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My name is Jeff, and I'd like to welcome you on a journey of reflection and insight into the tolls and triumphs of a career in automotive repair.
After more than 20 years of skinned knuckles and tool debt, I want to share my perspective and hear other people's thoughts about our industry.
So pour yourself a strong coffee or grab a cold Canadian beer and get ready for some great conversation.
Jeff Compton [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to another exciting episode of the Jaded Mechanic Podcast. Kind of doing something a little different. This week. We're doing just a solo run. I can't reiterate enough times how this podcast and the people that I've met through social media people have now become family. I wouldn't be in this industry if it wasn't for them. Still, I'd have washed my hands of it and walked away from it. Some days it's still very tempting to do that, but I made a vow that the goal was to try and make this better for other technicians, younger technicians, older technicians.
Jeff Compton [00:00:41]:
It doesn't matter. I'm a person that always has to tinker with stuff and try to make it better, improve it. I think that's what makes us really good technicians. I think they have to have that to be a technician now, because you have to not just know how something works, but you always got to be thinking about how you make it better. And, you know, for a long time, I thought that this industry didn't work. A lot of days it don't. But it's the need to always want to make it better. That's what why I'm here.
Jeff Compton [00:01:16]:
So I'm thankful for that. You guys have reached out in a lot and really got talking about the last two episodes we did with all the TikTok guys from Asta. And of course, the big thing that hit on a lot was the DIYers. And everybody kind of knows by now we don't run a platform here that's all that beneficial to them. That's putting it nicely. I'm not, you know, I'm not their advocate. Okay. I want to advocate for the professionals, the DIYers.
Jeff Compton [00:01:57]:
Do I. A couple of former guests of mine have made some really good points. And it's like, I understand that without a DIY contingent, we really, really shorten the amount of people that would even get into this industry. Because a lot of us started out as DIYers, and, you know, it was because either financially, we had no choice. We had to learn how to fix this stuff. A lot of us grew up poor or we just were wired that way, right? Where we like to take things apart and put things back together. So I'm on a crossroads here, guys, with this idea, because when we talked with, like, Chuck, we talked to Brandon Sloan, we talked with Mr. Subaru.
Jeff Compton [00:02:44]:
Like, they're guys that are known for kind of, like, helping out people, DIYers enthusiasts, whatever you want to call them. And, you know, I used to a long, long time ago there was, before I was on Facebook there was a website called OBD codes.com and we're talking 20 years ago. I used to post there a lot because it was a forum of people, you know, check engine like codes, you know, tried this, tried that, been autozone, tried this, can't fix it. And I would just to kill time, I just help people out. And what a lot of that was, was most of the people were genuinely respectful and polite. Now you get some people on there and they'd shoot their mouth off about been down to the stealership or you know, been to wherever. Three, been there three times and they can't fix the car. Blah blah, blah, blah, blah.
Jeff Compton [00:03:40]:
Every mechanic is, you know, and of course, just like now, even back then I would put those people on blast because to me it's just, it's just stupid. If you're going to come to a place and seek help, the kind of help that you really need, the help that's going to fix your problem, the idea that you're probably not going to talk to some experts within that field is crazy. So I just, I live my life where it's like I don't try to come with a disrespectful tone. Now sometimes I do. People that know me a long time know that, yeah, I pissed a lot of people off. Be a little abrasive. It's not that I'm that way, it's just that sometimes the way I talk and especially the way it gets typed out, it comes across that way because I'm just blunt. I don't know if something wires across somewhere or what, but.
Jeff Compton [00:04:37]:
And I don't like lazy. That's just a human flaw. I think that I just really have no patience for. I don't like to give people answers, I like to teach people how to find the answer. And that's been the biggest thing for me with the DIY segment for a long, long time. Since I started to get to a pretty good level in this industry of my own skill set was just to give people an answer. Isn't the answer you have to show people the way. You have to give them the tools to point them in the direction of training, help them understand the system better, but you don't give them the answer.
