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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.
[Matt Lofton] (0:00 - 0:24)
There's a lot of friction between shop owners and technicians right now. There's a lot of validity there and some of the concerns that they have because of the way things have been for years and the fact that people have taken things that could be good business practice if it's done the right way and done it the wrong way. There's nothing inherently wrong with flat rate unless you do it wrong.
There's nothing inherently wrong with bargaining on time unless you do it wrong. However, it's done wrong a lot.
[Intro] (0:26 - 0:55)
The following program features a bunch of doofuses talking about the automotive aftermarket. The stuff we, or our guests may say, do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of our peers, our sponsors, or any other associations we may have. There may be some spicy language in this show, so if you get your feelings hurt easily, you should probably just move along.
So without further ado, here's your host, Mike Allen, with Confessions of a Shop Owner, presented by Techmetric.
[Mike Allen] (0:56 - 1:24)
So, here we are. Here we are. ASTA 2026.
Greatest expo in the world. The greatest automotive service and tire alliance expo in the world. But we're on the tail end of day two.
They're about to have dinner out on the trade show floor for all the owners, so it's probably going to get really loud in here shortly. So hopefully Braxton can work out the gain in the ambient noise.
[Matt Lofton] (1:25 - 1:28)
Are you trying to say that shop owners are going to be a rowdy, ruckus crowd?
[Mike Allen] (1:30 - 2:16)
No, more just noisy. Full hot air, you know, really. Yelling things like, free Diag for everybody.
Free Diag for everyone. I am pretty upset that I didn't get a free Diag t-shirt at check-in. So I was at the shop because all the stuff for the hospitality suite was upstairs on the second floor of the shop, and so we were putting it all in a box truck to bring it here to get the hospitality suite set up.
And my phone's sort of blowing up. I got one of your t-shirts. I was like, what the fuck are you talking about, one of my t-shirts?
Oh my god, these t-shirts are amazing. What are you talking about? And I was like, because we have a swag store, we have some t-shirts, but nobody's ordered any, right?
Because, well. And I started getting pictures. And I was like, holy shit, that is amazing.
[Matt Lofton] (2:16 - 2:17)
They're ordering these things, aren't they?
[Mike Allen] (2:18 - 3:08)
That is an amazing t-shirt. So for those of you who don't know what it is, it's me looking like a crazy conspiracy theorist with like a cigarette in my hand pointing at my wall. My wall behind me is like the classic conspiracy theorist map with the pins and the strings strung between them and everything else.
This is free Diag and big letters on the wall. And evidently, it's the most sought after item at the expo this year. So how many of those t-shirts did you buy, Matt?
I didn't have to buy them. You didn't have to buy them? No.
There were more people involved? I've been trying for two days to figure out who the masterminds behind this are and everybody is denying and it's driving me crazy. So anyway.
[Matt Lofton] (3:08 - 3:19)
See, my vote was the... Remember the movie A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe? Yes.
When he's at the whiteboard and he's got all these numbers on there? That was going to be my vote for the picture.
[Mike Allen] (3:24 - 3:32)
Well, it just tells me that I'm making an impact in the industry that there's a t-shirt with me being a crazy, cracked up conspiracy theorist.
[Matt Lofton] (3:32 - 3:35)
Yeah, you made it. You're like Forrest Gump with the smiley face.
[Mike Allen] (3:35 - 4:13)
Yes, exactly. Have a nice day. But anyway, we are here to talk about Carfix.
And our last coaching call got a lot of snarky comments because you pointed out that we had had 30 zero dollar tickets or some obscene number of zero dollar tickets in the time frame that we were looking at. And we were operating at kind of capacity for staff anyway. So why are we doing free diag and giving shit away when we're at capacity?
Do you think it's that fire detector, smoke detector or?
[Matt Lofton] (4:15 - 4:18)
I'm really hoping that's a forklift.
[Mike Allen] (4:18 - 4:23)
Backing up maybe? Well, we'll see. If the place burns down, it's going to be great content.
[Matt Lofton] (4:23 - 4:25)
I don't see anybody running upstairs yet.
[Mike Allen] (4:25 - 6:01)
So I think we're safe. Got a lot of commentary about, oh my god, hell's frozen over. Mike's charging for diag.
Oh, Mike realized the error of his ways. It's not what I said, you sons of bitches. Look, here's the deal.
I got my cigarette out and I'm pointing my map over here like the T-shirt. I believe that free diag is a very viable customer acquisition strategy if you need more cars and more customers. If you are a specialty shop that people drive 10 miles past 100 other shops to visit, if you are booked out three weeks or if you're a one man show and you got all you can do, why would you give away anything, right?
If you are trying to grow car count, there are lots of ways you can grow car count. One of the easiest, fastest ways to grow car count is lost liters. Lost liter oil changes is the most popular and most well-known one.
But also lost liter oil changes are just a cheap oil change. And sometimes those cars don't need anything else. They don't need much else.
And the motoring public has been conditioned to think, I've got a coupon oil change. You're going to try to sell me an air filter. Say no, right?
A lost liter diagnostic procedure, the car has a problem. It needs a repair. You're going to have a much bigger ARO on a lost liter diagnostic than you will on an oil service.
It's my thinking and my justification for it. I might be crazy. I'm not wrong.
I'm right. You're wrong. It's just one way to do it.
But the conclusion that we came to is that it was time to start charging for DAG at that store.
[Matt Lofton] (6:02 - 7:55)
Well, I think the experiment is worthwhile. Yeah. Like you said, I don't have a problem with lost liters as long as there's a strategy behind it.
There's nothing unethical about doing lost liters. We've talked about this before offline and online. You're paying your technicians.
Everybody in store is getting paid. You're the only guy taking the hit when it doesn't work out. You're still providing a diagnostic service with quality equipment and a quality technician and standing behind the work and the repair if it's done.
So the only thing that's different is you're not collecting a payment for the service that you're providing because you're hoping that it leads to a profit instead of generating the profit right there. Like you said, there's several other lost liters out there across multiple industries. Obviously, everybody knows about our oil change lost liter in our industry.
Like you said, nothing wrong with those either. I think different things work in different market segments and different demographics. I think a lot of it depends on A, what type of car you're bringing in.
If you're bringing in a car that's 15 years old for a diagnostic service, that's probably also going to need a lot of other things as well. We get into the killing the car scenario. If you're in a metropolitan area where the cars tend to be newer and it happens to have a check engine light, it's probably only one thing and it's probably one of the pattern failure things that happens inside of a car in five years.
Your ability to diagnose that car quickly is going to be pretty good because it's going to be one of the pattern failure situations and you're not going to have 5, 10 other tech fines that go along with it with safety and reliability concerns. Therefore, like I said, you can drive a good ARO. You're only going to be addressing the immediate problem that's there.
You can get to it pretty quick. It's usually a pretty easy diag. My concern is based off what you have in demographics for your area.
