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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.
Swell AI Transcript: 4th Of Juy.mp3
SPEAKER01 flat rate. I like being paid flat rate. I would count my steps doing a job to make sure I was doing it the most efficient way I could. Count my steps. I bought an alignment machine. I had never done an alignment before so I learned how to do it and then I'm subconsciously counting my steps so I can do it in the most efficient way possible. No extra steps because you see guys running around. They're not efficient. They're just wasting time. I'd rather walk at a reasonable pace and take no extra steps because I know I'm doing it in the most efficient way possible.
SPEAKER00 Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to another exciting thought-provoking episode of the Jada Mechanic podcast. My name is Jeff and I'd like to thank you for joining me on this journey of reflection and insight into the toils and triumphs of a career in automotive repair. After more than 20 years of skin, knuckles and tool debt, I want to share my perspectives 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. Welcome back everybody. So I got Here I am in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. It is the 4th of July America bless America. God bless America This is my first ever fourth in America. It's a big deal for me. Thank you very much Our big day was the first that's our Canada's earlier in the week, right? Yeah, July 1st. So, um, who have I got sitting with me? Start we'll go to go go to my left
SPEAKER03 Okay, your other left or that left this left this left.
SPEAKER01 Okay, American left or Canadian left.
SPEAKER03 It's the same metric or standard the same as when you got your drink called them copy that. This is Mike Allen from Carfix and from the Automotive Service and Tire Alliance.
SPEAKER00 An old friend we just had you recently? Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER01 Yeah, good, good. And I'm Brian Kerwin. I own Pete's Garage. And you used to work with Mike Allen 20 years ago.
SPEAKER00 This is why we're excited. So Brian, this is the first time that I've ever met you. And we started an interesting conversation. There's been a lot of interesting conversations started an hour ago. with you asking me, because you just recently listened to the podcast that Mike and I recorded, it got dropped, and you really enjoyed it, and you were very complimentary, and saying, and you asked me what I thought about flat rate. Right? So, you know, the back story is that my flat rate, and my first introduction to who Mr. Mike Allen, sitting to my left was, is that he was a guy that I wanted to punch in the mouth, because, you know, the way, you know, he goes on, or was led to believe through my initial impression was that he wanted to pay everybody flat rate and flat rate was the only way to be and it was the bestest thing in the world and I've since I've come to know Mike and and have lots of good conversation with Mike is that that's not what he thinks right but you guys have some backstory there's some history between you two we have the same backstory yeah so let's let's hear about that because this is I mean and we're not trying this would be no incrimination You're not gonna be arrested. You know, whatever. It is a statute of limitations. Yes. If you have some old girlfriends, here's something that they're not supposed to hear about. I'm not part of that.
SPEAKER03 That's not the point of fear. The point of fear is the current, current partner hearing things they're not supposed to hear.
SPEAKER00 Exactly. So give us kind of your how you two are linked. How, you know, how did that work out?
SPEAKER01 So I went to work for James, Mike's dad, When I was 16, I was working for another independent and they let me go. And I went to lunch and I came back from lunch. He's like, well, you can't work here anymore. You work down the street. So I just walked down there and James shook my hand and gave me a job changing tires.
SPEAKER00 So they terminated you or they saw that you were a better fit down at James.
SPEAKER01 I was 16. I'd gotten the job just through high school and they said they didn't need me.
SPEAKER00 Right. Where were you?
SPEAKER01 Juergens yeah so that they still exist there there in Carrboro okay really nice guy his name was Brian with a y2 so you know I got to give him that but that's how I met the Allens was he didn't need me anymore but thought enough of me that he found me another job well that was kind of cool so and and I figured it was your mouth that got you fired no
SPEAKER00 Y'all see my hand go up, that's the biggest reason I've ever been fired.
SPEAKER01 My mouth has done me a lot of good and also hurt me sometimes in the past too.
SPEAKER00 So you got Mr. Mike's father, James, immediately put you to work.
SPEAKER01 Yes, just changing tires and oil changes and that was it. And that was back when it was Mayhem Motors, like Mike talked about, 120 cars a day. just rolling them through.
SPEAKER03 Moved a ton of tires.
SPEAKER01 And like I told you earlier when we were talking, I remember, I think it went long after Jameson met Kelly Bennett, and then we were gonna have a $100 average ticket. Everybody's like, he's out of his mind, there's no way we're gonna do it.
SPEAKER00 Because what would the average number have been back in that time? Like in the 80s.
SPEAKER03 Yeah, what year was that? That was 97?
SPEAKER01 That's probably right. As I was in high school when I worked for your dad and I graduated in 98. Okay.
SPEAKER03 So it probably was 75, 80 bucks at the time.
SPEAKER00 And you, and the goal was we're going to be, we're going to have a hundred average.
SPEAKER01 I think when it hit 75, $80, we had grown it to 75, $80. I think there was a good chance it was worse than that.
SPEAKER03 And we were doing this with handwritten repair orders, you know, in triplicate. And, uh, I remember, uh, we would, show up to the shop and there'd be a line of 10 or 11 people. They'd get to the shop well before any of the employees so that they could be first in line because we had such high volume. It was like a game they played to try to get in and out quickly.
SPEAKER00 What drove the volume pricing?
SPEAKER03 I mean, good reputation. So dad grew up in my dad's shop, right? And one of his sayings was, you can shear a sheep a dozen times and it'll thank you for the service, you can only slaughter it once, right? So, cars break enough on their own, you don't have to make shit up, right? Just be nice, tell the truth, and everything else works out. And so, our industry has the reputation it has for a reason. We earned it, we didn't participate in a lot of the causal factors of that reputation. And so, word spreads.
SPEAKER00 Because I meant to ask from the last time, I get the impression that your father wasn't necessarily the cheapest job around, even back then.
SPEAKER03 I mean, it was very tire-minded business, so price consciousness was a thing, but I don't think he ever tried to be the cheapest tire guy in town. If you go down that path far enough, then you start competing with the used tire guys.
SPEAKER00 You get a very short piece of rope to hang yourself with, is what I say. So Brian, you're young, and you get in there with Mike and James. You and Mike are the same age.
SPEAKER03 I wasn't really there yet.
SPEAKER01 No, he wasn't.
SPEAKER03 I was away in college. Okay. Yeah.
SPEAKER01 Yeah. I mean, I think we've worked together some in the, in the summers. Yeah.
SPEAKER03 Yeah. I would work there in the summer. Yeah.
SPEAKER01 And then I also went to college and then I came back in January of 2000 and you were still probably a year or more later before you came back.
SPEAKER03 I came back like February of a two. That's when I came back. That's right. Uh, and. Whoa.
SPEAKER00 Yeah. Honestly, for me, it seems like yesterday. It really does, because when I think about where I was in 2002, I was making the transition from, like you and I were talking, I was moving out of a heavy truck shop into the automotive sector side of it all, and a lot of change and a lot of new things to learn. And you and I talked about in 2002, I was working in a shop for $10 an hour, and I was finishing up my last intake of our trade represent, Our trade development program, our apprenticeship program in Canada, and I was finishing off my final intake, and I was making $10 an hour, and I went to class with a bunch of guys that were there that had come from dealerships, and they were making $15, $16 an hour. And you know, you get to know, you sit around in class, you start talking to people, and you're like, okay, they're no smarter than me. Like, and then some things on, because my background in the truck shop had been like, I had to do a lot of wiring on trailers, a lot of wiring on trucks. I was given some pretty big repair responsibilities to do. So I would be, you know, in some of the advanced stuff, I was advanced. And these guys would be like, Why are you working for such little money, right? So, when I, like you and I discussed, when it was my final intake was done, I was going to go back to that shop, because the intake meaning where you're out of class, right? You're off the job. You go to school as if you're going to school every day, eight hours a day, sit through class, take your final, learn the final intake of drivability, electrical, Ohm's law at an advanced level, all kinds of stuff. And they're like, you know, you need to go get that job at the dealership. And I'd heard things about the dealerships and all that kind of stuff, and I was like, oh, that's got a bad connotation, because a lot of the guy that mentored me at that little shop, he'd been a former dealer mechanic, and he told me, it's going to chew you up and spit you out. I'm like, oh man, at 10 bucks an hour, I can't afford to buy tools. There would be days I'd go in and I'd need a tool to do a job, and it would cost more to buy the tool than what I earned that day, right? I can still remember, it was a Geo Metro, sitting on the hoist, and it had exhaust studs that broke off on the Y-pipe. And this is before we talked about my welding, getting bolts out. The studs broke off and I needed a stud remover, stud extractor. That snap on truck like they always seem to do shows up at the most appropriate time. And I walk out there and I buy the stud extractor. It was $95.
SPEAKER01 Four dollars a week for the rest of your life. Yeah.
SPEAKER00 I still have it, it's a great tool, I'm not trying to say I still use it. I would have put $15 in my pocket if I had stayed home that day at $10 an hour. So that's when the light bulb went off for me. So when I went back and saw my boss and I gave him my notice because I decided I'm going to take the job at the dealership and the dealership just wanted me. They weren't worried about what I, they're just like, we need it, we need a person. When I went back, my boss said, well, I was going to pay you 11. So from then on, I jumped both feet into the dealership. So, and this is not about me, this is about you, but so how did you find Mr. Allen compared to your previous employer?
SPEAKER01 Juergens is a good shop. Yeah, I mean they do fine. It was a really short sample working for Juergens before I went to work for James because You know, in Florida, it's where I started school, and we were way advanced over North Carolina. We took seven classes a day, and when I come up here, we only had to do six. So I didn't want to graduate early. So I went to school until lunch, and then I had to go to work through the school. So I'd take four classes in the morning, go home, eat lunch, and then go to work every day, and that was at Juergens. And then I think it was in the summer was when he got me the job at Chapel Hill Tire at the time for James. But no, he was fine to work at. I met a couple old school mechanics that were good at fixing cars.
SPEAKER03 When you left Dad, did you go straight to Pete's or was there anything in between?
SPEAKER01 Yeah, I was retired for a year and a half.
SPEAKER03 Is that when you broke yourself?
SPEAKER01 No, no, no.
SPEAKER03 Broke yourself? That's another story.
SPEAKER01 guess for about five years I kind of changed oil and tires and I was doing trailers and hitches a little bit of exhaust work which I wasn't good at and then we actually had a unsanctioned company outing and I didn't walk for two months afterwards due to a broken ankle so I had a lot of time to sit yeah and you know you're a different man when he came back to think about my career yeah so I was 25 so it's like you know, if you want to do this, let's make the most of it. So when I came back, you know, I was hungry. I didn't have to do exhaust and trailers anymore, which exhaust work, I wasn't good at it. It wasn't a good fit for me. So I just started doing light mechanical work. And, you know, I wanted to go to training. That was when they were transitioning from Like I told you earlier, just really easy stuff. So I got in on the ground floor going to training for check engine lights, air conditioning, training, air conditioning. You know, I did the first clutch in probably 10 or 15 years. And it just the timing was right. You know, I needed that that injury. for a little quiet reflection to be like hey it's time to get your life together you're 25 years old and at that point I said you know I'm gonna give it five years and we're gonna put our head down and see how far we can go with this and I think I went a long way and then yeah you know I was 30 and I just felt like it was time for a change so I just quit and I didn't have anything else lined up so I was home for a year and a half
SPEAKER00 And you said you were kind of doing a little bit of work at home. Yeah, I had a big garage at home.
