Lucas Underwood [00:00:00]:
Radio is a hard business. Okay. I'm just telling you, my family owned 2 radio stations and got rid of them.

David Roman [00:00:10]:
And is there anything your family didn't own?

Lucas Underwood [00:00:13]:
No, not at this point. There's lots of things my family owned that they never made any money with. Oh, okay.

Jackie Beech [00:00:20]:
Yeah. It's hard to make any money on radio. We're part of a— they were part of a small group.

Lucas Underwood [00:00:26]:
Right.

Jackie Beech [00:00:26]:
So not one of the big conglomerates. And it was pretty tight on the budget, which I was feeling as well after a while.

Lucas Underwood [00:00:32]:
Yeah, for sure. And like the entire organization is pushed in. And I think what ends up happening if you watch radio, they are so pushed on budget that they have to squeeze everybody. They have to get every ad revenue sale they can get. They have to make it work.. And if they don't get it, man, like the reason they put so much pressure on the employees is because if they don't get it, buddy, they're done. They're out of money. That's it.

Jackie Beech [00:01:01]:
There is no option. People see that you don't do it and they don't want to work with you anymore.

Lucas Underwood [00:01:05]:
Yeah. 100%. Yeah.

Jackie Beech [00:01:08]:
It's rough.

Darryl Beech [00:01:09]:
Automotive.

Lucas Underwood [00:01:09]:
I think it does. It does. And so many of those people, right? So many of the disc jockeys that I know, Braxton, one of our producers. Worked for the radio station. I'll never forget when Braxton and I met. Um, I'm not very good at paying my bills. Usually it's not because I don't have money, it's usually because I am in this situation of, um, I forgot to pay the bill and I've got a lot of stuff going on and I didn't realize that I hadn't paid the bill kind of deal, right? And so they always have to send somebody out here to get money for the bill. And little Braxton comes to the front door of my shop and he is trembling Right? Like, the kid is shaking.

Lucas Underwood [00:01:47]:
He's developed a lot over the years, but like, he was coming to collect money, and, and I honestly sat down with him and said, dude, I don't know that there's a future in radio. Like, you, you want to do this very badly, but I'll be honest, I just don't see a future in it. The market's changing so fast. The people you work for, um, the man who owns the company is very old. Daughter's going to take it over. They have a very different perspective of what radio is. This may not be what you think it is a few years down the road. And then he went to work for the biggest Christian station on the East Coast, 106.9 The Light, which is Billy Graham's station, right? And he went to work for them.

Lucas Underwood [00:02:29]:
And then about a year and a half later, he called me and said, hey, I want to come work for you guys with the podcast. And so now he's one of the producers. So Well guys, Darrell, Jackie, introduce yourselves.

Darryl Beech [00:02:41]:
Darrell Beach, in my 60s, on my sundowning years in the automotive industry, trying to work my way out of it, pass it off to the next generation, trying to get the most I can and enjoy it. Had a pretty good ride at.

Lucas Underwood [00:02:58]:
It.

Darryl Beech [00:03:00]:
So lucky to be happy and healthy at this point. Glad to have my daughter back in the business.

Lucas Underwood [00:03:05]:
That's awesome, man. That's awesome. Jackie, I know we've heard a little bit of your story. Why don't you tell us who you are and tell us a little more?

Jackie Beech [00:03:13]:
Um, well, I, uh, I'm Darryl's daughter. I grew up in the business. Um, they started it back in 1990, so I mean, I really— I was 2, right? I really grew up around it. Um, I did not have a lot of interest in it growing up. Um, I was interested in other things, a lot of, a lot of music things. Things like that. And I graduated, went to Clemson for communication. I got a really good education, and then I moved back here to do radio.

Jackie Beech [00:03:44]:
And then it's, you know, radio being the state of what it is, like, I think there will always be the need for community, and there's always the need for that. But it existing is what it was. It just wasn't there for me by the time I got there. Right. So I ended up selling shoes for a little while. And then, um, and around, uh, 2013, um, Daryl ran the business with my mother. Um, she took terminally ill, and so for about a year and a half, we took care of her together with the business.

Lucas Underwood [00:04:15]:
Um, okay.

Jackie Beech [00:04:16]:
And so that was a really hard time. It was a lot of learning for me because I, you know, I tried to stay away from the business until that point, but, um, I, I went in there out of necessity and kind of took over her duties at that time, which was a lot of the behind the desk, um, keeping, contact with customers, scheduling appointments, things like that. Um, and that's where I started stepping in more and learning more about just the automotive.

Lucas Underwood [00:04:40]:
Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. And, and, you know, Darrell, to have somebody to step in and help like that is, is a big thing, right? And it sounds like there's a lot of structure, right? Because one of the things that we dealt with, and everybody knows the story, but like when my mom got terminally ill, um, and she passed away a year before last, when, when she got terminally ill, like, my dad needed to be there for her. Like, that was what was important to him. And they had spent their life working in that business, right? I mean, from the time they got married, they were working in the business doing the thing, right? They were married for 57 years. And it, it's, it's disappointing how everything turned out, but in our case The person who was supposed to be there taking care of the business and doing what was best for mom and dad, they didn't have their best interest in mind. They didn't have the, the family business's best interest in mind.

Lucas Underwood [00:05:34]:
So to have somebody that you can trust and to be there with them and see they're doing the right thing, man, that's gotta be, especially as a dad, that's gotta be a really good feeling, right?

Darryl Beech [00:05:45]:
It was, it really was. Uh, good news is, I mean, we had had enough training. We're ATI members. We had completed 90% of the program and my wife fell ill, which meant that we had restructured the business to where we had processes and procedures in place, which made it easier for Jackie to move in. And it's definitely recommendable, you know, 100% anybody that's in business, of any business, to set up standard operating procedures. And that also meant that we had support. We had additional outside training we could send her to, to bring her up to what she needed to know in the automotive industry. And then I will credit the fact that we had the management training behind us and we had a business structured the way it was to us being able to allow me the freedom for 2 years to take care of my wife.

Darryl Beech [00:06:43]:
Without bankrupting myself.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:46]:
Amen. Amen.

