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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: Jeff And Matt Fanslow - Episode 5 - Auto Edit.mp3
00:00 Matt Fanslow people that just love to fix cars and, well, their wife has a really good job or their husband has a really good job where they get the health insurance and the benefits so they can just work for the money.
00:11 Jeff Compton That's what we're forcing. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to another exciting thought provoking episode of the Jaded Mechanic podcast. My name's 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. I'm sitting here tonight with a really good friend of mine, Matt Fonzle. Matt, how do you feel tonight? I mean, I'm still breathing. That's pretty good. That's the main thing, right? It's been a long winter for us up here. We're just finally starting to get rid of it. And it's been, I think that today's, it feels like the 10th day in a row it's rained. The grass is like super long. Everything's starting to, ditches are flooding. It's a lot of fun. So we're starting to finally roll down to the end of the entire season, which is always a plus because my body hurts from doing it. I mean, we've got a young apprentice that's kind of, we've had him now, I guess, about three months, four months, and he's come along pretty good, which, but you know, it's just, you know, it doesn't matter. Sometimes it's not how old you get. There's just some speed factor, right? From how many doing a million sets versus him not doing a thousand yet. So I still get scrubbing in on a lot of them. And it's like, man, you know, I would have not thought it almost 48 that I'd still be touching tires, but you know, it would be a lot worse. Right. So that's going to always be worse.
02:16 Matt Fanslow Yeah. How about you guys? Well, it's dried up a little bit. I should say it's dried up quite a bit because even though it seems like it rained just a few days ago and then we had the snow melt, got hit with some more snow, got a snow melt. It's been kind of muddy and everything. Yeah. And driving home tonight, there's a few tractors out in the fields. One of them was planting and then most of them are tilling or what, you know, with the, they don't really work the soil like they used to, right? So the soil saving type techniques they're using just a dust storm. It's a crazy dust storm. Even the planter, just a terrible dust storm. And it's like, it was so wet just a couple of days ago. And now you're out in the fields and you can barely see the tractor with all the dust and
03:04 Jeff Compton dirt debris in the air. And you, so you've had snow recently. We've been probably, I don't think we even had a flurry for the last, it's been probably three weeks tomorrow that since we've had even like any kind of flurry.
03:17 Matt Fanslow So I think we, cause it all melted, right? And everybody thinks it's spring and you got the birds chirping and everything starting to see the grass turn a little green. And then inevitably we get hit one more time. And usually it's a wet, heavy snow. You know, I hate to put like a depth on it, but usually a two, three, four inches, super heavy, breaks branches, breaks trees. It happens like every year and every year everyone seems so surprised it happened.
03:47 Jeff Compton Yeah. I don't know. Caught off guard. So, and you guys probably don't do as many tires as me. You're predominantly your shop. Would you say that you guys kind of specialize in die aggers? It just like, no, you're general all around you do and everything.
04:03 Matt Fanslow It's just, yeah, the shop, the shop itself is bumper to bumper, everything except collision. How big is the body work? We don't do any. The shop itself is about 10,000 square feet. And I think we have, if we count the alignment machine, alignment rack, we have eight hoists and my area. So what's odd about the shop is it's very compartmentalized. There's almost like rooms, if you will. So my room will fit three vehicles across, you know, left to right. And then I can usually squeeze one or two behind those. And that's just my area and that's all flat. And then we have an alignment bay that's basically a room with the four post hunter and the Hawkeye Elite alignment system in there. And so that's very compartmentalized. And then we have kind of really two other shop areas. One of those we call like the big shop and that's got four hoists. And then another section that's a little bit smaller, that's two hoists and in the way
05:11 Jeff Compton back kind of by the tire machine and the wheel balancer is another hoist. Yeah, nice. And I should probably ask, what's the name of the shop? Riverside Automotive. Riverside Automotive.
05:21 Matt Fanslow And you're in Red Wing? Yep, Red Wing, Minnesota. Which is home with the boots. Yes, Red Wing shoes and boots. That's where I was born. And you've been at this shop quite a while. Yeah, I think it's like 11 years now, maybe going on 12. Nice.
05:37 Jeff Compton Maybe it is 12 years. Did you kind of move around a lot before that? Or I mean, I kind of know your background a little bit. Like I first saw your name on IATN, but you and I didn't really connect until Facebook. You know, I was on IATN before there was a Facebook and then when Facebook kind of came along, I was not, I wasted enough time on Facebook every day. It seemed like I just went away from IATN. But I remember seeing you in there way back when different posts and, you know, talking with some of the sharpest minds. And I was like, that guy really knows what he's talking about. So I was probably just parroting somebody else that was way smarter than me. But give us kind of give us kind of your your what got you into it. I mean, did you grow up on a farm and kind of was grounded or?
06:31 Matt Fanslow Well, I grew up on a farm and then maybe even more importantly is my grandparents, my dad's parents owned a farm implement dealer. So when they first opened it long before I was born and maybe even maybe even before my dad was born, but it would have been open while he was a kid. It was Minneapolis and Moline. That's what they sold in service. And after really, I think World War Two is the slow demise of Minneapolis Moline. So when they kind of went belly up and got bought out, my grandpa switched to Massey Ferguson and then for the implement stuff, what they would pull the balers and the planters and all that they went with Spear. At the time, it was Spearie, New Holland. And then after a while, I'd have been pretty little yet, but Ford bought out New Holland, Spearie, New Holland. So then it was Ford, New Holland. Uh, so yeah, that, that meant that was a big deal growing up on the farm and back in the time where you could really fix stuff in the, the field and being around that, uh, helped a lot and up at the implement. I was still pretty little when they were still doing, uh, machinery and right around, I think like 88 is when Ford specifically said, if you're going to be a dealer, you're going to have to put in this computer system, uh, cataloging service information, stuff that we think nothing of nowadays. But back then it was a big deal. Uh, everything else was microfiche at the time. And, uh, we kind of had this file cabinet was how you looked up parts and it worked, but, um, it wasn't a computer. No. And the system was a lot of money. If I remember right, it was something to the tune of $125,000 investment.