SPEAKER01 So, you know, I had a lady friend who paid the household bills. I made the house payment, didn't take a lot of money to keep me up. And, you know, I traveled, I fished, I had a real good time.
SPEAKER00 And you worked on cars and did a little bit more probably than what you had been exposed to or given the opportunity to do, right? Right. You get a little more of what you'd learned, do some AC work, do a little bit of drivability, check engine light. I remember what it was like in 2002, those cars were, I don't want to say they were easier to fix, but I mean there's less wires, right? Oh yeah, that's a good way to put it. And that's not throwing shade because I mean when you look at what a scan tool in 2002 what it would still was what you had to work with say it was a 1991 you're working on. I still have it. Yeah you don't have I got one too and it's like you didn't have a lot to go on right so you kind of but So that was your first take at your own kind of employment. You're not an official shop owner, but you're kind of setting up your own clientele.
SPEAKER01 There wasn't anything real serious about it.
SPEAKER03 And how did you end up buying Pete's?
SPEAKER01 So Martin Terry, who you know, who owned a transmission shop, said, hey Brian, do you want to have your house back? Because I will say that when you work from home, there is no privacy. People show up at nine o'clock on a Sunday evening and want their oil changed and stuff like that.
SPEAKER00 Or you come home and there's a bunch of cars at your parking spot that have been dropped off, right?
SPEAKER01 Right, exactly. So he said Pete wants to retire and Pete had a shop. We would send some work to him. He'd rebuild rear ends, work on old weird stuff. You know, nothing exotic. So that was in February of 2012. My brother had graduated college in December of 2011 and he was purposefully not getting a job because we had a snowboarding trip planned for the third week in February. So first week of February, we find out about the shop. I talked to him. He wants to do it. We get everything in order. We go snowboarding and March 1st, he and I are shop owners in Durham with no clue.
SPEAKER03 No, but did your brother have any experience in the industry other than just helping you out at the house zero Wow, and you take him on as a partner exactly how so
SPEAKER00 Would you do that again?
SPEAKER01 That's a good question. Oh yeah. I mean he and I are very different. We're good partners. We compliment each other. He lets me run the show. And of course I don't do anything without him or against him. We get along really, really well. And currently the way our business is, I write service and kind of run the show and he's a tech. but you know we're hoping to grow and expand because we bought a new shop a year ago so we got the security of owning our own building so his role is going to change my role is going to change it's time to have a grown-up business.
SPEAKER00 Well you have two locations now or you're just going to a bigger location that's actually going to be
SPEAKER01 It's actually a smaller location than the one we rented, but the old shop was four bays laid out poorly, and then this shop is five bays with AC, and we own it, so we have the stability of owning the building, which is big for us.
SPEAKER00 Yeah, so while you've been doing on that say we're on that point in your in your career Where are you? Like you guys are still you're staying closer Was there a friendship there that was always been like, I mean, you've known each other a long time We were we were tight.
SPEAKER03 We ran together close for many years and then I got married and started a family and we kind of drifted after he left dad's business and I would say there was, you know, five or six years there where, you know, if we bumped into each other, it would have been perfectly fine, but we didn't communicate a lot. And then we reconnected recently at ASTE. And, you know, Brian, I think you're at a point where you're ready for like the next level of evolution in your business. That led to some conversations between the two of us, and it's just like we picked up where we dropped off.
SPEAKER00 So when you went to ASTE, Brian, what kind of courses did you take? Because we've all heard kind of Lucas talk about how ASTE was life-changing for him, and ASTE was life-changing for me. That's just not me saying that. That is legit. I would not be sitting here if I had not gone to ASTE. So when you went… Same for me.
SPEAKER01 I mean, I went there and then I joined ASTA. And then I went to Wilmington and now I'm here. I'm really enjoying it and I think it's pushing me to do a lot of good things for my business.
SPEAKER03 Are you going to go to any technical classes this year? Zero.
SPEAKER00 That was going to be what my segue into the question was going to be, because I want to think maybe when you went last year, you probably took some technical training. I didn't. No? I didn't. I'm out of that.
SPEAKER01 It was all business stuff. It has to be, you know, my body won't let me turn wrenches again. If I was forced to turn wrenches again, I'd starve. Yeah, I just can't do it from a production standpoint.
SPEAKER00 I just got too many problems I mean, I was good at it when I did it, but those that's past I hear you brother I'm the same way right like I mean we were talking earlier My shop now is not one that is on me about how many hours why did it take that long? How many hours did you we don't clock that? You know what? I mean? They give me a broken car or broken bus and I fix it and I'd fix it well and I do a really good job and they just say thank you and I collect a paycheck, you know and If they want to discount the labor on a job to sell the job, it doesn't affect me. If they seem to go overboard on an estimate and I knock it out in half the time, I don't know about it. You know what I mean? It is all neutral.
SPEAKER03 So you don't even know how many hours are on a ticket when you get it?
SPEAKER00 From the standpoint of, I know, okay, so if I'm going to put a set of control arms and some tie rods and a steering rack and a thing, I look up the labor and know what it's supposed to be. But it's like, I could get pulled off that job five times to do other things. You know how that can go, right? It can screw your flow up. At the end of the job, there isn't like I'm punching a ticket to know whether I was over on that or under, right? It's just I got it done by the time frame that we needed to get it done by. And we got all the other work that came in and out, I got that done. So I don't really know. Excuse me, I don't really know if I go over or if I do drastically under and my production is through or if I'm not. Nobody's really making me completely aware of that. It's a crazy concept, isn't it?
SPEAKER03 I think that that's bad business.
SPEAKER01 It's because he's not paid flat rate.
SPEAKER00 Yeah. Well, I can, I can tell you, I'll let you in on why that is Mike. It's because you got to remember sometimes a lot of what my work might be is that it's my boss that owns that piece of equipment, that bus, because it's his fleet company, right? Yeah. So he is my, his company. That's a different animal. It is. His company is a fleet of buses that are going on tours all the time. Whether it's to take some senior citizens to the casino, or whether it's to take, we do a lot of the local university team, we might be taking them three hours away for a hockey game or something like that. So he's not, whatever we do on his equipment to repair it in-house is saving him money. So he doesn't get too wrapped up in about, I could have had that done cheaper at, say, the truck center shop in town, because they couldn't look at him for a month. You know what I mean? We can get it done that day and done and gone. Right?
SPEAKER03 So it's not a traditional standpoint of… So one of the things we talked about in the podcast with you and I was that the reason I didn't understand the vitriol towards flat rate was because my entire experience and exposure was just in my dad's business and then my own. And once I learned about what your experience was in the dealerships and what Brian Pollack's experiences have been, I was like, oh, well, shit, that makes sense, right? But at the same time, a totally salary position like what you're describing, it makes sense in what you're describing, where you're working for the dude who's servicing the fleet that he owns that's providing, so it's a small part of a larger entity, right? But if it was just a general repair shop working on, you know, Chevys and Fords and Hondas and Toyotas, It's harder to make that work.
SPEAKER00 Now we have other fleets that come in and we're tasked with fixing them as well. But again, like fleet work is very much where they don't get really super analytical about how many hours it should take to do that because a lot of what a fleet is, a lot of it is a modified vehicle. Whether we talk about, they've got a truck out there right now, I was looking at it with Terry yesterday, and it's got, like they're doing just a driveshaft U-join in it. And I think there was something else. Well it, because it hauls Christmas trees around and it's got a dump box and everything else on it and it moves really slow and it's in the mud most of the time, it's got an aftermarket oil cooler underneath it that is massive, huge. Well, that adds some variables when you're doing a u-join in it, right? Or a hanger bearing or anything else like that. So, times that by every car almost that comes into my shop, and the quoted time is not really all that particular. We have a lot of our customers that it's almost just like, here's a blank check, you know, be respectful. Yeah, it is what it is within reason. And get it done, and we do that. And I don't think we're coming out where it's like, You had six and we charged them four. I think there's more often than not we probably had six and we charged six. You know, which you're going to have a hundred experts that are going to tell you that's not good enough. We have glowing testimonials from our customers about the quality of work that we do, how upfront and honest we are with them, and they would recommend us to a hundred other people. So we gotta get away from that. I think sometimes with, you've heard me talk about how the P word, and you and I discussed this before you showed up, it is still a very negative connotation for me.
SPEAKER03 I'm sorry, which P word? Production.
SPEAKER00 I like proficiency, if we're gonna use the P words, I like proficiency better. Show me what you can actually do, right? Because if you can solve a problem, solving problems is great. I can find a guy that needs to hang apart. I need problem solving, right? And we talked about, you asked me the question of what's it like, you know, the Rust Belt that I live in, versus down here, and we were laughing. Oh, I couldn't imagine, geez. We were laughing at Mr. Lucas's little tiny training torches, that that's their torch set, versus what we have, one of them in a service vehicle, right and then we would have we have a giant set of tanks and a big torch and like we have a saying it can't be stuck if it's liquid you know like if you get a hot enough and you get her molten it makes me sad thinking about the rust issues you deal with but you know it is just one of those things i have grown up in that You know what I mean? Like my father was a collision tech.
SPEAKER01 You know you can move. I mean, we have none of those issues. North Carolina is awesome.
SPEAKER00 Come on down. I'm hiring. It's tempting. So I grew up in it. So it's just part of what we do. Brian Pollack talks about it as well. You just do it. It's just your job. It's just your normal. Yeah, and so does that add time to the job? Oh, for sure. But where I get into the problem, and I can still remember this, this is a funny thing. So we talked sometimes, I was at a dealer, and I heard somebody talking in a conversation earlier about how if they were to add, what did he say, one hour for every, or 10%, add 10% for every year that it was older than 10 years old, right? He said if it was 10 years old, you're adding 100% more labor at 10% per hour for every year that it's about that. He's like, what a neat concept. Because I can remember years ago, I did a rear caravan, or I did a caravan rear exhaust manifold. The job came in pre-quoted. I never got to inspect the job. And it was 10 years old. It had been to the local chain store, and the local chain store had given the estimate that was not 3.8 hours to do that rear manifold in that vehicle. They needed six hours because of the condition of the bolts. My service advisor up front strictly told them, if it's 3.8, we'll do it for 3.8, and I got handed the ticket. Well, I can tell you that was every 10 mil nut and stud on that was not 10 mil anymore. It was eight, nine. I think I even had a couple of seven. And this was a shop that I didn't have a welder in to use. So I was doing it the old school way of pounding on sockets and pouring the heat to it and turning it off. I had well over double that ticket. Well over double the time. 3.8. I was on that all day. I got it done. What did I do? I donated four hours of my labor.
SPEAKER03 See, you should have the autonomy and the authority in your workplace to say, I'm not gonna do this for that many hours, because that's not appropriate. Right. I mean, I can't fathom how shops keep technicians doing that to them. That's why we have a, it's a contributing factor to why we have such a shortage, right?
SPEAKER00 Because they tell you, Mike, you're going to make it up on the next one. You never do.
SPEAKER01 In a dealership, you can. Well, when I worked for James, I would price all my own labor. Do you remember that? I would write it down. It needs brakes. This is what it pays. It needs a water pump, belt shocks. And I'd have a time there. And I feel like most of the service advisors appreciated that because you didn't have to look it up.
SPEAKER03 That's company policy at Carfix now is technicians build their estimates and they put the jobs on the ticket and they put the labor times on there.
