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Confessions of a Shop Owner is hosted by Mike Allen, a third-generation shop owner, perpetual pot-stirrer, and brutally honest opinion sharer. In this weekly podcast, Mike shares his missteps so you don’t have to repeat them. Along the way, he chats with other industry personalities who’ve messed up, too, pulling back the curtain on the realities of running an independent auto repair shop. But this podcast isn’t just about Mike’s journey. It’s about confronting the divisive and questionable tactics many shop owners and managers use. Mike is here to stir the pot and address the painful truths while offering a way forward. Together, we’ll tackle the frustrations, shake things up, and help create a better future for the auto repair industry.
Josh Oberlander [00:00:00]:
In one dealership we were in, they had a huge multi speaker intercom system that would just yell at the technicians like, hey, your customer's here at the front. And everybody would stop to listen. Every then the one technician would always have to stop and go to the front. I was like, this is the worst system I have ever seen.
Mike Allen [00:00:53]:
What's up, guys? How are you?
John [00:00:56]:
Good, I'm good. Yeah, it's been good.
Mike Allen [00:00:59]:
Excited.
Josh Oberlander [00:01:00]:
Mike, we've seen a lot about your podcast and so definitely amped to be on it. Appreciate you having us on.
Mike Allen [00:01:05]:
First, I want to know a little bit more about you guys. Before we started recording, I was, I was talking to John about the fact that he's just gotten married and moved to Milwaukee. But you guys founded your business and have kind of grown your business in North Dakota, which is, I'm going to go out on a limb and say atypical, especially for tech startups. So if you don't mind, tell me a little bit about how you found yourself starting a tech company in the automotive space in North Dakota.
Jon Cabak [00:01:34]:
Well, I think the biggest thing that we did when we kind of found our way into the automotive space in general was we had a completely different product that we were selling at first that wasn't even automotive related. And Josh and I started that with one other guy. Man, what was that? 2021, I think. And we were going door to door selling this thing to pretty much anywhere that would let us in. We were very obnoxious and annoying, and as we're just banging on all these doors trying to get people to talk to us, somehow the one group of people that would let us in and hear us out were shop owners. And we would just go to every single one and try to talk to them about what we were doing. And, you know, it's a long story about, I know we got time for how we got to North Dakota, but man, the early days on the street with Josh was quite the experience, to say the least.
Mike Allen [00:02:29]:
You guys don't have any history in automotive prior to Detect Auto?
John [00:02:33]:
No, no, sir, we did not. Nope.
Mike Allen [00:02:36]:
Wow. Okay, give me a little Bit. Josh, give me a little bit of background. What have you done prior to this?
Josh Oberlander [00:02:43]:
Yeah, so I kind of started a business when I was 24 in the service industry actually. So I was an arborist and had a tree servicing. So I was outside doing manual labor, building my own company. I had a couple people that I hired working underneath me. So I definitely know the grind of that kind of like blue collar entrepreneurship. I think that kind of heavily relates with automotive, which is great. But you know, working outside in Minnesota, where we were at the time where I met John, you can only work outside like three months, you know, the other, the other 10 months of the year or however many are you just, you're indoors. And so I bumped into John and so.
Josh Oberlander [00:03:32]:
But basically it was kind of an entrepreneur from. From the beginning. I had. I worked for like two months, I think at a business that taught me how to climb these trees. And then I was like, you know, let's try this on our own. So for three years I did tree service and then I met John because he was like, hey man, starting this cool, cool business where he haggled me into doing this door to door sales. And man, I give props to anybody who's done door to door sales before. That is the worst stuff on the planet.
Josh Oberlander [00:04:00]:
Especially when, especially when you're selling a product that hasn't been validated yet. Like, it is just. It'll put you in the dirt. It is a hard, hard thing to do.
Mike Allen [00:04:11]:
Was this business door to door or residential door to door?
Josh Oberlander [00:04:15]:
It was business door to door. So we were going from business to business. We were kind of trying anyway, we were trying to find our ideal customer and one of them just ended up being automotive. So it was business door to door. And it was slog for sure.