[Mike Allen] (7:56 - 8:01)
Is broke college kids with broke college kid cars getting totaled? That's exactly right.
[Matt Lofton] (8:01 - 8:42)
You're getting mom and dad's hand-me-down car for them to go off to college. It's 10, 15, 20 years old. It has all the safety reliability things that are wrong with it and now we're adding the diag in and we're getting into that conversation of is this car worth fixing?
We're killing a bunch of cars before we get an opportunity to sell anything to them. Yeah. That was the more in-depth reason of why we talked about making that strategy change.
You mentioned that car count's not really a problem. If car count's not a problem, why are we trying to solve a problem for something that we don't have with a loss leader in that way? I know we made the change.
[Mike Allen] (8:44 - 10:22)
I know it's a small sample size, but let's talk about- We made the change the day we recorded the last episode. I called immediately. We talked about it.
We said, okay, let's do it and we did it the next day. What we found in that time frame and we just looked at the period immediately before the change and the period since. It was four weeks before and four weeks since.
Interestingly, obviously, as expected, the number of zero dollar tickets has gone down significantly. I think it was 30 in the four weeks before and it was seven or something since. The seven, I think two of them were people who were like, but you said you don't charge for DIAG, right?
The other ones were unrelated to diagnostic needs. There were no more free DIAGs at that store to speak of. Obviously, gross profit went up.
Obviously, effective labor rate went up. Car count went down a little bit as expected because we had some people call in and we told them that it was going to cost money to look at the vehicle and they chose not to come in. Those are all very much expected, but interestingly to me, at least, average repair order did not change significantly.
With car count down a little bit, average repair order stays the same, revenue is down a little bit. Sure. But gross profit and effective labor rate, all that is up so that the amount of money falling to the bottom line is probably about the same.
[Matt Lofton] (10:22 - 10:23)
Probably about the same, right.
[Mike Allen] (10:23 - 10:40)
Yeah. And so same net profit, fewer cars is a better outcome in theory, but it's also fewer hours to the technicians. So that's a consideration to have because those technicians were getting paid for those zero tickets, right?
[Matt Lofton] (10:40 - 10:40)
Yeah.
[Mike Allen] (10:41 - 10:49)
So that's a consideration for them, but I was surprised that the average repair order did not go up.
[Matt Lofton] (10:50 - 11:16)
So before we get into average repair order, let's talk about the volume side of it first. So do we know, because volume in-store, there's a lot of other things upstream that have to happen before volume in-store happens. So do we know if phone call volume was the same?
I mean, if we're plus or minus five or 10 calls, then that's the same phone call volume, but if we lost...
[Mike Allen] (11:16 - 12:07)
I can pull the statistics from our VoIP system if I need to, but we don't want to sit here and watch me decouple our computer for five minutes. I would say that it was not hugely variant. Students were in town for both of those four-week periods.
Actually, the first four-week period before we stopped was when they came back to school. So for the first portion of that, they were out of school. And this store is on a college campus, and so the seasonality is not tied to the weather or summer or anything else.
It's tied to when the kids are on campus or not. And so at the beginning of that period, the kids were off campus, and then they were on campus, and then they've been on campus for the entire time since we made the change. So I would venture that call volume has been up comparatively because of that.
[Matt Lofton] (12:09 - 12:52)
So how are we handling that conversation? And I know one of the other concerns, and there was a lot of listeners that typed in in the comments section on Facebook and on YouTube about having uniformity across the three different stores that you have and the comments that we made about there being different businesses that offer different promotions depending on geographical area, which is a valid concern, and it's one that you brought up.
My question to you is how much... Raleigh's a small, big town, right? I know geographically there's not a big mileage range between your stores, but it's a world lifetime...
[Mike Allen] (12:52 - 12:57)
Yeah, it's 1.3 miles variance between those two stores, and there's almost no database overlap.
[Matt Lofton] (12:57 - 13:10)
Yeah, and so I know that they could drive 1.3 miles down the road and get free diet, and that's an option, but the reality is that 1.3 miles might be 20, 30 minutes of extra drive time.
[Mike Allen] (13:10 - 13:21)
Well, and in four weeks, we didn't have a single person say, well, I'll just go to the other store. Right. And they don't know that the other store does that.
Right. Isn't that calling multiple car fixes? That's right.
[Matt Lofton] (13:21 - 13:43)
So they're calling it because it's convenient, because it's right there on campus. So that's why I wasn't terribly concerned about that side of things. But the process of how we handle the calls from store to store is somewhat of a concern because they're in a habit of being able to say, hey, we're the store that doesn't offer, you know, that's our home of free diet, welcome to Carfix, right?
[Mike Allen] (13:45 - 13:46)
They do not brag about that on the side.
[Matt Lofton] (13:48 - 14:01)
Thanks for calling Carfix, home of free diet. So how are they having that conversation about, are we talking about diagnostic fees over the phone? Where do you feel like we're missing the opportunity to get that customer in?
Because they're still calling, apparently.
[Mike Allen] (14:02 - 14:32)
So we've got an internal conversation happening in the business because I'm concerned that if you don't mention the diagnostic fee on the call, that it could have the flavor of a bait and switch. And some of my guys are like, if they ask what the diagnostic fee is, yeah, we'll tell them. But if they don't ask, the expectation, I mean, like if they've been coming to us repeatedly and they've been in 10 times for DIAG, well, we need to tell them that there's a fee because that's a new policy to them.
[Matt Lofton] (14:33 - 14:33)
Right.
[Mike Allen] (14:33 - 14:38)
But if it's a first-time customer, there's an assumption that there's going to be a fee for inspecting the vehicle.
[Matt Lofton] (14:38 - 15:21)
So the other thing is, for your customers that have been coming in and they're used to that, why change the experience, right? They're already coming in, they're used to it. They're a repeat customer.
That's a benefit of being a repeat customer. They're already a buyer. They're already a buyer.
I'm fine with it. Like I said, as long as everything either is for a profit or leads to a profit, what we're trying to eliminate is the tickets that have very little chance of ever leading to a profit. Right.
And so if you have somebody that has good buying habits, they're used to the plan. And I know we're going to get a lot of talk about, oh, you're making everything different between this customer and that customer. But I mean, the bottom line is there's a lot of business models out there in different industries that they're going to cater the experience to the customer that's there.
[Mike Allen] (15:22 - 15:32)
You don't think Amazon has a buyer profile for my habits and special pricing? Yeah, 100%. I mean, and Delta and everybody else we shop with?
I mean, yeah.
[Matt Lofton] (15:32 - 15:38)
I mean, I'm a SkyMiles member and my ticket says zone six, but I board one through four.
[Mike Allen] (15:39 - 15:40)
Right?
[Matt Lofton] (15:40 - 15:43)
I'm not first class, but I'm, you know, my priority.
[Mike Allen] (15:43 - 15:45)
You're first class to me, Matt. I appreciate that, Mike.