SPEAKER00 And I want to tell you that When I was at the dealer, we built a lot of our own tickets, right? It wasn't like I knew what the labor was supposed to be. And I went out to the advisor and I said, this is in a rough condition. I'm not going to be able to do this exhaust manifold in 3.8. I've done them in 3.8 before, whatever the number was. It's hard to remember now. We're going almost 20 years ago. When it was brand new. Yeah. I said, exactly. When I had to do it under warranty, I could do it within the time because it was brand new. It would come apart easy. When it's rotten and rusted and blah, blah, blah. So whatever. So it wasn't a situation I never got to build the estimate. But the way that would work for me is that I would go, he'd say, OK, I'll look after it. Well, when you flag your hour sheet the next day, He didn't look after it.
SPEAKER03 Does the consuming public up there understand the rust condition? No. No.
SPEAKER00 They're getting better now, Mike, because there are shops that are having the backbone to be able to say, you and I talked about Ford manifold jobs. Our dealer, our Ford dealer, a long time ago when these were becoming a real problem and they were out of warranty, they were starting to say, I can't do it for the published time. My guy has to drill them out. My guy has to, you know, weld a nut onto the end of that stud and get that out of there. That's going to take time. They were doing the same thing when spark plugs of the Triton were coming out and they were doing a tune-up. They would tell the customer flat out, you want us to do a tune-up on this thing? Okay, here's where it could go. It could wind up being a set of cylinder heads on this. And the customer's like, well, I need that misfire fixed, like you better, whatever. So, yes, they're starting to get But for everyone, and thank God it's the dealers that are, first of all, that had some of, in my area, that had the gumption to stand up and say, no, we need more, because my techs just won't do the job. Because I'll tell you, a lot of guys at the flat rate in the dealerships where I work, you weren't going to pay me? It ain't getting in the shop. You can go find another monkey to do it. And if all monkeys are on the same boat, that's what it is. Yeah, you create enough pain and they'll fix it. But there are still, for what you talk about, there are still other shops out there that are like, oh man, I can do that in that time, I can wallop that, and they'll hold the customer to that. So even if you are super hustle, super efficient, did you make really the profit on it that you should have? No, because everyone else, if they'd have got the job, they'd have made more profit on it. So what are you doing by doing it for less profit? Well, maybe you're building a client base. Okay, I can respect that. But do you have people that want to work for you? Do you have?
SPEAKER03 You're building a client base of unprofitable clients.
SPEAKER01 Sure you are. You would have made more money saying no and doing something else.
SPEAKER03 You said you would have made $15 if you'd stayed home that day when you were a kid. It's the same thing with those customers.
SPEAKER00 Exactly, right. So how do we get people to understand that then? Training? Coaching?
SPEAKER03 When you say people, you mean people in our industry or the end user?
SPEAKER00 People in our industry. The customer quotient to be able to fix, that's a whole other thing.
SPEAKER03 Well, what you're doing is a big part of that. And what Lucas and David are doing is a big part of that. There needs to be easily consumable media conversations, videos, reels, whatever you want to call it, educating about the folly of how we've always done it. And we've always done it that way as not reason. It's an excuse, right? And so just spreading the word. Yeah. Getting the word out there. I can get on my soapbox and preach all day long, but I've never truly been in the trenches like the two of you. But Brian's got a lot more authority speaking to it because he's been on both ends of that spectrum, right?
SPEAKER01 Right. And I support the tech, you know, that's where I came from. Yeah. You know, and I have my own shortcomings as a service advisor. And I'm aware of that. And we're going to work on that.
SPEAKER00 Well, that's what you mentioned, because you said you're the bottleneck within your own business. 100%. That's a brave thing to say, man. Thank you for that. It hurts to say it. Listen, I'm not trying to say to single you out or make you feel out. I want to uplift everybody in this industry, right? I'm past the point of where I want to hate on owners and I want to be mad at owners and say that it's because of owners that I go without, right? Because at the end of the day, you know what? We're all in this together. And if I go without because of an owner, it's because I chose to stay with that owner. Right now there is such a lucrative market that if anybody, I heard, I just recorded last week and I said the same thing. If you're unhappy, get that toolbox, have a conversation with your person that is employing you. Make them aware of the reality of what it is and if you're not happy, put your money where your mouth is and go put yourself out there. There's a lot of them too and Lucas and I talk about this. There's a lot of technicians out there that are overselling themselves, right? and their abilities. I am not, Brian Pollack is a superstar technician, I don't care, put that guy in top 10% in the country. I'm not that level. Right? I'm not. It's cool. I'm good with it. But what I am is I know what I'm capable of and I know what I'm not. I know what I'm weak on and I know what I'm really strong at. And I want, I'm always very upfront and honest with, this is what I'm good at. It's like you and I talked about, you asked me to do a 10 diags on an AC job. Boy, you better clear that schedule for the next month because it's going to take me 10, it's going to take me a long time to do diag on AC. I am terrible at it. I don't have a lot of background on it. I don't have training on it. I can show you the electrical side of it, how it works.
SPEAKER03 Can you imagine what a disaster it is to pinpoint AC leaks in a bus?
SPEAKER00 Oh! So here's how it goes. We know that it's between this section and this section.
SPEAKER03 Just replace everything.
SPEAKER01 That's right. Take the battery out, put another bus under it, put the battery back in.
SPEAKER00 The bus was built around that section. So that section is not coming out of there, and there's no public service information on how you maybe access that leap. God, I can't even imagine. Oh my gosh. So that bus maybe now becomes a bus that we retire from the fleet. Or I made the analogy I was talking about last night. Holy crap. If that sucker's only gonna hold refrigerant in it for five days.
SPEAKER03 You only book four day trips, and you refill it between trips.
SPEAKER01 That's ridiculous. Right? You have the AC machine strapped to the back of the bus.
SPEAKER00 We buy 134 by the pallet. really and I'm not trying so please don't take this as we're taking a known system and and and we're doing our due diligence and if we could find a leak we find the leak but there are some places like where it is leaking you can't get in there and with a UV light or a sniffer have you tried stop leak So they have this stuff, I think I shared on my socials last week, there's a company called Red Tech that is huge up in Canada. Red Tech, this is always, because they're not selling. Sounds like communist. It could be. It's probably made in China. But Red Tech is an approved refrigerant blend that they can sell at, it would be up there, it'd be like an AutoZone. But down, up in Canada, we don't have AutoZone, we got Canadian Tire. So you can sell Red Tech at Canadian Tire. Another store that we have is called Princess Auto, which is equivalent to like Harbor Freight. So they'll sell you cans of Red Tech. And they already now have an approved refrigerant, you can buy in tiny little cans, for $12.34 YF. So people are buying these, so it is not uncommon. What happens a lot, and it does to you guys too down here, is that you, you know, your AC system is like, when I hook up to this customer's car, I probably should really identify if there's something that's not virgin, authentic refrigerant, because otherwise I'm contaminating my machine. There's a lot of that being done. There's a lot. So it's not a situation of we're not fixing the leaks that are in a bus, but it is one of those when we have a bus and it will not maintain refrigerant level in it, we probably use that bus maybe more in the wintertime, or we retire that bus. Because by the time it does, by the time it gets to that level, it might already have a million and something on it. So it's getting to be where it's not reliable. My boss is very good, he tracks the expense reports on each bus per year, what it's gonna take, how many downtime days it was, how many times we had to reschedule around it because it was broke down, that kind of stuff. And then he will sell that bus off. But it's one of them things where, you know.
SPEAKER03 So there's some poor dude who's servicing the second owner buses from your company. when y'all have done the calculus to figure out that it's no longer worth taking care of this thing.
SPEAKER00 They tend to be bought by people that want to start their own busing company, and what they are is they're okay with their customer that's going to take a- Walking? No. Listen, they'll keep them running, but you're going to take a bus trip, say, from Montreal, and you're going to go all the way to Toronto. That's an eight-hour drive. You're going to make that with no AC in the bus. And he's going to apologize every time, and he's going to say, I'm sorry, it was working yesterday, I don't know what happened. The reality is he knows what happened, it won't hold refrigerant. But the reality is he'll do that route, he'll undercut us on a price, on a bid, and just make excuses for the reduced value, reduced service that he provides. And it's just like, we go back to it. There is customers for that. That I can take that bus tour for $60. That's better than paying $100. The difference might be is in the $100 bus tour, you're riding around with the air conditioning on in the bus versus the $60. Or you're still riding around as opposed to walking. Yes. So none of them walk. As soon as the bus is down, we're normally sending a rescue bus to it, and we put them on another bus, and we get the tour continued, and then we either limp that bus back home where we fix it, or it gets fixed where it is to get us back home.
SPEAKER03 It's a very interesting… Do y'all run… I assume that you're running tours year-round? Yeah. I can't imagine roadside service on a tour bus in February in Canada.
SPEAKER00 It sucks. Anything roadside in Canada sucks, first of all. But on a bus it's even harder because buses are a very specific thing where it's like, for instance, ours are all Prevo. We buy Prevo, just Prevo, for a very good reason because we're familiar with how Prevo does things. We're familiar with the bus. If somebody calls us and says, I have XYZ brand bus, can you look at it because you repair buses? We say no. We are responsible first and foremost for our own fleet. We're familiar with that brand. We don't want to go down a wormhole of trying to fix your different bus that we're not familiar with because A, we probably can't get parts for it, or B, we wouldn't even have a clue how to approach even accessing the service information for that. So it's very like high-end cars. It's very similar to that where a lot of people, if you've got a high-end car and you're trying to take it to an independent shop, unless they've got the OE service information and the OE scan, we have OE factory scan tool for the bus, for the Prevo systems, all the systems because it's a Volvo Pentastar engine in it. Or not Pentastar, Volvo. I'm thinking Chrysler there for a second. So it has all that in it. You don't have to call yourself out.
SPEAKER03 I had no idea what you were talking about.
SPEAKER00 We don't have to jump around and try and interpret is that really right or not. We have the Volvo software that's actually working on that bus. The rest of the systems in the bus, I don't have to because I don't work on these buses. We make a phone call and we talk to one of the engineers that actually is responsible for those buses being built every day in Quebec City and Canada and they walk us through what to look for, how to service it and all that kind of stuff. Plus we send our guys to training.
SPEAKER03 How did you find yourself going from the Ford dealer to a fleet service, bus specialty place?
SPEAKER00 So it's not actually Ford dealer. I never worked in Ford dealer. I've worked at Chrysler dealer, I've worked at Nissan dealer, I've worked at Hyundai dealer. Ford, if I'd have brought one home when I was a kid, 16 years old, my father was still alive, he'd have kicked my tail right out. I'd have been living somewhere else. He hated them. As a collision guy, he felt that they were always like, they rusted too fast, they were trash. So I'm not a Ford guy. I've bounced around all the time between, I'll go where somebody treats me good. So I've worked the dealerships, I've worked the independent shops, right? I've worked independents, oftentimes between dealer jobs because my, the way I am. doesn't always suit a dealer, right? Because if I take four hours to do the job because it took four hours to do the job, I'm getting paid four hours to do the job. If you want to come up with some BS like that exhaust manifold job about why, oh well, it took you eight, I can only get four.
SPEAKER03 What if it took you four hours and it's normally a two hour job but you fucked it up with a stupid mistake?
SPEAKER00 We'll define stupid.
SPEAKER01 You gotta eat that. As a tech, if you screw it up and it takes you more time than it should, that's on you.
SPEAKER00 Well, I'm trying to think how I can think of a scenario because I mean like, so if say I'm up there with a torch cutting the mold off.
SPEAKER03 You're doing an oil leak and you pinch the gasket, putting it back together. You didn't realize it until you were done with the job. You go driving, it's puking oil everywhere and you got to do the job over again.