Darryl Beech [00:06:46]:
Right there. The thing that happens to a lot of people is, yeah, yeah, they don't have those systems and structures in place to support themselves if they need to step away.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:58]:
Yeah, you're, you're exactly right. And that, that is exactly where the family business ended up. And, and my dad was a very, very smart man, but he always ran the, the business on his back. Right? Every decision, he made it. Everything that came up, he didn't need processes, policies, and procedures because everything went through him. And that sounds well, great and good. And we all tell ourselves, it'll be fine. I don't need to spend all the time and energy to do this stuff.

Lucas Underwood [00:07:24]:
Now, we'd had discussions. This is not running like a business. There's something wrong, Dad. I'm worried about this thing. And that was right as my mom— we found out she was sick. There was some stuff going on. And I told him, I said, dude, I'm nervous about this. Now, I'm a hothead, right? So I approached it with a little bit of aggression.

Lucas Underwood [00:07:43]:
I approached it, you know, a little louder than I should have. And I feel like if I had approached a little bit differently, maybe I could have had more traction and we, we could have done something better. But I'll just tell you that now we're looking at about $3.5 million worth of tax debt from the past 7 years that somebody else didn't pay, and $140,000 a month in credit card spend. That, um, 1,500 Amazon packages a month went somewhere. They didn't come here, right? And so there were a lot of things that happened. There was a lot of, of, uh, pressure put on my parents. And all the internet cable, Lucas.

David Roman [00:08:19]:
Yeah, right.

Lucas Underwood [00:08:19]:
I mean, we just yesterday, we took about— we— the first picture was 100 pounds. We actually weighed how much ethernet cable we took out of the family business that literally made circles back to itself. And it was about 250 pounds of Ethernet cable and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment that wasn't even hooked up. That's just sitting out here on shelves. And it was, it was this concept of, I mean, all you can call it is mismanagement, right? At the end of the day, all you can call it is mismanagement. And it's, it's because there was no structure. It's because the books weren't clean. It's because there were no processes, policies, and procedures.

Lucas Underwood [00:08:57]:
And dad says, why would somebody do that? And I said, dad, because you didn't tell them not to. And he said, son, I shouldn't have to tell them not to. And I'm like, dad, I know you're right. You shouldn't have to tell them not to, but you do have to tell them not to. Right? Like if they don't know, they don't know. You can't, you can't expect them to know. You can't expect them to have your experiences, been through what you've been through.

Jackie Beech [00:09:15]:
They don't know. Yeah. So they don't even know what to ask you.

Lucas Underwood [00:09:20]:
100%. And it's like, you know, the shop, Yes, of course I've got a P&L and I've got cash flow statements and I can pull those up and I can say I'm not supposed to spend more than 10% here and this many percent there. Now, of course I don't follow my own like recommendations and advice, but if, if there was structure to the family business, we wouldn't be here. Right? And so it sounds like you had enough training and enough structure that it was seamless. Jackie, did that make it easier for you?

Darryl Beech [00:09:50]:
It did. But we're also blessed that we lived in a time where the technology aided us. Yeah. Uh, you know, we were able to reach out to remote systems to where if she had an estimate or a problem she was trying to deal with, I could actually just turn around and log in from wherever I was on my phone and look at what she's looking at and give her a, for sure, or a direction to go. And it makes it a lot easier instead of, like you ran into where you have somebody else that's having to make these decisions and you're completely out of the loop. So you have to trust what they're doing. At least with the technology today, that employee can reach out and say, hey, you know, I need some help with this. What do you think I should do? Or these numbers don't look right.

Darryl Beech [00:10:36]:
Or I just did this. Do I need to do this again? You know, we just paid this. Did we really pay it?

Lucas Underwood [00:10:42]:
Can you check this? Uh, you, you are so right. And with the shop, that has been a lifesaver for me because I've had to dedicate all my time to cleaning that mess up. Right. My dad's 70-some years old and it, it's really tough because they put all this technology in and he doesn't know how to use any of the technology up there. And so I, my team down here, I can support them remotely and do the things that I need to do remotely to help them while also making sure we don't lose that up there.. And so that has been huge for us. And I, I, that man, if it wasn't for Shopware, I'd be in a world of hurt right now because to be able to do that. And I, I don't think a lot of people experienced the non, like some of our listeners did, but very few of them have experienced that non, uh, web-based SMS.

Lucas Underwood [00:11:30]:
And Darryl, if you've been in business that long, I know you used to use the pen and paper method and then you went to the one that was, you a database on the computer and you're like, this sucks.

Darryl Beech [00:11:39]:
I can't even see this anywhere else. We were actually computerized from day one. We bought an existing business and when we knew we were headed for the automotive industry, I broke out a program for my Tandy 1000 and we set up an operating system to run the business in. I've got pictures of her sitting on my lap in the back bedroom while.

Lucas Underwood [00:11:59]:
I was setting the software up.

Darryl Beech [00:12:02]:
That is phenomenal, dude. That's awesome. Yeah. And it, you know, I've always been a techno geek. My background is I'm an ex- Navy nuclear power electrician. So very cool. I'm— I was an early adopter at everything. I mean, I've had computers all the way back into the '70s.

Darryl Beech [00:12:20]:
So it was just a natural to look at what the automotive business was going to need and reach out for what was available, which trust me, back in 1989 and '90 was not much. Yeah, for sure. Systems that were defined for a business like Shopware just didn't exist. You had to take a generic package and then fine-tune it to do what you needed to do, or compromise it to where you could get the information and the tracking you needed out of it. But along the way, you learn a lot as far as software programming. I've run Lotus, I've run, you name any database, dBase, and a lot of the others that we've had to use.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:00]:
For tracking over the years. You're giving me flashbacks of AS/400. Um, I worked with AS/400 for a little bit, and I don't ever, ever want to experience anything like that ever again.

David Roman [00:13:11]:
I don't know what you're talking about, dude. The AS/400 was the best. I got so fast at 10-keying it, like, I didn't have to look at the screen. I knew exactly, like, the sequence of numbers I needed to get to to.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:22]:
Get exactly where I needed to go. Let me just explain that on the user side AS400 was okay. On the IT side, AS400 made you question all of your life choices.

David Roman [00:13:35]:
It was miserable. That was only when you wanted to change it.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:38]:
Yeah.

David Roman [00:13:38]:
It worked.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:39]:
Leave it alone. Until you've worked for a hospital that.