[Matt Lofton] (15:47 - 16:43)
That means a lot. You touched me right there in my heart. But, you know, I mean, so I mean, there's all sorts of different things to say, OK, this is a preferred customer because of X, Y, Z, whatever thing that they opted into.
And so, I mean, I understand there might be some difficulty in the beginning internally in the team of who do we pick and choose to give this to, but I just don't want to discount the thing and say, well, it has to all be this way or it has to all be that way. Right? The second part of that is the real question is on the phone, how many times does a customer call in and they have an issue with their vehicle and they tell you they need a diagnostic service for X, Y, and Z and you get it in and the technician comes in and he's like, oh, yeah, just this.
Right? Or it's something completely different than what we were originally diagnosed. Right?
[Mike Allen] (16:43 - 16:43)
Yeah.
[Matt Lofton] (16:44 - 17:19)
So my question is, why are we going into giving a diagnostic quote over the phone for something that I have no earthy idea needs to be diagnosed at this point in time? I understand the check engine lights on. Right.
But if the check engine lights on and we scan it and it's an EVAP code and we walk over there and the gas cap's hanging out, I know that's an extreme example, but one plus one is going to equal two there. And we're going to say, we can't diagnose this until we tighten the gas cap and clear the code and you drive the vehicle.
[Mike Allen] (17:21 - 17:30)
So you've won a customer for life, potentially, whereas if they never came to you because you told them it was going to be $180 over the phone, take a look at it.
[Matt Lofton] (17:30 - 17:56)
And so do I know that a large percentage of the time it's going to lead to some sort of testing fee and some sort of diagnostic process that needs to be done to diagnose the vehicle correctly? Absolutely. But I also know that no matter how small the percentage is, when we look at that percentage over time, that small percentage adds up to a lot of instances that we don't necessarily need to diagnose the vehicle because there is some large apparent problem.
[Mike Allen] (17:56 - 17:58)
Because it got towed in and it was out of gas.
[Matt Lofton] (17:59 - 18:15)
It got towed in and it was out of gas. We pop the hood and the P0301, there's a wire tube across the control wire for the pull number one. I mean, I'm not saying that's going to be the norm, but we don't know until we get it in and perform that initial assessment.
[Mike Allen] (18:15 - 18:24)
So are you a proponent for, you know, to cheapen it, the quick look see, like the 10 minute no wrench or whatever you want to call it?
[Matt Lofton] (18:25 - 18:50)
So I'm a proponent of the complimentary consultation to see what the vehicle needs. And then I can give you an accurate written estimate to move forward from there. All right.
So we can kind of blend the two strategies that you've had before. What got them in the door was the opportunity that you may be able to diagnose their car for free. Right.
But we've talked offline before. There were times that that car coming in that you were giving free DIAG to, it did lead to a DIAG charge.
[Mike Allen] (18:51 - 18:51)
Yeah, for sure.
[Matt Lofton] (18:52 - 18:55)
Because it wasn't something that could be found inside of an hour.
[Mike Allen] (18:56 - 18:57)
Yeah, or they got a half dozen different problems.
[Matt Lofton] (18:58 - 19:32)
You know, that you code scan it and it's got 14 different codes that aren't related to each other. And you're calling the customer and you're getting an appropriate charge to run down all three of those issues or five of those issues, whatever it may be. So, I mean, there's no difference in the concept there.
You know, we're just shortening the loop. And instead of it being a one hour that we're giving away for free, we're giving that 15 minutes away or 10 minutes or whatever it is. And I'm less concerned about the car than I am the customer and making sure that I can have that conversation in person versus having it over the phone.
[Mike Allen] (19:33 - 19:47)
Getting them across the counter from you or you're standing next to them in the parking lot with their car or whatever it might be, obviously you're going to have a much higher success rate in converting them to be a customer of your business than if it's over the phone, right?
[Matt Lofton] (19:48 - 20:07)
And it's not a bait and switch because there is the possibility that it's going to be something that doesn't need to be diagnosed, right? Your brake noise is either going to be your brakes are metal to metal or you have a pebble this size between the backing plate and the rotor. And I'm going to take a screwdriver and pop it out like that and you're going to be on your merry way for nothing, right?
[Mike Allen] (20:08 - 20:15)
Are you, when you're doing the complimentary consultation, is that done by the service advisor or by a technician?
[Matt Lofton] (20:15 - 22:49)
It's going to depend on the situation. I'm most of the time, I'm going to try to find the lowest common denominator because I do know that there is a high percentage of the time that it's going to be, it's going to need some sort of testing service. And my goal is to have that conversation in person so that we can sell the value on it.
It's really, really difficult to sell the value over the phone, right? I mean, because we're getting into a how much is this? Now we're in a comparative state of mind.
I'm going to pick up the phone and call three other places and I'm going to get a how much is this? I'm going to make my choice based off the comparative number of $180, $160 free, right? I'm going here, right?
So that's where I'm trying to get in. I'm trying to get them in person where we can have that conversation. So the process that we use there would be the customer brings the vehicle in.
We're going to move the car as quickly as possible. We are going to do some sort of visual inspection on the vehicle. Depending on what the concern is, we've kind of talked to our different staff members about how to perform the complimentary consultation.
If there's a check engine light, we're going to code scan it. I'm not testing anything in a code scan. I'm going to code scan.
I'm going to get a P0301. We're going to pop the hood. We're going to get some sort of visual identification underneath.
If nothing's blatantly obvious, then we're performing testing, right? And then we're going to have a conversation about, hey, you have a cylinder one misfire. There's a couple different things that that can be.
This is the testing process that we would have. And our canned job service has the testing process listed out. So the advisor can say, we're doing this, this, this, this, this, and this.
So there's tangible. It's not just we plug the computer in and the magic pixel box tells us what's wrong with it. They understand that there's a physical act and sequence of things that has to get done.
And we're going to read those lists of things off. And then the technician and his DVI report for the testing service is responsible for recording the results of those. So we're not just going down different rabbit holes.
We actually are going to check compression. And we are going to make sure that fuel trims are good. And then when we get to spark, we're going to verify the fact.
So they're getting something tangible on the back end for the testing, not just the answer. I give you the answer for free. You're paying for the steps and things that led up to us getting to that answer.
And so that's the conversation that we try to have in person. We've just been much more successful having it with them sitting across from the counter than we have over the phone.
[Mike Allen] (22:51 - 24:00)
It's a conversation we had at a, we had a company outing earlier this week, actually, Tuesday night, we closed or Tuesday. We closed all the shops down early and we went and we had two, two and a half hours off-site talking about policies and procedures and whatnot. And then we all went out and had fun together afterwards and had dinner.
But one of the conversations was, when do we go back to the well for additional diagnostic time? Right, because we give away the first hour. Yep.
And, you know, what is, you know, what needs an additional hour? What needs an additional three hours? What needs an open checkbook, right?
What needs to be documented? Say, here's what we've done, A, B, and C. Here are the results that we got on these tests and here's what we've learned with that.
