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The Gearbox Podcast brings on industry professionals to explore the day-to-day operations of owning and operating a shop. From common frustrations to industry-wide shifts, this podcast covers it with fun and insightful conversations.
Jessa Boyd [00:00:00]:
It.
Jimmy Purdy [00:00:01]:
There it is. Finally.
Jessa Boyd [00:00:03]:
Half the battle is getting here.
Jimmy Purdy [00:00:06]:
Percent of the battle. Good Lord.
Jessa Boyd [00:00:09]:
All of it.
Jimmy Purdy [00:00:10]:
I don't understand it at all, Johnny. Yeah. I just don't understand this. P four zoom. Yeah. The interface between all these mics and using USB. I don't know. Well, you're learning a lot about this stuff now.
Jessa Boyd [00:00:25]:
Yeah, I've got this focus right set up and I have no idea what it does. I got it hooked up for me.
Jimmy Purdy [00:00:32]:
As long as you got someone to do it for you, that makes life pretty easy.
Jessa Boyd [00:00:37]:
That's a perk of being with an it guy. It's definitely a good perk. I'm a car girl, not a computer guy.
Jimmy Purdy [00:00:45]:
So cars, that's what we're here for, I guess. I'll let you give yourself an introduction.
Jessa Boyd [00:00:50]:
Well, my name is Jessa and like, super into cars. I have been as long as I can remember and I decided to venture off and make a career out of it. And I'm loving it. I love what I do. Even the stressful days, I find it rewarding. And I started working on cars when I was a kid in the garage with my dad. And that's just where I got my start and then clawed my way into the industry and been doing it for about 15 years now professionally. Twelve years with the company that I'm at now.
Jessa Boyd [00:01:24]:
And then the last two years, I was actually promoted to manager and given my own shop to run that was closed down when I took possession of it. And it's been a very interesting learning curve in that management leadership role. But it's proven to be rewarding and challenging all at the same time.
Jimmy Purdy [00:01:45]:
Yeah. I wanted to have my wife in here and kind of talk about the challenges and obviously the future moving forward in the auto industry. It's the stigma. Right. Of women don't know what they're doing. I want to talk to a man. Right.
Jessa Boyd [00:02:01]:
Yeah.
Jimmy Purdy [00:02:02]:
One of the challenges she deals with all the time and I hear all the time and I'm even to the point where, no, you need to talk to her like she runs the office. So I don't know what you want from me. When we talked in a previous podcast about that kind of similar situation and getting that stigma, but it almost seems like in this day and age, being more numbers driven, I feel like you all have a way of seeing numbers that I just don't see and more meticulously minded when it comes to cleaning. I mean, not just cleaning, but keeping numbers strategized.
Jessa Boyd [00:02:45]:
Organization. Yeah, the organization factor of it and seeing patterns and rhythms, I feel like we have an ability to kind of see things differently and we have to.
Jimmy Purdy [00:02:57]:
Cleaning up the numbers, cleaning up the books, even coming down to just seeing a woman as a technician and keeping everything so organized and clean and precise, it's just different. And I don't know. Obviously there's plenty of technicians on both sides. It doesn't have to be a gender role necessarily that, oh, because one way or the other you're going to be cleaner or not or whatever. But I think overall, and I see that push happening in the industry right.
Jessa Boyd [00:03:22]:
Now, I find it's a lot different than it once was. I've been doing this for a while now, and when I started, it took a lot. I started in parts and it actually took a lot for me even to get in the industry because I had to prove that I did know things about cars. I remember my first interview for one of the bigger parts companies that I worked for for five years and I became management in that during the interview, the guy had a piston on his desk and he's like, well, do you know what this is? And I'm like, that's the best paperweight ever, right? But just getting into the industry back then was a challenge and then I progressed from there. But I've seen a large shift since then. I don't deal with as much of the I need to talk to a man situation. I don't take offense to it in a lot of ways because I understand that we are constantly evolving and thank goodness it is getting better, but I'm seeing less of that. And maybe that's because when I started I was a puppy, now I'm an old salty bitch.
Jessa Boyd [00:04:27]:
When I started, I had a different mindset. I was very people pleasing and timid. I'm not arrogant now in any way, but if I do encounter those, I have a different way of handling it to where it's, hey, let me give you a chance to give me a chance, and then if I don't know, hey, we're both going to learn something here today. And I find that, that approach to it, I just don't deal with it as much anymore from, for instance, customers. All of my technicians that I deal with because I don't have any women technicians on my team, they're male. But in the twelve years or ten years as a service advisor and now two years as a manager, approaching it a certain way, I haven't had any instances where technicians gave me grief because I was a woman service advising for them. I have had a pretty good run with mutual respect with people that are my coworkers. And I think that that goes a long way into dealing with how you deal with the adversity as being a woman in the industry.
Jimmy Purdy [00:05:31]:
Yeah. And it's not even so much of a polarizing one way or the other. It's just like that deeply rooted process where someone comes in, they have that anxiety, they're stressed out because their vehicle is broken down. And I don't think if you wrote it down on paper, hey, are you looking for a woman or are you looking for a man? Because if it's for me, I want to talk to a woman. Obviously, I understand they run the show. I understand they may usually make the decision. So it's like, that's who I want to talk to. Right.
Jimmy Purdy [00:05:58]:
But I think there's that older generation or in that field, like, I just want to know an answer right now. And you just have that old school mentality, like, I just need to talk to a guy. I need a guy to come out here. I need a technician to come out here. And in your mind, the technician is a guy, and he's going to come out and he's going to tell you what's wrong. It. Right. Yeah.
Jimmy Purdy [00:06:17]:
That situation is. I mean, everyone handles it differently. And I think it's like you said, between the arrogance and the confidence, and I think just gaining that little bit of confidence is all it takes. And I think there's plenty of tech turn owners or guys that are new in the industry, and they don't get a lot of respect that they feel they deserve. Hey, I've got four or five years. I went to tech school. I know my stuff. But they don't really feel deeply that they understand it.
Jimmy Purdy [00:06:41]:
And so they don't have that confidence that comes across when they're speaking to a client when something goes wrong. Because when everything goes right, it's like, yeah, that's easy. Like, hey, I fixed it. It's $500. Have a great day. See you next time.
Jessa Boyd [00:06:52]:
But, hey, I wish that would happen more.
Jimmy Purdy [00:06:54]:
Yeah, right. But it doesn't. And it's like, hey, so I was wrong. You still owe me that $500, and then we still got to move forward from here. And in the back of their mind, they're screwing this customer. And it's like, no, I'm sure there's guys out there that are. But for the majority, I think it's like, you're doing the right thing here. It's just a difficult vehicle, and we got to figure out how to get this thing fixed.
Jimmy Purdy [00:07:15]:
But if you're not confident in that situation, it can go south real quick. And it's like you lose that trust, you lose that confidence in the client, and it's like, what do you do now? How do you get out of that situation?
Jessa Boyd [00:07:28]:
The ego factor. As a technician, I would imagine you take pride in what you're doing. So having the fact of when something goes wrong, you're having to have that confidence and hold on strongly to it. But then on the inside, you're feeling kind of crummy, because what if you were wrong? And that has to have an effect on, if a technician is up front trying to talk to a customer, there's no buffer there, and there needs to be that buffer.
Jimmy Purdy [00:07:55]:
Now, in your situation, this is where the tables kind of turn, because I think it's easier for you and your gender role to be able to make that softer approach. And it's almost easier in a sense, right? 100%, yeah. So that's where you all get kind of dangerous when it starts coming to that situation, because it's like you get that intelligence and, you know, these vehicles, and then you can take that situation and just hash it out. So much easier than my big booming voice or another service advisor. That's a guy, maybe a bigger guy, and he's got that booming voice. It's very difficult to simmer down that hostile situation that comes up even with all the intelligence in the world, because my biggest problem is I go out there and I just start rattling all my education off, and they're looking at me and their eyes kind of get starry eyed and they're like.
Jessa Boyd [00:08:45]:
Gigawatts.
Jimmy Purdy [00:08:46]:
Yeah, exactly. I think I went too deep, didn't I? And it's like, stop me if I get too technical. But they're not going to say that because everyone wants to feel like they're on the same page.
Jessa Boyd [00:08:56]:
Well, luckily, I believe that my copilot, my awesome service advisor and copilot of the ship that we run, we run a tight shipwreck. But we are over explainers, to a sense. But that's where our technical knowledge does come in handy, because we're more than just paper pushers and not having an understanding. And if we don't understand how the system works, we're figuring it out. So we have a way of explaining to a customer with just enough technical, but also to the point where we're not overwhelming them with information. And that tends to help simmer down the situation. But those disclaimers and explaining to a customer, in our terms, how systems work and always having that backdoor of, hey, look, these systems all work together, but we need to start here. I mean, nobody's perfect and mistakes happen and such, but on the normal operating sense of it, being able to do that and get on the customer's level is a skill that some technicians may not have.
Jessa Boyd [00:10:00]:
Have. So why are we.
Jimmy Purdy [00:10:01]:
They don't want to have it either.