SPEAKER00 I don't, when I was flat rate, I did not expect to get paid to do that over again.
SPEAKER03 You expect to get paid to do it over again in a normal scenario now.
SPEAKER00 So this will sound bad, the only reason I would expect is because I've seen somebody make a mistake and still get paid for their mistakes. So that's a funny precedence, right, when we talk about that.
SPEAKER03 It is, it's delicate, right, because people make mistakes. And so, like, I've had technicians come to me after making a mistake and say, you know, hey boss, I'm sorry I screwed that up, I'll pay for it. I'm like, dude, no, that's crazy. You don't need to come out of pocket. But is it reasonable to say, hey boss, This was not just like a fluke weird situation, this was a stupid mistake on my part. I should do the job again and make it right and not expect to be paid twice to do it because I screwed it up the first time. If there needs to be two sets of parts that go through that, well, then the company needs to eat the parts, right? So what's the right answer there? I'm genuinely curious.
SPEAKER00 So somebody asked that in the Changing Industry podcast the other day, and it kind of came up, and I said, here's an example I gave. Say I diagnose a coil as bad. Right? On a Ford. Let's use Ford, because let's be real, they use a lot of coils, right? And say I put the coil in it, and then it comes back in 30 days later, and the connector's hanging out of it. And nobody probably touched it, nobody unplugged it, nobody, it's never worked somewhere else. And the terminal tension is crap. Maybe the plastics broke off, and I just jammed it back in, right? I do not expect to get paid to diagnose that again. Why pay the guy to diagnose that he it was his screw up and then okay so it needs a connector. I'll probably go out there and just put that connector on and I would have expected that I'm not expecting to get paid for that. I would have probably done that on my lunch if I was an easy 10 minute, swap it out, right? Well, maybe what if it's the one under the intake? Maybe I had the intake off and you know, well, so then are you going to do that one?
SPEAKER01 It should have got all of it. If it's under the intake, it gets all the coils under the intake. And if you put a questionable connector back on, that's still your fault. You risk too much. Yeah. You got to fix it.
SPEAKER00 But we had an interesting conversation where I said, but what if the situation, and this is where sometimes it gets used against the tech, is the tech may go out there and say, listen, I've had one of these where these connectors sometimes, like, what's the ones that the Toyota, that every time you unplug the coil, the Toyota breaks? Yeah. So if you're going to quote that job now, here's how I'm going to quote it. I'm going to quote it just like you said. Six coils, six connectors, I'm going to install. And then somebody can say, but we as owners sometimes, not me as owners, but owners can say to the tech, what are you trying to do? Blow my estimate out of the water? Are you trying to do this for twice as much as my competition? No, we're not trying to do it for twice as much of competition. We're not that involved in what the price is. We're trying to avoid the comeback. And that's what makes a tech sometimes seem like they want to install every part in the engine when they're doing an oil leak or something like that. Because if I have to donate the time to redo it on a judgment, I don't want that, right? I don't want to work for free. So I want maybe sometimes it's like when we see guys and it's like, I want every bolt and I want every gasket and la, la, la, la, la, and people go, My god, man, you're blowing this this estimate out of the water.
SPEAKER03 Well, it's communication and managing expectations, right? I mean how many times have you heard? You know Lucas or David or any of the you know Popular talking heads in our industry say over promise under deliver, right? Yes it I mean go back to the Triton Spark plugs, right? Yeah You got good at those and you got to where they didn't break very often because you knew how to get them out right, but it was still a possibility. So it's your job or it's someone in your company's job to explain, Mr. Customer, there's a known problem with these and this tends to happen. And if this happens, here's the additional cost. And so I'm going to provide an estimate to you that is the worst case scenario. If this happens on all eight holes, Here's what we're potentially looking at. Or maybe we're looking at heads, right? I don't expect that will happen. We're really good at this. But it happens sometimes. And then you're communicating the worst case scenario and then you get to be the hero when you come back to them and one had to be tapped.
SPEAKER00 100%, that always drove me nuts because in the dealer you start to learn the product really well. And you've seen the worst case scenario happen. And then you got an advisor out there that never wants to make the customer aware of where this could go. It's a lazy advisor. It is a lazy advisor. And where's your head been? Up your butt for the last six months? You've seen this go sideways three times. You should be making your customer aware of it. Okay, we're going to do some exhaust manifolds on your 6.8 F350 V10. We have not had one of them in quite a while that they could take them off without having to get the welder out and get onto the bolt and get the It's going to take more time. You got an advisor that rolls in all of a sudden, he decides he's not going to make his customer aware ahead of time. And now he has to hold me up. We talked about hoists earlier, right? And bays and how if I'm going to work flat rate, I want at least two. And I was that kind of guy where if I inspected it and you didn't have approval, I ain't putting it back together to put it back outside to take it back apart. It's going to sit there until you tell me that it's done. Because I've got my estimate time and if the job doesn't sell, I got to get it back together, ready to go out as I found it within that estimate time, no exceptions.
SPEAKER01 Instead of taking it apart twice.
SPEAKER00 I will not do that for the same amount of money. I refuse. Because to me, I'm doing the same job twice. I'm getting it back to the same point that it was. If you're only going to pay me for the one time, that's theft. I'm sorry. That's how I see it. I'm giving you twice the labor for half the money. I'm not good with it. You can tell me, well, but you're going to get it apart and you're going to do X, Y, and Z on it. Cool. I already had it apart though. Right? It's the same as when we do break inspection in this industry and we say, okay, we're going to do a break inspection and then we're going to put it back together. And the customer's going to come back to the brakes. Oh, when you do the brake job now though, your inspection time that you spent last week, say an hour on a brake inspection, we're going to take that off the top because you already inspected it. Cool. I understand the marketing aspect of that, but… That's lazy service advisor. I got to do the job over again because I got to take it back apart to get to where I can install the tire. You didn't have it pre-sold? You've heard me all argue about this. You work at a dealership, or you say you work on a fleet of the same type of things. Customer's got a brake complaint. You all should have it memorized in your head. Caravan brake pads, calipers, rotors cost $779.84 plus applicable taxes. It's going to be $962, ma'am. Can I get that started for you right away, yes or no? You should not have to say, before it's even in here, let's take it apart, let's look at it, let's call. You should have that customer primed that this is what it could be, and this is sometimes an unpopular opinion. You should have that customer prime that it's going to be maybe this. This is what it costs. If that's what it is, do I have your authorization to do that? Yes or no? That streamlines the whole process. It's not a blank check to say, go ahead and definitely spend $960. If she's only got a rock between the rotor and the backing plate, and we go over there and we take the rock out, and the driving around and the pads are still thick enough and the rotors are still fine, it doesn't make any noise. That's not to say that she's, where everybody out there is immediately going to slap a CPR job on that calipers, pads and rotors and do it for $969. But why tie that tech up and that bay up that could be making you money? Well, you have to go through the procedure of calling that customer, making the pitch, which you've already made the pitch a hundred times in your career at that particular place. Explain to me as owners, what's the logical of not doing it like that?
SPEAKER03 Pre-selling work is great when you have clients that already know, trust, and like you.
SPEAKER01 Or at a dealer. Everything that I work on is different. I just can't pull that number out of my head. Yeah. I mean, does it need a brake fluid service in, you know, I'm already going to be calling them back because it needs a belt and radiator hoses and struts. Right. Why make two calls? You know, I still feel like I can just sell all of it with one call and, and I don't think it takes long. You know, our, our shop management systems are so good. I mean, I'm building 90% of the tickets in 15 minutes or less, probably less than 10 minutes. Um, I don't mind because by the time they turn in that ticket, I'm sending off the DVI. By the time they're calling, even if they get it and call me back, I'm 80% done or all the way done and ready for the sales call. I don't think I need to sell that would be my thoughts on it. Think I get what you're saying, but I also turn it around really quick. I didn't mean to cut you off.
SPEAKER03 No, it's okay. I have I've mixed feelings about you know, pull it in do the DVI put it back together and back it out unless you get an answer immediately put it back together and back it out and I understand that there's lost time having to set the lift twice and pull the wheels twice and and that kind of thing, but We've built systems and processes into the way that we operate to account for that lost time and to make sure that it's still profitable for the team members. You know, I remember when you started going to training, you were all over us as advisors, Brian. I don't remember whose class it was, but somebody broke down the value of your time per minute as a technician producing. And at that point, and this is early 2000s, it was something like, you know, $18 or $20 a minute or something like that.
SPEAKER01 We spoke about it. So we had two lifts. So morning would start, let's say I had nothing left over from the day before, pull one in, check it out, pull another one in, check it out. If I hadn't heard about that one, it's going out the door and then the next one. And I didn't mind having the GS guys push stuff in late in the day, but no, I was going to be busy the whole time. You know, flat rate, I like being paid flat rate. I would count my steps doing a job to make sure I was doing it the most efficient way I could. Count your steps, meaning literally? Count my steps. I bought an alignment machine. I'd never done an alignment before, so I learned how to do it, and then I'm subconsciously counting my steps so I can do it in the most efficient way possible. No extra steps because You see guys running around. They're not efficient. They're just wasting time. I'd rather walk at a reasonable pace and take no extra steps because I know I'm doing it in the most efficient way possible.
SPEAKER03 Okay, this is the tenth time I've done one of these jobs. I know every tool I'm going to need for that job. I'm going to take them all out and put them in the cart, and the cart's coming with me to the job, and I never go back to the toolbox until I'm putting the tools back in the box, because I know what I need. And we all have guys, or have seen guys, that are back and forth to the box, back and forth to the box, back and forth to the box.
SPEAKER01 I'm guilty of that. Oh man, like a timing belt on a Honda Odyssey. I could open the toolbox, put everything in the cart, roll it over, finish the job, back it out.
SPEAKER00 See, I was like that way with steering racks on caravans. I had everything right on top of the cart and I could do it like I could do them in 45 minutes. And they paid six hours. Like they were awesome. And it's just because they leaked so much under warranty, you were like, what's the pay under warranty? Four hours?
SPEAKER03 Hell yeah. Just give me six of those a day.
SPEAKER00 Like you didn't even care if the customer complained about it. You're doing your due diligence. You're looking at that going, oh that steering rack is starting to leak a bit. I better go out there. And like our advisors, this was before back in the day where they weren't necessarily watching so much the OEs where it's like if the customer didn't have a complaint, you don't do the repair. That's how the dealers really got hung is because, which I had both sides because it was like, I'll give you an example. Neon head gaskets used to leak oil. Really bad. Really bad. First shed in neons. Well, that single cam one, those guys would write them up all day because they were easy to do. That same head gasket on a 2.4, the twin cam, which sucks way more to time and do. They didn't write them up nearly as much. It's the same bleeding gasket in there, right? It's the same leak. It's the same failure.
SPEAKER01 So I got a really good joke about dodges, but you might have to edit it out. I'm not sure if it's clean enough. Lucas will get offended. He loves his dodge. I'd rather have a sister in a whorehouse than a brother in a dodge. I heard that years ago.
SPEAKER00 That makes me think of that Borat line. This is the number three prostitute. So when the dealers were not cracking down so much on what actually was being, if the customer didn't have to complain about it, you didn't sell it, right? They had to be, and I've seen dealers where they're under restriction, which means they're doing so much warranty work. that if the customer didn't have a complaint about it, they didn't want you to write it up. Why?
SPEAKER03 Wait, I'm on the forums and I'm hearing about ESOs. What is that?