Jeff Compton [00:05:13]:
You know, I can remember OBD1 forwards used to generate a code for insufficient EGR flow and everybody'd stick an EGR valve on that and then everybody sticking DPFA on and you know what, a lot of the time it was, was a plug Port in the throttle, body full of carbon, right? Everybody just wanted to know how to fix the car. Well, without the car in front of me, I can't tell you how to fix the car. I can give you the five, six different options that might fix it, right? We can always say that it's broke. If you change everything, that'll fix it. We're not wrong. It's not what anybody's come and ask for. But when people come and just ask for, what do I need? And we just say, you need this part. Even if that's accurate.
Jeff Compton [00:06:03]:
Let's dig into is, are we really helping? I mean, you're helping that person fix that car, okay? Whether they're a DIY or technician, you're helping that person fix that car, right? Or you can say, for instance, like somebody's gone through all kinds of rabbit holes and they still have a 420 DCC on something and you can say, oh, hey, did you know there's a software fix for that? Now, that person should have egg on their face by then because they probably spent a lot of money and a lot of time. And some research would have shown them that, like, hey, there's a software for a fix for that. That's the kind of stuff that like, you know, can really help people, but it diminishes the process. When we don't teach people a process, right? It's like, you know, the conversations pop up about all the time and how we treat like DTCs with part numbers. And that's not entirely inaccurate because we do. And brother Brian Pollack and I have talked about that a long time. Sometimes it really does fix a car. It can be really that simple, you know, but the process still needs to be what we're out here teaching.
Jeff Compton [00:07:15]:
So the DIYers, they're not looking for a process, okay? They're looking for an answer. And that's where you can call it from my pulpit, my soapbox, whatever in this industry is. I don't see how giving them the answer from our industry standpoint benefits them. A couple reasons why, if you go out of your way to enable them, that's less cars that come into a service base somewhere to get a diagnosis. Now, I understand a lot of these people are pretty competent and can put a lot of parts on. I want to be able to offer them diag right if they have an EGR fault. I know we're talking EGR and it's getting to be an outdated system, but let's just hang on that for a minute and we'll be able to run through a couple tests in the bay for an hour and say to the customer, yep, the EGR has failed. This is how I can show you that it's failed.
Jeff Compton [00:08:16]:
If they want to go home and put on a good quality part, they have no problem with that. Make a. Make an afternoon of it. Drink some beer, put an EGR on your truck. When we don't even, you know, push for those cars to be in our bay to get diag done. And we just say, yeah, you know, 99% of the time you can throw a new jar valve on that thing and fix it. You're taking money away from a brother or sister in a bay somewhere. If you're a technician, listen to this.
Jeff Compton [00:08:49]:
Who. That's one less job they get. Now, I understand there's more cars than we can fix. I totally get it. But I'll argue that we're devaluing the experience that we gained and the diagnostic processes that we developed. When we start to just hand out answers, somebody had to really. Like when I think of the cars that kicked my tail, and I'm not talking like an eg, like an easy check engine light diag or something like that. I'm talking about like something that looked funny on the data, you know, the symptoms were hard to nail down.
Jeff Compton [00:09:20]:
I think about the time that, like the first time I ever saw one do that and the first time it kicked my tail, I would be really devaluing something. If I was to turn around and somebody, if they came to me and said, I have the exact same symptoms that you did, and I just go, oh, go. Put a vehicle speed sensor. There's a relatively recent case study that my friend Scott Laster put up. I am devaluing the time and Scott's expertise, my own, by just telling somebody to do it right. And I get it, it fixes the car. Some days, you know, that's what we just need done. But the real way we empower people is that we teach them the process.
Jeff Compton [00:10:07]:
And I'm having a little reflection about this because last weekend, you know, on Tick Tock, I had a really good conversation with a young man. He put up a video and on social media, like when people. So what he did essentially is he said, you professional mechanics need to do better. Now, he's not a professional mechanic. So you guys know me, know that I'm going to jump all over that like a dog on a bone, right? Like, first of all, you don't tell me to be better, right? You're not me. You don't walk my shoes, you don't wear my boots. You don't have my tooling. You don't have my training.
Jeff Compton [00:10:41]:
You don't have the scars in your hands and the sore parts of your body from doing this. So you're not me. Don't tell me to do better. Now, I understand he's coming from a consumer standpoint, but he's not. Because what he's doing is, he is saying, I had a customer bring me a car because I advertise myself as somebody that can fix cars, but I'm not a tradesperson. I don't do this for a living. I do something else. But I just really want to learn and I really like this job.
