked about, about the discussion about what the numbers mean and why they're important and how to, you know, have impact on that and what the other considerations are. You know, a general dentist is never going to outpace the sales of an orthodontist.
Jay Power [00:16:37]:
Right, right.
Mike Allen [00:16:38]:
Generally I shouldn't feel bad about being behind all of the orthodontist in the practice.
Brad McAllister [00:16:43]:
Yes. I mean it points to you got to really know the business in order to make sure you understand what that is, not just put it next to
Mike Allen [00:16:50]:
a recipe for a going to be behind the master technician, you know, so. Cool.
Brad McAllister [00:16:56]:
Well, did I answer the question you asked?
Jay Power [00:17:00]:
I don't think so.
Brad McAllister [00:17:01]:
I don't think I answered. We were talking about conversion. You got out of it. So this is why I'm coming back, Mike, because this guy skated right by it. So you asked about conversion and we can show reports and stuff, but this has lately come up because we talk about conversion. Do you want to.
Jay Power [00:17:14]:
Yeah, I can cover it. So right now our report is call conversion. Very first time call conversion. And the current metric is. Hey, are you a first time caller? We know you're a first time caller. We've never seen your number in the system before. We connect that to did we get an appointment? Did we get a repair order? We don't currently track how many dollars in that report were generated from that conversion. So we've been going back and forth.
Jay Power [00:17:40]:
I'm like, this is a, that's a marketing conversion. We need a sales conversion version of the report. So we are building that and it will be available. But curious to get your take. What type of conversion is important to you?
Mike Allen [00:17:59]:
So marketing conversions are important. Right. My job is to make the phone ring. Service advisor's job is to convert a. A ring ring into a car in the bay. The technician has to convert the car in the bay into findings and needs. Right. That then the advisor has to sell and collect.
Mike Allen [00:18:18]:
So there are lots of different conversions along that trail. The first and most important I think is converting an inbound call into a car. Right. And ultimately I think an appointment is probably enough because no show rate's pretty low now. You don't have a ton of people that are no showing appointment. I don't have a ton of people that are no showing appointments. I don't know if it's a problem industry wide. What are you Seeing with the pool of data that you have access to is the average first time inbound call conversion rate.
Brad McAllister [00:18:52]:
Go ahead.
Jay Power [00:18:53]:
It ranges from, if we're doing marketing conversions here, anywhere from 20 to 40%.
Mike Allen [00:18:59]:
Okay.
Jay Power [00:19:00]:
First time is what I typically see.
Mike Allen [00:19:02]:
Okay. So it takes three to four, three to five calls to generate a car. So from an owner's perspective, I would say, what can I do to lower that number to 1 to 3? Is that the quality of my marketing spend? Am I advertising more intelligently and getting better qualified calls? Do I have erroneous calls? Because I've got some, you know, bugged out page, landing page on my website. Right. So how do you help? So it's not your job to help people increase that number. You're just reporting that number.
Jay Power [00:19:41]:
But we do, we do provide the tools to help with that. Because in that report, you as an owner or manager can go through and listen to those calls that didn't convert and be like, well, was it somebody looking for bodywork? And we don't do bodywork. Was it somebody they called the wrong number, you know, because of the way the ad was structured? So we can definitely give you the information to fine tune that. The end of the day, if it is a sales problem, we're not going to solve that for you, but we can at least show you what the outcome was of that call.
Brad McAllister [00:20:11]:
Yeah, and I think from my perspective, it was coming from the line of questioning of logistically, how would you use it during the course of ownership of the shop or talking to your people? What thing are you looking at to then go, okay, I'm looking at conversion, marketing, conversion to a car. And that's a metric that I'm gonna use as a KPI with my advisors and I'm gonna be able to talk to them. And then from the second side, how would you use that? Just kind of during the course of operation of the business. And so it sounds like you'd break those up essentially between advisor and technician for those types of conversion.
Mike Allen [00:20:45]:
Well, I think, you know, from a marketing perspective, it would be, I want to know what, how many calls from my direct mail piece equals one car versus how many calls from Google Ads equals one car versus how many cars from my calls from my community outreach efforts.
Brad McAllister [00:20:58]:
Yep.
Mike Allen [00:20:58]:
You know, and then it's for each of those funnels or however you want to phrase, I don't know all the right buzzwords, but for each of those avenues of inbound calls, what's the average repair order?