Jessa Boyd [00:10:03]:
Oh, yeah, I know. I try to get my guys to come up when a customer is super happy. I'm like, hey, come up to the office, this customer wants to talk to you. And I don't do that very often. It's usually because the customer specifically says they want to thank the technician. Well, we get all the kudos up front just as much as we get all the grief. The technicians don't see the happy customers. They don't see the people that are leaving our place with a smile.
Jessa Boyd [00:10:23]:
They just fix the car. They see the car leaving out of their bay and they're like, hell yeah, bye. But they don't get that gratification of that warm, fuzzy feeling. So when I go to pull a technician up to the front to say, hey, can you come talk to this customer? Trust me, you're going to love it. It's going to be great. They're like dragging their feet, like, why are you doing this to me?
Jimmy Purdy [00:10:40]:
This is not what I want to do.
Jessa Boyd [00:10:44]:
And it generally ends in a cash tip. The customer, that customer wants to give them a little bit of $5 bill or something for working on their car or just a thank you. So that's the very rare occurrence that they will come up to the front. But other than that, we're not going to have them beat down by the adversity of it. That's what we're here for. We're here to be the shield, to also take in all of that and not let it reach them because it can ruin their whole day. And they're working their pushes off on these cars and doing the best that they can.
Jimmy Purdy [00:11:12]:
It's all about mindset. It's just another huge overlooked aspect of, I think, people in general, but in the auto industry, it's way overlooked. We're just in the back. We just have a couple of cigarettes and drink a cup of coffee and get back to work. Right?
Jessa Boyd [00:11:31]:
Cup of ramen.
Jimmy Purdy [00:11:32]:
Yeah. It's like, that's no big deal. It's like the mental health aspect of it. And like you said, it pulls them down. And having these technicians that are technically mindset and they go in there and they fix these cars and these complicated problems. And then to have them pull up to the front and then deal with the client interaction, it's two different jobs and they're equally hard. Right.
Jessa Boyd [00:11:54]:
Just in different ways.
Jimmy Purdy [00:11:55]:
Different ways.
Jessa Boyd [00:11:55]:
Just in different ways.
Jimmy Purdy [00:11:56]:
And I see a lot of shops that do that, where they pull their technicians, and they want the technicians to sell the job. They want the technicians up front to make the phone call to the client, let them know the vehicle is ready, let them know this is the next step. And I'm not sure how you run your ship from the inside and out.
Jessa Boyd [00:12:14]:
But we have four shops. And the shop that I work at is George's friendly auto service in Lincoln. It's California, which is kind of by Sacramento. It's an outskirt line area. The other three shops that we have are Duncan's automotive. And it's funny, the older I get in this industry, the more amazing I'm realizing that the owner's business plans are. He's been doing the situation for years where he has the front of the house and the back of the house, and he is a technician that turned shop owner, and he did it because he loves it. And getting to learn from him all of these years and see how he does things.
Jessa Boyd [00:12:57]:
What I'm seeing in the industry now, like on the CTI podcast group and all that is stuff that. More I see this. I see he's been doing it so right for so long, because at my particular shop, we only have two service advisors. We had three technicians up until just this last week. We got a new technician, a 30 year veteran technician from Lexus and Toyota. So that's been kind of exciting. But the other shops have generally three service advisors and then five or six technicians. But his mindset for being.
Jessa Boyd [00:13:31]:
For the technician, it's very important to him that the technicians are taken care of, that everyone's taken care of, really. But having a clean shop that attracts technicians is huge. Having operating procedures that are just, that become muscle memory for everybody from the front to the back. We have these standard operating procedures that we adhere to, because if we do that and we keep that system going, it's like a fine tuned machine. Of course, we get wrenches and the gears and such, but having that is very important.
Jimmy Purdy [00:14:04]:
It just cuts down on the percentage of things when they go wrong or when things go wrong, you know, what to do, because exactly how do I pull that wrench back out of the gears? That's the next step. How do I get back up? What's your plan now?
Jessa Boyd [00:14:18]:
Yeah, where do we go from here? But that 80%, 20% rule, 80% of the things you can control and then 20% you can't. And it's about being able to capture that 80% of things you can control so that 20% doesn't flex out to 50, 60%. And then you're in a whole world and the ship's on fire and everyone's hair is on fire.
Jimmy Purdy [00:14:42]:
Yeah. And it's just not that day. It's like the next day and then the next day and the next day it's like that. And you never get out of that rut. And all of a sudden, two, three years go by and you're like, why am I doing this?
Jessa Boyd [00:14:52]:
Yeah, right.
Jimmy Purdy [00:14:54]:
You get a burnout owner, and it's like, if your owners burn out, your leaders burn out, your sales aren't going back up.
Jessa Boyd [00:15:02]:
Yeah. How he does what he does. This man works harder than anybody that I know. I'm not even kidding. Six days, seven days a week, he's working just to keep. Not in the shops. He's not necessarily in the shops fixing cars. He's just keeping everything going, going around and making sure that everyone's doing what they should be doing.
Jessa Boyd [00:15:21]:
But also inspiring. He doesn't just come in and say, oh, because I said so. He's taught me a lot about leadership, because the way that he leads is he inspires you to want to do well, rather than I said so and do it. It's just a whole different. It is the mindset. It is definitely the mindset.
Jimmy Purdy [00:15:39]:
Yeah. On that example, that is definitely the way of the future. And they say it's a generational thing. When I was brought up in this field, it was like, you do what you're told, and if you screwed up, they just carried it on for weeks. And if you say you screwed up ball joints, you were ball joint for the next year because you broke one ball joint, it's like that constant harassment and you got to have thick skin to be in this industry. And, yeah, I get it. I get the harassment, but I think the wave of the future, that is not sustainable anymore. To be a proper leader and to elevate the industry and to have multi shops and be like the guy you're just talking about.
Jimmy Purdy [00:16:28]:
What's a good example that comes to your mind as far as him leading you or that makes his experience with you throughout the day positive?
Jessa Boyd [00:16:37]:
Well, that's so rough because there's so many. Let me give an example of even.
Jimmy Purdy [00:16:44]:
A better example of the whole situation I brought up. There's just too many.
Jessa Boyd [00:16:48]:
So every day starts with mopping the floors. Everybody mops the floors. It's not just one person mops the floors. Everybody mops the floors. If he finds that one of the shops, because he has cameras at all the shops. If he finds that one of the shops is slacking on the opening duties, he might pop by and he's not going to come in and scold us. He's not going to come in and say, oh, this is terrible. You're just going to see him pick up a mop and he's going to start mopping the floor.
Jessa Boyd [00:17:09]:
And then you're going to feel really guilty because why is the owner here mopping the floor when the procedure is to mop the floor? But he doesn't do it with any kind of negativity. But that's just an example of how he inspires you to want to actually do things because he leads by example. He doesn't ask anybody to do anything that he hasn't done before. And then he's just very empowering in so many different ways. That's the only example I could think of because you put me on the spot there. But that was a terrible example. But I get what you're saying.
Jimmy Purdy [00:17:40]:
Yeah. No, it's a perfect example of leading by example. I guess someone listening could probably think that sounds a little passive aggressive, but there's obviously a lot more of a culture that's been built in where you have that. I'm not mad at you, I'm disappointed.
Jessa Boyd [00:17:55]:
Exactly. And you don't want to let dad down. That's the worst thing ever. Be mad. I just don't want to disappoint you. And he's not my dad.
Jimmy Purdy [00:18:05]:
But that doesn't come for everybody. And if you're just hired or you're not bought into the culture, you don't understand what's going on there. So there's so much more subtext going on in what your example was there. That proves that there's so many layers built in to this culture that's built at the shop to even have that mindset, because a lot of guys are like, oh, cool, he's picking up the mop. Mopping for me. Right on. I can do what I need to do, right? And it's like that mind shift is like. And I get it.
Jimmy Purdy [00:18:33]:
It's kind of what I like to do, too. And I don't look at it as I'm being passive aggressive. I'm just like, hey, the guys are busy and I'm kind of caught up for the moment, or usually it's because I'm kind of stressed about something. So I'll go grab a mop and I'll start mopping the floor because it's the easiest job in the shop. I just need some stupid work right now to reset my head so I can go sit back in the office. But you can take it two different ways, I guess, is what I'm getting at. And you obviously see that as, like, he shouldn't be here. There's more important things, and you understand that there's more important things for him to be doing.
Jimmy Purdy [00:19:06]:
I should have been able to see that this wasn't happening today, and I need to do better to make sure he doesn't.
Jessa Boyd [00:19:13]:
Exactly. And then here's another example. Being afforded the chance to fail at every level rather than learning from just being what's expected. Being able to have ideas and go to him with ideas, and he may not think it's a great idea, but being able to implement a change, that may or may not be great, but being afforded that opportunity to fail, I feel, brings on the opportunity to succeed and maybe facilitates that success better, too.