Mike Allen [00:04:27]:
I can only imagine how rude businesses are. I did door to door residential sales. I sold educational material for a summer between two years of college. And it was savage in and of itself. And if you're going into a busy business where they've got stuff going on, they're stressed out already and you're trying to interrupt them. I can only imagine. It's got to be terrible.
John [00:04:50]:
Yeah, it's pretty rough. But the. One of the funnier parts too was the product we were selling was a fan with a camera in the middle of it. We called it the following fan. And the thing with it was you could basically use it in places where you didn't have air conditioning. So the fan would always track onto you and as you walked around, it would always point at you. So it was really cool. But as we were going selling it all over the place, we went down to Miami and spent like a month down there just going to every single auto shop we could.
John [00:05:24]:
And I mean, I don't know what they thought, but I guarantee you, when we pulled up with our fan out of like our rental car that none of us fit into, and we're all just trying to like go show them this fan, they must have thought we were the weirdest people they've ever seen.
Mike Allen [00:05:38]:
How much does a face tracking fan cost?
John [00:05:43]:
Well, I think when we started it was like 299. It was a big fan that was like a really big pedestal fan that was pretty powerful. And then when we realized no one was gonna buy it, we were trying to sell it for whatever they would pay. We were just trying to get rid.
Mike Allen [00:06:00]:
Of a warehouse full of fans.
John [00:06:03]:
Yeah, exactly.
Mike Allen [00:06:05]:
You know what? I can see why auto repair shops would be a client that would buy that because they're in a stifling place with poor airflow and frequently no air conditioning. You know, we were. I was having a conversation with one of my technicians today about that, about how it's like 100 degrees last week in North Carolina almost all week. I mean, it was hot across the country last week, but. And my biggest shop does not have air conditioning and does. Has decent airflow. You know, it's not a cave. But he was telling me we need to buy a bunch of fans because the ceiling fans in there are a joke.
Mike Allen [00:06:43]:
They're like residential fans from. Somebody got a. At a Habitat store or something. I don't know. We didn't build the building, so. Yeah, you know, I mean, that's why that.
Josh Oberlander [00:06:54]:
That's why we thought it would be great. That's why we were going to all these automotive shops. It's like one technician or two max is working in a space. It can perfectly be cooling you the whole time.
Mike Allen [00:07:04]:
Nobody cared.
Josh Oberlander [00:07:06]:
Nobody cared.
Mike Allen [00:07:09]:
So how did you get into. Well, okay, we'll take a leap forward then. Tell me about the business that you have together now and how you got in that space.
John [00:07:19]:
Yeah, so right now our real focus is how can we just automate things in your day to day and save time whether it's in your shop. Management software, checking in customers, auditing tickets for profitability. It's really just all about how can we save you time in your process that you have to do every day. And we've been building software in the automotive space now for three and a half years or so. And just, just kind of working really closely with shops, either in shops or just chatting with them every day. And over time you get to see these are consistent gaps that we find a lot of shops have issues with or things that get pushed to the side when you get busy. And so that's kind of where Josh and I and our other co founder Nate have really gotten going is we've just continued to talk to shop owners and learn more and more and more about what problems they face or even we talk to their technicians and figure out what's going on or even the service advisors.
Josh Oberlander [00:08:16]:
Right.
John [00:08:16]:
We're going all across the board talking about all the problems they have and things they do every day. And you really get to find out across the board a lot of problems that people face in shops are pretty similar. And, and we try to automate a lot of those for them.
Mike Allen [00:08:30]:
Copy. And I think I met Josh, I think I met you, you at ASTA Expo last year. You had a booth and I think you were gonna be ready to go live like the next week. I think it was.
Josh Oberlander [00:08:44]:
I mean, we haven't been, we haven't been around that long. Like we, for what we've been doing with these AI automations hasn't even been a year, it's been 10 months. So the fact that we have four tools now, we've been, we've been growing fast and moving quick.
Mike Allen [00:08:58]:
Yeah. And I think it's. And obviously I'm a big proponent of what you guys do. Our listeners probably roll their eyes because they hear me talk about it so much. But if somebody's been under a rock and not listening, give me a quick rundown of what those four tools are.