08:24 Jeff Compton And way back in like, are we talking 1980 money?
08:29 Matt Fanslow Yeah. 1987, 1988.
08:32 Jeff Compton So a substantial amount of money. Yeah.
08:35 Matt Fanslow So he's like, he told him the pound sand, uh, he got out of the implement, um, portion of it, no more tractors, no more machinery. What he had taken on as a sideline again, long before I was born was the farmers, you know, they have trees falling into the field and they need to clear it out and they couldn't find a place to fix their saws or buy a good chainsaw. And at the time, home light was considered pretty good way back. And they, uh, took on home light for a while. And then this rep shows up one day with a super strong Swedish accent. And he sells, he sold Jens Rude or what we call John's Rude. And then some places call it John's red. And the thing with home lights were, and most, most chainsaws back in the day, if you let them just sit on the ground and idle while you're throwing brush or whatever, you'd go pick it up and hit the throttle and probably die. Right. You'd have to start it back up. So this, uh, John's Rude rep starts one of his saws and I'm pretty sure it was like a 601, let's it sit outside and idle while him and my grandpa shoot in the breeze. And then my grandpa goes out, picks it up, hits the throttle revs way up. And my grandpa says something like, okay, I'll take four of them. And that started the forestry and garden type of stuff where we started out with John's Rude, then he got Husqvarna and eventually got steel or still, I guess, depending on where you are in the country. And then, um, the machinery went away. So right around late, late middle school and all throughout high school, very few tractor and implement repairs, but lots of chainsaws, trimmers, blowers. And that's, that's where I picked up a lot of the troubleshooting stuff. I'd watch my dad do it. And I wanted to be just like him. I wanted to be, I wanted somebody to bring their saw up and he complained about something and I would go outside with it, pull on it a few times or started up and listen to it and just kind of know what's wrong. And I worked really hard at it. So I think I've told the story before. It would have been, man, probably around 11 years old, 10. I told my dad, I wanted to fix chainsaws like him. He kind of laughed at me and he went up, you know, the implement property had this really, really big machine shed for storage and a lot of what they stored was old chainsaws people trade in their junk. They'd throw them in a bin and then you had used parts. So he went up and he grabbed two John's Rude 621 saws and set them down on a little bench and said, make one good one. And I think he thought I would work on it for like five minutes, get bored and go do something else, right? See if I could get my grandpa to let me go drive one of the tractors again or something like that. But I didn't, I don't, it never occurred to me to quit. It's good. Yeah. And so I took them all apart and, uh, Picked out the good pieces and I got some help. I, it wasn't like total solo here, but got a little bit of help where you would expect to get some help. And eventually I had it all put together and I had spark and I was trying to get it to start and I couldn't get it to start. My dad went out and pulled on it like three times and goes, I know what's wrong with it and pulls the carburetor off and we pulled it apart together and I had rebuilt the carburetor, but on the diaphragm, there is a kind of a little peg that's got to slip into the lever on the needle and see it. And I didn't do that. And he kind of laughed cause he had done that before. And, uh, so that's yeah. Then that saw started and ran and my grandpa said, put a new chain and bar on it and put it on the used car or sorry, the used saw shelf. And I did that. And a couple of days later, I stopped in after school, the school bus had dropped me off there and, um, he handed me like a hundred dollars and he said, your saw sold. So, uh, you know, that was, yeah, it was a big deal.
12:34 Jeff Compton Yeah. It's good money. And back then for 12 year old boy, right. Good.
12:38 Matt Fanslow Hey, I blew it all on a model chain or a model tractors that he sold up there.
12:44 Jeff Compton Yeah. So the money stayed within the business. That's good.
12:47 Matt Fanslow Yeah. Yeah.
12:47 Jeff Compton And it was very strategic on his part, I think. But I mean, that's, that's kind of, I mean, you could kind of say that kind of was your first really lit the fire into your right to that you enjoyed it and you have a nap, a knack for it.
13:00 Matt Fanslow So, yeah, I think I always like to figure stuff out. I always wanted to know how something worked. I always wanted to be able to figure out what, what was broken. I didn't always like actually doing the work fixing it, but I did like to figure it out, like, could I figure out why whatever didn't work, it didn't matter what it was and, uh, you know, they bought a new VCR and couldn't get it hooked up. And I was right up my alley. I figured it out.