Darryl Beech [00:13:41]:
Thinks we need to— Yeah. Good news is technology moves fast.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:45]:
Yes.

Darryl Beech [00:13:45]:
So you're not there very long.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:49]:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, Darrell, you said Navy nuclear electrician. I just want to point out that David really hates it when people say things like that because I will spend all day in in the Stationary Engineers group on Facebook. Uh, I, I asked for the, uh, I asked for the hotel rooms where I can see the cooling towers on the mechanical equipment because like that's my kind of thing, right? I love it.

David Roman [00:14:10]:
He's not that interested in technology, he's interested in the disaster behind it. He's like, yeah, did you know in 1984 this blew up over here and then this caused this thing?

Jackie Beech [00:14:19]:
We're like, all right, next to the thing that might blow up, please.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:23]:
Yes, exactly. I want to see it. I want to understand how it works and why it does what it does. Like, that's just how my mind works, right? That's how I ended up in automotive because like my mind needs these puzzles to solve. And so observing the puzzles and watching the puzzles and understanding how and why they do what they do is fascinating to me. David, David doesn't want to hear another.

David Roman [00:14:47]:
Word about it. Okay, you know, you have no idea. In a few years, I might find that to be my next rabbit hole. I have no idea.

Darryl Beech [00:14:53]:
You never know. I don't think so. Failure mode analysis happens on an hourly basis. With us. I mean, it's just something you do, you know, you're forensically going through what's showing up at your door to identify what happened to it. You know, was this a user involved? Was this, you know, just an act of God? Was this environmental? How did this happen? And I think we've been in business so long because a lot of times we can educate our customers. We understand the cars well enough to educate our customers. As to what's happening in terms that they can understand.

Darryl Beech [00:15:30]:
Yes. And then we can also engineer solutions for them so they don't reoccur as often. We're always finding that better part, that better vendor, the better solution, the faster solution, you know, something that works out better for the customer. And technology has definitely sped that up to a degree, but we are finding that we're spending a lot more time researching now than we actually are with.

Lucas Underwood [00:15:55]:
Our hands under the hood.

David Roman [00:15:57]:
Yep, 100%. David, do you take that approach.

Darryl Beech [00:16:02]:
To your repairs?

David Roman [00:16:03]:
That is our approach to repairs. And I asked that because we were— one of the, the things we were talking about in the previous recording was the, the approach to the repair is bottlenecking Lucas. Where he's running a very high average repair order. I do too. We run over $1,000 our repair order. And we are sticklers about the part that we use and the repair process because we want the car in better shape than how it came in. I mean, even before it broke down, right? Better than original. We want to repair the entire system.

David Roman [00:16:50]:
And so it's not— it's fine that you can get a ball joint for a lower control arm on a Dodge Ram truck. They're available. The factory replacement, though, is an entire control arm. And the reason that is, is because that ball joint, if you take it out and press a new one in from the aftermarket, will last a year, and then that mother effer will start to flop around and you'll have to replace it again. Now most of these shops offer a 1-year warranty. I don't. And so we had to then figure out, hey, why are these failing? Oh, it turns out that these should be whole control arms. Yeah, we're not doing anything wrong in the installation process.

David Roman [00:17:30]:
Uh, it's that these control arms were designed to be replaced as units. Um, and so now we do entire control arms. So the repair is $2,500 instead of $800. Um, that the— we don't see a lot of shops like that. Most shops are like, okay, let's get the car out the door, turn the bay, get it, get the money at the door. Yeah. But when you say what you just said, that's what triggers in my mind going, yeah, we take the exact same approach because we do want to analyze the failure.

Darryl Beech [00:18:00]:
We want to figure out— yeah, we're, we're definitely more of a holistic shop. When a vehicle comes in the first time, it's like walking into a new doctor that's never seen you. They tend to poke and prod everything. They want to get a full background and history and, you know, find out how you've been living life. And we do the same thing with the.

Lucas Underwood [00:18:21]:
Cars.

Darryl Beech [00:18:21]:
And the, the, the reasoning to the customer is the better we know your vehicle, the better we know your use of it, the better we can make educated recommendations in how you need to treat or maintain the car. And what level of maintenance you need to maintain to get what your desire is. Whether you're looking for speed, performance, ultimate reliability, you know, understand there's trade-offs in any one of those that you pick. And it allows us to, to better fit their need, better fill their need. Sometimes it's not the easiest thing to do because you end up trying to read people a lot. 35, 40 years of dealing with people, it's made it a little easier. And Jackie can tell you, sometimes I can tell when they walk in the door what the outcome of the conversation is.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:08]:
Just turn around. Could you just walk back.

Darryl Beech [00:19:13]:
Out, please? Yeah, but you learn tactics for satisfying customers as best possible and understanding when you can't. And that doesn't mean that we're elitists. Jackie can tell you our customer base ranges from people that are in poverty, fixed income, seniors. All the way through to 1 percenters. And it's a matter of understanding what their desires and what their goal is and what their pain level is to achieve that. And then we go through and tailor as best possible. It does.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:47]:
Have challenges though. So here's my question for you, and this is kind of a dual question, Darrell. I want to start with you though, because for me, this process very much can become an addiction, right? I want to get to the answer, right? I need the answer. I want to understand why it happened. I want to understand how it happened. That's how my mind works. And so I even get emails and in my head, my head begins to run through how the system works and why the system did what it did and how did we end up here? What did you do? How did we get to this point? And then here's what the failure was and this is what caused the failure. Like, I just go down this rabbit hole..

Lucas Underwood [00:20:24]:
And I love that. And, but it can be an addiction for me because I really enjoy that process. That's a lot for somebody else to take over. Do you feel like it's reasonable to expect that from Jackie? And Jackie, do you feel like that's, I mean, that feels like big shoes to fill, right? And I'm looking at my business kind of trying to back myself out of it right now for that very reason, because I'm looking at my staff saying, Maybe this is unreasonable for you guys to put this level of attention to detail that I do because I'm sitting at home at 1:00 AM with the diagrams up on the screen trying to understand how it works based on an email somebody sent me about, you know, I did this and now a fault light's on. What's up with that? You know?

Darryl Beech [00:21:07]:
So is that reasonable though? Yeah, I think going back to the history that, you know, the fact that I had to step out of the business in 2012, 2013, and Jackie had to step in to fill those shoes. She can tell you that probably 80% of the phone calls is, is Darrell there?