Josh Oberlander [00:09:14]:
Yeah, yeah, I would love to. So basically our bread and butter, the one we've had for the longest amount of time, it researches the vehicle and tells you what maintenance is overdue. So, you know, it's that monotonous task of looking through the history, looking through the carfax with us, it's just click of a button and what's overdue in terms of time and mileage is right there in front of you. So that's our first tool trying to get more gravy work in the door.
Mike Allen [00:09:41]:
So on that one, speaking from a customer's perspective, because obviously I am a client of yours, for our listeners, it is searching your local service history, like within your company and it's searching the CARFAX service history. And if you're an MSO and you're using Carfax and you're already Reporting to carfax. So it's searching your service history at your other locations too. If you have customers that bounce between locations. Right. And then you can input your own maintenance schedule. Like so I go in the backside of Detect Auto and let's just say, you know, I want to recommend Service x every 50,000 miles if it hasn't been done. And so it's going to search my history, my other shops histories and Carfax service history.
Mike Allen [00:10:23]:
And if it doesn't see that service in the last 50,000 miles, it's going to automatically add that to the DVI for me. Did I miss any details on that?
Josh Oberlander [00:10:33]:
No, I think you hit that dead on.
Mike Allen [00:10:34]:
The.
Josh Oberlander [00:10:34]:
Dead on the nose, I would say also just coming out right now is we take all of your history across all of your shops. So we're going to be supplying your personal internal history. If you're an MSO, instead of just living through the carfax or looking through the carfax, it will be your other shops, actual parts and labor on there too.
Mike Allen [00:10:53]:
Super. So what that's doing, from my perspective, you know, one of the things that we're trying to really hone in on is speed of service. I want to be able to go from keys in hand to first discovery and discovery conversation to, you know, outbound sales conversation with my customer about what their needs are. I want to shorten that window as much as possible. And so one of the things that takes a big portion of that time is the DVI process and the research and the history process. Now it's program that's doing it in 30 seconds or less. Right. So we're cutting five, six, seven minutes off of every single DVI, which is a huge value.
Mike Allen [00:11:31]:
So I just.
Josh Oberlander [00:11:32]:
And we've, we've made it. I appreciate that. We've made it super customizable now as well. You can. When we first started it was like you have to pick your own shop specific interval and, and we're map mapping every car to that. But now we've added OEM intervals. We can change all the due soon stuff. You can have variable intervals like it's due first at 100,000, then every 30 after.
Josh Oberlander [00:11:53]:
We've made so many settings changes that it's very customizable now.
Mike Allen [00:11:57]:
That's awesome. I got to jump into the settings and dig around some more. Then you've added more features even since I was last in there. That's great. Talk to me about the service advisor tools for the customer write up process because that's the one that gets Me the most excited.
Josh Oberlander [00:12:11]:
Yeah. The nice thing about it is it's super simple. The customer is coming in and you just type in the concern that they have and AI generated questions come back and it gives you five very simple non technical questions to ask the customer. Just empowering your team. Especially if you have a good salesperson up front who isn't very technical or maybe unexperienced person up front, it gives them the good questions to ask to get more information out of the customer so that your technicians spend less time diagnosis. So they're coming in with you know, a brake noise or just a noise check engine light, their car won't start. And you know, I'm sure you guys all know this but they, there might be multiple noises. We're trying to help you figure out exactly which one.
Josh Oberlander [00:12:58]:
We don't want those comebacks, you know, to be coming into your shop. So it just helps get more information out of the customer. And then maybe one of the best parts about it is it writes it all up for you as well. So even if you are an experienced, you know, service advisor, maybe you've built out those questions in your head that you like to ask, you can fully customize it for yourself and then you just type in the answers to each and it writes it up all for you just so you're not missing any of that information. It's all in the customer concern. You're not going back and forth talking with the tech because you forgot to say something.
Mike Allen [00:13:33]:
So there, there are two reasons. I love this one for probably decades, but I've been around coaches a lot for the last decade. Coaches have been saying that you need to have customer questionnaires for diagnostic purposes because if you want to infuriate a technician you hand them a ticket that says check smell, you know, check noise or whatever. I mean there's a reason that they all want to stab their service advisor occasionally. And so questionnaires were created and passed around and very rarely used effectively. You can integrate that questionnaire into the detect auto tool so that if the service advisor just types in customer states noise it's going to ask you all the questions you need to ask and document the customer for the technician's benefit. So that's one of those processes that I know we should have had for years that we've never properly integrated is now part of the write up process and it doesn't require a separate piece of paper and you know, the customer with a pen and a clipboard filling out like they're sitting at the doctor's office. None of that.