Jeff Compton [00:11:10]:
And, you know, that's how I learned. Case in point. And this was a really good conversation we had. It was almost an hour long. It started as a TikTok thread of his video. He since pulled the video. But he said to me, he said, I had a customer spend $1600 on fixing a front end noise. And they never did get fixed.
Jeff Compton [00:11:31]:
They got new struts and, you know, blah, blah, blah. The old story, right? And the customer says, the car was still not fixed. The customer brought it to me. And what it was is the brake pads were, you know, rattling in the brackets on the rear of the car. Okay? So he gets to, from his standpoint, sit there and say, you know, this customer took a car in and only had one thing wrong with it. And so we got talking about a lot of interesting things, you know, because first of all, like most people, he couldn't really tell me where the thing got fixed, right? He didn't know and he couldn't tell me where it got fixes. How does that person, what do they get paid for charge for diag? Doesn't know. Okay, did they go there? Because this customer called him up and said, I want new sway bar links put in my vehicle because I've had a bunch of work done and the noise is still there, and I want you to put sway bar links in it.
Jeff Compton [00:12:31]:
Well, him doing his due diligence, right? Not disrespecting him. He went through and says, that doesn't sound like a swimmer link to me. I'm going to check this out. That's how he found that the brake pads were rattling in the brackets. Now, he admitted to me, I'm not throwing shade at the guy, that it took him three hours and countless different things of whatever he did to try and narrow it down and determine that, yeah, that's the brake pads in the back, not in the front. So I had a nice conversation with the guy where I said, so what do they all. They change struts and something else. Okay.
Jeff Compton [00:13:09]:
Did they take it to someplace where they're not paid for diag? I don't know. So did somebody do a visual inspection of the car? Because we know in this industry how this can happen, right? Where you might not spend any time test driving a car. Now, I'm not advocating for that. That's just not a good process. Don't do it. Right. If somebody gives you noise complaint, drive the car. But it could happen that somebody could just ramp the car and look and go, struts are leaking oil.
Jeff Compton [00:13:36]:
Needs struts. Now, are they wrong that it needs struts? No, they're leaking oil. Right. Or say the tie rods loose. Are they wrong to sell tyre? No, right. You're wrong to sell it. When you tell the customer, though, that it's going to fix that noise. See, this is again, back to language.
Jeff Compton [00:13:56]:
We have to be transparent. We have to say, I have to fix this because it's unsafe. Right. Do I know if it's your noise? No, listen, I'm the first to tell you that I'm terrible with suspension noise. My hearing is so shot that I oftentimes don't hear things. And then a customer hears it. Like, I have to be driving, like, no rain, no wind, no radio, no blower fan, trying to listen. That's how shot my hearings got.
Jeff Compton [00:14:26]:
So he talks about this car, you know, and he's got his chest puffed up. He's like, oh, three hours, I found this. I'm like, okay, so let's talk about the reality of that. Say, let's make round numbers. Say the door rate at a shop's 150 bucks for an hour. Diag. And let's say that every time you bring a car in, I'm going to charge you $150 an hour to find a noise. That's one hour.
Jeff Compton [00:14:57]:
You would tell most customers out there, most people online would tell you, I'm not paying that. So then they go to the run to their Google machine, right? They get on the old interwebs and somebody says, oh, I have this kind of car and it's making this noise. I think it's the links. That's how we ended up with that. Right? So this is the conversation we're having. So I'm like, so think about this for a minute, Nathan. It took you three hours at $150 an hour, hypothetically, say, to find this. Did you sell your customer $450 worth of labor? No.
Jeff Compton [00:15:33]:
You spent three hours of your own time to determine that the brakes were bad was what was making the noise. Not necessarily bad. Yeah. Nathan, do you think that every business out there that operates a shop should act that way? I said, because you know that they can, right? They can't donate three hours. Now, I understand he is an amateur and we're a professional. Probably wouldn't take us three hours. But hypothetically, right. What about these noises we've all had that are intermittent, that don't always happen? Right.