Jackie Beech [00:21:24]:
Can I talk to him? Yeah.

David Roman [00:21:27]:
Yeah.

Jackie Beech [00:21:28]:
At least half of the phone calls.

Darryl Beech [00:21:31]:
The one thing that came from that experience was it weaned a lot of my customers from having to talk to me directly. They may ask now, but they will accept if someone else has to deal with them. And that really was a good step in the direction we're going. We're currently— I have a plan of trying to be out of my business by the time I'm 65 years old, consultant basis. Somebody else is going to be running it, which is why we're restructuring for that. And one of the things we've already determined is that it cannot operate the way it operates now. We are going to have to change the way it operates to make sure that the employees' needs are still met. And then we taper off the customers that need that personalized handholding because again, there's not going to be somebody there that's going to give them that, that personal service that they've grown to expect.

Darryl Beech [00:22:31]:
And we don't want to disappoint them. We just need to make them understand, you know, there's an exit going on here and at some point we may.

Lucas Underwood [00:22:40]:
Have to part ways. So that resonates very loudly with me because I went through the exact same thing. I had to back away. And I'm curious, was there a point— you've been doing this a lot longer than I have, and it may be that when you hired ATI and brought that in, was there a point where you looked at this and said, this is not sustainable? Because I definitely had a point where it was like, I feel like all of these people are always coming at me. I couldn't go to Walmart. People were stopping me. Hey, my truck did this. My car did this.

Lucas Underwood [00:23:15]:
This happened. That happened. And I had that reputation for being that guy. My wife finally came to me and she's like, Lucas, like, we can't keep doing this. This— people are knocking on our door at midnight. And, you know, there's people stopping us in Walmart. It takes 2 hours to do a shopping trip because somebody wants to talk about their car. And you'll engage them and talk to them.

Lucas Underwood [00:23:35]:
We have to have a healthy work-life balance here, and this is not it.

Darryl Beech [00:23:38]:
Did you ever encounter that? When my wife was part of the business, we were pretty much fully involved, and we were running several automotive clubs at the same time, doing newsletters. And these are back in the cut and paste days. So we're talking about a significant amount of our time was going toward those. Uh, we looked at them partially as soft marketing, but also it was a way for us to develop a social network out of the shop. And there were certain events that I was not the happiest to attend because, as you said, you don't get to see the cars. You don't really get to talk to the new people you'd like to meet because you're being dragged aside by everybody that already knows you that has a problem. Yeah. And, uh, that, that does— there are certain events that we would avoid simply because it was a large social drain and an emotional drain.

Darryl Beech [00:24:38]:
Yeah. You don't like disappointing people, and it's.

Lucas Underwood [00:24:40]:
Easier to just not be there.

Jackie Beech [00:24:44]:
Yeah, 100%.

Lucas Underwood [00:24:44]:
100%.

David Roman [00:24:44]:
I just want to— I want to point something out real quick. Like, Darryl, you're, uh, you know, getting up there in age. I don't.

Darryl Beech [00:24:54]:
Call you old, but, uh What.

David Roman [00:25:01]:
39S old? Yes, exactly. I see what he did there. That's hilarious. The amount of like, you have random knowledge. Like, I don't know. I don't think you understand the advantage, Jackie, that you have. Like, your dad's been there, done that kind of thing, right? So like, he survived 90 all the.

Darryl Beech [00:25:20]:
Way to now, right?

David Roman [00:25:20]:
So it was a long time. And that, that kind of guerrilla marketing that we're putting together newsletters and we're setting up auto clubs with our name attached to it, that's like, that's like old school, ground level guerrilla marketing that they teach in textbooks. He was just doing it because that's what we needed to do to drum up his— but like You, you get these new guys, and this is why I get so frustrated with these like idiot techs that are like, oh, go open a shop. It's like, dude, you have no idea the ocean of knowledge you don't have.

Lucas Underwood [00:25:59]:
Yes.

David Roman [00:25:59]:
Like, you think, yeah, you're just gonna work on cars and be fine, it's whatever. Like, you have no idea. And it's just stuff like he says randomly. He just said it randomly. He just said it like, I'm just talking, and just, it's just a story that came out. And it's like, whoa. We could teach a course on just that. Just like, how did you set it up? Where did you do it? How, like, who did you talk to? Who did you send it out to? You could do an entire course on just the random newsletters.

David Roman [00:26:25]:
And you think, well, that's outdated.

Lucas Underwood [00:26:28]:
It's not.

David Roman [00:26:28]:
100%. You could start doing it right now, tomorrow, ignore Facebook and stuff like that, and do some ground-level guerrilla marketing and.

Jackie Beech [00:26:37]:
Stuff like that and, and be perfectly successful at it. It's gonna jump off real quick though.

Lucas Underwood [00:26:42]:
And it's a slow start.

Jackie Beech [00:26:43]:
It's always a slow start on stuff like that, and people don't understand the amount of work that it takes to.

David Roman [00:26:48]:
Really pick something up off the ground. Yeah. Oh, 100%. But that's the, that's the point though. Like, yeah, like you're not gonna— you're also not dropping $10,000 a month into Google Ads. You see what I'm saying? Like, it's which one are you going to take? Like, I'm a big, I'm a big fan of BNI, and, uh, like I typically serve as the mentor. So when somebody comes in Like, I try to guide them in how to be successful in BNI. I've been in BNI for almost 10 years, and I tell them, like, look, you have a choice here.

David Roman [00:27:18]:
You're going to put in an hour and a half to 2 hours a week of your time in and then spend about $1,000 a year to be in this and get continuous business, or you're going to spend $10,000 a month on Google Ads. It's like, would you have that kind of cash to dump into Google Ads?

Lucas Underwood [00:27:40]:
Yeah.

David Roman [00:27:40]:
Oh, absolutely. And then, you know, like they're starting to advocate some of that towards online and like reviews and stuff like that. And people are looking at reviews and online stuff almost as equal as— and I get that, but that costs a lot of money. And yeah, if you're doing enough revenue that you can just go, hey, I'm just going to write the check, deal with it. I'm all for that. But when you're brand new, and that's what I'm saying, like these guys start out these shops and they, they have no idea the grind. Like buy a shop, take over a shop that's already established, been in business 46 years, like jump on that. Don't start from scratch.