And here are the next tests that we need to do to justify the additional cost, right? Do you have a standard in your business about, hey, we sold an hour. And they come back and say, you know, part of the conversation was, you can't say it's an electrical problem, I need three hours.
Three hours to do what?
[Matt Lofton] (24:02 - 25:56)
So, yes and no. There's written policy and, you know, there's written policy that's on paper of how it should be. And then there's actual, you know, reality of how it plays out.
Do we have written policy that says XYZ equals this? From a time standpoint, we do. Does it work out that way every single time?
And I would, you know, no. Does it work out that way the majority of time? Probably not.
Because it's easier to say, you know, the base, the canned one hour of testing, one hour of testing, one hour of testing. When I'm in, let's just say I'm in the store and I'm trying to do it myself the way that the policy is supposed to be. I'm more of a believer in canned services for testing, not a menu service for testing.
Meaning that I know what the typical time is going to take for evap. We know what the typical time is going to take for drivability. We know what the typical time is going to take for transmission.
We know ACs, all that because it's a different amount, you know. And then we can always start there. And if it's something super simple, because evap is either 10 minutes or two hours, right?
I mean, there's just not a lot of in between there. I mean, it's either like purge valves not clicking at all. We do a quick check.
Yep, definitely purge valve. It's not, you know, it's not operational. We check wiring to it.
It's bad, right? Or we're hunting down some, you know, microscopic leak in the gas tank and it's leaking through the pores of the plastic. And it takes, you know, CO2 foam, you know, foam indicators and all sorts of weird stuff to find these kinds of things, right?
So I want to go ahead and know that I'm going to protect ourselves on the high end, knowing that if we find it in the first 10 minutes, I can always come down on that and be the bearer of good news instead of bad news.
[Mike Allen] (25:57 - 26:42)
So one of the conversations that grew out of that very same discussion was if it's a problem and we get approval for an additional $500 of testing and inspection, and the technician finds the answer in 30 minutes, but they find it in 30 minutes because they've been doing this for 20 years and they know how to, they've invested in the tooling to, or they've got enough reps to find it in 20 minutes.
When the younger technician or less experienced technician on the other side of the shop would have taken four hours to find that. Is it still worth the $500 or is it worth $100?
[Matt Lofton] (26:44 - 27:41)
And I mean, that's going to be a debatable question from now until the end of time. I mean, my conversation there is meet in the middle. I mean, you've already got that, let's just call it five hours.
I know that $500 is not going to be five hours, but let's just say that's what it equated out to, right? I'm going to go, hey, Mike, got you five. You found it in 30, it's two and a half good for you, right?
I'm still calling the customer back. It's still going to be less than what we originally talked about. Hey, Mike, I got some great news for you.
We were able to find this a little bit easier than we thought. Instead of $500, it's going to be $250. Your technician's still making out good.
And what I would say is, yes, he's getting less hours for that. And I understand that, but his efficiency rate is up and his ability, and that makes his ability to be more productive better. So he is still getting more compensated than the guy that got paid four hours that took four hours to do it.
And so because he's able to now move on to the next ticket.
[Mike Allen] (27:41 - 27:41)
Yeah.
[Matt Lofton] (27:41 - 27:53)
So he's not getting shafted, right? So his proficiency is increasing his efficiency, right? His skill set makes him more proficient.
[Mike Allen] (27:53 - 27:53)
Yeah.
[Matt Lofton] (27:53 - 27:57)
And that makes him more efficient. And as he's more efficient, he can be more productive.
[Mike Allen] (27:58 - 28:02)
So in that four hours, he's done this one in 30 minutes and he did two great jobs.
[Matt Lofton] (28:03 - 33:42)
And he did two great jobs. He's still going to make more than the, you know, than the Ctech who sat over there and middled around with it for four hours, right? Yeah.
Even though the Ctech got paid for the four hours. So I understand, and I think this is where, and I mean, we're not just, there's a lot of friction right now in the industry, and we're seeing it a lot on your channel and, you know, on the podcast and all that kind of stuff. I tend to encourage it a little bit.
Which I understand, but, you know, but it's still there, right? I mean, just because we're, you know, just because we're picking the scab doesn't mean that the scab doesn't exist, right? And, but there's a lot of friction between shop owners and technicians right now.
And there's a lot of validity there. And some of the concerns that they have, because of the way things have been for years, and the fact that people have taken things that could be good business practice, if it's done the right way and done it the wrong way. There's nothing inherently wrong with flat rate, unless you do it wrong.
There's nothing inherently wrong with bargaining on time, unless you do it wrong, right? However, it's done wrong a lot, right? My thing is, and, you know, we talk about this with pay plans.
There is no pay plan that's unethical or ethical. There's people that implement the pay plan ethically or unethically. And so I can take an hourly technician, and he can be just, I can't, and I can uncap his pay based off of his productivity, because I can track his productivity and make that an escalator for him to continue to get a raise.
I'm not capping his pay. So all the guys out there that say, oh, if you pay your technician's hourly or salary, you're just capping your technician's pay. Well, that's not necessarily true, as long as I care about my technician, and I'm actively paying him what he's worth, and I'm tracking what he's worth based off what he's producing, I can continue to pay him more.
And vice versa, on flat rate, I'm not an evil shop owner if I pay my technician flat rate, as long as I'm doing the things that it takes to make that pay plan work for the technician, right? So, you know, it's the same thing applies to this, which is, it's very difficult to get some of that trauma out of the technician mindset, and everything comes off as a, I'm trying to take it, you know, we're trying to take advantage of you as the employee scenario. And it, but it just, it takes a lot of conversation, it takes a lot of trust, it takes a lot of, look, I'm not trying to take advantage of you.
Let me explain, you know, let me explain this to you. And then once there's some time, once there's some time and there's trust built, you know, in those internal relationships, then it's not a problem anymore. And I was, I recently rehired a technician that had been with me for a while in the past, and he was the first master tech that I ever hired.
And he's coming back to the team, and we got to the point where we were negotiating pay, and we, you know, I threw out a pay plan. He's like, Matt, I'm just going to be honest with you. He goes, I never had a complaint with what I got paid.
He goes, if I ever had a problem, I came to you, I told you about it, you fixed it. He goes, I trust you. He's like, the bonus plan, I don't know whether it looks good or whether it doesn't look good.
He goes, we'll figure it out. He goes, I know if I'm not making what I need to make, and I tell you that, that we're going to sit down and we're going to fix it. And so we could all just get to that point, and A, as shop owners, we had the intent of being that type of owner.
And I know that not all of us are, and I get that. So that's fair. But if we could get to that point where we all had the right intention, and as an employee, you had the intention to come in and do the best job that you can do and be the best employee that you could be for the shop, knowing that if you do that, the owner's going to take care of you and do the best that he can for your pay plan.