Jeff Compton [00:16:01]:
Can you have three hours wrapped up in a finite noise? I can show you some brilliant mechanics. They'll have horror stories of how long it took them to find the source of a noise. Way more than three hours. So, of course, Nathan goes, no, you're right. Okay, okay, so point for me. Right? I said, so, Nathan, what's about this, the second half of this conversations. How old are the brakes in the back? I don't know. Who did the brakes last? I don't know how much you want to bet.
Jeff Compton [00:16:31]:
Maybe that customer did them himself. Or again, they went to some places Jeep has showed up with some parts from online. Right. That don't fit and had them at a shop put on. Maybe they went to somebody else just like you, who's not a shop. It's not a technician in a bay somewhere. It's just a guy that does, you know, might have a Google Marketplace ad saying, you know, I fixed cars. Maybe that's what that customer's obviously always.
Jeff Compton [00:16:57]:
That's their kind of service that they want that level. An amateur guy in the backyard, a DIYer fixing cars. Maybe that's what that customer wants. No hate on them. I don't want that type of customer. Right. But to sit there and say that everybody needs to do better because young Nathan donated three hours of his time on a weekend trying to fix somebody's car that he didn't get paid for the three hours, he just got paid for whatever. Probably putting.
Jeff Compton [00:17:29]:
Slapping a set of brake pads on. It's all other conversation right. We could go into. Is that really right? No, it's not. Does it solve the problem? Yeah, but we're supposed to be doing things right, right? As the professionals, we're supposed to be doing things right. So this conversation went really well. It took about. About an hour.
Jeff Compton [00:17:52]:
Conversation on a phone. Somebody I've never met before, just somebody online, just a DIYer who, you know, got called out Got challenged. Excuse me. And it was a good conversation because I saw some of his points, and I think he was reluctant. He kept going back to, well, this is how I learn. Like, I want to do this. This is how I learn. Okay, cool.
Jeff Compton [00:18:20]:
You're not hearing what I'm saying. If it. If you can't see that sometimes it might take three hours to find that, and that sometimes the customer should be paid or charged for it. If you can't see it, you think that it's wrong. And you think that because somebody maybe only had an hour, and maybe it had a whole bunch of other stuff, maybe it had loose tie rods, Maybe it had, like, bad shocks. Maybe it had multiple noises. But then you get the customer secondhand, and the customer says, that's the noise that I was always trying to get rid of. Right.
Jeff Compton [00:18:56]:
Communication breakdown. Happens all the time in this industry. So that's why I try to become a better communicator. Okay? It's a daily struggle. It really is. Because I'm not, like, I want to be able to communicate really well with my coworkers. I really want to communicate very well with my employer, and I need to communicate reasonably well with my customer. But it isn't the priority.
Jeff Compton [00:19:25]:
Right. Of the three people that I mentioned, that the number one priority is not the customer. That's not my job. I'm not wired that way, where I have to spend tons of time interrogating them on their vehicle from a communication standpoint or starting to sell things to them. That's not my job. But again, yet somebody with a platform immediately gets on there and says, it's the technicians that need to do better. Now, I understand he's saying that. Professional, but whatever.
Jeff Compton [00:19:56]:
But the repair process needs to be better. We don't even know how that transaction went down at that shop where somebody maybe was just handed a ticket and it says, clunk noise in front end. Okay, well, they find sway reversings were bad struts that were bad. That's the front end, Right? They were handed a ticket. I don't think they were handed a ticket. Anyway, that said, diagnose sound coming from suspension, rattle type noise over bumps, yada, yada, yada. I don't think they were given that. Probably if they were.
Jeff Compton [00:20:34]:
You all know me. It comes back to, well, how much were they tasked? How much time were they tasked with actually finding that? See, that's the thing. He can't answer me. He didn't answer it. Right? So if it's one of these places where there's no diag time, right? And it's rolled into the repair. Well, what do you always say, right? What do I say all the time? You get what you fucking pay for. You paid for no diag, you got no diag, you got a repair, you paid for the repair. So what do you really want? Well, you want a diag done that determines what repair I need.
Jeff Compton [00:21:07]:
Okay. This is where when we start to see the diyers come into this thing, they don't understand that it's a two part process. They just think something's broke and I need it fixed. Okay, yep, something's broken, fixed, something is causing a problem. Right? We all can't just get in a vehicle and snap our fingers and drive it and listen to and go, yeah, I know exactly what that sound is. It's pads rattling in the brack. Right? And here's the other thing I said to him, I said, here's the reality. You know, a lot of places, if you're not getting paid for your diagonal, charging for your diagonal, you go to the customer and go, hey, Mr.