Jay Power [00:21:08]:
Right.
Mike Allen [00:21:09]:
Is the customer, what's the customer retention Are they one dones or do they stick? Yeah, yeah, because then I can find out. Well, my spend through this avenue to get a car that sticks and spends money.
Jay Power [00:21:26]:
I'm gonna.
Mike Allen [00:21:27]:
I'm willing to spend a lot more
Brad McAllister [00:21:27]:
money re acquisition cost. Yeah, yeah. We actually have within the customer information that we gather and build basically a customer detail and journey. You can build reports off of that and tag different customers. And I only bring this up because one of our Euro shops came to us. He said, you know, I'd love to. I see the inbound calls converting to these things but I'd also like to tag them and find out did that ad bring in the type of car that gets me the higher. Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:21:54]:
Quality score?
Brad McAllister [00:21:54]:
Yeah. So he was, it was Land Rover. He was asking, you know, did it bring in this type of Land Rover and so you can actually tag that and do it. We were looking at that. But I thought it was interesting thinking about it. Not only did it convert, did it convert to the car that makes you the most money? Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:22:06]:
So it doesn't matter if a bunch of people with Bugatti's call my store.
Brad McAllister [00:22:10]:
I'm.
Mike Allen [00:22:10]:
It's not going to make any money for me, so. Or, you know, 93 Chevy Corsicas. I don't want those either weather. So get me in the sweet spot.
Brad McAllister [00:22:18]:
Who wants a Chevy Corsica?
Mike Allen [00:22:19]:
I'm trying to think, are there any left? I don't know, maybe down here. Probably there's no rust down here out west.
Brad McAllister [00:22:26]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:22:27]:
So maybe still don't want it.
Brad McAllister [00:22:29]:
Yeah, I think you have to. Like if you're driving, if you're driving
Mike Allen [00:22:34]:
a Corsica, it's because you don't have a choice.
Brad McAllister [00:22:36]:
Yeah, tell us in the comments.
Mike Allen [00:22:37]:
Yeah, yeah.
Brad McAllister [00:22:40]:
Do you still have it and why'd you get it?
Mike Allen [00:22:41]:
Yeah, 704 confess.
Brad McAllister [00:22:43]:
That's right.
Mike Allen [00:22:44]:
704 confess. So I'm doing a coaches panel tomorrow morning and it's got, you know, eight different coaches from, from different coaching organizations around the industry. And I'm going to ask permission. I don't know if they're going to let me do it or not. I probably should have asked before the day before. They're kind of busy. But I'm going to sit down with my phone and put it down on the, on the table next to the chair and I'm going to say, okay, guys, 704 confess. Text in your questions that you want these coaches to be asked.
Mike Allen [00:23:13]:
And that way, one, it's not like, hey, somebody run a microphone over to them because they got a stupid Question. I don't want to read it.
Brad McAllister [00:23:18]:
Right.
Mike Allen [00:23:18]:
You can just scroll or if they're just going to talk forever, you know. Yeah, I might not have time. Right. You got eight different coaches on there. An hour is going to go by quick. But if I have some extra time, you know, send me your zinger questions that I want to hear about.
Brad McAllister [00:23:31]:
That's good. Well, the panel today was fantastic, too.
Mike Allen [00:23:34]:
I thought it was really good.
Brad McAllister [00:23:35]:
Yeah, I mean, really good, insightful stuff. It's really.
Mike Allen [00:23:38]:
The dude from Christian Brothers was very quiet. He didn't. It's like he's the. He.
Brad McAllister [00:23:43]:
He was a bit. When he. When he said that about the question, he was worried about boxers are briefs. Yeah. Like, yeah, it was like, man, I did not expect that one.
Jay Power [00:23:52]:
So well. And.
Mike Allen [00:23:53]:
And the weird part is right after the mics went off, he said, and the answer is commando.
Brad McAllister [00:23:57]:
Oh, did. Did he really? I think he did.
Jay Power [00:24:00]:
I think.
Jay Power [00:24:04]:
All right, so.
Mike Allen [00:24:05]:
So I'm interested to hear from you guys and I want to come back to kind of the history, like, what you guys did before Octorocket and what was the genesis of Octorocket. But first, you're telling me that you guys have had the ability to analyze a very large pool of data across the industry over multiple years. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and what are some of the interesting findings you've got there?