We could get rid of a lot of the back and forth and the tension and all the things that, because at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter, right? If you're making what you want to make, and we have, you know, we've had this conversation internally on a few different things, but, you know, because a lot of my technicians are hybrid. Some of them are hourly, some of them are flat rate.
I'll pay you however you want to be paid. But one of my guys that was hybrid, we started having a conversation about, you know, getting paid to do DVIs and stuff like that, or putting in a light bulb, exterior light bulb. And I'm like, well, you get paid X amount of dollars an hour, right?
My question to you is this. If I came to you and I asked you, is $30 good to put in this light bulb? Would you say yes or no?
He's like, well, yeah. It's like, well, then what are we talking? What are we arguing about here?
It doesn't matter how we get to the $30. You know what I mean? If I paid you flat rate and it was flat rate, then I have to pay you exactly the time that it says to do it.
But if not, what difference does the time that I have on that sheet make? It's what you actually got for the time that you had in it, right? So I just, I think there's a lot of, you know, there's been a lot of muddying of the waters.
There's been a lot of hurt feelings on both sides. There's a lot of shop owners that have been taken advantage of by technicians that didn't perform. A lot of technicians have been taken advantage of by shop owners that didn't have their best interest in mind.
But I don't think, A, I know you're not one of those. You don't have that intent to take advantage of your team. Just have the conversation, you know, about what we're really trying to do in this and show them how you're not losing.
You know, again, your A tech that's got the 40 years of experience that bought all the tools that went to all the training and it's got all the experience. Yeah, he's doing it and he's only getting two and a half hours versus the guy that did it in four. But he's also going to turn six in that same time frame where this guy's only turning four.
Who's making more money?
[Mike Allen] (33:43 - 33:43)
Yeah.
[Matt Lofton] (33:43 - 33:44)
You're still making more money.
[Mike Allen] (33:44 - 33:45)
And at a higher rate.
[Matt Lofton] (33:45 - 33:46)
And at a higher rate.
[Mike Allen] (33:46 - 35:20)
Yeah, for sure. So one of the things I've been considering is the difference between hourly and salary and the legalities around salary. And every state's different for that.
So, you know, it's up to each individual to determine what the legalities are. There are some situations where in North Carolina, salary is a viable option. There's certain checkpoints that have to be met.
But what that really comes down to is when you are changing a compensation plan for an existing employee, it's sketchy. Because it takes trust and faith on both sides. Yeah, don't mess with somebody's money, right?
Yep. And in an industry where there's a lot of friction and a lot of history, right? If you come in and tell somebody you're changing their pay plan, what do they hear?
You're taking money away, right? And so let's say that there's a listener who has techs that are all flat rate and they've decided it's time to go to a hybrid or it's time to go to hourly or vice versa. They decided to go to a hybrid plan.
How do you recommend they go in and broach that subject and implement a change in pay without losing the trust and buy-in of the team?
[Matt Lofton] (35:20 - 36:03)
So I mean, number one, there's gotta be an honest conversation about why the pay plan's changing and what you're hoping to accomplish by changing the pay plan, right? So on the technician side, it's a little bit more cut and dry. Advisors or advisor pay plans get a little bit more muddied because there are commissions and spiffs.
All different kind of things in there. And so I don't, on the technician side, what are you trying to accomplish by making the change? A, I think very few times are we trying to change somebody pay because we're paying them too much money.
We're trying to change the pay, to try to change the pace, right?
[Mike Allen] (36:04 - 36:06)
Find the right motivating button.
[Matt Lofton] (36:06 - 36:22)
To try to find the right motivating button. I would say that I heard somebody say it this week and it's something that gets talked about a lot. I don't know that pay plans are as big of a motivating factor as everybody makes it out to be.
[Mike Allen] (36:23 - 36:34)
You think it's because owners and businessmen and women inherently are more attentive to money and finances because they have to be so they think that everyone is that way? 100%.
[Matt Lofton] (36:35 - 36:54)
Now, would I like it? Yes. When I was a salesperson working for my dad when I was 16 years old, I was 100% commissioned.
And I liked it. I like being in control of my paycheck. I like being able...
Is there an element of technicians out there that love flat rate? You see it all the time, right? In the comment section, it's divided.
It's not 50-50.
[Mike Allen] (36:54 - 36:56)
I wouldn't do this if I wasn't flat rate.
[Matt Lofton] (36:56 - 37:51)
100%, right? And there's gonna be those guys that are out there that wanna be like that. And I interview guys like that all the time.
But there's also the guy out there that says, I just wanna know what I'm gonna make every single day that I come in. And I wanna bust my ass for you. We had a guy that recently switched.
He came to me and asked to go to hourly, which is fine. So we sit down and we have the conversation and I show him the math and I say, hey, no problem. This is the hourly rate that you want.
You can't ever do less than this. Because if you do, we have a math problem and we have to solve the math problem, right? And it's not that you're gonna get fired the first time that you do less than this but we have to have a conversation and we definitely can't average less than this, right?
And so we had that conversation. We had one week where he didn't hit that. We came in, we had the conversation about it.
His average hours are up seven hours per week since then for the last three or four months.
[Mike Allen] (37:51 - 37:57)
Do you think it was a blip in the radar? It's like a car count problem or the advisor had an off week or he had an off week?
[Matt Lofton] (37:58 - 38:13)
I think it was more of an advisor dispatch issue. Because I mean, one of the things that and advisors do this too. They think, oh, well, he's hourly.
It doesn't matter, right? You know, it doesn't matter how he gets paid. So what difference does it make kind of deal?
But it does matter because it matters to the company.
[Mike Allen] (38:13 - 38:13)
Yeah.
[Matt Lofton] (38:14 - 38:56)
If he gets, you know, it almost matters more, you know, in that standpoint. But I think it was a dispatch issue. But we were able to sit down and talk with him and talk to the manager and, you know, get on the same, you know, get on the same page with it.
But now it's a source of pride. You know, now he comes to me and he shows me. And inside of that three months, he's only been on an hourly plan for three months.
His production's gone up so much. He's already gotten a raise. His hourly rate's already gone up.
So again, and then, so I have more issues with like advisor pay plans when we change that because there's a lot that gets factored into that. And I'm usually adjusting it because some portion of it got gained. Not in a bad way, but.
[Mike Allen] (38:56 - 39:01)
That's just human nature. If you're in a sales role and you have a really complex pay plan, you're going to figure out how to maximize the pay plan.
[Matt Lofton] (39:01 - 39:28)
So I mean, it's the cobra effect, right? You know, not familiar with the cobra effect? No.
So in India, when India was under British rule, British, they had a cobra problem, infestation. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And British government came out and started paying citizens to bring in dead cobras.
Citizens started breeding cobras. So they could have hundreds of cobras to bring in. So they could have hundreds of cobras to bring in.
So they stopped the, you know, the program.
[Mike Allen] (39:29 - 39:29)
Population explosion.
[Matt Lofton] (39:29 - 39:52)
Then they had a population explosion because they just let the cobras go, right? So we had an intent of getting rid of this problem and we tried to solve it with money, right? And the deal, it's always temporary.