Jeff Compton [00:21:45]:
Smith. Yeah. So we took your car around the block, road tested, we inspected real quick. Your noise is your brake pads that you put on or whoever you had put them on are rattling because they're junky, crappy, shitty pads from Amazon. They're the wrong size, one wrong application, whatever, doesn't matter. Mr. Smith goes, okay, thanks. I'm going to go home and get some better parts and I'm going to put them in my car myself.
Jeff Compton [00:22:13]:
What do you charge Mr. Smith then? Well, you charge him the flat rate fee of whatever the initial inspection was, right? The initial diag. If you don't have one, stop doing business that way because it's bullshit. If for another other reason, then probably if you're not charging Mr. Smith, there's a lot of shops out there that are not paying their technician and you're a problem, you need to go away. But you know, this is the reality. So this is kind of what I, this young man and I had these kind of conversations, went back and forth, a pretty good conversation, but it boils down to is that like the DIYer and me are at such loggerheads, you know, because they're speaking from an assumption, right? And just like I could assume that they're all absolutely useless and not very good at fixing cars. And we can see the evidence of that when they say that I have tried six parts and I still can't fix this car.
Jeff Compton [00:23:09]:
Yeah, it's going to blow them fuse. I can Make a relatively accurate assessment. A lot of the DIYers probably not that good at getting to the source of the problem. They can fix the part when they know what the problem is, but getting there, tricky. So when. When they constantly are coming online, and I see it on TikTok a lot, right, and they derail threads and they. They just blurt out ridiculous stuff and we call them out on it, they get really agitated and they oftentimes come there with a lot of hate already towards the professionals. And we had a conversation last week where the guys like so much of what that is, is the sales experience when they bought the car was not good.
Jeff Compton [00:24:03]:
They felt like they paid too much, whatever. They then want to make the service side of it miserable. Now, I know we're talking from a dealership standpoint, but it can happen. Listen, it happens in the aftermarket too, with people with used cars and warranties and all this kind of stuff. It's long thing. The more informed that a consumer is oftentimes, the less trusting they become. And that's where I have a problem, because less trusting starts to work its way into being belligerent, confrontational, offensive, insulting, ignorant, whatever. You want to use one of those words.
Jeff Compton [00:24:42]:
So if you're coming to get help, but you're coming with that, why would you expect that you would get help? Why do you think you deserve help? You think you deserve help because somebody worked on your car and did a bunch of work on it and it didn't fix it the way you thought it should be fixed, right? How many times have we all had a customer come in and said, I need an alternator put in because I have to boost my car four or five times. And, you know, maybe the alternator gets put in, car still has to be boosted because he's got a parasitic drain. Or maybe the battery shot and he's like, oh, it can't be the battery bad. It's battery's only 2 years old. Guess what? Battery's bad. That's kind of the thing where when we let the customer dictate the process, right? They don't ever put their hand up and say, oh, man, I was an idiot. I'm sorry, I owe you an apology. It wasn't that they're still angry.
Jeff Compton [00:25:38]:
Still angry and still distrusting and like, they. They don't ever, you know, say they're sorry. They don't ever say, yeah, I really appreciate what you guys can actually do, because I can't do that. It'd be the same as me, like Nathan and I had that conversation. It's like, I can. I can go buy a steak. And I know it's a tired old cliche, but it's the same thing. I.
Jeff Compton [00:25:58]:
Just. Because I've cooked a steak a thousand times in my life doesn't mean that every time I go to the restaurant and I come home and it wasn't as good or wasn't as even close to as good as what I cook at home, that I immediately jump online and say that every chef out there is crap. That everybody that works in a restaurant is garbage, that everything, that it cost too much. Why I just wanted to go out and have a steak that I didn't have to cook. This is what a lot of people that, like, when they want their car fixed, they just want their car fixed. They don't want to do it themselves. It's these people that, like, think they could do it themselves, or sometimes they do it themselves, but they choose or they carry on like they could, but we know they can't. That they suddenly determine my value or what's fair.