Mike Allen [00:14:39]:
It's all just part of the write up process. I'm starting to look outside of the automotive space to hire front counter personnel because I want people who are just love people and love solving problems and love helping and maybe they don't have the greatest automotive knowledge like you said. And that's a big. Historically that's been a problem because that's a weakness, not to know what questions to ask. Right. Hired a guy out of the H vac space recently and he's killing it. And he's just using that tool to figure out what questions to ask. And you know, and he's right, it's asking the question and he's writing a one or two word response to each question and then when you're done, you, you summarize and it's giving a well written, clearly thought out paragraph to the technician.
Mike Allen [00:15:20]:
Awesome tool. Yeah, yeah. That's the worth, that's worth the price of admission by itself if you've got a large front office team or across multiple stores, in my opinion.
Josh Oberlander [00:15:30]:
We try and make it, we try to make all of our tools something behind our head. Every time we're making a tool is just how simple can we make this? And so that's why we think it's super powerful. About, you know, our extension, we integrate directly into your shop management software. So all those, all these features work. When you click add concern inside of your shop manage shop management software, it automatically pops up. You don't have to go find this file or go to another website. It's part of your natural process inside of your shop management software.
Mike Allen [00:16:06]:
Yeah. All right, what are the other features?
Josh Oberlander [00:16:11]:
Yeah. So the third tool we have, we call it profitability analysis. It really follows a key metric, GP per hour, you know, build hour. And we follow it per job because we think it's crucial on the individual job to be following. Maybe not as, you know, important when you're looking at month to month, but as in terms of your service advisor making profit on that particular job. In ro, it's very easy for you to set goals. So basically what the tool does is you set goals as a shop owner and then it is calculating whether the ticket is meeting that goal or not and on each job as well. So basically it flags how your team is doing, either red, yellow, green or purple.
Josh Oberlander [00:17:01]:
And it's just a very quick awareness tool, like, hey, I'm purple on this job. I'm doing really good. I'm crushing it. It's holding up the entire ticket. But the ROS may be only in the yellow. So, you know, like, I don't really, I can't really negotiate even though that job's doing really well. Or, hey, I got three greens and one red, but my ticket's losing money. How is this happening? So it just, it's very good awareness tool to keep your team on track with your goals.
Mike Allen [00:17:29]:
And you said you brought that up. And then I immediately pulled up the work in progress screen at one of the shops to see how they're doing because I know that it's. They've just closed and it's. We're recording this on July 3rd, and so it's effectively the last day of the week for us. And so I'm waiting to see the tickets that are left to bill out. How, how are we looking? I'm just, you know, you just scroll real quick and look for the colors. So it's pretty cool.
Josh Oberlander [00:17:53]:
We definitely want to make that easier for a manager to quick, high level check all of them. That's kind of like a next step that we have a focus on right now. You have to look into each individual job and it's very easy to tell once you're in there, but it's harder to audit how you did for the week. And so that is something we are keeping an eye on. Want to fix.
Mike Allen [00:18:14]:
Awesome. What else?
Josh Oberlander [00:18:18]:
The last tool we just launched, this one, it's been in beta for the past like month and a half, two months, something like that. This one we're super excited about because we can finally help the technicians a little bit more. And what it does is it helps them write up their findings on their DVI inspection better or helps the service advisor go back and clean them up. So basically you have, you know, your front brakes, you mark on your, on your inspection that they're red and they're at 3 millimeter. And maybe that's all they put in and they write 3 millimeter replace. What this tool does is it analyzes that row. It sees that, hey, you marked it red. Or in the break section, they marked it 3 millimeter.
Josh Oberlander [00:19:02]:
And it will take that information and write a better story that makes it more professional. Clean grammar, clean spelling, and can give a better reason why the customer should buy that service in the finding.