SPEAKER00 ESO was the abbreviation. Evil shop owner. I saw that in IATN years ago.
SPEAKER03 So what is that, an evil dealership? ED? ED, is that something different, right?
SPEAKER00 Yeah, ED is erectile dysfunction. Both are problems. Both are problems within a lot of dealer owners, I'll tell you that right now. There's medicine for one of those. The other one, the medicines, the blue pill and money. So anyway, because you've seen some dealer owners that they're, how'd you get that? Nevermind. So under restriction meant that they were doing way more warranty. And this is how it was explained to me. The guy would come down, your district manager, and he would say, you're doing way more tie rods on caravans than any of these other dealers in your area. Why are you doing so many? Well, there's two sides of thinking of that. One, I told you about how we would do it, is if we had one that was loose, and the other one was really loose, we did them both. And then I was telling you how, because of how our shop was set up, the customer, if it had around 30,000 kilometers on it, the customer paid for the alignment. Right, so any tech in the shop would do the two tie rods. They would wheel over to that one shop, one tech's bay that only had the alignment rack in it. He did all the alignments in the shop. He would do that alignment. That was how our shop was set up. Other shops maybe, they did that one tie rod, they did not charge for the alignment, and then if the customer came back in two months and the next tie rod was loose, they just did it and put the warranty claim through again. Now, you can look at that and go, That shop that's not charging for alignments is missing out on an opportunity to make some money. The other way you can look at that is if I charge the customer for the alignment and I do one tie rod and the other one's got a little bit of play but it's the allowable amount. And in a month time they hit a pothole and they come back in and it's past the allowable amount?
SPEAKER01 What's the allowable amount in the dealer?
SPEAKER00 So I was told it had to have over an eighth of play before they wanted it changed.
SPEAKER01 Thanks for changing that to American for us.
SPEAKER00 Yeah, I don't do the metric thing because I was raised on standard. So you see my point where as if I was to charge the customer the alignment. And then I was to do just one tie rod under warranty. And then that next tie rod failed and I had to ding the customer for another alignment. That customer's mad at me, right? And they're going to say, well, if they're such a known thing, why didn't you just change both of them while I was just here? And you, good luck trying to explain to the customer that, hey, you're OE that built this band, that you love this band. You think this band is great. If I had to tell you about how often I hate dealing with the OEs on what they want to pay for warranty and, you know, because everybody thinks that, like, you get 100% payback on your warranty claims. That's a myth. There ain't anyone running with 100%. They're not even close. Every claim that you make, you now get paid. It doesn't work that way. You have to be absolutely meticulous in your paperwork and your process and everything else before they want to pay, because it's just a numbers game to them, right? It doesn't matter whether you fix the car. If you don't have, say, the one number in the VIN is wrong, they're not going to pay that claim. So this is the side that people have never worked in a dealer.
SPEAKER03 If that claim is not filed appropriately, and the dealership does not get paid for that claim, do you not get paid for your hours?
SPEAKER00 I still get paid. Okay, good. Now I've heard of other techs that have been in dealerships where stuff didn't get closed off, where stuff didn't get paid, and they come to the tech and go, I know you did the repair, and I know the car's fixed, but they're not paying us for that repair, or they're only paying, that's all I can pay you. If that tech accepted that as an answer,
SPEAKER01 They're part of the problem. They are part of the problem because. My head's going to explode just hearing that.
SPEAKER00 But see. I just couldn't imagine. This is you and I talking. If you've never been in it, you don't know it. You don't know it. You just think it's like, OK, he does the job, he gets paid. That's how in one section of the real world it works. The other section is, and I look at it real like this. Most dealership owners, they're millionaires. So if you try to tell me you can't afford to pay me 50 bucks for two hours of labor, you're full of it. And I'll never swallow that, ever. I won't believe you. Now, I don't want to see it be taken advantage of. But don't tell me that there isn't the money there. Give me any other reason. Think of something way more creative than just saying the money's not there.
SPEAKER01 When I worked for your dad, Mike, I pushed to have us all review each other, where the techs reviewed the service advisors and the parts person, you know, everybody back and forth. And one of the complaints that I got from one of the service advisors was that I worried too much about getting paid correctly. And I think your dad did that too. Somebody said you worry too much about getting paid correctly. It's like, look, I'm here to make a living. I just happen to do it fixing cars. That is the A number one reason I'm here. I want every dollar coming to me.
SPEAKER00 My number one priority when I go to work is that you pay me correctly.
SPEAKER03 100%. One of the things that took me years to get over after I left dad's operation and went to Carfix, So I think everyone that wasn't a tire tech at dad's operation was pure flat rate, I think.
SPEAKER01 No. So what we made is, is we all made $7 an hour to be in the building. And then we made flat rate above and beyond that.
SPEAKER03 And there were tiers that you could get more per hour if you turn.
SPEAKER01 And that's what I told you earlier is that at 120 hours, that was the highest tier. Right. So over two weeks. Correct. Yeah. So, you know, I just made sure I did that. Uh huh.
SPEAKER03 But there was a very heavily weighted performance based pay plan for almost everybody.
SPEAKER01 I can tell you I think it went up like a dollar and a half at 90, and then it went up like 75 cents for every hour, each 10 hours above that.
SPEAKER00 So I can tell you the last time that that Nissan coached me, coached, poached me into joining their team was to tell me about a performance bonus that once I hit 45, I wasn't gonna be making 28, I was gonna be making 30 an hour flat rate hour. I went, ah, 45, that should be easy. I made it once in a year and a half, three years of work.
SPEAKER03 Was that a car count issue? Was it an advisor issue?
SPEAKER00 Or the work they were feeding you issue? That's an issue of like, okay, we got a whole lot of guys in the shop.
SPEAKER03 We don't have necessarily enough work in there, but we keep these guys on because if I… They flood the building with technicians and nobody ever gets bonuses because it's just a labor load.
SPEAKER01 That's evil shop owner. Yeah, that was not my experience. Dangling carrot, right? There was just as much work as I could possibly do.
SPEAKER00 So you're like that dumb mule that just keeps whipped every day that's got the carrot hanging out in front of him. He's like, I'm going to catch that carrot one day.
SPEAKER03 But he wasn't a dumb mule. He was a very well-earning mule.
SPEAKER00 He was. But he also knew, like they knew, they're tracking that. So it's like, you've had a really good first four days.
SPEAKER01 Day five, you're going to get handed crap. All right. It's cheaper to hire another mechanic than to pay everybody the bonus.
SPEAKER03 Yeah, so that was one of my big pitches to technicians early on when I was trying to compete with dealership techs before I paid on their level or before I had benefits on their level was Look, they're, you know, how many bays they got? They got 25 bays. They're going to put 20 technicians in 25 bays and you're going to get one and a half to two cars a day and you'll never hit bonus. Right. I'm going to have, you're going to have two bays and you're going to be one of four techs and you'll always have more cars than you can deal with.
SPEAKER00 But you understand my reluctance now to even talk about and engage in the conversation of a bonus plan, or an incentivized, whatever you want to call it.
SPEAKER03 You've been burned so many times that you don't trust it, I understand.
SPEAKER01 Let's say you have a comeback. Yep. Do you give it back to the tech that did the job or to a different tech?
SPEAKER00 So comebacks for me, I love this conversation, was a very lucrative thing. And oftentimes it was a very avoidable thing. And what tended to happen is they dispatched it, because of a time constraint, scheduling problem or whatever, to somebody that maybe wasn't as proficient at the DIAC. And the car would come back. Car's misfiring. Right? Gets all new plugs in a fuel system service. Say a V8 HEMI comes in and it's misfiring, right? It gets, it's got… So they load the parts cannon and they don't ever diagnose it. Well, so that's not necessarily a load the parts cannon because, like, the HEMIs, the first-gen HEMI, was known for, like, they were still putting copper core spark plugs in it. So 50,000 K on a HEMI, kilometers.
SPEAKER01 It needed plugs 20,000 miles ago. It was getting to where that plug was, so you'd get… 50,000 K is like 75 miles, right?
SPEAKER00 No, 50,000 K is like 35,000. Yeah. So it would get a fuel system cleaning. That was two hours, right? So that's, you take the throttle off, clean it, you run some injector cleaner through the rail, and it would get all six, all eight park plugs, and you would clear your adapters and you kick it out the door. That truck would come back next week and it'd be the same thing, misfire and all again. And I'd get it while the EGR is hanging open, right? Only maybe this time it had an EGR fault, but maybe it didn't. But I still caught that the EGR was open, and that's why the truck misfired.
SPEAKER03 So the first guy just did the overdue maintenance without actually finding the source of the problem.
SPEAKER01 That's a necessary first step, though, so I don't hate that they did that to start with, as long as the service advisor said, hey, there might be more problems.
SPEAKER03 Let's see when it would come back. So many of our problems in our industry as a whole is failure of communication. Ms. Jones, you know, you're 20,000 kilometers overdue for these maintenance services and we can't possibly figure out what's bad until we replace what we know is overdue. Right. So we have to start here and then we'll reset the system and we'll see what else is going on. Yeah. If you had a quality advisor.
SPEAKER02 Yeah.
SPEAKER03 who was confident in what they were presenting, then you overcome a lot of those objections. Those are perceived comebacks, and the perception is created by poor quality advisor communication.
SPEAKER00 But see, I was always jilted because I would have caught that the EGR was bad, and I would have done the EGR, plus I'd have sold the fuel system cleaning and the tune-up. So I would have taken that one-hour EGR job, and I would have made it into a five-hour job. from my two hours for a tune-up and two hours for my fee. Whereas now, that guy got four hours, and I got one. And you fixed the problem. And I fixed the problem. So that's why comebacks to me Should they always go back to the tech that did the car? Sure, provided that they can actually fix the car.
SPEAKER01 So let's say it's a legit comeback where the tech screwed something up, and I'm the one that worked on it to start with, and then you get it coming back. So you fix it, it's my screw up, what happens? Real quick, I know one thing that would happen when I worked for James is that if I screwed something up and someone else had to fix it, they would charge that flat rate back from me.
SPEAKER00 They'd dock you. Yeah. That's illegal, is it not?
SPEAKER03 I don't think it's illegal here.
SPEAKER01 So I thought it was a great plan because it held everybody accountable because it wasn't a problem for me. I don't have quality issues.
SPEAKER03 I think that speaks to the culture that dad had in his business. There was a culture of accountability and it happened so rarely. that it wasn't a situation where people were getting screwed over. 100% agree with Michael on that.
SPEAKER00 I can tell you the scenario that I saw happen is that we had some guys that could really turn and burn, really generate some hours, even on diagnostics, check engine light, they could really turn some hours. Was their accuracy 100%? No, not even close, not even close. But they were so busy that you just couldn't give them their comebacks. If you tried to backflag them, here's my thing with backflagging. If I'm not available, How do I know you're not full of it when you tell me that you had to do X, Y, and Z to fix a drought? I agree. That's why I wanted to bring it up. That's a really good point. You got to trust the other dude. It's a slippery slope. You got to trust the other dude. And when you work in a dealership where you're all like dogs on chains and you're pulling up to the scratch ring and you're like, you're trying to get him to get him to get him to get him to fight one another. Because that's how, I don't care what they talk about in other podcasts about creating cultures within a dealership, that's what you want. You want everybody hustling. You want all the motivation. You want them hungry. Hungry, right? Well, if I don't already like that guy, because I feel like he's fed, if you give me one of his, if he takes one of my comebacks, because say I'm on vacation, and you try to backflag me, you're going to watch my toolbox roll out the driveway. Because you're not, that's theft. You didn't give me the opportunity to make it right. You didn't get to have the conversation with me about how do I make it right. I don't trust that guy that he even did anything, because I would see it. He would work on it. He would get paid. That tech would get backflagged. Some bitch, there's the same car next month for the same intermittent problem or the same damn thing. Who we back flagging now, boys? Right?