Jimmy Purdy [00:19:48]:
That's a tough pill to swallow, I think, for most, especially if you're new as a shop owner and you're hiring guys, you just want to hire your replica and you just want to be perfect, and you think that first mistake is going to throw. Everybody's going to be scared of you, not scared of you. Everyone's not going to want to come back to the shop because you're screwing stuff up, you're misdiagnosing. And so you get this micromanaging atmosphere where, yeah, you're not allowing the technicians to grow, you're not allowing the service advisors to not sell something. It's a tough one. That's a really tough one. And maybe a lot of people look at it like, well, if you're an MSO and you got four or five shops, sure, you can afford to have these guys make a mistake because you got all this other income, but on the other side of that coin, it's like, no, because your overhead is five times more than everybody else, too. You have even more of an opportunity if someone were to fail, for you to go under.
Jimmy Purdy [00:20:43]:
Right? Yeah. How do you handle that with your technicians when they make a mistake? Because that obviously breeds from him down to you, and you're the front lines. You're making that happen. So how do you handle those situations?
Jessa Boyd [00:20:57]:
Well, really starts with discussing it with the technician to find out what went wrong. Where did we go wrong? Being able to say, first of all, hey, I was wrong. It's just never beating them down because it's mistakes that happen, but also being able to adapt and pivot. Okay, so a mistake happened. Getting the feedback of, how are we going to fix this? It's not am I going to fix it or is the technician going to fix it? How are we going to fix this? What are we going to do with this mistake? And what are we going to learn from this mistake moving forward? If you've gained something from it, it's not really a mistake at the end of the day because you've earned something out of it.
Jimmy Purdy [00:21:38]:
It always can be a learning opportunity. But having that conversation, I think it's so much harder thinking about it than actually having that conversation. I don't know if you ever get away with that, but is there anything you personally like to think about before you're entering that conversation? Everyone, they get a little worked up because there was a mistake made and now you're like, oh, now I got to have this conversation. And it's a really hard place mentally that you got to put yourself and then get yourself out of because you got to go have this gentle conversation. It's tough.
Jessa Boyd [00:22:17]:
I feel like I'm kind of spoiled in a sense because the communication that upfront with me and Tilly that we have with our never, I guess I don't really find it stressful because we openly communicate back and forth. Yeah. Hey, look, it's frustrating. I'm frustrated. You're frustrated. We're frustrated. The customer, we're going to try and keep them from being frustrated. But at the end of the day, when you say, hey, customer, we messed up, we made a mistake.
Jessa Boyd [00:22:49]:
That takes away the stress from that in most cases, because customers, they can be very understanding. We have a really good client base and tilly and I effectively communicate with our customers. But going to the technician and being like, yeah, this sucks a bunch of butt. What did we do? How do we get there? Where are we going? It's just open communication. Being able to not be us versus them or manager. I hate the word manager, by the way. Manager versus subordinate. It's not that we're all a team.
Jessa Boyd [00:23:24]:
So, for instance, when you play a sport, right, you should, if you're being honest with yourself, know when you're making a mistake or when you didn't and where you are in the team, and that is part of being a team player. Is it not being a big deal to say, hey, technician, this is messed up, there's a mistake here and making it a negative. Let's find something positive out of it. Let's communicate, let's talk about it. It doesn't have to be that negative us versus them situation.
Jimmy Purdy [00:23:57]:
Yeah. I think that the day to day operations, when you're trying to work through it, you're just making your to do list, and you go through and got to talk to technician Johnny, and he messed up this, this and that. Or you're looking through his productivity sheet, and you find these different vehicles, right? And you bring them in. You're like, okay, so this one here, this one here, and this one here. Out of a two week spread, you were 10% under where we want you to be. How do we fix that? And you think you're doing the right thing because you're trying to be constructive with it. But in his mind, he's out there working, or she is, eight to 10 hours putting out work, and then you bring him into the office to say, hey, so these three cars out of the last 40 is under where we need to be. And it's hard to keep putting yourself and giving yourself that 30,000 foot view.
Jimmy Purdy [00:24:51]:
But the one thing I've heard about is called the sandwich. What was the word for it, but layering it like a sandwich, right? So you bring them in and you have your bread. So you're like, hey, really appreciate you being here. Love what you do. I never had a problem. Few things here, you get into the meat and potatoes. Like, a few things here that we can correct. Go over that, and then at the bottom, you got the other slice of bread.
Jimmy Purdy [00:25:15]:
You know what? But you're an awesome guy, and you smell great, too, right? Like, whatever.
Jessa Boyd [00:25:20]:
I call that the compliment sandwich. So it's, hey, yeah, your hair is awesome, dude. Your shirt sucks. But look at, those are some good looking shoes you got there. They make you go fast.
Jimmy Purdy [00:25:30]:
Do they light up when you run?
Jessa Boyd [00:25:32]:
Man, they should have light up shoes for adults. I would so get myself some.
Jimmy Purdy [00:25:36]:
When's the last time you got new shoes and anybody asked you how fast they were?
Jessa Boyd [00:25:40]:
Isn't that sad, growing up? When we're grown ups, we don't get that. It's funny because my technician actually just got some really fancy shoes, and it was actually funny enough off timu. And he was like, I got these off timu. They're super cool. And I was like, but are they going to make you go fast?
Jimmy Purdy [00:25:54]:
He's new boot goofing. Got my new boots. New boot. Goofing.
Jessa Boyd [00:25:58]:
No. And then going back to that, having to have that conversation. If there's a pattern, if there's a pattern of missing things on 45 point inspections that we do, or if there's a pattern that becomes a different conversation, then that becomes that more. Hey, we really do need to talk about this. What can I do to help you not make these mistakes?
Jimmy Purdy [00:26:24]:
Because where do you draw the line? So do you take that first instance and you're trying to nip it in the bud, or do you wait for that pattern to emerge? Or where's that gray area in between? Right. You get someone that comes in late, like once every two months with no excuse, and it's like you're waiting for that pattern, but you start realizing the patterns every, like, two or three months, and it's like, it's such an awkward situation where you're like, yeah, well, I hate to be the guy because you've been here on time for the last two or three months, and it just seems like it's out of the blue and you're like, I don't want to micromanage. But at the same time, it's kind of turning into a pattern. But what a difficult situation that you've been put in and you're trying to be a nice person about it and you're trying to not give them their personal space. I understand. You have a life. Right. But we all count on each other here.
Jessa Boyd [00:27:17]:
Yeah. And that goes back to the communication thing, for instance, missing stuff on the peace of mind, inspections, letting the technician in real time see and have some feedback that isn't necessarily more than just in passing. Like, hey, look, we missed. This air filter was dirty and the customer had to found out about it or whatever it is. Just that one quick little blurp and not making a big deal out of it, but them having that feedback of, yes, here's a little blurb of something, and that's it. It doesn't need to be an emotional thing. You don't be mad at the technician all day because they missed an air filter. I hate that mindset.
Jessa Boyd [00:27:56]:
But then if the pattern does emerge, well, we're seeing this pattern here now where things are being missed often do we need to give you more time to do these inspections. In fact, a story for that. One of my technicians was consistently missing stuff, and it's really hard because he's my yes guy. He's a little newer in the industry and he was consistently missing minor things. But those could be major things on these inspections, because a lot of our clientele is repeat. Come in every couple of months sometimes, whatever the case is. But it became a pattern. And all it took because I had the conversation, hey, buddy, we're missing a lot of these things now, and it's becoming a pattern.
Jessa Boyd [00:28:42]:
And we need to be confident in what you're doing, because the customer builds their confidence on what we're doing. And if we let these things go, then there's a problem. But bringing that to his attention and that, he really took the communication. We had a pretty good conversation about it, and he took the communication, and he really started to introspect into what his processes were. And, you know, what it turned out to be is that he was doing his inspections. And at this time, we were still paper inspections. We just went to the DVis this last week, which has been great. That's a whole nother story.
Jessa Boyd [00:29:14]:
But he was doing his paper inspections, and as he was doing them, rather than writing things down in live time, he was trying to remember everything at the end. And so he came to me and he, this is. I think I figured it out, and I said, okay, well, what'd you find? He's like, well, I haven't been writing down as I go because I had noticed, actually, that his inspections were substantially better. And I'm like, hey, these are great. He's like, yeah, I figured it out. I wasn't writing things down right away. I was waiting till the end, and I would forget things because every time I go say, hey, Brandon. Oh, I shouldn't use his name, hey, we missed this.
Jessa Boyd [00:29:48]:
If you could edit that out, that would be great. We missed this. He'd be like, oh, yeah, I saw it. And I'm like, well, why didn't you write it down? Oh, I forgot. Okay. So that little tweak in his operating procedure for himself as a professional technician has been night and day, and this is last year, and it's been nothing.
Jimmy Purdy [00:30:08]:
But it takes so much work to get to that point. You sit them down, whoever it is. We have team meetings. We have one on one meetings. And you just ask and you're hoping that you get this information and you think that's good enough, right? And it's a realization that I'm making personally as well. You just assume that they will tell you, hey, so let's sit down a little bit. Let's talk. Anything going on? No, everything's good.
Jimmy Purdy [00:30:31]:
Okay, cool. That must be. But it's like you almost have to be a detective, or you have to be involved. And I don't know how msos do it because there's so many people, but obviously I'm not in that position either. But you have to watch those things. And just like you're saying you're paying attention to these inspections, and it's like, hey, what's going on? What's going on? What's going on? You can't just have one conversation and say, I need this. Better fix it. And if that doesn't happen, you're fired.