Mike Allen [00:19:17]:
All right, so I was unaware of this. That's awesome. And I just, I just logged. I told you, I just logged into the shop. I just pulled up. If you've been listening, you know that I've got a crappy Miata that I'm fixing up for Brian Pollock because he loves Miatas. And I'm opening the inspection. Okay, let's see.
Mike Allen [00:19:40]:
It says, camshaft caps are leaking oil, one valve cover. So you guys integrate with shopware and TechMetric, right?
Josh Oberlander [00:19:50]:
Those are the two.
John [00:19:50]:
Correct.
Mike Allen [00:19:51]:
And that's the bulk of the shops that are trying these days. So how will I then use your tool from within? Do I do it from within the DVI inspection or do I do it in the estimate screen? Where do I do that?
Josh Oberlander [00:20:06]:
So while you're on the inspection screen, just you should have Detect Auto. There's a little probably blue button on the right side of your screen. If you have that open and you click into the line item, it should say Inspection Finding Writer as a button in the top right of Detect Auto on the side panel.
Mike Allen [00:20:28]:
That's awesome.
Josh Oberlander [00:20:30]:
And what it will do is then take that information, incorporate it, rewrite it, and then you can use the chat there on the side to be like, hey, hey, this looks good. Or like, hey, make this shorter. Or add this detail. And you just have to do little fixes to it and it'll rewrite it. Or you can say like, hey, change this to Spanish or make this all cat. You can do whatever you want over.
Mike Allen [00:20:49]:
There, and I can go through and complete the dvi and if I have a foreign language customer, I can just say change all this to Tagalog or whatever.
John [00:21:00]:
We haven't tried Tagalog, but I do think it works pretty well in Spanish.
Josh Oberlander [00:21:05]:
I've done rushing a couple times. I don't know what it's saying, but it. It. It comes back with something.
Mike Allen [00:21:10]:
So it says, need more vodka. Well, that's awesome, guys. I'm excited about that Rack Attack Crew at Carfix. Hook it up. Let's check out that tool. Make it work, man. That's just one more way to. To we.
Mike Allen [00:21:25]:
We talk about. And this is not our idea. We got this from the folks down in Houston, Adams Automotive. But a level 10 presentation, we can have the best technicians, the best warranty, using great quality parts. You know, we can have really good customer service. We can have free loaner cars. We can have an amazing facility. But if the quality of the inspection report that we send to the customer is shitty, then we're shitty shop.
Mike Allen [00:21:48]:
Right? And so everything's got to be level 10. And we need level 10 presentations to maintain that level. So it's part of the process of getting there. I think that's pretty great. So thank you for that. Yeah, of course. Now, I have some questions that are tangentially related to the tools that you're building, but they're more just gossipy for me. So I hope you'll bear with me.
Mike Allen [00:22:16]:
So I go to a lot of trade shows as an attendee. You guys are slogging through all of the trade shows now as vendors and I imagine that it has to be a slog for you guys because it's the same dude at the booth across the hallway from you that it has been for the last three months. Right. Or the same group of them. And like there's a core group of people that move around to all the trade shows and then there's regional folks that come to all of them. Right. And then there's like Apex where everybody's there. I know plenty of funny stories about shenanigans and stupid that happens at these shows.
Mike Allen [00:22:54]:
From the attendees perspective, I want to know where is the craziest party among the vendors? Because you guys got to throw down because you all know each other well.
John [00:23:07]:
I'll say this and it's going to make me look so lame after those days, I'm so freaking tired. I just go home and pass out. It's exhausting when you're up just kind of talking about what you're doing all day every day and you're, you're really excited just to show everybody what you got going on. I mean it's exhausting. I will say I think the worst thing Josh and I got up to before an event. So we, we had our buddies wedding like the day after. We had like a big trade show event and we stayed, I think we were out until like 2 or 3am and then we had to get up at 5am to drive four hours down from Fargo to Minneapolis and everyone's passed out in the back of my car. I'm barely alive.
John [00:24:01]:
I'm doing the drive. And we had to golf. We golfed 18 holes. Like it was one of the worst days of my life. I was like 45 minutes late to his rehearsal dinner. I felt so bad. Just a disaster.