13:28 Jeff Compton I was always up with like that too. Like I wasn't interested in, you know, um, you could show me the insides of an automatic transmission and I'd be like, okay, that's cool. Right. But if you showed me the circuitry that made it work, that was way more interesting to me, right? Cause I mean, it was, I wanted to be, cause my background at the dealer was you'd see a lot of guys that, you know, it was rebuilt and it still was in limp. Right. You know, like, and it would kick over and you're just like, it'd wind up in my vein and it's like, well, this can't be that complicated. Right. Like it's not, we're talking like, you know, 98 caravan, right. As an example, it's like, yeah, okay. So there's some stuff going on there, but it's really like, it's not what we, what we're used to dealing with now. And, you know, I can still remember the first couple of ones that I figured out and it's just like, oh, okay. The relay circuits are bad. That's why it's in limp because it, it doesn't know what to do. It's dumb. Right. And, um, I remember I bought a, it was a Dodge shadow for a hundred bucks from a customer that had high mileage on it. And the transmission had already been rebuilt twice in the life of the car. And they were regular customer at the dealer. And of course it comes back in and it had been rebuilt. Like, I want to say 15 months before and say 30,000 miles. Right. So not a lot, but there was no warranty left on it. And they were like, I'm getting rid of this car. And, um, a former mentor of mine, he was big into front wheel drive, uh, Chrysler, everything from the old GLH is to anything. Right. And he was always buying parts. So I'm like, well, I'll buy this car because I know it's got a good engine and, uh, you know, and I took it and I don't know, it was probably three o'clock a shop closed down, kind of got pretty slow around four. I remember pulling it in and like tearing through the circuits and finding like a broken wire down in the fender well area for the main relay for the TCM. And like, I was still remember I'm, I'm driving that car around the parking lot and it's shifting after buying it for a hundred bucks. And I called up my friend and I'm like, I got this shadow here that, um, you know, the transmission was rebuilt just a little while ago. And I said, they just traded it. Do you need it? He's like, yeah. He's like, I'll give you 400 bucks for it. So that was the first time for me that was like, and I'm not, I, I don't want to be in the business of flipping cars, but to me, that was pretty smart that you could take something that somebody just was like, not interested in putting like your, like your, like your saw and, you know, putting a few hours time into getting something that, you know, other people would have maybe just chucked a module out because it was, you know, common and, and making that much money that fast, like to me, that was like, well, that's, that's the same kind of money that I would have made work in eight hours, hanging brakes or ball joints at the dealership here. And, you know, I did it by fixing a wire that cost me 25 cents and I just made, you know, $300 on this car gone the next day. Like, and that kind of drove me to be like, okay, so, you know, focus on that. Right. Which was, cause it didn't interest me. Like I couldn't remember if it was a three speed or four speed. Didn't, I didn't care. Right. It was just the fact that it was broke and you know, a simple repair to a wire restored everything that it was supposed to do. And I thought that was the coolest thing. Right. And I wasn't like, I was good at electrical driveability, but that was like, okay, this is really where I can see the money being, you know, that was first light bulb moment for me that, okay, Jeff, you know, you kind of have an act for this.
17:16 Matt Fanslow I think, I don't know if I had one of those moments on a car until I was probably working in a shop, you know, I think I had really good instincts and I got away with a lot of stuff for a long time. I'm there with you for sure. Yeah. Well, you know what I mean? Like I was in a thousand percent, even in high school, somebody's car wouldn't start, you know, they started up, maybe started to pull out of a parking lot and it died and then I was, oh, they couldn't get it started. And I really had no idea what I was doing, but for some reason it's like, I think it flooded and this is, you know, in the mid nineties, a lot of kids were still driving cars with carburetors cause that's what you could afford and, uh, you know, I just, I would know to pry open and hold open the, uh, choke and maybe hold the throttle wide open to clear it out. And they get going again. And everyone thought like, oh, wow, you must really know what you're doing. It's like, I don't know why I knew to do that other than I suppose a chainsaw would flood and I would know what to do or a tractor gas tractors at the, uh, would have chokes on them, stuff like that. And then, you know, the, the whole, the move into the profession was really just to kind of get my parents off my back. Cause in high school, after high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Right. I mean, just really no idea, you know, kick around the idea of, uh, the military and, uh, just, I don't know. I didn't know what I was going to do, but the, uh, area, the local college had an automotive program and the instructor had stopped into the high school shop class and kind of put on a little bit of a presentation and part of his presentation was to kind of wow everybody with what all these parts are on a car. You know, the electronic stuff and he would hold them up and I got all of them right, except for a cam sensor. But I got all these other ones right because a, some of the tractors already had some of the stuff and B the vehicles for the implement to, you know, tow the trailers and, uh, deliver equipment or pick it up, had this stuff and we serviced the vehicles up there. So I had some familiarity. So he goes back to his office and calls my parents, calls my dad right up at the implement and says, Hey, you know, your kid, you've got a bright future in auto repair. And so they're like, wow, you know, you'll never be out of a job. They're always going to need their car fixed that that would be a pretty good gig kid. And I wanted to fix chainsaws cause it was easy and the local or not local, the regional still rep calls me up at home. His name was Jim. I'll never forget it. And he's like, I really like you and I think you do really well for five years. And then you'd go broke because the writing was on the wall already. You know, when I first started going up there, hanging out, you could pretty much buy a part for a chainsaw regardless of age. Yeah. It was one of the very first ones built. You could probably still find a part for it, but the newer ones coming out. That wasn't the case. They're designing in a designed or what do they call that predicted obsolescence or something like that?
20:30 Jeff Compton Or lessons. Yeah.