David Roman [00:28:21]:
You have any idea the amount of time and effort you're going to have to put in just to build the audience to be able to market to. And be effective at it. You have— you don't know, like, you know, do you know how to put together a newsletter? No, I've never done it before. There you go. So you got to learn all that skill first and then come to the table just to get a car in, to then be able to work on the car, and maybe you'll make some money on the car.

Darryl Beech [00:28:47]:
Idiots. Sorry, that was my rant. They don't know what they don't know.

David Roman [00:28:51]:
You're exactly right.

Darryl Beech [00:28:52]:
I try to tell them, but they don't listen. I, my senior technician has been with me over 20 years and I asked him the other day, we just signed back up for management training for doing this transition, which also includes technical training to where we can hone everybody's skills a little better. So we turned around and, and I, I asked him, it's like, I'm going to sign you up for technical training. I said, you know, I have no problem signing you up for the management training program also. Would you like to sign up for those? Completely voluntary, free to him, doesn't matter, you know. And he looked at me and he says, no, I don't want to have anything to do with people, right? He's, he's been there. He's tried to do side work at his house on custom jobs and stuff, and he's had to deal with people. He doesn't have the temperament, and he knows it.

Darryl Beech [00:29:41]:
He's a really great guy, you know. He's a fantastic person. He's a fantastic mechanic. But he doesn't have tolerance for people.

David Roman [00:29:50]:
That just are being idiots. Yeah. And, you know, like that, at the end of the day, that's— if you're a technician, you need to take a step back and you need to look at it and go, am I really good at working on cars, or do I really enjoy talking to the people around me while I'm working on cars? And I, I get way too distracted to try to sit there and just focus in on, on working on cars, and I want to go do anything but work on the car. Where I know plenty of people that can just hone in and get the work done. And that's what they like to do. They like to see the fixed thing. They like to start with something broken, finish with something fixed. And they find, they derive a lot of satisfaction from that.

David Roman [00:30:26]:
But if you're deriving satisfaction from that, that's not what you're going to get from running a business. That's not the business. The business is talking to customers and petting the dogs and kissing the babies, going out into the community and all that nonsense. That's what you're signing up for. It's not to fix the cars. So if you're really good at fixing.

Lucas Underwood [00:30:48]:
Cars, go fix the cars. We need you. Amen. Absolutely. Jackie.

Darryl Beech [00:30:53]:
Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. We have seen that. Uh, I learned the hard way probably 25 years ago that I couldn't be productive working on cars. Too many interruptions in the business. So at some point you do have to figure out that you have to transition., and I've watched other shop owners that have done the smart thing. They own the shop. They hire people to deal with the people.

Darryl Beech [00:31:19]:
They're like you're saying, David, they want to hone in on that car. They love repairing the cars. They just don't want to deal with the business. So you hire somebody to do that. You just have to figure out where you're going to be the most productive.

Lucas Underwood [00:31:31]:
Use to your business. Yeah, for sure. Jackie, I have a question for you. This feels like really big shoes to fill. Right? Um, it's a big deal. And, and as somebody who's like, I'll be completely honest, I had no intentions. I always thought the other person involved was going to take over the family business. I had no want, desire, need, anything.

Lucas Underwood [00:31:54]:
And then it was like, hey, this legacy that has been in this family since 1956 is getting ready to be no more. And that was like heavy for me. That bothered me. And I saw the impact it had on my dad. I saw how much it hurt him. And I was like, well, it ain't— this has got to happen, right? And so I said, I'll take it on with this and do everything else too. And I also recognize, like, when I didn't care as much, it didn't really seem like it would be that big of a deal to step in. But then when I stepped in and it was in a mess and I realized how important it was to him and I realized how important it was to the family that it got saved, it felt a whole lot heavier and it felt like a lot more to carry this tradition on and carry this honor on.

Lucas Underwood [00:32:46]:
It felt like an honor to have the ability to do it, but it also felt heavy.

Jackie Beech [00:32:51]:
How do you feel in this transition? So I recognize that there's a lot of people that are just, they're Darryl's people. People. And, you know, when he ultimately decides to not be there, I'm going to do my best to connect with them and, and, you know, keep going with them. But some of them are going to fall off. I think that's just going to be an inevitable thing. But I think the important thing is for me to make sure that the relationships that we have with the people that we expect to stay, we need to make sure those are just golden. Um, you know, those people have no reason to go anywhere else. They, you know, they're going to stay with us.

Jackie Beech [00:33:26]:
They they don't need to see this transition in the business as anything as like instability or anything like that. Yeah, because, you know, we don't want them to have that feeling. So, um, I, I think that's going to be a lot of my focus is on, you know, who are my people that we're working with right now that I can keep. And, um, I, you know, we have another technician that's, um, interested in, in more of the management stuff as well. And so, you know, who are his people? Who can we keep? That, you know, he can work with and then just kind of build and grow from there. Because that, that attrition naturally happens anyway, especially, um, we work on some older cars. Some of our customers are just old and they die. Um, it happens.

Jackie Beech [00:34:06]:
And so like there is always that natural attrition and you're always looking to find new customers generally. Um, we have the advantage of being at a point where actually in this year we had so much backlog that we decided 2026 was a no new customers year. Oh, wow. We have to catch up and we have to, you know, do right by the customers that we have. Yeah, 35 years is a long time.

Lucas Underwood [00:34:30]:
To build a customer base, for sure, for sure. Absolutely. And I, I think that so many of us are in that same situation, right, is that, that we know we have this attrition to deal with. I, I'm going through some attrition here in the shop. The guys who wanted to come in and talk to me And I'm sure you see this, like the ones that I think about are the ones that need that special attention. And Darryl, you know exactly what I'm talking about. They want to talk to me. They're interested in, you know, my very complex analysis of the vehicle.

Lucas Underwood [00:35:02]:
They want that personal connection with exactly what's happening, how we're going to do this. They know that I can work some magic on like, well, we don't have to do this, but maybe we could do this instead. And I'm providing options and I'm navigating going around it to create the outcome that they want. But that's a lot of work. And those guys, man, some of them are really hardheaded and some of them can be jackasses if they don't exactly get their way right away. And my, my service manager came to me a while back and she said, you know, I think that you're accustomed to dealing with these people. I think you're accustomed to working this hard to make this sale work and to make this thing happen with this client, to please this client. She said, I'm not.