Brad McAllister [00:24:29]:
Yeah, sure. I've got some pulled up. This year we're releasing it. It's an industry report. It is a little bit unique in that we're pulling in shop data from our customers as well as some communication information. And when you think about doing communications CRM and the analytics of the business, we can see some really interesting things and try and make sense of it. And of course, Rick spends many hours in his office with the door closed, walking back and forth, pulling his hair out, but loves it. But basically, I pulled together some reports and some data just so we can talk through it.
Brad McAllister [00:25:07]:
But the way that the report's going to be structured, we're hoping to Release this in Q2. If you don't mind, I'll do a shout out if you go to our website, octorocket.com, o k t o R O C K E T or as
Jay Power [00:25:17]:
we like to say, it's okay to
Brad McAllister [00:25:19]:
rock it, it's okay to rocket. Mike, you knew it was coming.
Jay Power [00:25:24]:
No, I didn't see that.
Brad McAllister [00:25:25]:
You should have seen it coming.
Mike Allen [00:25:26]:
I fucking love it.
Brad McAllister [00:25:27]:
You can't unsee it.
Mike Allen [00:25:28]:
Once you see a rocket yeah, but
Brad McAllister [00:25:30]:
there's a link for industry report. If you sign up, we'll send you the report when we get it. And the thing we're also going to do is when you go to the page, it's going to be reactive, that you can actually put in some of your own data from your shop. So if you're not a customer of ours, you can actually put in your data. We'll show you where you are in the rankings and also tailor the report that we're going to send to you. So we're trying to make it more kind of like a calculator. You can actually go in and say, okay, well, where do I rank? Right. What is important to me because different shops have different things that are important for them to look at.
Brad McAllister [00:25:56]:
But. But we're essentially going to break it up in seven different ways by percentile bands, revenue tiers, tech count, staffing, gross profit bands, effective labor rate and regions. But I brought some that are essentially a couple little call outs from 2024-25 and some other different regional things. The thing that we saw from 24 to 25, now this is over a thousand shops, right? This isn't just survey data that people sent us. This is actual data gathered across all the different SMS systems that we integrate with. But close ratios from 24 to 25 decreased by 6.3%.
Mike Allen [00:26:31]:
No shit. Like they went from 50% to 44%
Brad McAllister [00:26:36]:
or close ratios dropped. Okay, on average by 6.3%. Well, I say on average, I might say that accidentally we really look at medians because averages sometimes get peaks and things in there and data. Rick will correct me if I say it wrong, but 6.3% depending upon arrow, that could be quite a bit of change. So close ratios decreased, effective labor rate and GP per hour increased by 5.5% and 5% respectively.
Mike Allen [00:27:05]:
I believe that everybody's raising their rates.
Jay Power [00:27:07]:
Yep.
Brad McAllister [00:27:08]:
Cars per day. What's your guess?
Mike Allen [00:27:11]:
24 to 25 vehicles in operation went up a little bit, but not by a lot. I'm going to go with cars per day went down by 5%.
Brad McAllister [00:27:26]:
It was effectively flat.
Mike Allen [00:27:28]:
I'll say pretty close.
Brad McAllister [00:27:31]:
But it's interesting you say that when you think about the number of cars and we're talking about here at the conference about things being difficult, it makes you ask questions like if there's more cars, but it was flat, there's less. Effectively less cars.
Mike Allen [00:27:44]:
Yeah.
Brad McAllister [00:27:44]:
Is there something about that?
Mike Allen [00:27:46]:
You know, you were talking service intervals are increasing, right? Yeah, that's definitely a part of it. And I also think that we're talking about 24 and 25. We weren't really feeling a pinch until the second half of 25. First half of 25 was still kind of happy days. It felt like. Yeah, maybe that's anecdotal from my own experience in my marketplace. So I don't know how the country was. My market has been relatively economically secure and I haven't had felt a lot of the pressure that might be felt elsewhere in the country, so.
Jay Power [00:28:14]:
Right.
Mike Allen [00:28:15]:
Yeah.
Brad McAllister [00:28:15]:
We call those the salad days from raising Arizona, if you recognize that reference. You don't.
Mike Allen [00:28:23]:
Never seen it.
Brad McAllister [00:28:24]:
Never watched Nick Cage, Raised in Arizona.
Mike Allen [00:28:26]:
I hear it's great. But no, never seen it.