20:32 Matt Fanslow Yeah. They're, they're engineering obsolescence and that it's going to be obsolete. You won't be able to buy parts. And even at that, like the, the, the consumer model saws that you, that's what you sell the most of it's getting to the point where it's too expensive to fix if you can buy a new still chainsaw. Cause all you really do is some limbing and maybe a storm goes through and you got a few branches to cut up. Yeah. You don't need a big lumberjack, big saw, big pro saw a couple hundred bucks gets you a still chainsaw and we'll do anything and everything you needed to do. However, now if that thing breaks, depending on what you can hardly afford to fix it, you can just buy a new one and the profit margins on the new ones are pathetic. You know, my dad and I figured out if you spent more than about 10 minutes with somebody on a chainsaw, you lost money. Wow. So we're losing money. If you're acting as good salespeople on a smaller consumer size consumer saw, you know, you start to get into the bigger stuff, you know, probably anything over like three cubes or whatever, you know, 50, 55 CCs, then the prices go up enough and margins enough to maybe spend a little bit of time, but nothing like the pro stuff, but there's not that meant the pros are the loggers. They show up, they know what they want. You know, there's two sides to choose from. There's the small lemming saw that's light and fast, and then there's the big one for felling and that's what they bought and they already knew what they wanted. They walk in and say, I need a new saw. You know, they need the big one or the small one.
22:06 Jeff Compton And then that's kind of, we see that similar thinking in our industry still to this day, right? And I like being so much of my background is in the dealership, right? Like I, I never got into the what's a margin on a neon versus a margin on a town and country versus a margin on a Durango, right? I didn't care. I knew the type of customer, what they were like for each one, right? But it's so, you know, it's funny when you, we all want to reminisce about the glory days of when you just kind of went out and lifted the hood and, you know, tweaked the carburetor and, you know, plug the ignition wire back in and it smoothed right out and they handed you, you know, five bucks or something and they were happy as could be. And now we look at it and it's like, okay, we know what the margin is going to be from the time when that car comes in, right? What it can be. And if you spend too much time doing this and too much time doing that, I understand that it's a necessary evil of this business, but I mean, I can see why people still reminisce so much about the old days, right? Where it wasn't, even if the margin was not great, you still spent the time doing, just being a good person, doing what the right thing to do. You know, I wish some of that could come back, but I'm, I'm scared that it's not gonna cause I mean, I, I can remember lots of customers that I spent 20, 30 minutes after their repair going through with them because, you know, they didn't understand why their guy had said it needed X, Y, and Z, right? And I fix it with a broken wire or something like that, right? And they want to understand. And, you know, I'm not getting paid for that 30 minutes, right? Like I've done the repair. It was flat rate at the dealer. Like I had some really good advisors that knew what I could do and they, they'd let me do it and they, I don't want to say that the advisors looked after me, but I mean, they kind of, right. I would help them out with things and they would help me out with things. And so it's never a situation of, you know, that I couldn't talk to customers or I didn't enjoy it. It's just, you know, you know how it is, right? The one customer can be just absolutely awesome. And the next five can be that nightmare. You know, they've already judged you before you ever even have opened your mouth. And it's those kinds of people. I just, that's sold an archaic. I can't even, I can't even stomach it. Right. I just don't do it. And it's tough. So people look at me and they're like, don't let him talk to customers. And then I'll have two customers come in. Like I had last week. They were, they were moving from, I'm in Ontario. They're moving out of province, had to buy a car that day. And they're like, you know, so they bring a car over from the local dealer and I don't even rack it. I'm like, what is it? Oh, it's a Nissan Juke. No, don't buy that. And they're like, why? I'm like, cause it's going to have a transmission problem. Probably when I drive it, I said it's one of their lowest selling, we're talking like a three or four year old Juke just at a warranty. I said, it's, they didn't sell a lot of them. The parts are expensive. Their serviceability, them is terrible. I wouldn't buy it. I said, and here's not only that I would probably wouldn't buy any Nissan that's out of warranty from that generation because expect to put a transmission in it within the year, there's a reason that it's traded. It needs the CVT. They all do just expect it. And so they, they take it and I drive it real quick. I don't even rack it. I just drive it and I'm like, yep, it's got a transmission issue. The lights on yet, but you can feel it. If you've driven enough Nissan CVT, like me, you know, there's something wrong. So they're like, okay. So they go back and they come back with a little Mazda three. I racked that car, go through everything. Okay. So the factory remote start doesn't work. Make sure you have them fix that before you buy it. Your wheel lock key for this car is missing. Make sure they give you that before it's make sure that, you know, there's like five things on the car. It had supposedly been undercoded. Not a dealer at a up here. We have what we call crown undercoating and they had receipts in the glove box of previous owner for crown, but when you got into the car, you never thought that it had been sprayed ever. And I said, okay, so when you get to where you're going, they're going to Halifax, get to your local crown. Show them the car, show them the receipts and tell them that you don't think it was sprayed well enough and if they're going to spray it, have it sprayed heavy. Those two ladies left and they were literally like the one that gave me a hug. And she's like, I wish we'd have found you years ago. And it's cause they're just coming in because like we could get them in that day for a pre trip or like a pre safety inspection, you know, normally don't even charge a hundred bucks for it. Right. It's, it's not charged enough as what it should, but it's not necessarily a safety inspection as much as it's just like, is the car worth buying or not? And they were so happy that we didn't, you know, we essentially looked at two cars for them, but only charge them to look at one and gave them more knowledge than you could tell anybody in the industry had yet to this point treated them like they weren't just, you know, a walking checkbook and instead treated them like, and we knew they were not going to be future customers because they're already leaving, right? We could have blown them off, Matt. We could have said, yeah, okay, well, this is just blah, blah, blah. And out the door. But the fact that I spent, you know, 45 minutes going over with them and another 15 minutes talking about what to expect with the car they're going to buy and how to kind of navigate like, okay, so, you know, understand that this is not your dad's Mazda, you know, that he had in 2002, this is a 2018. It's very different. Like you have to appreciate this little thing and that little thing and how the technology makes it so great. And they remind their, their minds were just like blown, right? With how much they'd never had that kind of interaction with somebody that actually genuinely seemed to genuinely care that the buying experience, which I'm not even selling the car, right? Matt is what was a positive experience. And I came home from that night realizing that, you know, it's not about selling. Right. It's about trying to make people understand that this industry is not this cesspool of deceit and dis, you know, distrust. There's a lot of people that have really good intentions that for whatever reason, just, they don't get to talk to the customer or it doesn't come out. And then there's a lot of people that are doing just some really shady stuff. But I mean, in the middle of us, there's a handful of us that don't get the, the accolades that are just doing the right thing every day. Right. And it, I didn't get like from a flat rate standpoint, would I have been the same way with that customer? No, I can't say that it would have. Right. I would have, I would have spent maybe 10 minutes and then I would have been, okay, I got to get back to whatever I'm doing, even if I had nothing to do, because you can't get another job, right? If you're yakking, but it is so much better for my, what I feel I have to bring to the industry if I don't work that way, you know what I mean?