Lucas Underwood [00:35:45]:
And I don't think you understand how much of a jerk this dude is being.

Jackie Beech [00:35:49]:
And you're just used to it because— Yes, the same. Yeah. I actually have, uh, I have had conversations with our customers. One day they'll talk to me, they'll be upset, they'll be absolutely just, you know, and you see, you know, whatever's going on. And then, um, like maybe mere hours later, um, they'll call back again and.

Lucas Underwood [00:36:09]:
Talk to Daryl, or— and it's a.

Jackie Beech [00:36:11]:
Completely different story because I'll say, you know, so such and such was upset, maybe help smooth this over. And the conversation, the demeanor that they have is nowhere— it's not in the same room as what they were talking to me like. I'm telling them in my mind the same things that Daryl's telling them, and.

Lucas Underwood [00:36:31]:
They just don't want to hear it from me.

Darryl Beech [00:36:36]:
Yeah, absolutely. To the T. We have fired customers for misogyny. Yeah, we have literally fired customers simply because of the way they've treated Jackie on the phone, or when my wife was around, when they treated her on the phone. It's like, I, I have plenty of customers.

Lucas Underwood [00:36:53]:
I don't need you. Yeah, exactly, dude. I had, I had somebody tell my wife one time that her place was in the kitchen, and I carried him out the front door of the shop. And, uh, he, he would— he refused to talk to her, said that he would only speak to me. And was being a complete jerk. And I literally picked him up and carried him right out the front door of the shop and said, we no longer do business together. And I set him down and I.

Darryl Beech [00:37:16]:
Shut the door on him. And the sad part about that is I taught technical college, the automotive training here for about 3 years. And I can tell you that I've had half a dozen female students come through that were more on the ball and more intelligent than the males that we're trying to get into the business. Absolutely. So by excluding females from your technician base, you're missing a lot. They have a different perspective, they have a different discipline, you know, they, they have a whole different mindset. And a lot of times it's because they don't have the strength, they don't have the desire to get dirty and stay dirty. So they find a better, smarter, easier.

Lucas Underwood [00:38:00]:
Way to do the same job. Yep, 100%. Did you know that Jasper had done studies on gender in their repair process or in their remanufacturing process, and that they had found that women repaired transmissions and engines far more effectively with less warranty work than the men did because they paid more attention to detail? They asked more questions, right? Like, I, I will blunt force my way through a problem., and my wife is over here asking all these questions. I'm like, this all, this takes too much time to ask these questions. What are you doing? And like, she's asking very in-depth questions. And then I'm like, oh, well that makes sense. Like, I wouldn't have ever got there that easily, you know? But I, I don't take the time to— Yeah, exactly. This is crazy.

Lucas Underwood [00:38:49]:
Uh, you know, I think that's, that's common in our industry too. And, and we, you know, in, for instance, like Jackie taking over, for you. Uh, one of the things that was a wake-up call for me was at some point or another I became comfortable with saying I don't know. I became comfortable with saying I'm not as strong at this as I thought I was. For the longest time, I really thought like I was the reason the business was going to be successful, and now I look at Jade, who is our manager, and I'm like, she's way better at a lot of things than I am.. And I think that when a shop owner can finally get to the point that they acknowledge that and they can acknowledge like, I'm not the smartest person in the room, I'm not the smartest person in the shop. I think that is a powerful moment. I know it was powerful for me because I started to recognize I was the roadblock, right? I was the bottleneck in the shop and, and for the shop to truly reach its potential, I'm gonna have to step out of it.

Lucas Underwood [00:39:47]:
I'm gonna have to turn it over to them and let them do what they need to do. To make the shop great because they.

Jackie Beech [00:39:56]:
Have skills that I don't, you know. Jackie, what do you think about— I'm really just wondering, I'm kind of trying to like peek into Darryl's head right now because I'm thinking like, well, you know, he knows he's getting out at a certain point. These cars take a certain amount of time. And I'm like, does he have a car countdown?

Lucas Underwood [00:40:12]:
Like, you like 50 cars and you're done? Like, I think she's calling you old now, Darryl. 50 cars. I mean, I don't know, he's working.

David Roman [00:40:23]:
On one a year. So are you going to be done like you're going to get on a cruise and you're not going to come back? Like, I'm going to be in Mexico, or I'm going to be in Australia.

Darryl Beech [00:40:32]:
Don'T call me, that kind of thing? I think one of the, uh, I think a lot of things that are missing with some shop owners, and I'm sure y'all will agree with this, is they fail to diversify early enough in their careers. They don't have other revenue streams to support them. They're not making the investments, you know, the personal investments they should be to where they can actually get out. And I've lived long enough and I've seen enough other shop owners around me try to get out. And these are the guys that ran businesses for 35 years and they're delivering parts for AutoZone. Yeah, exactly.

Lucas Underwood [00:41:11]:
Exactly.

Darryl Beech [00:41:11]:
They did 40 years and they're just too old to finish the projects they need to finish because they didn't get out early enough.. And in my case, through a series of unfortunate events, I was provided with enough financial means to comfortably pick a date and say when I can get out. But I like the industry. I like the business. I like the customers. I like what we're doing so well. I'm going to be available for that phone call. You know, you have that project that needs a little extra attention that you need some experience on.

Darryl Beech [00:41:47]:
I'm not going anywhere. You know, the nice thing about technology is, is I could be on that cruise ship and then you can turn around and we can Zoom call, or you can show me what you're looking at and I can give you an idea of where to go for the next step.

Jackie Beech [00:42:03]:
And that I don't think goes away. The— Let me tell you how much.

Lucas Underwood [00:42:07]:
I'm going to try not to do that. Jackie says, what I'm trying to say is, is like maybe like You could take a cruise for 6 months or something, and maybe.

Darryl Beech [00:42:18]:
We could just get some distance first. Okay. And the thing is, I also have.

Lucas Underwood [00:42:22]:
The option of not taking the phone call.

David Roman [00:42:26]:
Yeah, there you go. The guy that used to hire the delivery drivers, sorry, the guy that used to hire the delivery drivers, I'm just telling you, they just get bored. They have plenty of money. They don't need the job. And so they dictate the hours. They're like, I'll work from this time to this time. And don't bother me on these days. And they just, they get bored out of their minds.