Brad McAllister [00:28:28]:
You gotta go watch it. It's fantastic. Anyway, parts cost came down by 1.5% down.
Mike Allen [00:28:39]:
So that means people are buying parts then, Mike.
Brad McAllister [00:28:42]:
I don't know what they're doing because
Mike Allen [00:28:43]:
I don't know what price has gone down. Yeah, I mean, you're looking at the data.
Brad McAllister [00:28:47]:
I'm looking at the data. I'm just telling it how it is out of the data.
Mike Allen [00:28:50]:
But wait, so that's a. That's a percentage as a percentage of the retail cost of the part. Right. So that means. Might mean that they're cranking up their margins.
Brad McAllister [00:29:00]:
The cost. Yeah. And then margins went up.
Mike Allen [00:29:03]:
Yeah. So maybe they got aggressive on their parts metrics.
Brad McAllister [00:29:05]:
Yeah. Which one of the finders in here is about parts cost control? The number one driver of GP we found was just parts cost control.
Jay Power [00:29:12]:
Look, when I first opened my shop, I thought my old systems would keep up. The software that I had would continue to evolve. But as we grew the slow estimates, scattered workflow, increasing downtime, it really just. It was becoming a real problem. That's why I switched to techmetric. It's not just software. It's a complete shop management system that makes my life easier. Smart jobs, instant estimates, integrated payments, integrated financing options.
Jay Power [00:29:39]:
I mean, it allows me to focus on the work that actually makes me money and not get bogged down in the other details. My shop's repair orders have jumped over 300% since switching to TechMetric. And when I need help, their support team responds in real time. I actually was online with them asking questions just this week, and I got answers in minutes rather than having to wait for callbacks and emails days later. If your system is holding you back, it's time for a change. Tap the link in the show notes and see how techmetric can help you move your shop forward.
Brad McAllister [00:30:08]:
Labor costs went up by 5.3%.
Mike Allen [00:30:12]:
That sounds low. Jesus.
Brad McAllister [00:30:14]:
Yeah, it does. I mean there's certain areas definitely. And I mean again, this is regional and across American.
Mike Allen [00:30:20]:
That's just me being jaded. Don't worry about that.
Brad McAllister [00:30:22]:
That's right. I mean, looking at it, the thing that we really come to is that the close ratios is the biggest gap. And how do we do that? How do you increase close ratio in your shop to improve things? But that was kind of the biggest thing as far as regional performance. The highest we saw was out of Euro in the northeast. They lead at GP per hour at 194 on a median. And then highest arrow was around 1120 for average repair order.
Mike Allen [00:30:51]:
You have a region. Well, okay, but you think about the type. The type of shops that use Octorocket are not typical shops.
Brad McAllister [00:30:59]:
It depends. It depends. We do have some that have high end stuff that they go through their shop. So high ros.
Mike Allen [00:31:06]:
Yeah. I would say that an Octorocket client shop is already better than average to be looking for tools like that.
Jay Power [00:31:13]:
Yeah.
Brad McAllister [00:31:14]:
If they have analytics, they're trying to understand their data.
Mike Allen [00:31:16]:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so back up to the closing rate because that is a big, a big variance. 6%. You said it went down 6%, but went from what to what?
Brad McAllister [00:31:27]:
I don't have that for you. I just know it went down 6.3%. But it will be in the report.
Jay Power [00:31:32]:
In the report.
Jay Power [00:31:34]:
All you got to do is go
Mike Allen [00:31:35]:
to okaytorocket.com and click on industry report.
Brad McAllister [00:31:38]:
So there you go. There you go. But out of that, when we look at the median tech quote that we saw was 1482. 1482 and 254 cars per month. Right. If you raise the close ratio that by six points, that would increase your ARO and then that would be $24,475 more a month.
Mike Allen [00:32:04]:
Yeah.
Brad McAllister [00:32:05]:
For six points.
Mike Allen [00:32:06]:
I mean six points of close ratio, 6% GP. That number adds up in a very big way over time. And that's what we're doing. I feel like we're a window into a conversation we had with our team earlier this week. We had a full team meeting Tuesday night, so just got just a couple of points. Move the needle a couple points, it's going to make an enormous difference.