29:21 Matt Fanslow If it, I don't see everything as just a margin and a financial opportunity. Yeah. And there's a lot of stuff going on that's depending on your perspective is shady, but the intent isn't necessarily shady, you know, to be intentionally deceitful, it's really incompetence or just ill-equipped, whether that is proper tooling training, which would be lead to incompetence. And sometimes when you say incompetence, it's, it's so condescending, just you're, you're basically, you're a complete idiot, you incompetent, but that's all of us have a level of incompetence, right? I mean, you make a bad call because you looked at some data and you decided that this component had to be bad and it ends up, it's not bad or it doesn't fix the car, but okay, that would be incompetence, even if you're a very, knowledgeable tech that fixes cars that the others can't. So, you know, you start throwing around incompetence and people get really, really offended and their feathers get really, really ruffled and it's, yes, it can be meant to be running people down hard, but sometimes it's just the absolute truth and you have just a large, large, large number of techs and shops out there that are wildly incompetent. And I don't know how serious they are about becoming incompetent and then add onto that incapable, like they don't have the right tools for the job.
30:58 Jeff Compton Huge difference. It's it right. That's that speaks to me about the motivation of what do they really want to achieve when this is done, right? Like it's one thing to say, you just don't know, but you genuinely are invested in trying to do the problem solved. And then the other side of the coin is that I don't really care, right? If I don't fix everyone, as long as whatever the numbers line up at the end of the month and we get to keep the lights on, you know what I mean? And it's, that's the tight rope to walk, right? It's how do you do them both? Cause no, but none of us are perfect. Not one of us. That there's just like, you know, Keith was mentioned in the last couple of weeks ago, every shop out there, I don't care who their name is, the top people in the industry have got a shelf with some parts on it that didn't fix the car. And they didn't leave them in the car most of the time, right? And the customers certainly didn't pay for them because that's the right thing to do Paul Daner talks about it all the time, but you know, to the customer, you alluded to how it can go out of there with, you know, an initial module set of wires, tune up and a fuel system cleaning and it's fixed and the customer paid a thousand dollars and is happy, but really what it needed was just the coil. And they paid $80 for the coil in 15 minutes and they're like, they can't believe that, you know, that's, that's no way it can be that right. Why, or even worse, it's a broken wire to, you know, coil and you know, well, why can it only be that that's, and you charge me, you charge me a hundred dollars to find that wire and fix it. You guys are ripping me off. Yeah.
32:43 Matt Fanslow And this will sound like I'm trying to run a dealer into the ground. And I really not, I, but this is the reality is a customer had a, I don't, I won't even say the name, uh, brand cause it really doesn't matter, but it had all, you know, the Christmas tree lights on on the instrument cluster. So they take it to the dealer, the local dealer and thousands of dollars later, it's still not fixed. It still has this Christmas tree of lights on and wherever they were somehow, some way they get my name doesn't matter, but it ends up at our shop. They purposely didn't bring it to our shop to begin with because they had heard were really expensive, like as expensive as the dealer or more expensive than the dealer. So I locked up. I mean, I don't know if it was lucked out. It's just, it was a network issue. I had a whole bunch of modules, not communicating. And you probably know what branded is when I tell you the issue was the terminal tension at a connector. And it basically took out that maybe not half the network. It's probably a little bit of an exaggeration, but it took down a large number of modules on the network. It's quite kind of amazing. It actually ran, right. But two new terminals, I don't think it probably needed any of those modules and there you sit that dealer soaked that customer for thousands, thousands of dollars did not fix the car. And I spent, we'll just say the better part of two hours to find it and fix it. Cause I don't want to, I don't want to make it sound like I was a superstar. It's just, it wasn't that hard to find, especially, you know, I guess I'll put over auto a little bit, the module topography on the MS series. I mean the max assist series that helps a lot when you can see these modules on this boss after about here aren't talking and then a wiring schematic. You kind of have an idea where to go. Yeah. Right. So it's not like, you know, Matt was so fricking smart. It's just experienced doing that. Training and that's a training and that's a friends.