Jeff Compton [00:26:50]:
Well, that's. That's that word coming again, right? Like, we all heard me talk about that. And my friends in the chat group know exactly what I think about that word. Fair is relative. So when I come on and want to dictate what my value is or what is fair charge, they're not qualified to tell me that's what it is. The DIYer, the consumer is not qualified to tell me how to do my job. They're not qualified to tell me what I should charge for it. It is all based on emotion.
Jeff Compton [00:27:24]:
And I'm not a person that wants to deal with emotion. I'm a person that wants to deal with broken cars. So I ask that as we sit here and we're reflective and it's Thanksgiving and we're coming up on Christmas and everything, and you want to make a New Year's resolution. If you're listening to this and you're a person that's, you know, kind of handy, do things yourself. Think about how you come and ask for help. Think about how you deal with results that are. You're not 100% satisfied with. Maybe it's a steak dinner at, you know, Texas Roadhouse, maybe it's an auto repair at your local station to get online and immediately start to paint everybody in a chosen profession as one way because of one experience.
Jeff Compton [00:28:18]:
It must be really cool to be perfect. You're going to say, well, I'm not perfect. You're not perfect. Right. So that person People that served you and you left not satisfied. They're not perfect either. What gives you the right to all of a sudden start to tell everybody in a particular chosen occupation that they suck and you're better than them? You're not. Right.
Jeff Compton [00:28:50]:
It's all hearsay because we don't know. You haven't proven anything. You know, these people that get on here shoot their mouth off about, you know, professional technicians and guys that do diagn. What do you diagnose lately? What have you fixed lately? Nothing. You fix a 2002 Jeep one day, and now a 2022 Jeep you're an expert on. It's like saying, I had a, you know, Easy Bake Oven when I'm a kid and now I should be a pastry chef. It doesn't work like that. It's not real life, guys.
Jeff Compton [00:29:32]:
You can wish it, but it's not factual. And technicians and people in my industry, we're very binary. It's black and white. We're. We're. We're about the facts. You know, we have to be. So when people get on there with a lot of emotion, right.
Jeff Compton [00:29:52]:
Start to say some pretty derogatory things about my industry, about me, my brothers and sisters that do what I do, you're going to get hate back. It's just the way it is now moving forward. Okay? Because there's a message to this. It is important that I start to understand better the motivation for a lot of the DIYers why they're out there. Because if it comes from a place of distrust, then my industry, our industry, we've earned that, unfortunately. Now, if you're coming on because you genuinely want to save money, then we can go down a whole other rabbit hole, maybe on another time, about how much. I don't really think that a lot of DIYers truly save a ton of money. Not they consistently do it, because I think at some point it will bite you in the butt.
Jeff Compton [00:30:48]:
You'll end up with something unreliable or something unsafe. So. And what scares me is us professionals have been in the bay a long time. We have seen some really, really, really scary stuff done by DIYers that's just frankly, unsafe. And again, I'm not trying to wave the flag for certification. I'm not trying to wave the flag to take everybody's opportunity away to be able to fix their car themselves, because that's still a big part of what freedom is about, is being able to make choices. But what scares me is unqualified people doing repairs that are above them, and that's like, listen, that has been a big concern of mine within my own industry for a really long time. It's got not, it doesn't even.
Jeff Compton [00:31:39]:
I don't even draw the line at diy. There's some people out here in my industry that are doing things that they shouldn't be doing, but they're in my industry. We're going to get better at policing that and certification helps that. So if you choose to go to an uncertified person, that's on you. Okay? When I see people that advertise to other people, the public, that I'm just as good as the professionals, save money, don't come to them, come to me. Yeah, I'd be lying to you if I said I didn't want to see that all stamped out. It's one thing to go buy a part and put it on your own car. It's another to maybe you didn't make it in this industry.
Jeff Compton [00:32:26]:
Maybe you washed out, maybe you got fed up, maybe you weren't that good at it. But you got all the tools right. You bought all that tool set. You got a jack, you got some Jackson, maybe even got a hoist. You start to tell people, yeah, I can fix your car. Fix your car for $50 an hour. Don't pay a shop rate of $100 an hour. Pay me 50 bucks an hour.