Jimmy Purdy [00:30:59]:
Okay, well, that's not going to fix the problem. And it's paying attention and knowing, hey, something's a little off. What's going on? And then knowing if there's something going on with their family, like, hey, everything's good with your wife, your kids, like, everything at home is good. And just paying attention. I had a story about this guy was telling me a technician was late all the time, speaking of being late. And we kept asking him like, hey, I need you to be on time. I need you to be on time. It was constant.
Jimmy Purdy [00:31:24]:
10, 20, 30 minutes late all the time. Patterns kept telling him, hey, look, we got to get you on track. We got to figure this out. And it's like, gave him his warning and did the whole corporate thing. I did a written warning, and then a month goes by, and then the pattern comes back. It's every other week. So I did the final warning, and I was getting ready to let this guy go, and he just happened to sit him down, like, hey, look, man, I'm serious. I need you here.
Jimmy Purdy [00:31:53]:
But if you can't show up on time, I'm going to let you go. And he said the guy looked like he was going to start crying. He's like, dude, what's the deal? And he's like, well, I need this job. I need you to be here on time. And he's like, what's the problem? And it's like, finally got it out of him. It's like he said he's like pulling teeth. He's like, well, he watches his phone at night to fall asleep, and then his phone goes dead. His alarm is on his phone.
Jimmy Purdy [00:32:19]:
And he's like, just get an alarm clock. And he's like, a what? So he literally went. He said he went down to Walmart. Like, he left that day, went down to Walmart, got him a little one of them know, we're old enough to know what these know the radio and stuff on know bottom. An alarm clock was never late again after that.
Jessa Boyd [00:32:39]:
Oh, that's awesome. It's like, alarms every morning.
Jimmy Purdy [00:32:42]:
Yeah, but it's crazy. It's just crazy. And then after that, ended up being the best technician in the shop and life went on and everything was great. It's like, wow. But if you don't have that communication and you just have these procedures that you're following and not really looking at your people from the inside and figuring out and paying attention to what they're doing and how they're mood shifting and attitude shifting, you just never know. And it's like, that's all it took was a $10 timex freaking alarm clock to get this guy back on track. Like, dude, that tech is worth $20,000 a month to you, right?
Jessa Boyd [00:33:15]:
You're just giving up.
Jimmy Purdy [00:33:17]:
It's going to fire communication. I mean, that's what it comes down to. And paying attention, and it's crazy how that's all it takes. But you ask them and they won't tell you.
Jessa Boyd [00:33:31]:
Oh, man. Yeah. So this particular technician, at one point, I was talking to the owner and I'm like, look, I think it's at this point where I think he's very valuable to us, but I don't think that my shop is the right fit for him. So it might be wise to maybe move him to one of the other shops where he can have more supervision. Because we have a shop that's set up where I have three different compartments kind of to the shop. I have two lifts in each of these three compartments. So it's a little weird, but it was at the point where I was like, hey, boss man, I don't know what to do to get through to him on getting these things not to be missed. And I said, I think I'm ready to have him shipped over to one of the different locations and see if maybe they can give him more instruction than what I can or find a solution.
Jessa Boyd [00:34:18]:
Because the guy shows up early every day. He is the yes man. You could ask him to do anything and it's always, yes, he's a team player. He's caring. There's all these good qualities, but this one thing, these silly little things getting missed over and over and over, frustrating. Oh, my gosh. But how do we get through that? I told the boss man, hey, I was wrong. I do not want to ship him.
Jessa Boyd [00:34:44]:
I've seen, we've come a long way. We're in a whole different situation now than we were then, and this is a matter of just a couple of months where the patterns disappeared. But what if I would have let him go? He's a valuable member to our team. But if I gave up on him without finding a productive solution, that's what the boss man kept telling me. Well, are you sure? I think there's probably a solution here somewhere. What are you going to do to find that solution? He didn't give me a silver bullet answer, and that's part of his leadership. And how he works is he doesn't necessarily always give you the answer. He gives you the food for thought to think about the answer and get there.
Jessa Boyd [00:35:22]:
So it's an interesting situation, and it's.
Jimmy Purdy [00:35:24]:
Not like he knew the answer and he was dangling it in front of your face.
Jessa Boyd [00:35:27]:
No, not at all.
Jimmy Purdy [00:35:29]:
If he also becomes the yes man, then guess where you're going to be in five years. You're going to be asking him every time there's a problem.
Jessa Boyd [00:35:36]:
Yeah, exactly. And basically, when he comes to our shop, he's popping in for a cup of the coffee from that fancy Keurig machine he bought us. And, hi, how's it going? He goes and he talks to all the technicians for a few minutes. He gets to know them. So he's an owner, that is, he's a unicorn. I call him a unicorn as far. Or sasquatch, whatever. As far as a boss, they're rare.
Jessa Boyd [00:36:00]:
So he's in there for a few minutes getting to know where everybody's at, and then. Hi, k. Bye, see you later. And he speeds off and we'll see him again, or we call him when there's a problem and he'll come bail us out in a sense of show us where to look. But it's all about communication.
Jimmy Purdy [00:36:19]:
Yeah, well, having that leadership roles, it's a difficult one.
Jessa Boyd [00:36:23]:
I'm learning.
Jimmy Purdy [00:36:25]:
Yeah, I'm learning. We're all learning. I have no idea what I'm doing. It's just about taking the information that you get and obviously surrounding yourself by people that are obviously doing the same thing. And we all learn from each other and constantly try to figure out the next best movement forward. Like, how do we pivot from here? How do we get our technicians to not miss things? How do we get the service advisors to sell things without high pressure selling them. You got to talk to them, for one. And then you got to make sure you're managing and paying attention to what they're doing.
Jimmy Purdy [00:36:54]:
But so much easier said than done.
Jessa Boyd [00:36:57]:
Yeah. Like I said, I feel pretty spoiled. My copilot is, she's just a superstar. We're so much alike in our service advisor skills because I am a manager, but I'm an active service advisor. There's two of us. But working alongside her and just the confidence that I have in her and how we have our culture with the customers, too. The customers are just as much as part of the team as the technicians are, in a sense. They're putting food on our tables and we're keeping their cars on the road.
Jessa Boyd [00:37:36]:
So of course the technicians are ensuring the fact that we're getting the information, but we want to make sure that we're letting the customer know and painting a clear picture about their car without overselling or all that horrible stuff.
Jimmy Purdy [00:37:49]:
Oh, yeah, you can open up the nicest facility, paint it all brand new, shiny floors, hire all the top ac master certified technicians, top of the industry, service advisors. They sell 125,000 a year. But if there ain't no customers coming to your front door, that don't matter. That don't mean a damn thing. You know what I mean? You got to have people coming to your shop. Like step one. How do I start an auto shop business? Well, you need clients. Like, for one, you need cars to fix.
Jimmy Purdy [00:38:20]:
That's the very first thing you have to do well.
Jessa Boyd [00:38:23]:
And it's all about creating that customer experience. And truth of the matter is, when you look at that customer experience, it starts at the front and the back of the house, because the customer experience, what they get from the whole, as a functional, nontoxic team, is going to be a better product than if, in my opinion, if there's a toxic team, because there's going to be things that are just different. Culture means everything. Even with the customer.
Jimmy Purdy [00:38:53]:
You can tell when you go in the water. Yeah, you can go to a retail shop, you can go to, I don't know, a panda express or whatever. And if the team's not getting along, it's very obvious, right?
Jessa Boyd [00:39:03]:
Yeah.
Jimmy Purdy [00:39:04]:
And even if that food, I mean, it's terrible anyway, but I haven't had.
Jessa Boyd [00:39:08]:
Breakfast yet, so I'm hungry. I'd eat that right now, but even.
Jimmy Purdy [00:39:13]:
If it was great, but it's awkward when you go in there. You just don't want to go back. Even if it's the best one in town, it's amazing. And you can have the nicest people and the food sucks. And, I mean, it's kind of the same situation, but you're more apt to go in there, maybe give them some feedback, like, hey, just wanted to let you know, I would come here more if you offered this or that, but if you got a bad culture, it's like no one's going to tell you anything. No one's going to tell you you're doing a bad job. They're just hoping you go out of business so somebody else goes into your place.
Jessa Boyd [00:39:43]:
I think it's more forgiving if you have that good culture and maybe not top notch product. I mean, in the automotive industry, I feel like having a top notch product is very important because that's wheels on the road that are spinning with lifes in them. But I feel like the culture is so important that it can make or break a shop all the way around. If you have toxicity, it seeds out.
Jimmy Purdy [00:40:08]:
Yeah. And I mean, to be real and realistically, you're not going to be a top notch shop all the time. You know what I mean?
Jessa Boyd [00:40:17]:
I wish I could.
Jimmy Purdy [00:40:18]:
Yeah, we all do. We all hope that's going to happen. And it's one of the most frustrating and stressful things when you start hard is, like I said, the first couple of mistakes you start making and you're like, oh, my God. This was my business plan was be the best. I want every transmission I build to go out there and never come back. And then you get the first couple of ones coming back, and it's like, oh, my God. This was my whole vision. And now it's like, you can't base that on your product, but what you can do is make sure you stand behind your product every time.