Mike Allen [00:24:15]:
Well, I know that there have been some vendor sponsored events at these trade shows that have gotten police called for noise complaints and for shenanigans. So I fully expect at ASTA Expo this year for you guys to throw a banger at the hotel and, and just like make waves. So I'm gonna need, we're starting to.
Josh Oberlander [00:24:38]:
Get to that point. I would say, I would say for a while here we were kind of the, the small, small booth on campus. So we were trying to like sneak into everybody else'. They're like, hey, we're going to, you know, topgolf or something, and we're like, sneaking in the back door. But now I would say it's time. Maybe we'll start. Maybe we'll start hosting some events because it could be pretty fun.
Mike Allen [00:24:57]:
You know what we need to do is we need to do a podcast party with Brian and I and all of our sponsors.
John [00:25:05]:
There you go. We're already preemptively in for that, and.
Mike Allen [00:25:09]:
We can just throw down. And I'll take all the credit for all the hard work that you guys put into it. It'll be great for one of us.
John [00:25:15]:
Perfect.
Mike Allen [00:25:20]:
So are you both going to be able to make it to the Expo this year?
John [00:25:24]:
Yeah, I think we'll both be there. We might even get. We just hired our first account executive, Evan, too, so we're probably going to get him out there. So be the three of us.
Mike Allen [00:25:32]:
Did I meet. Did I meet Evan at Tools?
Josh Oberlander [00:25:35]:
You did, yes. He was there with me.
Mike Allen [00:25:37]:
That.
Josh Oberlander [00:25:37]:
That was week one for him, so I just threw him right into the fire.
Mike Allen [00:25:40]:
Well, and he's made it this far, so he survived the first month and a half or whatever. So. Yep. Yep. I'll tell you what, Tools was a fun time. I've. I haven't been up to Amish country in a little while, and it's a different kind of vibe than, like, Vegas or Raleigh.
Josh Oberlander [00:25:57]:
So I was pleasantly surprised. Like, I. I was, like, driving out into the middle of the country, like, John had. We had kind of booked this, and I was like, where am. Where am I going? And then we got there. Conference was great. It was at that big hotel. There was plenty of people there, obviously.
Josh Oberlander [00:26:14]:
You guys wearing those goofy freaking suits. Yeah. Hard to miss you guys. But, yeah, if you guys wanna.
Mike Allen [00:26:20]:
If you guys want to step up your game and come with some ridiculous sport coats and suits, you certainly can. I'm pretty upset that I did not win. I feel like I finished a comfortable second Tools but bringing my A game for the Expo. I've got my disco ball shoes. There's gonna be some pleather pants involved. Maybe, maybe not.
John [00:26:40]:
Oh, wow. All right.
Mike Allen [00:26:42]:
So, you know, there's a. I mean, you don't have to. It's just. The cool kids do.
Josh Oberlander [00:26:47]:
I might force John. That would get him so far out of his comfort zone that it would be fun for me to watch.
John [00:26:55]:
God, I don't even know what to say to that.
Mike Allen [00:26:58]:
Well, I mean, he already gave the very polite and proper political answer to where are the ragers? After the Expo. Because he's freshly married. For all we know, his bride is on the other side of the room, just out of camera range, listening in, you know, making sure that you behave.
John [00:27:12]:
She did actually just get home, so that is true.
Mike Allen [00:27:19]:
Well, congratulations on being a newlywed. That's exciting.
John [00:27:23]:
Thank you. Thank you.
Mike Allen [00:27:24]:
Condolences to her for your travel schedule.
John [00:27:27]:
Yeah. And for having to marry me as well, but that's a different story.
Mike Allen [00:27:32]:
Wow. We all marry above our weight class, that's for sure. Indeed. So now I've seen Josh at more events than I've seen you, John does Josh, do you travel more or you have a little more flexibility in that capacity, or is it just the luck of the draw for me? Well, well, you gotta.
Josh Oberlander [00:27:52]:
I'm the single dude of the group, you know, and I deal with the sales side, so I. I'm definitely at most of the events, but John's been at plenty. Like, it's been a grind fest for both of us over the past couple of years. I think we're. Maybe I'm just lucky enough to. To be the one to see it at those events, but it's been a lot of both of us. But also having a free schedule and not matter. Like, I'm in Denver right now.