You can't think of a SPIF program out there that you've had that's worked from the time that you implemented it to today. It has an immediate bump and then it goes down.
[Mike Allen] (39:52 - 39:53)
Plateaus and starts to drift.
[Matt Lofton] (39:53 - 39:54)
You know.
[Mike Allen] (39:54 - 40:16)
I'm experiencing exactly that right now with Google reviews. And I put a SPIF program out there on Google reviews and it was working amazingly well. And it's just, it's like the money hasn't gotten to be less.
Oh, it just. Yeah, I don't understand, man.
[Matt Lofton] (40:17 - 40:43)
But it's just, you're repetitive. You're thinking it's gonna change the behavior. And that's why I say pay plans inherently do not fix the problem, all right?
The pay plan was an intention getter for you to have a conversation with the team about what they should be doing, right? And then as soon as you didn't have the conversation anymore, the money didn't become important anymore. In our minds, the money should be the motivator of why they do it.
But it just doesn't work that way. It's always temporary.
[Mike Allen] (40:45 - 40:48)
So what have you found in your experience are the other motivators?
[Matt Lofton] (40:49 - 43:18)
I mean, the other motivators are gonna be pride. You know, we have to have some level of pride in the work that we do. We have to care about, you know, the product that we're putting out there.
We have to care about servicing the internal team. We have to care about servicing the external customer. And then it also has to be, I don't know that it's a motivating factor as much as it is a driving force on our end to make sure that we're constantly, you know, not disciplining, but accountable, you know, holding them accountable to the system that it's supposed to be, right?
We do this not because you get rewarded for it, but you do it because it's the right, it's the way it's done, right? So we take, I mean, everybody makes fun of me because of my sports analogies, because I'm a big sports guy. And I know there's a lot of people in our industry that aren't sports people, but I am.
But we don't give a quarterback 100% productive pay, right? But it's a production-based industry, right? But we don't pay him per completion.
That's his job. His job is to throw the ball and throw a completable pass, right? But he gets a salary.
But what happens if he doesn't produce on that contract? Yeah, he gets cut, right? So they're going to go through some accountability measures.
We're going to go back and watch film. He's going to get coached. That's what the coach is there for.
The coach is there to get the best out of the player, right? So if we have a player that's going through a slump, the coach is there to help him through that. We're going to look at film.
We're going to rep things in practice. We're going to do things that put him in a position to be successful. And if we've done everything that we can do as a coach and the player can't execute, that's 100% on the player at that point in time, right?
At that point in time, the player doesn't get the contract. You know, when it's time for renewal on the contract, what happens? He doesn't get renewed.
And then the next team that hires him doesn't hire him at the same rate that the last guy did, right? So if we just looked at that and we said, if we stop being lazy about, well, pay plans will fix everything. If we're 100% commissioner or 100% flat rate, and there's nothing wrong with those plans, absolutely.
But they don't solve the problem underlying it, right? And if I want to do a short-term initiative for Google reviews, well, we do spits on Google reviews too. I just, but I can tell you, until I start going in there and complaining about why aren't we getting any Google reviews this week, even though we had X amount of cars come in, our standard is we want X percentage for the number of cars we had coming in.
What's your standard? Do you know? We're trying to get 10 to 15% of the cars that we come in to leave a five-star review.
[Mike Allen] (43:18 - 43:21)
I want one in eight. So 12%, that's what I'm looking for. Yeah.
[Matt Lofton] (43:22 - 43:48)
So, I mean, that's, I think that's reasonable, right? And how does it happen? It's the steps that it takes.
They're not thinking about the money. They're not thinking about the $10 or the $20 when they're doing a vehicle delivery, because you have to do the things that make it a habit. And the steps are hard, right?
I mean, all those little things add up into time and effort, and it's easier to not do it. And if nobody's looking at it and holding them accountable, they'll stop doing it.
[Mike Allen] (43:49 - 44:49)
So that's one of the things that I struggle with is like, I feel like I'm adding so many mental check boxes to the process. It's like, you know, we're going to go out, we're going to do the walk around it right up. And we're going to, you know, use that opportunity to build rapport and find connection points and also check the tires and the inspection date and, you know, check for cracked windshields, that kind of stuff.
And then, you know, we have our process internally. And then at checkout, we're going to resell the work and resell the value of the warranty and revisit anything that maybe was deferred for later. And then we're going to talk to them about pre-booking the next appointment and the reminders that we're going to send them for that.
And then we're going to ask them for a review. And then we're going to walk them out into the car and pull the, you know, the car cover and the floor mat out. And it's just, I feel like I've created this process.
And I understand the why for each of those things and the reason. And I've explained it and they say they understand too.
[Matt Lofton] (44:49 - 47:09)
And they do. And I run into the same problem because we're, you know, we're heavily systemized about how I want things done. And one of the challenges that I have is number one, I'm not in store very often.
So the challenge is how do I hold them accountable? The accountability thing is not as hard because I can see it. You know, Techmetric is awesome.
And it allows us to be able to see all those things from afar. So yeah, put your Techmetric hat on there. The best.
And so, I mean, I can sit at home and I can see what's happening in the process because I know what makes this, I know what moves this number and this number and this, right? So the accountability is not necessarily a problem, but it's the after the accountability, how do we train it into a habit? And I think that's where we fall short.
I know that's where I fall short. We have the conversation, we write the SOP, we tell them about the SOP, right? And they understand it conceptually, but we haven't trained it and repped it in a non-live environment to make it a habit before they go do it, right?
And again, going back to the sports analogy or any other performer, you know, there's no choreographer out there, you know, that says, hey, this is the dance moves that I want you to do for this 30-minute dance routine, now go do it, right? Like they know the moves individually, but sequencing them and time with the song that they, you know, pick to go along with it, that takes repetitions, you gotta practice it, right? They can individually, they could do all of those things, all the steps that you just laid out, right?
They know how to do each and every one of those things if you quizzed them on it, and they know why each one of those things is important, but sequencing them together on a consistent basis is hard, right? So role play, practice, role play, practice, and then the role play has to be condensed down into each individual step. And then it becomes second nature, and then once it's second nature, you know, if you take a look at our unicorn employees that are just superstars that do it, they just came to us with those habits, right?
They just go do those things, right? But they weren't born with it. Either they saw the value in it themselves, and they taught themselves how to do it, or they were fortunate enough to be in the 0.2% of shops that had a leader that could actually teach them how to do those things, and they learned it.
[Mike Allen] (47:09 - 47:29)
There's just a certain percentage of the population that regardless of what their career is or their job is, they think consciously about how to be better at their job. Or, you know, if I do this, the effect for me will be this. I'm going to do that more because it's the effect that I want.