Jimmy Purdy [00:40:46]:
And then you got someone up front with a smile on their face happy. When that comes back in, we used to call them yoyos. So you put the trans in Boomerang. Yeah, boomerang, yoyo, whatever you call it. But you get in that culture where you have a leader that's like trying to push this. We're the perfect shop. Nothing breaks. And then every time you got one back on the hook, he's in a bad mood because it's ruining his reputation.
Jimmy Purdy [00:41:16]:
Well, you think anybody in the shop is going to be happy now? And you think the client's happy because I got to bring their car back. But if you're like, cool, this is an opportunity to figure out what I did wrong. Hey, guys, let's get this thing back in here. Let's figure it out. And then everyone's like, oh, cool, he's all right, we made a mistake, but it's all good. And it's like, then they're happy with the client, and the clients get better experience, and that's way more important than on the intake, in my opinion, anyway.
Jessa Boyd [00:41:39]:
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Jimmy Purdy [00:41:40]:
How you fail, not when, but it's how what you do with that.
Jessa Boyd [00:41:44]:
How you fail is important. We're all going to fail. And that's the thing is, I had a long time ago, long, many moons ago, I had a manager that told me to never apologize. He said, we never apologize because then you're admitting fault. I hated that piece of advice, and I became insubordinate about it because I don't have a problem saying, hey, customer, I'm sorry. We're human. This is what happened. Let me explain it to you.
Jessa Boyd [00:42:09]:
Of course we stand behind everything that we do, so we're going to take care of it. Customers respect that so much. And even if you failed them in that mistake, right, it's about how you fail. So, yes, it was a failure, but you're showing that customer, hey, we're standing behind this. We're going to turn this around. And actually, you would think in one school of thought that it would take away confidence from the shop, but in truth, it can build confidence with that customer in what we stand for as a shop.
Jimmy Purdy [00:42:41]:
Oh, yeah. I mean, if you wrote it down on paper and you're looking at this thing, technically the shop should never admit fault. The shop should never be wrong because you're an auto shop and we're here to fix cars. So technically, on paper, that's what we're supposed to be doing. But you forgot to add the most important aspect to that equation, which is the human element.
Jessa Boyd [00:43:00]:
The human element.
Jimmy Purdy [00:43:02]:
And that also shows what we can charge for our service. Because, yes, we are humans. We are people trying to fix these pieces of machinery, right? And it's like that's what gets missed so much. It's just like everyone thinks it's a retail consumer thing and they get menu pricing, right? I never understood menu. How do you do menu pricing? Doesn't make any damn sense. And it's like, you can't take this industry and make it a McDonald's. You know what I mean? We all strive to. And some of the best MSO out there are trying to make it, replicate it like that.
Jimmy Purdy [00:43:40]:
Right? Entire stores are probably the best ones at know. That's an easy thing to replicate. But for the most part, when you get the consumers in the point they think it's like Amazon and they can just pull prices off the Internet and say, I want this service on my car. This is how much it's supposed to cost. That's not how it works. Why? Well, because we're people and they're cars.
Jessa Boyd [00:44:03]:
Yeah. And everything's different. And that's where being able to. Yeah. We have standard operating procedures that are implemented at all the shops. They're standard operating basic procedures. But each shop, each one of the four locations, the recipe is slightly different. So Mr.
Jessa Boyd [00:44:20]:
Silverstein was saying, know, getting a mcdonald's burger versus the best burger in town, the best burger you've ever had in your life. Right. The last podcast. We may not be the best burger in the whole world, but we're not a McDouble.
Jimmy Purdy [00:44:34]:
It's finding that there's a lot of gray in between.
Jessa Boyd [00:44:39]:
Yeah, exactly. But of course I want to be the best, and I want us to be the best shop ever that can fix every single car and be 100%. But that's just not realistic. It's not realistic.
Jimmy Purdy [00:44:49]:
It's not. And so I always hate that correlation of trying to use our service industry and match that to different aspects because there's too much changes. Ground beef doesn't change that much every year and a half. You know what I mean? They don't add more technology into hamburgers and they got to figure out how to cook this new meat. I mean, yeah, if you really.
Jessa Boyd [00:45:13]:
The meat cooks itself now.
Jimmy Purdy [00:45:15]:
Yeah. If you really wanted to dive down deep into that hole, I think that's a whole different conversation to talk about what's in the ground beef nowadays. But you get my point. It's like the technology and the stuff that we're trying to deal with and the new tooling we got to deal with, and then the technician shortage and quotes that we're having to work through. It's like there's so many different aspects in it, and our product that we're delivering is based on these technically savvy technicians. We're not flipping burgers out back. And that is like the big problem. That's what the divide is.
Jimmy Purdy [00:45:46]:
We can't just have these layers of service management and all this and then rely on our technicians at the bottom as just hamburger flippers or stacking burgers together. It's like our service that we provide is based on technically savvy people. Right. And they're not easily replaceable. It encapsulates our entire conversation because we're all on the same kind of level. We're all in the same field. And you have to have this culture to keep the best of the best in the back, not just like these. Oh, you can be replaced tomorrow.
Jimmy Purdy [00:46:24]:
Because I can hire someone out of high school to come in and my procedures are so perfect that I can just implement the next guy in there like a robot, and everything's going to be fixed the same. Right.
Jessa Boyd [00:46:33]:
That's why have wheels.
Jimmy Purdy [00:46:36]:
Right. No, it's not how it works. Terrible it is, but having that correlation and trying to relate it to other industries, that's what it makes it look like. And on that reference of that podcast, like the Emyth and looking through, like, a technician and a manager and the entrepreneur. Right. And we all have these different mindsets going on, and you try to implement those mindsets into a business. And I don't know if it's not just the auto industry. I mean, HVAC, plumbing, it's all different.
Jimmy Purdy [00:47:01]:
All people, when you're talking about high level skilled technicians, they all have a different way of doing what they do. And that's the service that you're providing the client. So you have to almost custom tailor the work they do to the client that you're offering that service to. You know what I'm saying?
Jessa Boyd [00:47:19]:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jimmy Purdy [00:47:20]:
The inspections, you're talking about, like, every technician has a different inspection process.
Jessa Boyd [00:47:25]:
Exactly. And giving them the freedom to be able to do it in that way while they're not breaking the standard operating procedure, but they're just putting their little flare on it. And if the end result is the same, who am I to tell him, oh, no, you need to check the tires before you check the air filter. What does it matter? He wants to check the air filter first, then check the tires. Super cool. They're both still getting checked and documented. Whoopi doo. Like, why micromanaged to that extent? Because honestly, I feel like that creates just that toxicity at just the smallest level.
Jessa Boyd [00:47:59]:
And if the end result ends up being the same, there we are.
Jimmy Purdy [00:48:02]:
Yeah. They're just so worried about making a mistake at that point. You've read this culture. If I make a mistake, they're going to call me out on it. It's like everything I do, if I misspell something, right? I've seen shops, and I've worked in shops where the service advisor literally will mistype something and then they get called out on it. Hey, there was a typo in your work order.
Jessa Boyd [00:48:22]:
Oh, jeez.
Jimmy Purdy [00:48:23]:
Really? That's what you're worried about right now? You're just so perfect. That's the only thing going wrong in your life right now, is a typo. Get real. Right? And that's the problem. That's what's happening. It's like you try to take these books you read and these people you listen to and these podcasts you listen to, and you're trying to take all this stuff verbatim and insert it into your shop. Oh, I like that. I want to be Mr.
Jimmy Purdy [00:48:50]:
Perfect, too. You know what mean. And like, most of the other ones out there are a bunch of bullshit they're talking about anyway, but they try to implement that stuff in their shop and it's like, no, that's not what you're supposed to be doing. And, like, having a coach and being able to tell, hey, like, that's a great idea, but it's not going to work for you. I mean, it could work for your shop, but you need to do this, this and that to change the culture. And it's just like with the technician. Do you hire a new technician? Okay, now you need to watch him and see how he's doing his inspections, and you need to change your process up a little bit to cater to what he's doing or she's doing. Right? Same with selling.
Jimmy Purdy [00:49:24]:
Like, I don't really like how you talk to the customer like that. I think you should say this conversation like this. What does it matter? Who are you to tell them? If the job is sold and they build a relationship with the client, they don't have to do it like you.
Jessa Boyd [00:49:37]:
Yeah, well, that's actually an interesting point because, for instance, Tilly and I, we spend 40 hours a week together. More than 40, but we're in the shop. But when she first came to my shop, I asked for her from one of the other shops. I thought that I saw some strengths in her that I just absolutely adored. We'd only worked together for a grand total of two days, but I liked what I saw, and so I was like, well, I don't have a lot of resources here. Can I please have Philly? Well, it took a while. There were some learning curves and some adjustments because she was newer, or she is newer in the industry. I think she's like going on five years now.