Josh Oberlander [00:28:16]:
I'm not even at home, just kind of always traveling. It makes it easy when you're single, so.
Mike Allen [00:28:21]:
Fair enough. Fair enough. So you guys know that part of the shtick of my show is talking about train wrecks at the shops. And you guys obviously don't have shops, but you visit shops like Josh, you've been visiting shops today, right? Yep. I want to hear. I want to hear something. Something that would be informative, educational, and maybe a little bit mocking worthy, and tell us about something that, that you've learned from or that you've seen a shop owner learn from recently. If you.
Mike Allen [00:28:53]:
If you can soon.
Josh Oberlander [00:28:57]:
Let me think on this, John. If you got something, go ahead. So I'm thinking from the shop owner's perspective here on how to better their shop.
Mike Allen [00:29:07]:
Well, clearly the answer is switch to techmetric, use dissect auto and hub shop solutions. And if you need a coach, go for Elite. Right. That's clearly the way that you should go about it.
John [00:29:25]:
I'm trying to think because I know back before we were doing this whole AI automation system, the product we did in between the fan and this was a camera system where we would install cameras in shops, where we tap into existing cameras and then we kind of analyze how work got done in the shop and understand who was Good at what type of job and work on adjusting workflows and things like that. And it did not really go anywhere. I think we got into, like, 30 different locations with it, but that's some.
Mike Allen [00:30:02]:
Big Brother shit right there, man.
John [00:30:04]:
No, it was. It absolutely was.
Mike Allen [00:30:06]:
And I think that I bet technicians hated it.
John [00:30:10]:
Well, I was just gonna say we. It was kind of. Kind of related to your question, but when we got up, we. We did an install up in Edmonton was Alberta, I think, right, Josh? And. And they. I mean, I don't. I don't know what. What you can say or can't say on this podcast here, but they were saying some of the most disrespectful things to us when we were in that.
John [00:30:36]:
In that store. And then the other one that was great, too, is when we were in the. Our probably our first customer in Denver, actually, the shop Josh is visiting right now, they were looking at us climbing up on the ladders, and they were going like, Mike Wazowski, always watching the whole time we were up there. And it's just. It's kind of brutal. But. But I will say, though, you got to see a lot about, like, what people were really good at and what they weren't good at. One of the things that people frequently struggled with was dispatching and getting work, like, fairly assigned to technicians.
John [00:31:11]:
Like, I. We saw so many times how it would just be unconsciously or consciously, certain techs just got the better jobs, and it caused a lot of problems. I mean, Josh, I know we talk about this all the time with, like, new things we want to build on the dispatching front, too, but, man, there were just so many issues where unconsciously.
Mike Allen [00:31:33]:
Recognize that and analyze it and report that.
John [00:31:36]:
Yeah. So, like, the early stages of it, we were actually looking at, like, who was getting the easy jobs, who was and who was best at what type of job. So we could ultimately figure out, like, who should be. Who should get this electrical job, or if there's something related to, like. Like maintenance jobs or certain subsets of maintenance, if you're doing fluid exchanges or whatnot. We were trying to map all that out to see who was good at what, and then what should the optimal way to do these jobs be so.
Mike Allen [00:32:04]:
We can create an AI dispatcher, then.
John [00:32:06]:
Yeah, exactly.
Mike Allen [00:32:08]:
That's badass.
John [00:32:10]:
It was because, I mean, one of.
Mike Allen [00:32:11]:
The biggest complaints that you get from technicians when I interview a fair number of technicians is dispatch is done unfairly, or there's favorite. The people play favorites, or they feed this guy tickets and they, you know, or whatever it might be if you had the analytics and the data to back it up, that would be pretty slick, man.
Josh Oberlander [00:32:30]:
It was an intense problem to solve though, that it was not easy. Those job efficiency numbers on like how long each technician was spending on each job. Like, is that the right technician? What you know is are you getting pulling the right vehicle like it was. I mean, thank God we aren't doing that anymore. That was one, a hard product. But two, I felt so bad going into some of these shops with that, you know, big brother mentality. You're just like, these guys hate us. So thank, thank you, John, for thinking of all these ideas we have and Nate.