[Matt Lofton] (47:29 - 48:48)
But there's very few employees that are going to judge win-loss outcomes and what their impact was in that win-loss outcome. It just doesn't because most people don't think that way, right? And you've been to the top 2% or top 0.2% shops in America. You've seen it, and I've seen it too. And when I went, the big stuff, there's not that much different that they do. You know what I mean?
The core processes, if you looked at them, they're the same. They just execute. They execute so much better.
They execute so much better. How do they execute so much better? The one thing that all of them have in common, doesn't matter the business model that we're talking about.
It doesn't matter what processes that they're telling you to run. They've practiced them to the point of it's impossible to fail. Right?
And if we practice it to the point that it's impossible to fail and they fail, the only thing that could happen, the only reason that they could fail is two things. Number one, insubordination. I just don't care because I don't believe.
Or it's a talent gap, right? There's too much of a talent gap for me to be able to do the thing. Right?
I know how to do it. I'm physically trying everything that I could do to do it. I just don't have the ability to do it.
And you're going to run into that from time to time. It's going to happen.
[Mike Allen] (48:49 - 49:05)
Well, I've heard it put untrained or unwilling. Yeah. Right?
So, well, I guess there are people that are untrained, unwilling or unable. Right? They've been trained.
They want to do it. They just can't pull it off.
[Matt Lofton] (49:05 - 49:36)
Yeah. And so and again, I keep going back to the sports world here. But my son is playing Little League football in Person County, which most of the listeners don't know, but has not had Little League football in the county that we live in in the last 15 years.
So he's 11 years old. He's playing in the 12-U division. So these are a bunch of 11 and 12-year-olds that have never played football before.
It's their very first time playing. And they're playing in a travel league. And they're playing Wake County, Guilford County, Alamance County, and Durham County.
[Mike Allen] (49:36 - 49:39)
Little boys have been playing since they were seven or eight. Since they were five. Yeah.
[Matt Lofton] (49:39 - 51:32)
Because that's the first group that starts off. So they're playing against kids that have been practicing for six years. All right?
They have no idea what they're doing. Right? So you send them out there on the field and what happens?
They get crushed. They get crushed. Right?
Because they don't have the practice reps. And every rep, you get better and better and better. All the experience, you get better and better and better.
But it's not just reps. It's quality reps. Right?
It's the same reps over and over and over again. I'm a big Alex Ormosi fan. And Alex Ormosi says it's not repetitions.
It's iterations. So it's iterations of the same rep with improvement. Same rep with improvement.
So when we're training it, we have to train the rep with improvements on the smallest thing possible at each individual step. And then I think the other part of it is we overcomplicate things with so many processes and we need to make it a system. You know, like you think about, again, we go to those shops that, you know, or just businesses in general that run at a very clear level.
There's not a lot of process. It's big, overarching things that have to get done. Like here's the, there's a lot of little things that have to get done in there, but we're not focused on the little things.
We're focused on the concept of the big thing. And then we, we teach the clarity in the training. Right?
It's a five-step process that has a lot of definition between those five steps that we teach the definition in the training when we're doing it live. Right? And I think a lot of times we sit down and write this perfect process on paper and we get done and it's this thick and we're real happy with it.
And we're like, did you read the manual? I mean, it says it right there. Did you follow everything that's there?
And if you're the employer, like, my gosh.
[Mike Allen] (51:33 - 51:47)
It's funny. My office manager and my former parts manager said that they were going to write the parts process manual for Carfix. Yep.
72 pages long.
[Matt Lofton] (51:47 - 51:48)
A hundred percent.
[Mike Allen] (51:48 - 52:02)
And every time somebody asked me, what, did you check the manual? No, man. It's fucking 72 pages long.
Yep. Since I didn't write it, I'm like, this is bullshit. I'm not going to read that.
And I can only imagine that that's what my team is like, but I'm like, Hey, check out this great new policy I made.
[Matt Lofton] (52:03 - 52:36)
And, and the answers are all in there. Right. And if somebody would go, you know, take the time and go through, but, but it's just not going to happen.
Right. And so, again, I think a lot of it just comes down to a lot of these problems that we're putting on pay plan. A lot of these problems that we're putting on bad employees, a lot of the strife that we have between employees and owners and employees and managers.
It really just comes down to the fact that we're not practicing. We don't have a plan to practice the right way. We have expectations that are higher than what we've actually prepared the individual to perform at.
[Mike Allen] (52:36 - 52:36)
Yeah.
[Matt Lofton] (52:36 - 53:09)
And they know, but they don't know. And, and so that's, I think that's where a lot of the frustration kicks in. You know, and we hear it all the time with the manager.
I've told him 22 times. If you told him 22 times, you had to tell him wrong. You know what I mean?
Cause he's either the least intelligent individual in the world. He's insubordinate or it's a you thing, you know? And so, but we just, we don't look inward enough and we don't fix the problem.
We pass the problem on to somebody else.
[Mike Allen] (53:10 - 54:40)
Well, I've had some moments of introspection about that. You know, 20 plus years in this market, in this industry, growing my business, having ups and downs. I've had periods where we had incredible teams and I've had periods where we were really struggling and I've had turnover.
And I'm happy to say that coming here, I see a lot of technicians that have worked for me over the years that are still here coming to get training. Yep. And that's great.
And there are four shops that are open right now that are former employees of mine and two of them are here. Right. And that's pretty cool.
But I have absolutely been the problem in a lot of those situations where, you know, it's like, you know, I hired that individual and they rose up through the ranks of the business and became a manager and then they quit. And I hired that individual and they rose up through the ranks of the business and then they quit. And they all have shops now.
I don't know if they're successful or not. One of them just started this month. He just walked by a minute ago and waved.
And, you know, that's probably a me problem that I got to get that sorted out. Right. You know, and I think I am getting it sorted out, you know, regularly.
We got to be working on ourselves, just like we're trying to work on our team. But, you know.
[Matt Lofton] (54:40 - 56:56)
Well, I mean, there's, you know, there's two things there. Number one, I tell everybody. So when I do speaking, you know, events like here and stuff, one of the first comments that I always make is there's only two things that qualifies me to be standing in front of you guys today.
And that's that I fucked it up a lot faster than you could ever dream of doing it. I just made the mistakes really fast. Right.
There's nothing that you can do inside an automotive repair shop from a mistake standpoint that I haven't already done. Hired the wrong people. I've hired the right people and screwed them up.
I've implemented process the right way. I've implemented, you know, at the wrong time with the wrong people. I've implemented the wrong processes at the right time with the right people.
I've done the right marketing at the wrong time, the wrong marketing at the right time. All of it. I mean, there's nothing, there's nothing that you can try to do that I haven't already screwed up.
I just did it really fast. But failing fast is, is important too, because if you're consistently willing to admit that you made a mistake and try to change it, then you can go through it. It's the honest assessment with yourself of I made the mistake and I'm willing to learn to it.
That doesn't mean there's not pain with the mistake, like losing good employees, because I lost some good employees, right? That doesn't mean there's no pain with the mistake of I don't lose money. I've lost a lot of money.