Jessa Boyd [00:50:17]:
But when she was with me, you know, learning that trust, learning to trust her process in how she's presenting something to a customer. Whereas we might say the same paragraph, but I would put this part of it at an earlier point where she put it somewhere else, in learning to be able to adapt to that and trust the process and trust her and know that we're ultimately going to be saying the same thing in the same effective manner, but we're saying it in a different order. It also works. So it was interesting to learn that. To learn that trust on that level of it. Who cares for checking the air filter first or the tires first, right?
Jimmy Purdy [00:50:58]:
Or same with the repairs. Like you're watching the repair and their tools are everywhere, and it's a complete mess. Right? You look over there, and it just looks like a bomb went off. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, but the job gets done well. All the fasteners go back in.
Jessa Boyd [00:51:13]:
All the fasteners go back in, and.
Jimmy Purdy [00:51:16]:
It'S done under time, and it's a job well done. And then they clean up their tools after, and you got the other guys. He does the job. He's working. He takes the wrench, wipes it off, puts it back in the toolbox, and it's like, for me, I like that. Right? It's like, that makes me feel good. Like, oh, he's so organized. Everything's all laid out on a cart and on rags.
Jimmy Purdy [00:51:37]:
Like, oh, that looks so good. It really looks like he's being professional or whatever, but it might go over time or maybe forget some of those fasteners or whatever, but it's the process. As long as the job gets done and done well, you can't micromanage that situation. Like, hey, I need your bay to look like his bay, because it looks so much cleaner and so much more organized. Why? What does it matter? But letting go a little bit of that, that's the hardest thing. And I think on the front end, on the office, it's even harder because, you know, the conversations that you've trained yourself and you've learned how to have, and you're like, trust me, this works for me. But that's the problem. It works for you.
Jessa Boyd [00:52:18]:
Exactly.
Jimmy Purdy [00:52:18]:
Let them pick up the little tidbits and figure out how to mold that into what they're selling. And it's like having that confidence of using your own voice is what's going to sell the job, not parroting something else that works. And that's the hardest thing. I mean, hands down, having someone come into the office and speak with your clients, the people that you've built this trusting relationship with, and you're just listening. Know, there's a few things in there.
Jessa Boyd [00:52:47]:
Well, and I'm so spastic that Tilly loves me, and she learned it to accept me, but I'm so spastic that when I think something, sometimes I say so. You know, in the beginning, she'd be like, halfway through a conversation, I'm like, don't forget about would. I know I was the worst. I was the worst. Tilly, I know you're going to listen to this, and I'm so sorry for all of those times, okay? But that would hinder hers, her confidence. It would hinder her whole conversation. And I would throw a whole wrench in the gears just because. Just the trust.
Jessa Boyd [00:53:21]:
And building that trust now, building that trust is also helping her with her confidence, because my biggest goal back then was for her, my personal goal to facilitate was that I harbor confidence. She gets the confidence. She's unstoppable. And I get to see it now, and I realize now that sometimes I just keep my mouth shut because she's going to get there, too. She doesn't need my two cent.
Jimmy Purdy [00:53:47]:
Just maybe you were the problem.
Jessa Boyd [00:53:48]:
I was the problem. I'm not afraid to admit that I.
Jimmy Purdy [00:53:51]:
Made a mistake, but that's, like, step one, right?
Jessa Boyd [00:53:54]:
Yeah.
Jimmy Purdy [00:53:54]:
Everything that goes wrong in the shop is my fault.
Jessa Boyd [00:53:57]:
Yeah.
Jimmy Purdy [00:53:58]:
Hands down. There's no way around it. And I had talked to so many guys, like, oh, so and so is doing this again, so and so is late again. Well, then fire them. Well, I can't fire them. Then figure out how to get them there on time. Figure out how they're messing up the inspections. Well, how do I do that? Dude, you're the problem.
Jimmy Purdy [00:54:17]:
It's your problem. You know what I mean? Everything that goes wrong, it doesn't matter. You cut through all the layers. And at the very base of it, it's my shop, it's my business. It was my problem. Something that I am not doing or not adhering to, it's always. You can always find it down at the bottom somewhere. If you're willing to look that deep.
Jessa Boyd [00:54:39]:
If you're willing to look. Because it's so much easier at the human level, the human element, to be blind to that and being afraid of failing. That's the thing is, if I'm afraid to admit that I'm wrong, then I'm creating a culture and leading a culture to where I don't want my technicians being afraid to be wrong, because then they're going to probably make more mistakes that way. When you're living in that fear.
Jimmy Purdy [00:55:05]:
Yeah. Fear based decisions, that's probably the biggest challenge we try to overcome every day is being wrong on a diagnosis, being wrong on a repair, being wrong on a price. Yeah. And that goes outside of even the shop at home. Right. Like, fear based decisions, you stop making money, then you start pulling back and, oh, maybe I need to move. Maybe I don't need this big of a house. Maybe can't take my kids to private school anymore or whatever you're trying to do.
Jimmy Purdy [00:55:34]:
Right. It's just like these fear based decisions, and it's so hard to cut back, but it all stems from those having those conversations. Right. And admitting to yourself that maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I need to step back a little bit. And it sounds like the owner of the shop you're at has kind of figured that out.
Jessa Boyd [00:55:52]:
Yeah, I adore him. I think he needs to be on some of these podcasts because he's a very interesting individual. In fact, someday, if I have my podcast, I'm hoping to drag him on to it.
Jimmy Purdy [00:56:03]:
Nice. Yeah. I mean, it's good to listen to everyone's different perspectives and how you deal with certain situations. And you start realizing that once you get to a certain level, you start realizing we're all kind of on the same page. We're all kind of on the same level in a sense, as far as what we're trying to do. But there is no magic pill, there's no magic silver bullet. So when you're dealing with the office side of it and you bring in a new trainer or a new trainee for service advising, do you have a procedure now that you've been able to work up in your mind as far as how you're going to train that?
Jessa Boyd [00:56:40]:
Well, I haven't really had the opportunity because I've had Tilly since basically shortly after opening. So I have realized to be more, I just need to listen more and talk less sometimes. And that was the biggest thing for us. And now for how we are. We've gotten to a point now where we both teach each other things all the time. It's not that I don't learn things from her just as much as she learns things from me. And then we learn things from the technicians and we learn things from the owner. It's about being open to learning to be able to train or teach anyway, because if you think you know everything, then there's no room for new knowledge.
Jessa Boyd [00:57:18]:
Yeah.
Jimmy Purdy [00:57:19]:
As soon as you admit you know everything, it just proves that you know nothing.
Jessa Boyd [00:57:22]:
Yeah, there's a lot of know it alls out there in some of these groups.
Jimmy Purdy [00:57:31]:
So another tough situation that I work through is when you get an upset client and having someone new. So how is that situation for you? Do you like to get in there and take the bull by the horns, or do you sit back and just kind of like, I'll see how she's going to handle this situation and kind of let her take it?
Jessa Boyd [00:57:51]:
That's a good one. I have learned that if she needs me, we have certain cues to where, if she needs me to step in, we're such a tight knit team that I can take that cue and know when I need to interject. And then, for instance, we had this customer just this week, and I'm so proud of her for how she handled this. We had this customer. He came in with a total shitbox. Nissan Maxima. The thing hadn't run in two years. It was in a field.
Jessa Boyd [00:58:20]:
He wanted to see if it was worthy of getting running. I didn't have any part of this ticket other than just kind of eavesdropping, because I'm always eavesdropping with what I do. But Tilly handled it, and it needed a battery because the battery was dead. The customer was concerned about a drivability issue, but the thing had so many oil leaks that it wasn't safe to drive. And there was transmission codes, there was cat codes. There was just all these different things wrong with this car. And the initial conversation that she had with this customer was she understood his intentions with this car, was to get it back on the road, if it made sense. They had a beautiful conversation.
Jessa Boyd [00:59:02]:
She told him all the findings. Hey, you're going to need a battery first. I'm sorry, I've got that backwards. It needed an alternator. The alternator was just done. Gave up on life. The battery was needed also. She told him that, and he wanted to do that.
Jessa Boyd [00:59:17]:
And then, see, even though he knew that it would run in the shop, but we weren't going to drive it. We weren't willing to take that on because it was just dumping oil. They had a whole beautiful conversation about it. Well, he comes to pick up the car. She checked him out, and he goes on about his day, and then he calls me right back and said, hey, the car died down the street. I'm stuck on the side of the road. We told you that was going to, like. We advised you to maybe not drive the car because we're professionals and we're not going to drive your car.
Jessa Boyd [00:59:45]:
So he's like, but I came in there for a drivability issue. I wanted to know, I think it's the fuel pump. And Tilly had sold him diagnostic, and she did everything right. And everything right. So we get him back down to the shop, and his brother Billy Bob, or whoever this person was, his friend's mechanic that eats lunch with somebody, whatever. He started to grill Tilly, and I'm standing there and I see her. She did everything right. It was beautiful.
Jessa Boyd [01:00:13]:
She addressed him, addressed him directly and said, I gave you this information. We talked about this. You told me you didn't want to put a bunch of money into the car, she just handled it so well. And in that, the mechanic friend or whatever kept trying to cut her off and tell her basically what she's going to do and what he thinks. And she just stood her ground. And it was very kind. It was very tactful. She just basically repeated everything again in five different ways.