Jeff Compton [00:32:47]:
I'll work on it. I'll spend all afternoon tearing your car apart. I spent three hours to figure out that your brake pads are rattling. I won't charge you nothing. We, as a professional industry don't have that luxury of being able to spend three hours to prove the brake pads are rattling in the back. Now we should have been able to find that. But again, we don't know the whole story because Nathan didn't share it all. It's one sided, right? Not hating on Nathan.
Jeff Compton [00:33:15]:
Hope to talk to him again. We do not as an industry have that luxury of being able to spend countless hours trying to find something and not charge the customer for that time. Right. Because we could have very well, easily. Let's be real. $150 an hour. 450 bucks, right. If it took him that long, you eclipse the price of that brake job in the back of that car.
Jeff Compton [00:33:39]:
Most cars anyway. So lots of customers would rather that you just tell them without charging them any time to find it. I think it's that. And they'll go and spend $450 on that. And you know what, they might have thrown the dart at the board and hit bullseye and fixed the car. We though, as an industry are held to a higher standard on that because they don't want that. They want that when it's free. But when we have to spend time, we have to be accurate.
Jeff Compton [00:34:11]:
And all the other things that Nathan did that didn't fix that car or whatever, checks that he did, inspections, whatever, he wasn't accurate. He found it eventually. But there's the rub. What's the time invested versus the end result? That's all we're ever facing every day. So the people that don't do what I do every day, you don't even understand that. That's why when you come at me without attitude and opinion, it just becomes comedic relief for me. And it just becomes like in one ear or the other, because I really don't. I.
Jeff Compton [00:34:43]:
It's not that I don't want to see you happy, but I'd be lying if I said I cared, right? I want my industry to improve. Some people out there will never be happy with. No matter what they do, no matter if the repair is free, they'll never be happy. Right? I can't make everybody happy. That's human flaw. You can't do it. I don't live my life to. I live my life to make technicians better, to make shops more effective by empowering technicians to be better technicians.
Jeff Compton [00:35:23]:
Technicians become better, shops become better. The customer experience. I'm not in the customer experience business of communicating with them. I'm within the fixing car business, which sometimes requires some communication. Sometimes it requires a lot more communication than I'm comfortable with. But a lot of this gets lost. Like I said in translation, communication breakdown. Just like Led Zeppelin sang.
Jeff Compton [00:35:53]:
So in closing, we're going to have some people on coming up that are very familiar to the DIYer segment and we are going to continue to have the conversation about when they are such a large part of the social following, social network, the mechanics of TikTok, the guys on YouTube, all that kind of stuff, they are always going to be there and they are always going to sometimes rub me the wrong way. And I'm going to try to not be so offended by the way they conduct themselves and realize where it's coming from. But I have a responsibility to my people in my industry, my brothers and sisters, the technicians, that there is nobody out there that's fighting harder for you than me. Nobody that's out there that will put them in their place. They'll go to bat for you than me. So the people that are hearing this, that want to challenge me Dude, I'm all for it. Let's have the conversation. You're not going to really convince me.
Jeff Compton [00:37:11]:
I don't care. You know, you could be a rocket scientist and you're teaching people how to diagnose your car. You know, we're talking over there. You're not me. You're not my people. You're somebody with some skills. But when you go around running your mouth, trying to build your platform youm're not going to get support from me, right? So if I'm bringing people in to have a conversation and the diyers are familiar with them, it's because they're good people. They're cool with me.
Jeff Compton [00:37:47]:
I'm cool with them. There's going to be a lot of people that aren't. That's okay. You know, I'm not trying to put a dividing line down the middle of it. Just trying to understand better where they're coming from and hope that they understand if they're getting some kickback, some reluctance to help them. It doesn't come up from a place of greed. It comes from a place of. I can't necessarily accurately tell you what's wrong because let's be real, I'm not there, you're not here.
Jeff Compton [00:38:18]:
And secondly, it isn't good for my business or my industry to just give you all a bunch of answers. What makes us all better is the journey, not the destination. Anyway, that's it. I love you all. Happy thanksgiving. Thank you for all the support for the podcast as of late. You're going to be really excited to see who's coming up in the near future. Some really familiar names are going to jump off the screen at.
Jeff Compton [00:38:47]:
You're going to be like, wow, I never would have thought. Hey, I would have never thought either. So love you all. Talk to you later.