Brad McAllister [00:32:27]:
Well, actually that makes me ask a question because we provide a lot of the data. We both had shop experience. I GM'd a European shop many, many years ago. He grew up in shops and his dad shops. But you as an owner, what do you do to invest in your service advisors, to Close that gap or that is there something that you're doing to try and raise that point margin?
Mike Allen [00:32:49]:
Well, so the first thing you got to do is real, is figure out why you are where you are. Right. So the conversation stemmed from us being abnormally low for the previous month and we had a spike in major jobs, a lot of engines and transmissions, a lot of tire jobs, that kind of thing. And so that's going to drive down gp, but it's going to drive up gph. And so that's what we saw. That GPH was also very high. So, you know, the net effect is, is okay on that front, but just, you know, what gets measured, right. Gets done and, and bringing it to front of mind for them that, you know, hey, don't just trust the estimate to be good to go.
Mike Allen [00:33:31]:
Review the estimate, look at your gph, look at your margins. You know, you check repair pal, and see are we under the window for what's expected. Are we leaving some, are we leaving some meat on the bone there? And just be thinking in terms of how do we maintain the quality standard that we expect? Because we're not going to go get, you know, Chinese parts for everything, right? Because we want to maintain that five year warranty that we're putting out there, but we also have to maintain margin because if we're putting a five year warranty out there, we got to stand behind it for five years. So the margin's got to be there,
Brad McAllister [00:34:07]:
it's got to support the business.
Mike Allen [00:34:09]:
And so I think if you've got the right team members explaining the why is 90% of the work. Right. And then, you know, we tie, we tie compensation directly to gross profit. So. And that seems to kick it into how you're.
Brad McAllister [00:34:24]:
Yeah, seems to incentivize that.
Mike Allen [00:34:26]:
It's weird how incentives work.
Brad McAllister [00:34:27]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:34:27]:
Don't forget though, any incentive based pay plan is the devil. And it's horrible to incentivize people to do good at their job.
Brad McAllister [00:34:37]:
I hear you. I smell that sarcasm right across the table.
Mike Allen [00:34:41]:
Sorry, I'll have another Altoid.
Brad McAllister [00:34:43]:
Another Altoid.
Mike Allen [00:34:46]:
So, okay, give me, give me backgrounds. You referenced that a little bit. Brett, start with you. Tell me about your, your history in shops.
Jay Power [00:34:53]:
Yeah, so I grew up in my dad's shops. He had started with a single shop in Illinois in 93. I was 14 something.
Mike Allen [00:35:04]:
Is your dad Doug McAllister?
Jay Power [00:35:05]:
Doug McAllister.
Mike Allen [00:35:05]:
Yeah, my dad was in a 20 group with him.
Jay Power [00:35:07]:
Okay.
Mike Allen [00:35:08]:
Back in the day.
Jay Power [00:35:09]:
That's awesome.
Mike Allen [00:35:09]:
Yeah. R.L. o' Connor first and then Elite.
Jay Power [00:35:13]:
Yes.
Mike Allen [00:35:13]:
Yeah.
Jay Power [00:35:14]:
Yep.
Mike Allen [00:35:14]:
Yeah.
Jay Power [00:35:15]:
So that was my dad.
Mike Allen [00:35:16]:
Okay.
Brad McAllister [00:35:17]:
Still your dad?
Jay Power [00:35:18]:
Still my dad.
Brad McAllister [00:35:18]:
He's still fantastic.
Jay Power [00:35:21]:
He eventually had three shops. Growing up, I figured I would be a tech, probably, maybe an advisor. But I got into the whole computer thing and I was like, dad, this. I like this stuff too much. So I was always their IT guy. I would, you know, that was my job. I'd work on the computers back when it was, you know, all Data was on DVDs or Mitchell and we'd swap them out. I'd build disc towers and all the crazy stuff.
Jay Power [00:35:47]:
So I grew up doing that, went the tech route. I worked for Cisco Systems and I was a voice engineer. That was kind of my. The route that I went. And I started building him voice systems. And I'm like, oh, this is cool. And we could do all this fun recording and stuff, but it was complex, expensive, and I started tailoring things for just his shops. And then his buddies in the groups would be like, hey, we want that too.
Jay Power [00:36:13]:
I'm like, I got to figure out a way to build this in a way that works. So eventually I started building the Voice, the CRM piece. And they'd say, well, what about this? You know? And I'd start linking different things together. And it was just a side hustle for me until two years ago. Two years ago? Yeah. And I ran it under Digital Concierge, or DC was the name of the company back then. So it was a side hustle. I was working at Cisco and then I went to Twilio, learned the whole SMS world and I loved all that.