But you get to the finish line a little bit faster than if you just stay locked into this mode. And then, you know, all the things that we just, it's easy to say. Go practice more.
But I think one of the things that I keep coming back to personally with myself and my own business, and when I talk to clients and other shop, I think that's where scaling is so important. And we talk about, you know, it's not necessarily, it's not that big of a deal if you want to be a, you know, three man shop or this or that. And that's true to an extent.
My argument against that in some point, in some way is the reason that training is so difficult in our industry, not training like here, but training at the shop. The team's not big enough. There's not enough redundancy to go pull this, a portion of the sales staff and do iterations of this, you know, and say, hey, Tuesday is going to be training day.
Because if you're a one man, if you're a three man shop, it has two, you know, two technicians and a service advisor. You go pull the service advisor to do role play for an hour.
[Mike Allen] (56:57 - 56:57)
Yeah.
[Matt Lofton] (56:57 - 58:08)
You brought the business to a, yeah, you're a grinding halt, right? And I get it that you can do 15 minute huddles in the morning and you can, and you can practice some of those things. But how much are you getting done in 15 minutes in that environment?
I know a little bit consistently adds up over time. I get all that. But think about, again, you think about the, you know, the companies that do this at a really high level.
The advantage that they have is they have the advantage of scale that at a large size, I've got a training manager that his whole job is to train you on how to do your job. When we hire a new service advisor, I don't need that service advisor to go sit at the front counter the day that I hire him because I got four other service advisors and I can take a month and trains. I was, I was talking to, you know, one of our coaches that had multiple locations and he's like, yeah, it's, um, he's like, when I hire a service advisor, it's a month before they ever even get on the front counter a month.
I'm like a month. Like, what do you do for a month? And he's like, well, it's our onboarding program.
They do this, they go to each store, they, you know, they train under each manager, you know, they do this, we do this, we do this, we do this. And I'm like, well, I mean, that's great. But who in the world can do that?
[Mike Allen] (58:09 - 58:12)
The people listening to this show don't have that flexibility.
[Matt Lofton] (58:12 - 1:00:09)
Yeah, they just don't have that flexibility. But that's why I think it's so important for us to try to scale as much as we can so we can do as much of that as possible. Because if we're striving for perfection to that level, you have to have the time to be able to do it.
And if you're if you're only going to do an eight hour day, you only have eight hours to do it. And you're either going to give up the revenue side of it for a portion of time to shut the front counter down to do it, or you're going to try to grow to the point that you're going to take your loss, you know, and do it imperfectly for a while until you can grow and scale through the problems and the pain. So you can have redundancy at the front counter and you can go pull a guy and you can train at that level.
And then I think when you get, you know, when you do get to that size, and you can rep and train it at that, you know, at that consistency, and at that level, then you see huge jumps, right, instead of these small incremental gains over, you know, over time. But I think that's where 90% of these things that we're talking about, like I said, a lot of the, you know, a lot of the friction that we have between, you know, owners and technicians, a lot of the inefficiencies that we have with this business, is this business model, right? Or is this, I think it all comes down to which business model are you passionate about?
What do you believe in? What are the systems that it takes to run that business model that you're passionate about? You being passionate about that, and then really going through and training the steps that it takes to run those systems the right way.
Everyone that you know, that's successful at that level has done a portion of that in some way, shape or form. They're, they're locked in and laser focused on how they do it. They'll fight you tooth and nail about it's the best way to do it in the world, which is fine, right?
Doesn't make it the only way, but they're passionate about it, and that's why they're successful with it, right? For sure. And then, you know, they've been able to pass that passion along to the team, and then they've figured out a way to train it, that they can get repeatable success with multiple people.
And, you know, that's...
[Mike Allen] (1:00:11 - 1:00:46)
Well, I think that is the next, a next evolution for me. I've always got a lot to do, but I think one of the things is getting training process in place that is repeatable and manageable and sustainable, you know, so. We've run over on time, and everybody's outside eating.
It's been really hard to focus because everybody's walking by making faces at us. We're in the fishbowl here. Tell me real quick, if you can, about Ignite coming up.
I'm excited about it. Any excuse to go to Vegas for me, but...
[Matt Lofton] (1:00:46 - 1:00:52)
So our Ignite conference is our third annual conference at Elite Worldwide. I am terrible with the dates and everything on our events.
[Mike Allen] (1:00:52 - 1:00:54)
It's February 4th through 6th, I think.
[Matt Lofton] (1:00:54 - 1:01:10)
February 4th through the 6th. It will be in Las Vegas. We're coming up on the early bird special ending this week, or in the next week.
So if you're interested in going and you want to save a little bit of money, go to the website, go to events, sign up and register. It's going to be fantastic.
[Mike Allen] (1:01:11 - 1:01:31)
He said next week. He means this week because we're releasing this next week. So EliteWorldwide.com forward slash events. That's exactly right. And I'll be there recording. So opportunities to come sit down and record with me there and get your learn on.
There's a lot of in-depth leadership training happening.
[Matt Lofton] (1:01:32 - 1:02:09)
And this is a little bit different. We don't bring in the same people that you're used to seeing at all the different trade show events. We try to bring in some non-industry people.
We've got some great speakers lined up. I've had an opportunity to go through and do the preview on our main speaker and our second speaker. I think it's going to be each year we keep leveling up just a little bit more.
And then we've got some feedback from the last two years on some of the other side of things that I think we're going to implement this year. That's going to ramp it up even more. So it should be a great event.
Again, if you choose to go to Vegas, come and have a good time. Get a little training in.
[Mike Allen] (1:02:10 - 1:02:17)
Well, it's not right down on the Strip too. It's out on the south side of town. It's by the Raiders Stadium.
[Matt Lofton] (1:02:18 - 1:02:29)
So if you're not a Vegas person and you don't want to go, you don't want to deal with all the crazy stuff on the Strip. You're not going to be in all the crazy stuff. If you just want to do the automotive stuff, come for the automotive stuff.
If you want to come for the other stuff, you know.
[Mike Allen] (1:02:30 - 1:02:31)
If you want to come for the crazy stuff, take a cab.
[Matt Lofton] (1:02:31 - 1:02:42)
Yeah, it's a cab right away. But it'll be a lot of fun. We have that coming up in February.
We have our Fly With The Eagles event coming up in Rhode Island in October. 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
[Mike Allen] (1:02:42 - 1:02:44)
It's got to be close to sold out by now, I would think.
[Matt Lofton] (1:02:44 - 1:03:01)
It's getting. We have limited seats available for that as well. But that one's going to be...
Again, we just keep making that better and better. We got a few little tricks up our sleeve for this one that I'm pretty excited about. And yeah, it's going to be going to be a good event and excited about that as well.
Awesome. Thanks, dude. Yep, absolutely.
[Mike Allen] (1:03:01 - 1:03:40)
See you. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, or follow. Join us on this crazy journey that is shop ownership.
I'll see you on the next episode.