34:58 Jeff Compton Yeah. That always irked me when people would be, when they come to me and they lambast about the, oh, it's been at the dealer and, and, you know, they can't fix it. Or you've, you've seen me get right angry with people. And so dealer techs can't fix anything or dealer techs of this or dealer techs of that, and I still, I get really still offended because, cause at my core, you know, I spent so many years at so many different dealerships, right. And I know that there's a lot of us in the dealers that genuinely want to see the car fixed, right? We genuinely, but we're not given enough. Diag time. The guys that the dealer are not, it's a completely different environment, right? And I used to say all the time, if you've never worked it, you don't understand it. You don't know what the pressure is like, where you can have a service manager that's watching the oil changes back up and he needs to get them in the shop. And he could have, you know, two, one tech on a transmission job, one tech on an engine job, one tech on a diag, and they're going to stop them to go do something absolutely asinine that makes them nothing anyway. And, and he just took the progress train or train and drove it right off the tracks. It's done. You know, your, your train of thought is screwed for the next hour. So I've always felt that there's a lot more texts that get shade thrown at them. And it's not that they can't fix it. Cause I, everybody that knows me a long time has said, I will not invest my own time for free into a customer's repair. I will not do it. It is against my core value, right? If, if, now, if I make a judgment and it's wrong, I spent many nights of the dealer till eight or nine o'clock fixing a car that I screwed up my diagram and I couldn't let it go. And I was like, I gotta, I gotta know. I worked a lot of hours for free till I learned it right till I fixed it. Cause I didn't want to be just the typical, right? The stereotype. But so when people start to say this kind of tech can't do this and this kind of tech is better, there is no way you can know, right? You have to look at the shops culture, how they pay. And so I believe that there's a lot of texts in a dealership that are genuinely really good and can fix the car. It's just where some shops take the problem car and they have a rapport with customer. They spend three, four hours on it to get to the problem. They give the customer a bill for maybe two hours. The labor rate is a lot lower. The customer gets, you know, a $200 bill, one broken wire fixed, one terminal tension problem, corrected, whatever. And to them, you are incredible, right? At the dealership, their rate could be 50% higher. The tech is flat rate, right? It's always, well, they've authorized an hour. I don't want to call them again for another hour, right? And it's always, you're at two hours. You still don't know. Oh man. Like I, you know, we're, we're backing up with work here and I don't think I can call them again for hour three. You just see what I mean, man. Like we know the difference because we both work both sides of it. That the one scenario just leads to a much more trusting transaction, right? Where the, the dealer always has, yeah, the prices are what they are. Their overhead is what it is, but there's so many times that they're scared to say to the customer, listen, we need more, more time and then, and then time is one thing. Right? If you don't necessarily have the tech to be able to put on that problem, you might rethink about, should you even bring that car in? It's like the, the thread that went around last week where the guy was talking about, Oh, what was it? The ABS fault and they had to bring in a field service tech in to fix it. And that, that always really just irritated me when people, you know, start to talk about how those dealership mechanics can't fix anything. Cause I mean, I've always said, if I got paid some of the time that I've seen, if I had some of the time allotted that I've seen some cars get towed out of shops and get brought to me at the dealer to fix, I could have fixed anything. You know what I mean? And it was, it's, it's about at that point, it's how do we invest the customer's money the best way? So, you know, I believe that, yeah, you know, it's, it's hard to find somebody like yourself, Matt, that's so skilled or the superstars of the industry. We talk about them, right? The guys that can do anything, Brendan Steckler's and Brian and Paul, and, you know, those guys that are known for problem solving, right? But I believe that more of us out here, I guess I should pose that question. What do you think? Like, do you think that there are more of them out there that can do it? Or do you really think that it's, it's gotten to where it's going to be just kind of, I don't want to say elite status or elite ability, but what do you think about it?
39:54 Matt Fanslow I think it's a small percentage of people because I mean, everybody, I know that you would call that elite level, whatever that means, but I think we know when we say that we kind of know who we're talking about and you hate to start naming names just because you're going to start forgetting those names, forgetting people that very much deserve somebody in that group. But, you know, the Justin Morgans and the Pedro de la Torres and the Keith Perkins, you know, and we could go on and on and on, right? Just this massive friends group. And of course they're smart. They have to be smart to a certain degree. But the biggest thing is like the personal investment they have is tremendous. And I think that's the difference is they put, so yes, they have to have the brains, right? You could study chess as long as you want, but if you don't have a certain intelligence or intelligence type, you're only going to go so far. You're only going to get so good. Somebody else that's kind of got a little bit more of a knack for it. You know, they just certain concepts occur to them more naturally and make sense to them on a level that doesn't make sense to you. They put forth that same amount of effort. They're going to be way better than you. And I think that's the same case here is like whatever it is, not so much the intelligence number, you know, their IQ is this. It's not so much that as much as their intelligence is really strong in certain areas of mechanical aptitude and, you know, maybe certain like cognitive reasoning and spatial recognition types of stuff that they're very adept at. And then putting in hours and hours and hours of study, networking. You know, I like when Keith was talking about, uh, when he was working for a shop, like he would stay after work every night to work on cars or cars that were still there that he had to figure it out. He'd go back through and how, how could I have figured this out faster or what could I have done different, you know, even to the point of bolting on the old bad parts to try to read, diagnose it. That's a, that's a terrific level of dedication that most, I don't know.