Jay Power [00:36:46]:
But DC got too big and I had way more fun building my own stuff. So then I got connected with Rick. We had mutual customers. They were asking me, hey, can you build the reports Octorocket has? They were asking Rick, hey, can you do the phone system and CRM? And we're like, should we do an integration? What would this look like? And then eventually we're like, let's just merge this thing together and build something awesome. So we did. January 25th was when we officially merged companies. And it's been awesome. We've been growing like crazy.
Jay Power [00:37:22]:
Eventually we're like, we need somebody to run this thing because I don't want to run it. I want to do. I want to build stuff. Rick wants to build stuff. So we found this guy and it's been. It's been good.
Brad McAllister [00:37:34]:
So, yeah, we have a lot of fun. I mean, you think about what organizations, what kind of makes them different is the people who are in them, obviously. And we have a blast. So hopefully you can tell we enjoy joking with each other and kidding around. But we've all grown up in technology and been around large companies, large enterprises, and we're just super thankful to be doing what we're doing together and to be in this industry because we find it a lot of fun.
Mike Allen [00:38:03]:
That's super cool, man. Yeah. And your background prior to this?
Brad McAllister [00:38:09]:
I have had lots of different things of employment, but I've always gone through technology. I did gm, a European shop. I would say I did not do it very well, and I have some definitely scar tissue from that piece of employment, but not well enough to know that I knew how to run it. Right. But I was at a technology company, left there, went and did that, and then left and went back into technology. So my background is in telecommunications, customer experience, those types of things that I really grew up in. So building networks, building voice systems, and that's where it came through and used to manage software companies and then started talking to these guys. And what was interesting to me is that in the enterprise space, you see very large logos, very large brands that I've been used to serving most of the brands you probably frequent.
Brad McAllister [00:39:00]:
And I see them trying to connect different pieces of software to build a customer experience in the journey with their brand and their interactions. And I met these guys and saw what they were doing. I was like, you don't realize what you've done or what you've built is something that brands everywhere are trying to build. And you mentioned at the very beginning about the competitive landscape. He came through Cisco, I came from Extreme through another manufacturer. And it was always. I mean, you were selling the exact same thing. Right.
Brad McAllister [00:39:29]:
So you're always high competition. But the thing in which we operate is that we've built it from the ground up and we own it. And we are very rapid in terms of how we are able to do things and tailor it for our customers in the shops, which is really fun to us. We love it. And so as we build things and as we put them together, we can do a lot of cool stuff, which is what we're excited about.
Jay Power [00:39:52]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:39:53]:
So the root of the question that we did talk about earlier that you just referenced was the. The competitive landscape y being having the skill set necessary and the experience to be able to code effectively was differentiator. It still is to a degree, but that gap is closing rapidly with clog code and all the other tools that are out there. Right. There are a ton of people who are racing to build tools that do what you guys do?
Brad McAllister [00:40:24]:
Yep.
Mike Allen [00:40:25]:
So you're going to have an ever more competitive marketplace for your services and in tools that you offer. How do you stay nimble and stay on the leading edge of that. That curve in this? It's like a tidal wave, man, coming right now.
Jay Power [00:40:44]:
Oh, it's crazy.
Brad McAllister [00:40:45]:
Yeah, it's pretty. Well, if I may, just on the AI side, I mean, we have a lot of AI that we leverage and we use AI all the time in our business and how we operate, because obviously augmentation and efficiency is everything when it comes to AI. At the same time, understanding what it's doing and the why behind of what something it can do, we leverage it, we use it, but you always have to be really good at what you do in order to check it. And as a software company, we're not going to put anything out there that we don't fully understand, fully leverage, fully use, fully understand from a risk perspective to our customers and make sure it's going to be a great piece of software. So, yes, there is a convergence of AI being able to do things. You still have to understand and be able to craft and put those things together that are underneath it. So there's a competitive landscape and those things are happening fast and we're leveraging them to also rapidly improve things. So that's my little soapbox on AI, because we get people, a lot of times they'll be like, oh, I'm creating this app or I'm doing this thing.