Jessa Boyd [01:00:39]:
That was on the invoice about the conversation they had before that, and it ended up to be where that customer left there with a smile on his face. We arranged to get it towed from where it was at. Luckily, we're in a small town, so the local tow guy is our tow guy. So I called him and said, hey, you think it's going to get towed from here, where it's at? He said, no, because I'm the tow truck driver that would be picking it up. We were able to get the customer back on the home in a different vehicle, of course, and he left with a smile and understanding. But it was going really south in the beginning. But I did. I just kind of stayed out of it because she was handling it so well.
Jessa Boyd [01:01:17]:
But watching that level of confidence from her, if I would have interjected myself in that, other than being like, yeah, she's right. What she said, what she said. If I would have in any way interjected myself, I would have taken that opportunity from her. And she was so proud of it after it was all said and done, because it's really tough for her to be assertive sometimes as it is for me, because when you're assertive as a woman in the industry, you're kind of being a bitch. Right. It's not just being direct and assertive. That's kind of how the view is skewed. But she was so tactful and assertive in a positive way, and it had a positive outcome, and I didn't rob her of that by interjecting with my big mouth because I had a tendency to do that.
Jimmy Purdy [01:01:54]:
That's a great way to put that. Yeah, because you rob them when you do that. Absolutely. I feel like it's such like a second nature thing when you're kind of, like, watching that situation unfold. And for me, even like, well, this is my responsibility. It's my shop. This is my problem. You shouldn't have to talk to anybody like that.
Jimmy Purdy [01:02:16]:
And I've told service advisors, technicians, hey, if anybody comes in and starts giving you lip, you don't take that. That's for, like, you guys don't need to deal with that. We're all people here. But some of those situations is an opportunity for them to grow. And every time they come in and do that, it's like they're just looking for the owner. They're just looking for you. Let me talk to Jess. Talked to her last.
Jimmy Purdy [01:02:42]:
Like, every time there's a problem, they're just going to be looking for you. And how does anybody grow like that? And then every time they come in, she's just going to turn around and go, hey, judge, your client's here again.
Jessa Boyd [01:02:50]:
Yeah, well, on the flip side of that, too, that very same week, I think it was the next day, we had another situation where. It was a situation where she was getting yelled out on the phone, and it was something that I needed to handle because it needed to be taken up to me. And what it was was this young girl came in with the Prius, and it had a very hard misfire. And it was like, 69,000 miles. It's just like the 2017. It was very low mileage, but it had a hard misfire. Crazy engine noise. We sold her diagnostic like we were supposed to, because that's what we want to do.
Jessa Boyd [01:03:26]:
And then we ended up finding that there was rodent damage and a whole section of the cylinder, one injector wire, both pieces of it were gone. And luckily, we just implemented these dvis, so I'm very happy for that. But this customer, it was their daughter in there. The customers that was yelling at Tilly, it wasn't actually the customer. They were the parents of the customer. And so the customer and I, because I handled the ticket anyway, had a really great conversation. She was confident with it. I even reduced the diagnostic because we were at 252 for the diagnostic, but because we found it, and it wasn't a 252 diagnostic in this case.
Jessa Boyd [01:04:01]:
So I reduced it down to $100, sold her the new connector and explained it to her, gave her the pictures, and she was happy with that. So took care of her, took care of the noise, it took care of the misfire. All that was great. Well, she had the mom call and pay for it. Everything went great there, too. But the next day, the dad calls, the mom calls, yelling at Tilly, passes the phone to the dad. She puts it on hold. I pick it up, and this guy completely insults the integrity of the shop.
Jessa Boyd [01:04:32]:
And I understand why. And I had sympathy or empathy for him because his little girl went to a shop, and in his eyes, we took advantage of her. But it's having to overcome that. So what ended up happening was I said I had to stand my ground and say, no, sir, I know for a fact that we didn't just put electrical tape over a wire, we replaced an entire connection, an entire connector, and we did it for not much more than she was originally in here for. In the beginning, for the diagnostic, we reduced the diagnostic so they didn't believe me at all. He's like, well, I'm going to come down there and you're going to show me what you did in my daughter's car. And I don't know why you did $300 worth of work on something that I could have done and put a piece of tape on. And so, anyway, long story short, I was able to stand up and say, no, sir, my technicians have integrity.
Jessa Boyd [01:05:13]:
We have integrity as a shop. We are not a fly by night operation. And I would love for you to come down here so I can show you, because that would put my heart at peace, because this is not a good situation for either of us right now. Anyway, in the meantime, I actually pulled up a DVI and I called them back because they were supposed to come back this next week. I called them back and I left a message saying, hey, can I have your email, please? Because I can give you a picture proof. But they were being terrible. I mean, the lady was yelling at Tilly, and there's no reason for that. The guy that I was dealing with, he was being unreasonable at first, but they called back and gave the email and eventually thanked still, you know, that's something that abuse that she was having to get that wasn't meant for her, that wasn't her problem or anything that she should have had to internalize.
Jimmy Purdy [01:05:59]:
Yeah. It's not really meant for anybody, like, anywhere. And I just feel like in our industry, this is something that we deal with way more than anybody thinks of. We started this conversation about how. With a lot of positivity. Right. And it doesn't matter what shop you go to or how great you want to be. You have clients with unreasonable expectations that we all deal with all the time.
Jimmy Purdy [01:06:25]:
And it's a strange thing that, being a brick and mortar, too, they can come back at any time and you get this kind of feedback, I guess you'd call it, right, for apparently no reason. What's with that heightened level of anxiety that you're having right now? You haven't even came down to have a conversation with me. You're just going to call and start yelling at somebody. And that's just standard for an auto repair shop. And it is, though. You and I both. It's something. We both deal with it all the time.
Jimmy Purdy [01:06:59]:
And you have even a procedure. We're like, hey, look, if this wasn't yours, just pass it to me. And it's like, really? Who else? What other industry has to deal with something like that where it's like, oh, you're ripping me off. And I could have done that myself because I watched a YouTube video, and replacing a connector is really easy. That should have been ten minutes and $100 or less than $100. And it's like, really? You own a shop? Yeah.
Jessa Boyd [01:07:21]:
At the end of it, it was a matter of, no, sir, we did do a repair in the vehicle. I'm sorry if you're upset with the price. If the price is the issue here, that's one thing, but that's our prices. But the integrity of our shop, we did a proper repair, and we did it for almost just a little bit more than she initially signed for. We took care of her, and I didn't appreciate that. But here's the other flip side of that. Having the empathy to understand where he's coming from. In his eyes, all he knows is his little girl just went to a shop and got ripped off.
Jessa Boyd [01:07:55]:
He doesn't know the intricacies. Now, he could have handled it differently, but having the empathy to be able to understand on their end of it why they're coming to a shop with that guard up. And that's where the skill comes into play of being able to get through that guard and communicate effectively with the customer as well, and be able to get them to realize that, hey, you're on the same team as we are. It's not you versus us. We are all in this together. And then if they don't fit into that, you're not my client. Bye. I'm sorry.
Jessa Boyd [01:08:25]:
I'm sure there's a shop out there for you.
Jimmy Purdy [01:08:27]:
Yeah, I'm sure there is. Having the empathy, I mean, it's tough, too. You think about it, hindsight, and you're just like, I don't need to deal with that. But obviously, in the day to day operation, you have to. You're not going to get away from it. You're going to have people that are upset, and then you second guess your procedures, you're second guessing the technicians. You're emotionally discounting it because you've already foresighted this whole situation going south. Right.
Jimmy Purdy [01:08:52]:
It sounds like that was kind of like the mindset, right? And we do the same thing. Situation like that. That is kind of an easy thing for us to address. If we do charge them 225 or 250, I could see how that's going to go south. So you're trying to set up all these roadblocks to try to avoid that situation, and then it happens anyway. And you're like, yeah. And then you can't help but feel a little bit emotional about it as well. Like, look, we did not only fix the car, but I already tried to get in front of this situation.
Jessa Boyd [01:09:24]:
Right.
Jimmy Purdy [01:09:26]:
This job should have costed you. That's what the price should have been. And I already discounted it, and we took care of it.
Jessa Boyd [01:09:33]:
And now you're still coming out the problem.
Jimmy Purdy [01:09:35]:
Yeah, the problem is fixed. She's taken care of. And it was for a discounted price for no reason. You don't come in here and spend $100,000 a year. There was no reason for me to discount that on a business standpoint. I just did it because I have empathy and I'm trying to help. And then you still come at me like this, and it's like, it's so hard to have all that going on in your mind and still be like, listen, if you'd like to come down, I have no problem with you.
Jessa Boyd [01:09:59]:
Exactly.
Jimmy Purdy [01:10:00]:
I have no problem showing you, but I have no problem coming down. We can talk about this. How do we fix this? What do you need?