42:19 Jeff Compton I never had it because when I was at, when I would get there and it was like, you were at it, you were there at the dealer at eight o'clock right. And the salespeople were still walking around, but you're there fixing the car. At that point, it was just about fixing the car, right? You know what I mean? It wasn't a learning, it wasn't a learning opportunity. I mean, it was a learning opportunity. I learned a ton, but it wasn't at that point. It was just like, I need to get this car done because I'm behind this many jobs or this many hours and I don't really. Yeah. I know to check there next time, but you know what I mean? I didn't develop a process improvement through that learning expertise. I just got my butt handed to me and got chewed. Um, I had to make it up on the next cars, right? I had to get the work done. I had to get a paycheck. And I think that that's, um, that has hindered my career, that mindset, but you know, I don't ever think, pull the old part back in and look at it. And I, I've mentioned it, you know, the last one I had was a Mazda. That was a pretty interesting thing. And, you know, I, I, I can't remember who I shared it with about what was going on. I ended up having a, a skewed reading to the fuel tank pressure sensor through a connection underneath the trunk was causing the mass air flow to be all wonky. The oxygen sensor was an open loop. It would barely run barely shift. It was all kinds of screwed up all because of this connector at the back is full of green corrosion. And it was water, like you could pull the connector part and pour water out of it. And, um, you know, so it ended up being that we just literally put a pigtail in. That's all it needed to fix. That's it. And it's like, so I had a few hours into it and I got it done, you know, cheap repair for the customer other than labor. No, no major part takes, you know, and, and I'm done, but we're already a day behind when we had promised it. Cause they, you know, they figured it's just a mass airflow and it would have been out the door. We didn't put a mass airflow and we didn't shotgun apart in this, but because of that, being there a day longer, you're being all, they need it back right away. Right. So I didn't even have the time to go back and kind of stick the old pigtail back in, recreate the failure and start to document everything.
44:28 Matt Fanslow And I wish I did, but you know, there's always that get the car done mentality. Yeah. And I, I don't know that that can be stressed enough that going back to the vehicle issue that was at the dealer, that they put a lot of parts on it. There seems to be that misnomer of the dealer. Like you guys have access to training. We don't, you have access to information. We don't. And a lot of times the opposite, in some cases it's worse. You have less information at your fingertips. Like the service information is the same, you know, looking up, wiring the diagrams and stuff like that. Like training, sometimes the training documents are worse than what we get in the aftermarket. This is, this is what was interpreted or given to us by the manufacturer. This is all you need to know. And we want codes. You follow this trouble tree, do what you're told and you'll fix the car. And that's the mentality. And that's, there's no scopes. And if there are scopes, they don't really give you enough time to use them anyways. Uh, there's no cool tools for, you know, a network analysis or, you know, whatever. We could go down a rabbit hole with that, but it's just as misunderstanding like that they have that you guys, the dealer techs have such access that we don't, and a lot of times that's not the case. A lot of times we have more information about the fundamental operation of these systems than they do. And we're in a different environment too, right? Because we're probably not getting two tenths to diagnose. You know, if it had taken me all day to figure that truck out, I would have got paid, I would have got paid for the day and we would have built what we thought we could have built for and part of my point too, with that scenario was, or example, wasn't so much like I fixed something the dealer couldn't, it was, it was perspective because that bill ended up being maybe $300, the customer was ecstatic with us and ticked off at the dealer. But if they would have came to us first and it was the same exact thing, but no other parts were put on it and I find these wires or not these terminal tension issue and I fixed the car for $300, they're livid with me because it was $300 for these two little terminals. We're gouging you or, or, or they're, you're gouging us. How dare you. So that was kind of the whole point of that is this perspective thing. Uh, and yeah, and then, and then like I was saying, my instincts too, is I went to the two year college basically to get my parents off my back. I saw a scan tool the first day on the tour of the shop and then I was, I was whipped, like that's what I, that's what I wanted to do. What does that do? And the technology stuff kind of sucked me in and that my first job when I was going to school was that a Ford dealer, uh, kind of new car prep, and then they would let me do some other stuff. And one of the things was I got to assemble the, uh, SBDS, which was the, they're kind of their big, ah, what do you want to call it? It was a diagnostic system. It kind of worked. It would, it would had a harness is not that there are so many different ones for Ford, but, um, it would tee into the, uh, harness between the engine control module and the, the rest of the vehicle, the wire harness, and it could do pin by pin analysis and it had lab scope functions and kind of almost like guided fault finding in a, in a way. You could do fuel pressure tests where you would hook up the transducer and it would measure the fuel pressure and tell you if it was good and it would have you wait for, you know, a minute or whatever to watch a bleed down. And if it didn't pass that it recommended, uh, fuel pumps, something like that. And, uh, there's a flight record function, stuff like that. So anyways, once in a while, they'd throw me a car to work on other than prepping. And this thing had a kind of a, uh, what would they call that? I don't, cause I don't want to give it away necessarily like a fish bite. I think that's what they called it. And the service manager told me like, well, it's probably the transmission and here changed the transmission fluid and put a little bit of this limited slip stuff in the transmission fluid. Cause it's probably the torque converter, uh, so on or not so on it, but the, uh, torque converter clutch. So I did it. Stuff stinks. Like you wouldn't believe, but I do it, go out, does the same thing. And he's kind of like, well, you know, it's getting to the end of the day. The other guys aren't going to take it on. So, you know, we mess around with it, whatever. And, uh, you know, I drove it. I had it on the SBDS. I was looking at ignition and I had no idea what I was looking at. And the thing doesn't give you ignition waveforms as bar graphs, which turns out was like worthless, but I just had this gut feeling like this is ignition, this, this is a misfire and it was plug wires. And, uh, so I went and parts department gave me the, this is back