Brad McAllister [00:41:44]:
And from a software company perspective of that's awesome. That isn't necessarily software. That's deployable on a production scale to thousands and thousands and thousands.
Mike Allen [00:41:54]:
That's like me being, you know, at the ball game, watching my kids play, and the dude sitting next to me is like, oh, yeah, I put brakes on my car yesterday. I'm like, great, dude, that's awesome. Good on you.
Brad McAllister [00:42:03]:
Yeah, so, yeah, exactly. It's kind of that you really do need to understand what it's doing in order to really effectively handle it. Now, there are certain, there's great capabilities in different things, don't get me wrong. But we also want to do it in such a way that it has longevity to it, it has productivity to it for our customers, and it fits together and does the thing that we're going after, which is the North Star. And AI really is only as good as the stuff you give it. And so you have to stay in the driver's seat of it. And a lot of times when we talk about software and AI and the things people are building and we see this, you've seen this in the open space. I mean, people build something and think, oh, this is great.
Brad McAllister [00:42:40]:
I used AI to do it. They're testing it for what they wanted to use it for. When we're doing qa, we test it for the things you don't want to use it for. Right. I mean, what was it Chipotle that had their bot out there? And a guy said, why am I paying for Claude when I can just go to the bot and say, hey, I want to order a burrito bowl, but first answer this Python question and it spit back the code. So stuff like that, I mean, if you're asking it the questions you think you wanted to hear.
Mike Allen [00:43:04]:
Sure.
Brad McAllister [00:43:04]:
If you're asking the questions about, hey, do you think I should quit my job or do you think I should, like, I mean, was it. Rick was trying to get it to like an AI bot that we were working with on our own. He's like, hey, can you order my Amazon order? You know, it's like, ask it the questions you don't expect it to do or you don't want it to do. That's the kind of stuff you're going to do as a software company. But anyway, sorry, that was my little 5 second soapbox.
Jay Power [00:43:25]:
Spot on. From my perspective, because I run our dev teams, it's accelerating everything that we're working on. But to your point, if you're not paying attention to the code, it creates some really crappy looking code and it's going to become the most unmaintainable code ever if it's not kept in check. So that's something that we pay really close attention to, that, hey, we know what it's doing. We're not just blindly hoping that it worked. And then we deploy it out to thousands of customers and they come in on Monday and it's down.
Mike Allen [00:44:01]:
You gotta stress test it because.
Brad McAllister [00:44:03]:
Yes, yeah, well, and I mean to the point, it's efficient and optimization, it can help. And so in the arms race of software and us all getting to the things that we want to be and do, we're all using it, everybody's using it. So the way that we can do it and augment our staff and help and do the things efficiently. Absolutely, we're going to do that.
Mike Allen [00:44:24]:
Any new tools or features coming on the horizon?
Jay Power [00:44:27]:
Well, the biggest tool or feature that our customers are asking for right now, speaking of AI, are AI agents, voice agents. So we have it in beta right now with about 20 customers testing it. So after hours scheduling Things like that or overflow. There's a few asking for primary. I'm not really sold on that.
Mike Allen [00:44:49]:
Overflow and after hours.
Jay Power [00:44:50]:
Yeah, those are the two that I'm really tuning it for right now. It's working really well. We're just kind of getting a sense of how customers interact with it, because that's what I've seen is actually the biggest gap. They don't either one want to. They hear it's AI and they're like, click and they hang up. So just kind of making it sound more human and not even announcing, hey, I'm a AI agent. Seems to be more effective.
Mike Allen [00:45:14]:
Really?
Jay Power [00:45:15]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:45:15]:
I would think it'd be like, hey, I'm Mike Allen's fake AI robot. Mike's busy right now, but I can answer your questions. They just hang up.
Brad McAllister [00:45:23]:
Yeah.
Jay Power [00:45:25]:
It's very interesting. So we've been kind of monitoring, seeing what type of messaging works the best, how customers are reacting, and kind of guiding the customer through their options. If you just want to leave a voicemail, fine, just ask to leave a voicemail.
Mike Allen [00:45:40]:
Is latency gotten? Is it quick enough now that it's conversational? There's not that half a second delay that makes it awkward?
Jay Power [00:45:48]:
Yeah, there's almost zero delay now. The only delay is if you need to do a lookup on a calendar to see availability. And you're going to have human delay there.
Mike Allen [00:45:56]:
You can program in the ums and ahs.