Darryl Beech [00:42:46]:
They have nothing to do. Well, I've watched people travel that way. I've talked to service writers and service managers that when they retire, they'll go to another town somewhere and they'll just sit behind somebody's counter to let them go to vacation, you know. And meanwhile, they'll go out and, you know, see the town and just do the light, easy work of taking care of customers to relieve somebody else.

Lucas Underwood [00:43:07]:
And then when the guy gets back from vacation, go somewhere else. Yes. Well, Malan Newton did that. Malan did the, Malan did the remote service advising, went all over the country doing remote service advising. Um, and like, so he would, he would go to shops or he would work remotely, either one. And he wrote service for hundreds of shops like that. So I mean, I could see that. It makes sense.

Lucas Underwood [00:43:29]:
Yeah. I don't know. Jackie's got this look on her face.

Darryl Beech [00:43:32]:
That'S like, dad needs to, we need some distance here. I don't know. I can tell you that when I came back to the shop after my wife passed, it— she tolerated me for probably a year and a half before she started working more remotely. And it took me a while to finally get my feet under me and realize I needed to leave her alone a little bit more and not unload as much. There's a lot of transition you go through after a loss like that. Yes. And I've been through a few iterations of change on the personal side since then. And I'm not the same person I was even 10 years ago.

Darryl Beech [00:44:13]:
So it's, you know, that is one of the things you just have to live and grow with. And I think the changing perspective of knowing that I've set a date to get out, it changes what my focus is. As a result, I know that I have to offload more of this to Jackie and just trust her ability to do what she feels is the best thing to do and then support that. Because at some point it's going to be all of her decisions, or she's going to be developing those decision processes.

Lucas Underwood [00:44:45]:
With the people that are still going to be standing after I leave. Yeah. Well, and I mean, if you don't give her that opportunity to make those decisions and see the results of those decisions, right? I think that's a dangerous place to be. We try to save everybody from bad decisions, and all we end up with is more bad decisions because we never gave them the opportunity to learn and grow. And I've watched my dad go through, like I said, the exact same thing, except after mom died, then he found out all kinds of terrible things that happened. My dad retired in 1989, and the building burnt down right after he retired. And he came back and he said, I'll never retire again. Every time I try and retire, something bad happens.

Lucas Underwood [00:45:28]:
So I'm just not doing it anymore. And there was something very different this time after Mom passed away. There was a change in his mentality that said, I have to leave them successful. I have to leave them in a better place than they're in right now. I have to do something to make this different.

Darryl Beech [00:45:49]:
Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:45:49]:
It— you, you— I don't want to get into too much of the personal stuff, and, and I know it's hard to talk about.

Darryl Beech [00:45:58]:
What did you learn from that experience, Darryl? Well, one of them was that I could walk away. The second one is people are more important than things or businesses. Amen. And it's the relationships in our life that are really critical. Uh, some of my customer relationships were— even though they were financially fruitful for toxic. Some of my personal relationships that I had before the time were a lot shallower than I anticipated. There are always people in your life that will step up that you don't expect, you know, to have a customer walk in and drop a $30,000 home modification on you, you know, and not ask for anything. So it's, you start learning that people are definitely the most important thing, and that family is a precious item.

Lucas Underwood [00:46:47]:
Amen.

Darryl Beech [00:46:47]:
Uh, it is a finite supply for most of us, and if you live long enough, it's a dwindling supply. So you need to take advantage of, of the time you have with them. And businesses can be a huge drain on that if you let it. Yeah, you have to be able to separate it. You have to be able to have that personal life on the outside You can't live in the business. You know, I did— I, I can't even say I have respect for the guys that can put in those 18-hour days because it just means they don't have work-life balance. Right. They're either not doing something right so they can earn the money they need to, to where they can have the.

Lucas Underwood [00:47:29]:
Family time, or they're not prioritizing the right things in their lives. Yeah, absolutely. You're so right. And I, You know, when I first started trying to make the change in my business, I wasn't being the dad I wanted to be. I wasn't being the husband I wanted to be. The shop consumed all of me, right? And it's taken me a long time to be able to walk into the house and, and say nothing about the shop, right? We don't talk about it. And it— there's times we talk about the money struggles and everything else, but it's not, it's not what it was, right? I used to walk through that door and it was— I This is so frustrating and this is wrong and I should have done this and I wish I'd have done that. And we got this problem over here.

Lucas Underwood [00:48:08]:
And it was just those flowing out at the end of the day, the frustrations that I couldn't share with the staff or anybody else. And now I've learned to build a support system around me that I can call David or I can call whoever and say, man, I'm really frustrated about this, but it doesn't need to go home. And I think the wake-up call, and Jackie, you may have experienced some of this being younger, the wake-up call for me was, is At some point my wife looked at me and said, hey, I think you're giving our daughter anxiety. I think you're making her nervous about money. I think you're making her nervous about all these things. Now we're not struggling for money. Like the past couple of weeks have been really slow and it was hard, but I mean, we're, we're back up on top of it and things are going well. But like, she didn't hear about the good times.

Lucas Underwood [00:48:49]:
She heard about the times that I was stressed out and it was impacting her. But I didn't think about that as a dad. Right? And I think that's something that we miss sometimes. Yeah.

Jackie Beech [00:49:02]:
Jackie, did that impact you at all when you were younger? Yeah, I mean, I don't bring as much of my work home. Like, I had a lot bigger problem when I was still working in radio, to be quite frank, of just, you know, like, you're constantly rolling over in your head, what's next, what's next, what's next, what's next? And so I knew stepping away from that, that I wanted to move away from that. So I don't have a big problem with transitioning between work and home.

Lucas Underwood [00:49:30]:
Yeah. Um, but I, I do see it. Yeah, it, it causes a lot of, of troubles between families. Darryl, you got a lot of experience. What are the— I, I guess I've got two questions for you. The first one is, what are the things that you don't ever want Jackie to have to experience in the business? What are the big ones that you think here's where I don't want you to be in 5 years, 10 years, or here's the thing that I don't.