SPEAKER01 That's a really good point.
SPEAKER03 All right, can I go full change? You said, it triggered something in my head. You said, I already don't like that guy because I feel like he's being fed. Right. I'm actively in the process of interviewing a husband and wife couple. Okay, 25 years of experience one as an advisor and one as a technician very high-level technician all the certifications Everything indicates that he is what he what he says. He is sure Wife has the performance reports to dictate that she is what she says she is. Yep Part of the deal is they want to work together.
SPEAKER00 I'd never do it
SPEAKER03 Right? So here's the, like, they've got a history of working together. They've got a history of good numbers together, good performance together. Was it in a business that failed? No. So they're currently wanting to leave a chain store that they both went to because a headhunter got them and promised them the world and didn't deliver, right? Right. But here's the fear. How do I keep the other technicians, because in the shop that they would be plugged into, she would be in charge of dispatch. How do you keep the other technicians from feeling like all the best work is being fed to her husband?
SPEAKER00 Well, Mike, let me tell you, if you can put this together and you can make it work, and if anybody can, it's going to be you. But whatever it is that you can do then, and you can sell to me, sell to everyone else, because I have never seen it work yet, and I'll tell you why. I've worked in dealerships where if you started to see a tech date, an advisor, that was highly frowned upon. Because, and it's even worse when it's a husband and wife. They're going home to the same thing, right? If he's struggling, she's struggling. If she's struggling, he's struggling. Now, you can look at that together. If they're fighting. Yeah, but I'm thinking just from the production standpoint. She's gonna have all the prime candidates prime for him It's just I don't care how it's human nature, right? Exactly because she's getting paid twice once for selling the job and once for her husband doing the job exactly So to me what you're describing here, I can tell you I have never seen it work in my experience yet So I would put a big Tread cautiously, my friend, Mike, because I don't see that working well. Because you're going to, no matter what your culture is within your shop, if he is the superstar that he says he is, and even if it's all 100% on the board and legit, your techs, otherwise, if they start to see maybe the tech that was number one is now number two, it's the first thing he's going to say. So, and I'm not trying to say that it can't work, but I think they're better.
SPEAKER03 There's a lot of ways for it to fail.
SPEAKER00 If I had two stores, I'd put one in each store. I don't believe that.
SPEAKER03 Well, so that's part of the conversations. I don't have a store. actively that needs both of them in one location. And they're like, well, that's great as long as we can work towards that as an end goal.
SPEAKER00 I have talked to so many shop owners, technicians that talk about when there was an inner dynamic within the people working, how it killed the culture within the shop.
SPEAKER03 Talking about a husband technician, wife service advisor.
SPEAKER01 Right. It kind of be like having two brothers and you fire one. How long is the other one going to work for you?
SPEAKER03 Well, it's just, it's a super common scenario in independent aftermarket shops, right? Is that the husband's the primary technician and the wife's running the books in the, in the, in the office. But that's different because they're the boss. Right. Um,
SPEAKER00 They fail together or they succeed together. When I talk about fed, that is the first word that a lot of people say. He's fed the good work. Now, that's often times why they're fed the good work. And that's an unpopular thing to say. I was fed a lot of work, but why? Because I could get it done. That's not the same. Or you were fed the work you were good at.
SPEAKER01 You were fed the Diag stuff, drivability, that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER00 I would go to them and say, it don't matter if you've got, if I walked in at eight o'clock in the morning and the first job you handed me was four tires, it didn't matter if I could do those four tires in 16 minutes. I would say to them, have you got a drivability job to do? Why don't you give me that? Well, why don't you want to get this banged up real quick? Well, because if you give it to that guy, next week I'm still probably going to be fixing it. So I might as well have it now. And we avoid the comeback discussion. Right? Let's try to eliminate the comeback. See, I had a great conversation just the other day with Chris Craig from TikTok. You guys don't know him, but he's great. His episode's going to drop. And we talk about how important dispatch is in a successful shop. Don't matter, dealership, independent, whatever. It is the most poorly compensated and unsung hero of just about any is the person that's doing the dispatching because that is how you get your flow going so well. I've worked with so many countless good ones that knew okay like I'm gonna they if if I got handed somebody's comeback I didn't have to chew her butt because it was like I already knew that she knew that I wasn't supposed to have that car and somebody above her had said listen we need this fixed He's got the best odds of being able to fix it. Just communicate. Give it to him.
SPEAKER01 And if they come to you and say, here's why you're getting it. This is why we need you to take one for the team here. It works good.
SPEAKER00 We were on an automated dispatch system, which works on labor ops on a code. 01 is general. 01 can be anything. So here's how it goes, right? You might have a ticket comes in and it's like. Check engine light diagnostic on. Say check engine light labour office point is 02. Well, you would star that 01, miscellaneous maintenance, and then you put your 2, your second line would be 02, your drivability. That would flag to anybody in the shop and they would pick it up. That meant that that customer is waiting, or that meant that we just need somebody to look at this car and get it done. So then that carmate, he may, I'm doing a tune-up on it, and then it would leave, and then it would come back, and then we treated it like, okay, we should probably dispatch it to the proper person. That's what you want to avoid in all scenarios from a shop, is dispatching it to the wrong person, right? Right. I feel like most of the time, The independents have it better because they know more about what, where your strong suits are, where your strong suits are. It's a smaller group of guys in a lot of cases too. And I'll tell you right, this is the other scenario I've seen in dealerships a lot of time. There's such a high turnover rate. They never get to learn where they're really strong. Now, the other thing is if they're all on the standardized same, this is the other argument they make for guys not being specialized, we all took the same training. You should all be able to do that job. You can train to your blue in the face. Some people just have an aptitude for being able to yank a transmission or an engine out of a truck. And some people have an aptitude for being able to look at a bunch of PIDs on a scan tool and diagnose what's going on with that car. I don't care that that guy over there has been doing transmissions for 25 years. If you start to give him diagnostic as to why that transmission's in limp, you and I talked about this this afternoon, he's gonna struggle with that. I could no more tell you, like I said, you could tell me there's a whole bunch of elves inside of an automatic transmission, and they're turning levers, and I'd believe you. I haven't taken one apart in over 25 years, I know how they work, but I'm not gonna be, but if that sucker's in limp, I'm your guy that's going to be able to get it out of LIMP. Or to prove to you that it's not, it's in LIMP because of a mechanical issue inside. All the electronically circuitry logic is all perfect. It's got a fault on the inside, that's why it's in LIMP. I'm your guy for that. So when I would see transmission guys, Get into the diag on why the damn thing was in limp. We saw more than once We saw a four-speed transmission go into it in their caravan and the stillings still be in limp This guy'd go over and he'd change a relay or he'd fix a fuse on a splice And that sucker wouldn't be in limp anymore. Did it need a tranny? It's probably didn't because it probably worked one day and then the next day it's in limp what did it really need? You never really know Okay, but their thing was they made six grand on doing the transmission. I If I gotta pay Jeff 200 bucks to fix the splice, we just eat that.
SPEAKER03 That's dirty.
SPEAKER00 It is, but it is profitable.
SPEAKER01 It's hard to pay you flat rate when you're that guy too.
SPEAKER00 Right, so you understand my, and I didn't want this to be all about flat rate. This is a beautiful opportunity for me to sit down with two really good shop owners and you hear my perspectives from the Jada Mechanic and I hear yours because At the end of the day, if you're starting to hire people now and you see guys that are coming out of the dealer and they're starting to tell you, listen, I've had enough of the dealer. I've had enough of, this is where it comes from. And it's not a new thing. It's just, there's more and more of us and I don't, I'm not responsible for it. Don't say, before Jeff Compton got online and started telling everybody to stand up for themselves, you know, I'm sure there's a bunch of, you're never going to see me on some of the podcasts where it's a bunch of dealer fixed op guys.
SPEAKER03 Because are there dealer fixed up podcasts? Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER00 Yeah. Yeah. You know, I just I just don't know. Yeah. Yep. Yep. I don't know if I'm public enemy number one. I'm working towards that.
SPEAKER03 That's all I listen to is David and Lucas and Carmen his crew.
SPEAKER00 Yeah. So I'm working towards that. I'm beyond ranch J. Ginnin. He does a lot of dealer owners. Fixed up people. Joshua Taylor does a lot of fixed up guys.
SPEAKER03 Do they? I feel like those guys, they're at Operating at such a high revenue level and there's so much money at stake That I feel like it would be hard to get them to truly open up and share Honestly without being heavily filtered.
SPEAKER00 Oh, I know I don't expect to get the 100%
SPEAKER03 Because I feel like you're just going to get the heavily polished politician version of their opinion.
SPEAKER00 And I'm cool with that. If they ever approach me and they want to discuss about what techs want as culture, we can sit down and I'll school you.
SPEAKER03 But that's going to be you talking to them, but they're just going to give you lip service.
SPEAKER01 I'm a shop owner now, but I feel like I'm 100% behind you because that's the pain I grew up with.
SPEAKER00 I try to put myself in their shoes. Lucas and I have had, this conversation has come up a lot, and I touched on it earlier, but when we see some techs that are overselling themselves, or you see some owners and you're like, I hired that guy and he said he could do, he was great at this, and I get him in here, and I see this in the group a lot of the time. I hired this guy and he said he was great at Diag. Well, he can't Diagnosis way out of a wet paper bag. Well, so why does he think he was good at diet? Well, if he came from a dealership where he knows that one product line really well, and he kind of has a- He doesn't diet, he's memorized all the pattern failures. He has a feel and a lot of known pattern failures, right? He did diet. He did it and he was good at it. He got it done. I didn't know how much I needed to know and how much I had to learn until I walked into the dealer. Didn't know. I thought I was something special.
SPEAKER01 Man, we hired a guy years ago who was, Fantastic great diet guy. He gets a battery drain and I got to show him how to set up his meter to check it.
SPEAKER00 Yeah But your facial expressions do not transfer us through audio I did I got the face for radio though, but now I'm to the point now where I'm showing the guys The other ways of doing it, you know what? I mean? Oh, what about bull drop cross-fuse? You never seen that method before huh? Okay, what about not unhooking the thing and leaving the clamp on? Right? And doing it that way. Like we all old school it. And I still, listen, I still old school it a lot because I'm a visual person, right? And depending on the size of the draw, there's nothing wrong with putting the tessellate in between and watching what it does. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm to the point now where I'm so inversed in this industry of different ways of doing things. that I don't sit down with too many other cats in the shop and they know more different methods to do it than me. Right? I can say, have you seen this method? They go, no, I haven't seen that. How does that work? They're still going to go to what they're familiar with. I don't blame them at all. Right? There's nothing wrong with that. Time is money. You go with what you're most efficient and effective at. But I don't believe that there's a ton of techs out there that are necessarily intentionally overselling themselves. I just believe that in their little box, Of what they do and what they've done. That's a very true statement. Right? That they just feel like they're good at it. And let's be real. I'm not going to sit, there aren't many guys that are going to sit down and say, I suck at air conditioning. Don't even give me an air conditioning job. I'll do it when I sit down and do an interview. Cause I'm, I want to be totally transparent.