Jay Power [00:45:59]:
Some comfort noise in there. Yeah. So that's probably one of the big items that we're working on right now.
Brad McAllister [00:46:06]:
We did last year launch Rocket Shield, if you want to say anything about that.
Jay Power [00:46:10]:
Rocket Shield was a big one we're seeing. I'm sure you felt it. Robocalls are just a total time suck for advisors. They get lots of them. And when you're picking up that call, you're missing a potential customer calling in. So we created Rocket Shield. And it's essentially, I don't know how your current phone work, if they ring straight through or if you have a menu in front of it. The menu is the best way to get rid of those spam calls.
Jay Power [00:46:35]:
But a lot of shops are like, no, we want the personal touch. We want it to ring straight through. So rocketshield gives you that. The ability to do that. If we see that the incoming number is a little fishy. You know how you get this potential spam on your mobile? We use those same signals. And then we can put a menu in front saying, thanks for calling. Press 1 to speak to an advisor.
Jay Power [00:46:57]:
That Eliminates almost all those spam calls. Unless it's an actual salesperson still dialing through, they're going to make it through.
Brad McAllister [00:47:05]:
And one of the unique things on that is for customers, again, customer experience is key and making sure that we're lowering friction to sales. Yeah. And so once the customer, if a customer comes through and they have a suspicious number and they come through that, once they say, hey, I want to talk to somebody, we then record that number. They'll never hear that again, even if their call still comes to us as suspicious. I mean, that's the whole point. If we can keep from that being the front experience and lower friction for the customer, then that's what we want to do. But we still want to effectively improve the time that your advisor is getting having to answer calls. They're.
Brad McAllister [00:47:35]:
It's an expensive resource. Right.
Mike Allen [00:47:37]:
So what I'd love to see is if I had phones and you guys know I'm a happy, healthy techmetric user and I'd love to have techmetric on one screen and I love to have my phone system on the other. And as I'm having the conversation with that customer, be that an inbound call where I'm trying to get them to come in to visit me or an outbound call while I'm where I'm trying to sell, I'd love for the tool to have all of my base level scripts and all of my base level objection handling routines loaded and be able to identify the objections that the customer is giving the advisor and prompt them with the bullet points of how to overcome that objection. It's like a call coach in real time on the screen.
Brad McAllister [00:48:23]:
In the contact center, we'd call that agent assist, which is essentially where you hear the conversation and you're putting up things for them to next best action. And sometimes those are defined in the journey of the customer and how that comes in. But yeah, so we definitely hear that a bit from customers about being able to do that and present those to it. It's not something we have at the moment.
Jay Power [00:48:44]:
Not quite.
Brad McAllister [00:48:45]:
Brad is obviously. Here's the thing about Brad, he's the guy that's coding. He's going to sit here and write checks all day. So you can't get him to do that, Mike. But it is a really interesting thing because if we can present it in such a way that it helps us them stay on script because you know, that's really important obviously with the customer trying to get close that close ratio for that gap. But yeah, we hear that a bit. We don't have it yet, but that's something that's important.
Mike Allen [00:49:11]:
Look, man, I need you as the face sales guy to be like, yes, we can absolutely do that. It'll be in six months. Just sign up now, and then it'll be on you to make it happen. It's classic technology sales.
Brad McAllister [00:49:22]:
I hear you. I do.
Mike Allen [00:49:27]:
Well, awesome, guys. I appreciate you guys taking the time to come and hang out with me.
Brad McAllister [00:49:30]:
Yeah, we're honored to be here. Thank you.
Mike Allen [00:49:32]:
Yeah, Digital concierge first, and then Octoberocket. My guys have been beating me over the head to get on board for years, and it sounds like I need to get off my ass and actually take action.
Brad McAllister [00:49:43]:
So if I have an agent assist, you'll take a look at it.
Mike Allen [00:49:45]:
Heard it here first.
Brad McAllister [00:49:46]:
Okay. All right, cool.
Jay Power [00:49:50]:
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?
Mike Allen [00:50:06]:
Or do you just want to let
Jay Power [00:50:06]:
me know what an idiot I am? Email mikeonfessionsofashopowner.com or call and leave a message. The number 704-confess. That's 704-266-3377. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to, like, subscribe or follow. Join us on this crazy journey that is shop ownership up. I'll see you on the next episode.