Darryl Beech [00:49:55]:
Want you to have to go through. We've suffered through 3 major recessions in this local market to the point that at the second one, which followed within about a year and a half of the first one— these were local market, one of them was national, 2 of them were local— after the second one, we actually looked at going bankrupt because we were just about tapped out with all of our finances. Reserves were gone. There were no customers. Every time they would, you know, we had a shipyard close, every time they'd say shipyard closure, our phones wouldn't ring for 2 days. So we didn't have the customer base at the time to help tide us through that other project backlog that we do now. That's, I don't want Jackie to have to have that fear of how are you going to feed your family, because we were pretty much, besides my wife's part-time income working for other business owners, we wouldn't have had enough to have paid the mortgage, paid all the bills or anything else. And that's a struggle and a fear I don't want her to have to feel.

Darryl Beech [00:51:06]:
And then, uh, as a secondary on that, I want her to feel the freedom or have the freedom to actually take time to enjoy her children, to spend time with her husband, you know, to have that life outside of the shop. And that's been part of my conscious effort not to expand the business so large to a point that it requires an exorbitant amount of your time or requires you, you know, to manage a dozen different managers. We could have easily had probably 6 locations in our local area. By this point in our time, but I discovered third year I was in business that I didn't like handling more than 7 or 8 employees. That was about the maximum that I wanted to handle. And that's probably about any, you know, you could realistically expect most locations to run. But yeah, that's the big thing is I don't want to have to have that fear that I'm not gonna be able to feed my family or I'm gonna have to completely uproot.

Lucas Underwood [00:52:11]:
And, you know, lose everything to do it. It sounded like there may have been a little bit of emotion in the, the, I want her to be able to, to have quality time with her family. Do you feel like you got the quality time? Do you feel like you were there.

Darryl Beech [00:52:26]:
And present and you, you feel good about where you were there? And actually, it's funny because we had, uh, as I mentioned we were involved in all these automotive pursuits, you know, all these clubs, you know, a little bit of travel here and there. Jackie was always, I'll have to put it mildly, she was always extremely competitive and very self-starting and very motivated. So there was always an activity to go do with her. And I tried to make as many of those as I could to the point that I, we for a while did vintage racing and the demands in the vintage racing community got so strong because you are on severe deadlines during the racing seasons that there were events that I would've missed. One case in point, her birthday. We ended up having her birthday at a racetrack, which I think she enjoyed, but it's still, it's a birthday at a racetrack instead of a birthday at home. Yeah, yeah. I mean, she agreed to it.

Darryl Beech [00:53:34]:
But so we actually, we had, we were able to provide her with a really good life and shield her from a lot of the financial struggles that were going on in the background. So I don't think that she ever felt that she really wanted— there were things that other kids around her were doing that we couldn't afford, take the cruises, the overseas vacations. You know, the, the 3-week-long vacations during the summertime, things like that. She had friends that were doing those things, and we couldn't provide those, but she never really questioned it. You know, she accepted what normal was, and a lot of times she was proactive enough to find those activities on her own. You know, she did develop a strong friend base and things like that, so So I don't feel on the family side that we really sacrificed a ton. It's just that fear that that family life that we had cultivated could have been lost at several points along the way because of, number one, things that I didn't know. I mean, I thought I knew everything back then.

Darryl Beech [00:54:44]:
I didn't know what I didn't know. And then number two, outside environment, you know, bigger system things such as government closures of bases where you lose 30% of your customer base overnight. And there's a point here in Charleston, just a big industry thing for everybody to ponder. When they closed our shipyard here in Charleston, I was talking to one of my vendors from Napa and he walks in and Sonny had this gray look on his face and it's like, what's up today, Sonny? And Sonny says, I just came back from Firestone. He said they padlocked all 6 of their stores in Charleston. They owe us almost a million dollars. So he was in fear for his job because he's watching his customers. They were bankrupting at the rate of 1.5 shops a day for almost 3 months.

Darryl Beech [00:55:41]:
A lot of the guys just rolled over. It was horrible for about a year. Then unfortunately, we did the stupid thing. You know, we kept spending money and we kept working on cars and kept our nose down almost to the point of bankruptcy, but it turned out okay in the end. And that was mostly not wanting to upset the family cart. You know, we wanted to maintain the structure, the stability, and the family life that we had.. And, uh, it's, you know, every business I think has its trials like that. The big thing is, as we were.

Lucas Underwood [00:56:17]:
Saying earlier, developing that separation, not bringing it home. Yeah. Well, you know, Darrell, I'll tell you that the best times in my life were in the family business. Like as a kid growing up, I look back now and I think, man, how blessed I was to have those opportunities to spend with my mom and my dad and learn from them and learn the customer service aspect and grow and develop. Right. Like, so I think that that's a win in my book. Jackie, is there anything you want Dad to know? Is there.

Jackie Beech [00:56:48]:
Anything that you would say to him hearing that? Um, well, I wouldn't say I was unscathed, um, but I'm with you, Lucas, and that I also had a lot of good memories too. Um, you know, like I, uh, I picked up playing flute when I was about 11 years old and I used to actually practice at the shop, out in the shop while they were trying to fix cars, they had to listen to me, those poor guys. Oh, that's awesome. Um, yeah, so I mean, I just— there's a lot of, um, like they fixed up a little go-kart for me and let me ride it around the cul-de-sac and just little stuff like that that kids enjoy. Like, you know, I got the good side of that too. Um, I mean, honestly, I think the worst part of growing up the way I did was more the fact that I had to eat a lot of ramen noodles and Hamburger Helper, and it did take an effect on my health after a while. That's probably really the worst of it. That's awesome.

Jackie Beech [00:57:40]:
Yeah, but it was growing up in a shop is a good experience. I know so much more about cars than so many of the other people I grew up with too, that it's just like even without having to pay to go to school to have that training, I just, I'm the one that a lot of my friends call, you know, like, and I'll tell them like, I'm not a mechanic, I'll have somebody look at it if I don't know. But like, You know, and you know what that's like.

Lucas Underwood [00:58:03]:
So I'm stepping into that role myself now. Well, I think it's phenomenal and I think it's a phenomenal story and I'm so thankful that you guys came on and told it. I'd love to have you guys on again here soon, uh, after the transition happens. Maybe we talk a little more about it as things progress throughout. Uh, we'd love to have you guys back on and let's talk about it some more. Sounds great. It's been wonderful. Absolutely.

Lucas Underwood [00:58:25]:
All right, he's gonna hit end.