Josh Oberlander [00:33:03]:
But it is, thank you for what we're doing now. I would say one thing I noticed was communication in a shop is something we, we're trying to improve, but also like you just, everybody's trying to improve it. Like, I don't know if there's like a great answer for it. I've seen, you know, slack, I've seen you walking up in front to the back. I've seen walkie talkies. It seems like there's always like somebody's trying to figure out, you know, the best way for their situation. In one dealership we were in, they had a huge multi speaker intercom system that would just yell at the technicians like, hey, your customer's here at the front. And everybody would stop to listen.
Josh Oberlander [00:33:46]:
Every then the one technician would always have to stop and go to the front. I was like, this is the worst system I have ever seen in my life.
Mike Allen [00:33:54]:
And totally the system my dad had in his eighteen bay shop when I was growing up. You pick up the phone and hit line five and go. And then everybody would stop and listen. And then you'd call who you're calling or you know, John, line four or whatever it might be, right? And it was absolutely a distraction and everybody would stop what they were doing to be. Because the speakers were shitty and it was a loud environment. You'd have to, you have to squint to hear. You know how you have to squint sometimes to be able to hear something. But anyway, I, yeah, that's the worst.
Mike Allen [00:34:25]:
We're trying to, we try to use slack to varying degrees of effectiveness. Some people are really effective at responding and monitoring and other people will ignore it. Um, so I mean, it was, I.
Josh Oberlander [00:34:37]:
I, I was in a shop today, like I was saying, and we were talking about communication and they're walking back and forth a lot of times. But I was asking this older, older guy who's been, you know, a tech for 20 something years. And he's like, I don't look at my phone.
Mike Allen [00:34:51]:
I don't.
Josh Oberlander [00:34:51]:
I don't. I don't. When I'm working on a car he's. He's hands on and was. He's like, if you message, you message me. I'm not. I'm not replying. And I was like, well, this wouldn't work then for that situation.
Josh Oberlander [00:35:01]:
You have some. Something would have to change here.
Mike Allen [00:35:06]:
I was at Dick's Sporting Goods the other day, and every associate has an earpiece in and a walkie talkie on their hip and they can talk back and forth. And I thought, well, that would be cool. And, you know, that be clear. But the problem with that is 15 dudes spread across the shop. They're going to be Chatty Cathy and talking to each other back, and it's going to become a distraction to the point that people are going to pull your pieces out and then not hear when they're actually needed. I don't know. A solution. You need to work that into the next iteration.
Mike Allen [00:35:37]:
The next tool is the flawless, perfect omnichannel communication tool.
John [00:35:46]:
Don't spill the beans yet. Might be coming sooner than you think. Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:35:51]:
Awesome.
Josh Oberlander [00:35:52]:
Cool.
Mike Allen [00:35:53]:
Guys, I. I really appreciate you hanging out and spending time with us. I like the idea of, of a Confessions party at the ASTA Expo. Gotta find the. The place and time. But there's tons of cool spaces within a block or two of that because it's right in downtown Raleigh. So it's very walkable to lots of good restaurants and bars and entertainment complexes. So maybe we can work something out that'll be fun.
John [00:36:19]:
You can preemptively count us as a partial sponsor of that event. I'm down for that. That sounds like a good time.
Mike Allen [00:36:25]:
I support this.
John [00:36:27]:
Excellent.
Mike Allen [00:36:28]:
Thanks, guys. I appreciate you coming on. Yeah, awesome.
Josh Oberlander [00:36:31]:
It was great, Mike.
Mike Allen [00:36:32]:
Thank you. Thanks for listening to Confessions of a Shop Owner, where we lay it all out. The good, the bad, and sometimes the super messed up. I'm your host, Mike Allen, here to remind you that even the pros screw it up sometimes. So why not laugh a little bit, learn a little bit, and maybe have another drink? You got a confession of your own or a topic you'd like me to cover? Or do you just want to let me know what an idiot I am? Email Mike confessions of a shopowner.com or call and leave a message. The number 704-confess. That's 704-266-confession 3377. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to, like, subscribe or follow.
Mike Allen [00:37:07]:
Join us on this crazy journey that is shop ownership. I'll see you on the next episode. Bra.
Josh Oberlander [00:37:29]:
You know I said Jess. You know I said Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.