SPEAKER03 I had a tech, I don't know, 18 months ago interview and asked him about his previous place of employment. He was the shop foreman at his previous place of employment, 10 bay shop, does decent volume. And I said, well, you know, what happened? He said, I got fired. I said, what did he get fired for? He said, I don't know really. I don't know really the reason that I got fired. They didn't really communicate it with me very well. He said, I'm going to be honest with you, I was being overpaid and I don't need to be a shop foreman.
SPEAKER01 Wow. What, what a great answer. That guy earned a lot of respect.
SPEAKER03 And he's, he's a, he's a great teammate now and he has the support that he needs and he's not asked to deal with the problem vehicles and the problem diagnostic issues. Uh, he's supported by the shop foreman that we have in that facility and he's, he's a role player. And so that was super refreshing. Um, The other thing that came to mind when you're talking about techs that oversell themselves, because it feels like if you're running around a lot of owners, they're going to say that every technician says they're the best tech they ever met, right? I'm mortified about the evolution from ASOG and changing the industry. is great for a conversation with primarily just owners. And changing industry, I have to remind myself that everybody's in there. It's not just us owners anymore. And there's some accountability to be held there. And I'm like, holy shit, a lot of the people in my company are in that group. And I'm like, Oh my god, I'm saying all this stuff. Is that the reality on the ground or is that my perception of what I'm hoping it is? And are you getting a ton of Facebook messages from people that work for me that are like, Mike's full of shit. That's not what it's really like. I myself have not.
SPEAKER00 I haven't had an advisor or an advisor. I haven't had a technician message me and say, I'm working for a guy right now that you've interviewed or whatever. Now, listen, if I do this long enough, it could happen. It could happen. But I'm also running in circles now where I'm talking to people and they're like, some well-known techs, they used to work for another shop that I know from exposure on social media. And you get a different side of the story. That person that you see on YouTube that portrays himself as this. Man, when the camera's off, it's a different dude. Okay, that's human nature. But when I, I wanna be transparent, I wanna be, so when I sit down and do an interview, I can sell myself, but I'll also be totally up front with you, and if I say, like I suck at air conditioning, and then if the very first day on the job you hand me an air conditioning job, I am gonna look at you and go, Okay, is this some kind of test? Right?
SPEAKER01 Because I want to know, are you giving me an opportunity? Or question my dispatch ability? Because I clearly made a mistake right out of the gate. Are you giving me an opportunity?
SPEAKER00 Or are you trying to, you know, test me? I just, because I need to know how to tread from there. Right? And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm just being upfront. I tell you, this is the very small box that I'm good at. The very small window. I hope that you can utilize it. And we move forward. There isn't a whole lot of techs out there overselling. We just have to remember their experience, which maybe is one shop, two shops. They were the foreman, they were the go-to guy. And then they get into a place of where, through culture and pay and whatever, you got a whole bunch of guys all of a sudden, they were the big fish, they're big fish now. And you're the little minnow again, and you gotta maybe bring yourself up to their level. He didn't oversell himself when he said, I can do X, Y, and Z. He just didn't know
SPEAKER01 On Hondas.
SPEAKER00 Yes. He just didn't say that. Yeah. I didn't know that I had guys, you had guys in the shop that could diagnose at that level that I diagnosed on one brand on seven brands. My God, I want to get to where that guy is. Right? It's a different thing. So they're not overselling. So my message to people that are hiring in a shop, well think about that though Mike, let me finish. If you're hiring a guy in a shop and he comes from a dealership and he says that I can diagnose, I can do drivability, right? Take that with a grain of salt because some guys can, they can go jump from brand to brand, I could. But oftentimes what they were is they were tasked with a lot of drivability jobs at the dealer and they got the cars fixed. Are you going to say because it's only one type of brand that they didn't do DIAC? You can't say that. That'd be a bold-faced lie. They diagnosed cars and they fixed them. We have to be much more transparent on both sides of this equation, the hiring equation and trying to get people to come to work for us of what is it really you expect. You know, if you expect that I'm going to give you a Ford and I'm going to give you an hour for a diag on it, and I'm going to give you a BMW and I'm going to give you an hour for a diag on it. If you think that that guy that has only ever worked at the Ford dealer is going to struggle equally with the Ford, you're crazy. You're crazy. First of all, you shouldn't be charged in the same for the two brands should be charged. There should be different labor for that Euro versus that domestic. I said it. I think that works for other shops. But you have to realize, if I had only worked on domestic and then he handed me a Euro, man, I'm slow. And I'm slow and I'm cranky about it.
SPEAKER03 What you're describing is, you're not wrong, right? It requires two people to be more self-aware than is typical. It requires the owner to understand frame of reference. And most of us don't. That's what we talked about last time. My frame of reference was very limited and all of my opinions were based on that limited frame of reference. And it requires a technician to understand that just because I'm the man with Nissan, or whatever brand it is, right? It doesn't mean that I'm going to come into an aftermarket shop that does everything and be competent. Most individuals are not going to go into an interview and say, you know, I'm pretty good with one, but I'm going to be honest, I'm kind of a train wreck on everything else. Don't you want to hire me?
SPEAKER00 But in their mind, they might not be a train wreck because they might have got through and got the car fixed.
SPEAKER01 We recently interviewed a guy that was a Honda only guy and he was pretty upfront about that. And we thought pretty seriously about hiring him because he would have brought a lot of his own clientele.
SPEAKER00 See, I always, I said years ago, 10 years ago, if I was going to open a shop in my town tomorrow, it would only be domestic. And I would go, and maybe a little Japanese, right? I might say I might do Honda, Toyota, and the big three. And then I would go and try and do my damnedest to poach the top tech from every dealer. that I wanted. And then I would get the OE software and the OE scan tool in that shop and then watch me go. Watch me put a herd on the rest of them in town because I could do it. Because I know how I'm going to sell value and I know how I'm going to sell service. I'm going to take that person and it isn't about what you produce anymore. I mean yes you're going to have to produce But I want you to take that care of that customer and realize that at the end of the day, if this one kicks your butt, you're not gonna go home, and you're not gonna be rushed to try and get that outside so you can get something better paying in, because there is nothing else outside waiting for you. We need you to get through this car. And then, if I start to market myself and my shop that way, to those, my customers, man, I'm gonna have a lineup of people with those brands. You don't think so? I think, I think you,
SPEAKER03 Casting yourself as a specialist and marketing yourself as a specialist works with performance and Euro and to a lesser degree some Asian trying to cast yourself as a specialist and Domestic is really difficult because everyone expects any shop to be able to work on domestic
SPEAKER00 But see that's such a, when we talked about the diesel side.
SPEAKER03 Whether or not it's right or fair or reasonable doesn't matter. It's with this, the consumer perception.
SPEAKER01 So we don't work on any BMWs, Mercedes, Volvos, Volkswagens or Audis. Sounds like a great place to work. Sounds like revenue loss. Is that a mistake? Yeah. Why? I say no. I got to keep up with all the technology and scan tools and everything else.
SPEAKER03 You're not going to be doing ADOS calibration or advanced diagnostics on 2022, you know. I feel like I make more money not working on them. They all have brakes and chassis and suspension. And I mean, so.
SPEAKER01 Yeah, but if you're going to work on them, you got to work on them. You got to work on them all. Do you? You can't just do brakes. Do you gotta?
SPEAKER00 Well, so I'll tell you from the dealership… No, you don't.
SPEAKER01 I don't work on any of them.
SPEAKER03 It can be, hey, Miss Jones, you know, I've always worked on, uh, you know, car X, Y, and Z for you over the years. And I know that you just, you know, I've taken care of your Lexus and your Acura, but I know you just got this Mercedes and they're, they're wonderful cars. And there's a lot of stuff that we can do on that car, but there's some limitations to things that I can't do. If we ever get in and it turns out that it's something that's beyond what we can do, I'm going to let you know, and I'm not going to charge you for what we've done to that point. And so you're still going to pay your tech and maybe you're going to eat that hour or whatever when you realize it was over your head. And you're going to have a referral partner that you work with. Maybe you're a specialty shop that doesn't want to work on her Lexus or her Acura.
SPEAKER00 but wants to work on a Mercedes.
SPEAKER03 But you want to do her brakes and her tires and her chassis and the things that you can but maybe you don't want to work on her, you know, communication fault error or whatever it might be. There's no reason to turn her away for that as long as you're communicating well and you're managing expectations well because she wants to do business with you whenever possible.
SPEAKER00 Yeah.
SPEAKER03 She'll go to the other guy if she has to but she prefers to go to you.
SPEAKER01 So I see two things I was hoping you would disagree with me. I don't really want to have to work on that stuff, but you make a good argument.
SPEAKER00 So here's my Counter argument to that is that the reality though as I see is I've seen too many shops when they do do that and they say for example, like I worked in a tire shop and they brought in all kinds of brands and Sometimes we would be, we'd be at Mercedes, we'd be having a BMW in there, right? And we had a snap-on scanner and that was it. They don't play well with that Euro stuff. And now, it's gotten better, but I'm talking way back in 2006, it was not that good.
SPEAKER03 It's getting worse again.
SPEAKER01 I don't even know how to reset a maintenance light on a BMW or a Mercedes.
SPEAKER00 I gotta get my phone out and Google it. Yeah. So what I found is that a lot of the time we would have to say, okay, we're going to do the tires, the front end, the brakes on that Mercedes, and it's going to go across one block up and over one block to a guy that only works on that brand. Well, my boss was forever saying, I can't believe that son of a bitch charged us X, Y, and Z to go in there and figure out that it was one bad coil and he put coil in like, what a, that's not good culture. It's not helping your partner in the industry. So if you're listening and you do that, stop it. Because you either make the choice that you're going to tool up Train up and do all of it.
SPEAKER03 Yeah, or whatever you can't do shut up and quit complaining about what somebody else is gonna charge you for it because you'd do the same damn thing if you could get away with it, well, maybe maybe the answer is You know miss Jones wants one person that she calls whenever something with wheels has a problem. Yep and And, you know, Miss Jones, my job is to be your car guy. If anything that has wheels has a problem, you call me and I'm going to fix it. And if it's outside of what I can help for you, I can either point you in the direction of somebody that can help you, or I can just be your advocate and I'll take it to that dude and I'll manage the whole process. I think that's the right way to do it. And then that's going to be a better option for me. And here's what's going to happen. Here's the thing. Now, if it has to go to that specialist, here's, he's a specialist and he's, he's probably more expensive than me. And I'm going to charge you a little bit for handling that process. So whatever he is, it's what he is. And then whatever I am is going to be a little bit more than that for handling that interaction for you. But you still only ever have to talk to me. Um, Now, if you're willing to provide that level of service, that's a level of ass pain that a lot of people don't want to go through, right? But that's going to create lifelong customers and fiercely loyal customers.
SPEAKER01 And that lets you work on their Hondas and their Toyotas and their Mazdas and everything else that we're good at that they're already bringing to you.
SPEAKER00 So let me bring another ripple into that conversation. How about the liability of say, he doesn't do it to Now, I understand you're only going to refer to them as somebody that you have a rapport with and you're familiar with and they're competent, but we're all human. Yeah. Let's say something goes wrong.
SPEAKER03 Say he screws the pooch in some way.
SPEAKER00 In some way and Mrs. Jones is now not happy.
SPEAKER03 Well, she paid me. She didn't pay him. Right. It's my job to make it right. Right. So either I'm taking it back to him and working it out with him or I got to find somebody else to deal with it and I got to eat it.