Jessa Boyd [01:10:09]:
Well, and having that composure. But on the inside, I was literally having anxiety about it because first of all, I feel like we're failing, even though we're not. We do what was right, because we have an unhappy customer and a situation where just trying to find in the real time that way to communicate, but also being upset with the customer at the same point. Because you're insulting the integrity of my technicians. Because at first I said to the customer, hey, well, I'm going to go interview my technician. And I stopped that. And I was like, you know what? No, I'm not. I said, I know.
Jessa Boyd [01:10:40]:
I personally ordered the part. I know personally that he put it on, and that's when he came up with, oh, I'm going to come down and I want you to show me. Please do. And it wasn't like a please do in any kind of threatening manner was that would make my heart feel peaceful because I found on the inside I was worked up and I was trying not to let it show, but you just insulted my shop. I know. We did what was right.
Jimmy Purdy [01:11:03]:
Yeah. And you match that level of heightened anxiety that he has. You just can't help it. If you have a calm demeanor. They have a calm demeanor. If you come in excited, it's just human nature that you get excited. And then, yeah, you have all the procedures in place. You know, your guys, you know, you did the right thing, but you're still getting insulted by it.
Jimmy Purdy [01:11:21]:
And it's like the service advisor position is like. It's so difficult. And a lot of technicians look at that. And like, all he does is. All they do is sit in the office and sell jobs is like, no idea the intricacies that it takes. And sure, you could take that and be like, you know what, dude, go take a hike, or, okay, let me just give you all your money back and you can be on your way. Both of those are wrong.
Jessa Boyd [01:11:46]:
Yeah, totally, 100%. I'm not giving you any money back. Yeah, we did what was right. If you don't like the prices, I'm sorry that our pricing structure isn't right for you, but we were fair, we were honest. We had integrity. If price is the option, then just. I wish you the best. I'm not going back on that.
Jessa Boyd [01:12:02]:
I'm not going to give your money back for that. Yeah, you did the right thing.
Jimmy Purdy [01:12:06]:
There's no refunds. But then you've been asking, and that's the very first thing I was asking. Those situations when they come in like that. Okay, look, we're not going to go back and forth. How do I fix this right now? How much is it going to take? And if it's about money, then it's like, okay, now I know where this conversation is going. You're just trying to get money back, right?
Jessa Boyd [01:12:22]:
Yeah.
Jimmy Purdy [01:12:23]:
So you're upset because you think it should be a price. Explain to me where you come up with that price and I'll go down and tell them exactly down to the brass tacks of what we charge, what, the prices it is. But most of the time it isn't. It's not about financial. It's about something totally different, like you said. Well, I just feel like my daughter was taken advantage of. I totally understand now. We're on the same page.
Jimmy Purdy [01:12:46]:
Now I feel like I'm not upset because you have a legit concern in your mind of why you're being like this. It's an emotional thing. Okay, I get it. So let's move forward from here. You think your daughter was taken advantage of? Dude, I'd be upset, too. Let's figure this out.
Jessa Boyd [01:13:01]:
Exactly.
Jimmy Purdy [01:13:02]:
You know what I mean? And just being able to just split that. Okay, step one. What's the pain point here? And usually it's like, how much is it going to take? What do you mean, how much is going to take? Well, how much you want back? Well, it's not about money. Like, okay, perfect. Now we can start talking about money and you just think we're too expensive, then this is not a conversation that we need to have. I wish I could charge less.
Jessa Boyd [01:13:28]:
Right. We have the saying in the shop that money is expensive. Yeah, it is. But customers ask about price and most of our clientele. So we're very fortunate. We are in a town that has about a 6500 house, senior citizen community this close to us. And then we have a lot of middle class family in the area, and then some agricultural too. But a lot of times now with the brand that we've kind of created, it's not so much about the price as it is about what they're getting and the experience.
Jessa Boyd [01:14:02]:
But something you said earlier, that emotional discount, that's a term that I just recently heard. I hadn't heard that before. But not being about only the price. If price is the only thing that matters, then what do you expect? What can we do for you? How do we still be on the same team, or are we different teams?
Jimmy Purdy [01:14:21]:
As far as that goes, I've learned with the finances, it just has to be, this is what the price is. Right? And I think a lot of people, when they start owning their own shop or they're running their own operation, you just kind of throw a number that sticks and see what it looks like at the end of the month. Right. And obviously it's got to be a little more in depth than that. Figure out what it is it takes for you to pay everyone you need to pay, make the money you need to make. That's your price. And that's facts. This is what it is.
Jessa Boyd [01:14:49]:
Expensive here. It's so expensive. And then the technicians, we pay well. But even to get a loop tech at this point, if we have a loop tech and they have any of their own tools, California law means that they're entitled to double minimum wage. Well, is a guy that's just now getting into the industry, does he bring that much value? What's 1550 right now in California? So that's $31 an hour for a lube tech if they have their own tools. But just that kind of expense factor and keeping the lights on and workman's comp and all the stuff that you don't see at the end of the day, a customer doesn't understand that. Well, what if there was no shops to fix your car? Then where would we be?
Jimmy Purdy [01:15:27]:
Yeah, and just having that and putting that as a fact, this is what the price is. And then that's it. That goes into cover, that's lock and key. This is what the price is when it gets blurred into the emotional side of it. That's what that emotional discounting comes in. Right. Because you're like, I feel like the only way to make this client happy is to lower the price down and put that price like it's coming out of my pocketbook. It's like, no, if I go to a shop, whatever their price is, is their price.
Jimmy Purdy [01:15:55]:
If I go to a retail store, I don't go to Home Depot and be like, hey, so I saw online, it's this much like, no, it's the convenience that it's there on the shelf for me right now. Right. And then people to help usually, if you need it, right. So just adding services and making your product have more quality and being nice about it and happy about it and is there anything else I can do for you? Oh, you can lower the price. Well, that's not going to happen. Is there anything else I can do for you? Right.
Jessa Boyd [01:16:20]:
Charge double, give you half off.
Jimmy Purdy [01:16:21]:
Yeah, exactly. And just having a good attitude about it. But it's like having that price just be lock and key. That's what it is. This is what we have to charge. So I can show up tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day and then be, smile and be smiling and be happy with you coming in here. And I think where that term emotional discounting comes in, because that's like the trump card, right? We're all happy when we get a discount, right? So it's like you use that, I can lower the price. That'll make them happy.
Jimmy Purdy [01:16:51]:
It's like, figure out a way to make them happy without lowering the price because that's locked away. We can't move that price. Sorry. But it is what it is.
Jessa Boyd [01:16:59]:
One of the hardest things that I had a hard time with when I first got into service advising versus the parts world, and then previous to the parts world, being a do it yourselfer. I mean, I grew up in the garage working with cars, with my dad, like building old Chevys and such. But the value of when I was a parts person, seeing the cost of parts and then becoming a service advisor at that time and understanding why are these parts so expensive? Why are we charging so much for these parts? It was a total brain melt for me and it was such a hard pill for me to swallow. And this was twelve years ago and it didn't make any sense to me until one day the owner walked in and he shared the profit and loss statement with me. And just being a baby service advisor, being able to see that and understand and build value in why we mark up parts, the warranty and all that stuff, I'm still getting over the emotional discount part of it. I can admit that it's rough because you want to make everyone feel good, but at the same point, we want to keep the lights on, too.
Jimmy Purdy [01:18:01]:
Yeah. I mean, you never stop doing it. I don't think we'll ever stop doing it, but it's amazing where it's rooted from. And trying to divide that in your mind and realize my time is worth money. Right, your time is worth money. And having more value built into those pricing and being able to say, hey, look, if there's any problem, you can call me and just figuring out more creative ways to add more value to that price versus just saying, oh, you know what, I'm not good enough and I'm going to lower my price for you. Yeah, that's the problem.
Jessa Boyd [01:18:38]:
Value is huge. Definitely. I try very hard to build the value and less and less of the emotional discounting.
Jimmy Purdy [01:18:49]:
Yeah, we keep trying every day.
Jessa Boyd [01:18:53]:
Yeah.
Jimmy Purdy [01:18:54]:
Well, this has been fun. I appreciate you taking some time. I know we had a little bit of technical difficulties, but did we?
Jessa Boyd [01:19:01]:
Hey, half the battle was getting here, and then the other half the battle was evicting the two and a half year old and the seven year old from the house while we did this, trying to set this up with him here. That little baby wanted to touch every single little knob, button the light, twist all this stuff.
Jimmy Purdy [01:19:14]:
Don't touch that.
Jessa Boyd [01:19:15]:
Don't touch it. So. Well, thank you for having me on. And thank you for being patient through all the technical difficulties.
Jimmy Purdy [01:19:22]:
Of course. Patience is everything, right?
Jessa Boyd [01:19:26]:
Awesome. Well, you know what? I hope you have a wonderful Saturday. Or is it Sunday now? It's Sunday now.
Jimmy Purdy [01:19:30]:
Sunday, whatever day it is. Back to work tomorrow.
Jessa Boyd [01:19:34]:
Yeah, I hope. Hi ho.
Jimmy Purdy [01:19:35]:
This has been great. The next time around, I'll get the wife on here and we'll.
Jessa Boyd [01:19:41]:
Sounds good. I'm excited. All right, thank you. Bye.