SPEAKER00 And I see oftentimes what happens too many times is you wind up eating some until you're right back where you talk about, Chris, where it's like just saying no. Better off just saying no or I gotta finally get on board and I gotta get tooled up and trained up so that I'm not subletting Mrs. Jones because I want to keep it all for myself. Sometimes when we say I want to keep it all for myself we look at that and go that's greed. That ain't greed. That's keeping it where I'm in control. That's maintaining quality. Yes, right.
SPEAKER01 And then I mean can you charge enough to cover your risk when you're subletting it out?
SPEAKER00 Because it's one thing to just say, I put a guy in there and I had to drive it over and I had to pick it up. That was an extra hour and I charged the extra hour to Mrs. Jones' sublet. That's one thing.
SPEAKER03 It's your due diligence in finding your subletters that you trust to do a quality job. And if they screw the pooch 5% of the time, you're going to flush them and find somebody else. But if it's 2% of the time, that's an allowable risk. It is going to increasingly become difficult to be a one-stop shop for everything. It's going to become increasingly desirous from a shop owner position to specialize because of the cost of equipment and data access is becoming more and more for every brand.
SPEAKER01 Also, if it's like a symbiotic relationship where you got a European shop that's sending you all the Hondas and Toyotas, you know, it's a little easier to swallow.
SPEAKER03 But I mean, the big thing is, from a consumer standpoint, everything in the consumer driven marketplace right now is going towards convenience. Anything you can do to remove friction from the consumer's experience is good. She doesn't want to have a dude for tires and a dude for her car but her husband's car goes to a different dude and then none of them do inspections. I got to go to the quick lube place for the inspection. It needs to be, they want one call to fix anything that has to do with cars.
SPEAKER00 And you needed to provide that. Because I know when I was at the dealer and I saw this sublet thing happen where we once in a while, I can think of this scenario where it would come in and it had been from another shop and it came down to us for a recall. And while we do the recall, what they would do is they would add on a multipoint inspection to every car that came in. This was Nissan's procedure. That meant that it didn't matter if it was just there for a Takato airbag recall. It went on the rack and I checked everything out. Well, here's what would happen a lot of time. Their trusted mechanic that is just sending them up there for the Takato recall. Maybe he's only ever done oil change on that car. I do my due diligence on my multi-point and I go, There's a ball joint falling out of that. There's a tie rod falling out of that. The brakes are shot. The tires are worn. Guess what I'm just going to do? I'm going to do everything in my power to poach that customer from that person, that trusted person. I'm going to steal Mrs. Jones. That's my goal now at the end of the day is to steal Mrs. Jones. That's just business.
SPEAKER03 I felt like a lot of manufacturers were putting out bullshit recalls just to do that.
SPEAKER02 That's a really good point.
SPEAKER01 I didn't think about that.
SPEAKER00 I'm not an engineer so I'm not smart enough to know but I would see some like I think of the one my friend talked about and I was already at a Chrysler by the but then an airbag recall what all you did was take the emblem off the front airbag. Because it might cause a projectile when it comes off the airbag goes off it could you know the emblem could scratch you scratch it well let's be real right if the airbag goes off and it only scratches you, you've done alright. So is recalls driving traffic back into the dealer? I think we're all crazy if we think that it isn't part of the planned obsolescence of the vehicles when they're built, that at some point we're going to release a recall and that's going to drive a bunch of vehicles back into the dealership. And then if I can whack them for that oil change while I got them there, because this is, you've heard me talk about this before, customers want convenience, like you said. So I'm going to hold off on doing that oil change until I'm going in for the recall and they can do it while they're there. I don't want to have to go to two spots.
SPEAKER03 Well make no mistake, there are aftermarket service providers around the country right now that search for open recalls on every VIN code that comes into their shop, and they offer the option to the client, would you like me to schedule this recall for you and manage it for you? I'm not at a place where I can logistically manage that, but they're doing that to keep that dealership from poaching their customers. Or being a little over-aggressive on the DVI and selling stuff that maybe isn't really necessary.
SPEAKER01 Well, when we started out 11 years ago, I didn't want to do state inspections. I didn't want to do tires. I didn't want to do alignments.
SPEAKER03 You didn't want to do the stuff you didn't want to do.
SPEAKER01 Right. And I got screwed into doing all that stuff. I had certain customers that I needed to be a one stop shop. Yeah. And the other people that I relied on to do that for me kept letting me down. So the thought of trusting a European repair to someone else.
SPEAKER03 Do you still work on Brad's trucks? Yes. My favorite leprechaun. Yes. Angry little man. He had to be the one that forced you into doing tires and shit.
SPEAKER00 So can I ask you, why do you feel like they were letting you down?
SPEAKER01 Oh, because I'd take it to have an alignment and the steering wheel would be crooked. Or I'm their biggest customer because I'm going to bring you a bunch of money in tires and I get no deal. I don't need the deal, just be reliable and let me know when I'm going to have it back.
SPEAKER03 Do it in a reasonable time and actually follow through with what you promised. Lucas is eyeballing us.
SPEAKER00 Yeah, I want to ask you. And this will kind of wrap it up in a good way. We'll go back to the bottleneck thing. You said you're the bottleneck within your business right now. 100%. So what are you, Chris, are you going to do? Brian. Brian, excuse me. That's all right, John. To rectify that, what are you going to do about that?
SPEAKER01 I'm going to share it with you guys because you guys hold me accountable when I see you in person and we talk about it.
SPEAKER00 You talked about you're going to hire an advisor. Yes. Are you or are you not?
SPEAKER03 I think Patrick needs to be your advisor.
SPEAKER01 I do too.
SPEAKER03 Patrick, if you listen to this, what's stopping Patrick from doing it?
SPEAKER01 Money? He's been challenged yet, has he?
SPEAKER00 I'm the bottleneck. Patrick, is it money?
SPEAKER01 Or you just don't want to relinquish control? Patrick's my brother and he are 50-50 in everything. I just, I don't think I've asked him about it or pushed him hard enough to do it. I just do it.
SPEAKER00 I think tomorrow that you make that your goal.
SPEAKER01 Agreed. He's not going to be happy.
SPEAKER00 But who's the boss, you or him? Well, you're 50 50. Yes.
SPEAKER01 So is he going to ask once, once he lets me steer the ship, but we do everything.
SPEAKER00 So once, once you put him in the advisor role, what are you going to do? Cause you're going to put more work on him and you're going to take some work off yourself. What are you going to do?
SPEAKER01 I got to find a next move. You know, we got to find shop number two. Is that the goal? Yeah.
SPEAKER03 Okay. So you're still at a point where you're not marketing at all. No. So you need, you need to have the time to grow your existing business to maximum capacity.
SPEAKER01 Right. I need to be a shop owner and start doing owner status.
SPEAKER00 You want to need to work. Yeah. Okay. Right. Yeah. Don't work in the business. Work on the business. Exactly. I love it. I love it. Well, gents, I want to thank you, man.
SPEAKER03 This has been I feel like we're going to talk for three hours if Lucas wasn't giving us the side.
SPEAKER01 I got so much more to say about Mike Allen. You're going to have to invite me back because we haven't even got to the good stuff.
SPEAKER00 So Mike and I recorded not that long ago and I already told him there would be a part two is going to be a probably we're going to probably hit the double digits with how many times we have Mike on because Mike is an awesome guest and I'm just not allowed to talk about Atlantic City.
SPEAKER01 Oh, was that some stories from the Vegas?
SPEAKER00 I've tried, I would love to go. I want to do the apex and SEMA. I have not made it.
SPEAKER03 Let's go this year, man. We're all going this year.
SPEAKER00 Let's go. So, okay. But remember what we talked about?
SPEAKER01 They only let a few Canadians, so you got to get your tickets early.
SPEAKER00 Yeah, and I suck at air travel, so that's another story for another time. Just take one of the buses from work. I could do that. Make sure it has AC. You've got to remember, when I go, I'm booking my time off from my shop, so I'm using up my holiday pay to come to it, which I'm not saying Apex and SEMA wouldn't be a great thing, but I'm going to be at AST. So maybe by then, if you're gonna be at AST and you're gonna be at AST, we're gonna sit down and we may discuss what you've done since this point to how did that transition go. That's some accountability shit right there.
SPEAKER01 So the first time I ever went to SEMA and Apex, was with his dad. Well I mean he was gonna go yeah and that's kind of guy he was I said James can I go to SEMA show with you and he's like sure. So that was pretty cool. My first time in Vegas first time at SEMA show in Apex was with James Allen.
SPEAKER03 That's probably how you learned that when you're parking at a certain type of bar you back into your parking space so that you can escape more quickly in case you're running out the door.
SPEAKER01 Also also met your dad at Winston-Salem one time a little run-in with some cops this also real quick as I'm My first time in Vegas with your dad and I think was Terry Hubbard who owned our writer at the time And we were at a blackjack table, and I'd never done anything like that so we were playing having a good time and and When James and Terry left, the dealer said, if you're ever at a table with two guys playing like that, leave. There's no way you're going to win any money. Why did he wait to the end to tell you? Because they were losing a lot of money and they were good tippers.
SPEAKER00 Well, I mean I want to thank you guys this has been this has been awesome. I mean, I can't think Lucas is listening For for having me come down here, you know what I mean and be here on the fourth for you guys to celebrate this and I mean and You know, it's not just about the fourth we could have done this on any on any day What's it gonna take to get you to move down to God's country? So what I've seen of the fishing around here, there's not enough right now in local North Carolina for bass fishing to make a big move.
SPEAKER03 You can pack your toolbox and leave your torch. Do you like fly fishing?
SPEAKER_00 No. That's French Broad is world class for that. Yeah, but that's, so you take a really long lightweight rod and you fish for little tiny fish. That's not fishing. I don't fish at all. Yeah. So, so the appealing states for right now, Texas is looking really good for fishing thing. Um, you gotta remember, like I'm, I'm, I can see Lake Ontario from my front step. Lake Ontario is home right now to some of the well it ain't it isn't maybe it's the best smallmouth bass fishery in the world bar none now if you've never caught a smallmouth you're not going to understand what i'm talking about but if you have and then you realize that we grow them some of the biggest ones in the world and we certainly grow the most aggressive ones in the world it is a really hard thing to leave but as i've been down here and i've seen the the the friendliness of the people and the way that there's so much passion for the industry is right in this state. It is very tempting when I, you know, my phone's been blown up all day long. What are you doing there? When are you moving here? It is very tempting, it honestly is. And you guys that run good shops, I'm only here to try and make people aware that there are gentlemen like yourselves that are doing it the right way. And that there are, don't stay where you're not happy, where you're not treated right. Get out there, don't oversell yourself, but have a very transparent conversation about what you can do and what you can't and what you're looking for and what you're not. And go out there and have that conversation and find the people that will appreciate you and go there and do it. Because every time that I interact with more and more people like yourselves that are advocating for the industry and appreciate my perspectives and I appreciate yours, man, it just charges me up again. It makes me go back to the Canadian Rust and all that kind of stuff and feel like I'm making a difference. Hey, if you could do me a favor real quick and like comment on and share this episode, I'd really appreciate it. And please, most importantly, set the podcast to automatically download every Tuesday morning. As always, I'd like to thank our amazing guests for their perspectives and expertise. And I hope that you'll please join us again next week on this journey of change. Thank you to my partners in the ASA group and to the Changing the Industry podcast. Remember what I always say, in this industry, you get what you pay for. Here's hoping everyone finds their missing 10 millimeter and we'll see you all again next time.