when he could do like, ask for the parts and they would give them to you and you could try them out and if they didn't work, give them back. And, uh, I put the plug wires on and I could, I could see, I think it was number five cylinder on a four, six liter. The, I could see where it's burned through the boot. And, uh, so put that on, fix the car and they're kind of like, holy cow. And don't get me wrong. There's a lot of stuff that I. Stunk up the joint. Terrible. And so they, in retrospect, I was trying to figure out like, was that a good environment or a bad environment? And I think when, when really boiled down to it, it was a bad environment, but it led to, it led to the job that, so I delivered parts for a little while at car quest, which ended up being really good for me because it kind of gave me time to process stuff that I had learned in school, learned watching at the dealership, gotten my button handed to me at the dealership, and I was like, watching at the dealership, gotten my button handed to me at the dealership. Got to watch other mechanics kind of work, form relationships with them, banter. And then, uh, they wanted me to go full time parts at car quest. And I just, I couldn't do it. Uh, I wanted to finish up school. I really didn't picture myself being a counterman or anything like that. Not that there's anything wrong with that. So I ended up at tires plus for a little while, which is tires and brakes and alignments. And I hated every second of it. I don't know why I took the job. It was probably the most money I'd made for quite a while, even when I went to the, uh, the next shop. But that's the next shop after that was it was Preebs repairs, the independent repair shop. The owner had a really, really good reputation as being a really good mechanic. And he found out I liked electrical and driveability and all that. And that's all I wanted to do. And I got there and he's like, you can have it. And they let me struggle. They let me ride the struggle bus a lot. And, um, yeah. And I'm torn about that, right? Because for me, it worked out really well, but you know, I would get there at eight o'clock in the morning and I would stay until 10, 11 at night. And I would just keep fighting and fighting and learning and pouring through manuals, pouring through trade rigs. Uh, there wasn't a whole lot of training just yet. I had fought for that, uh, to get some sort of training, but one of those magazines was under hood service. And John Thornton had a column in there every other month. He'd share it with somebody else and I would read these articles and they just blow my mind. And it was between that and the, the third year of, uh, technical school. That changed everything that that changed everything. So I'd be on the struggle bus all the time, right out of my two year. And then after that third year, I that's, that was probably like the light bulb moment was up there coming back to the shop and being able to run out of work. Like before they might only schedule me a couple of cars a day, three cars a day. And then when I came back, they had a hard time. You can knock those out and substantially faster time. Yeah. Stuff that was tripping me up before wasn't tripping me up anymore. And the part of it was the schooling, the schooling helped with electrical. Immensely. I like, I don't know what it was. I think it was kind of the hands-on portion. I think it was just the way they taught. It was a lot more hard nosed, um, a lot more probably reminiscent of how my dad was with me, just kind of like, come on, use your brain, think about it. Nope. You're not right. Just go, go over there, go work it out. Think about it. Come back later. And for whatever reason that works for me, that worked for me. And then, um, yeah, coming back and be able to knock that stuff out. That was probably my light bulb moment. It was one, you know, these, these cars that used to just kill me, weren't, weren't killing me anymore. There was definitely cars that would kill me, but they're usually just totally jacked up or it was hard to be overly critical of myself on. Yeah.
53:52 Jeff Compton Cause they were probably, can we, can we say that they were maybe not much longer for the, for the motoring world and they probably should have been retired as a piece of transportation? Yeah. I worked on a lot. I, I still work on too many of them, but I mean, it's getting better now. So.
54:13 Matt Fanslow Yeah. But I wrestled with the whole thing about, you know, how long do you let somebody struggle and how important was it and how to recognize this investment? Like that they're struggling now, but I can see they don't make the same mistake twice, or I can see that they're staying late or they're going home and they're spending a lot of their own time studying and trying to get better. You know, it's around that time I found IATN and that you talk about like, aha moments, like there's aha moments up at the implement. And then the big, a big aha moment happened up at the third year of college. It was Alexandria technical college. They don't have the program in there anymore, but it was third year. You had to graduate a second, a two year, sorry, you had to graduate a two year just to get in. And all it was, was electrical driveability on GM Ford Chrysler. They had factory scan tools. I'd never used a factory scan tool before. I didn't know what I was missing. And then I saw, and it's like, Oh my, you know, and it had to use lab scopes. You know, you had to use the lab scope. It just opened up so much. It just, so many aha moments. So many, just, I don't know the hair on the back, your neck stands up.
55:28 Jeff Compton So you kind of, did you kind of get involved on IATN with like, I mean, I, I know some of the people that you, you will, I don't want to say aligned yourself with, but I mean, they kind of maybe mentored you or saw something in you that was like, okay, this, this young man's, you know, got a bright future. Did you immediately just kind of go in and start to, cause I know when I was there, I, I worked, I didn't hardly say anything. I mostly hung out in like the, you know, back here, you remember it when it was like, if it was a Chevrolet or a Ford or a Chrysler, you know, tech topics, right. And I would just read that all night long. And then if I saw one that I thought I knew the answer for, I would just say, Hey, you know, I've, I've seen when they go out of time, they do this. And, uh, but I never like the, the in-depth stuff that I saw, you know, Harvey discuss like Harvey Chan and, and, you know, Albin Moore and so many other people, like John Thornton, you know, guys that were talking a lot, I just read. I didn't say anything. I just read. And, um, I remember seeing you and Harvey discussing different things in there. And I was like, okay. And what's, what was cool is Harvey was Canadian, right? So, I mean, you know, he's, yeah. Yeah. And I was like, cause it wasn't like he was the only Canadian. On IETN, but I mean, there was not a lot of us. Right. Um, and certainly that didn't hold the, the esteem that they had for Harvey. Right. And I remember seeing those like Harvey Chan, you know, Canadian tire store number, whatever it was in Vancouver. And I'm thinking Canadian tire. Like, cause they do not have the best reputation in, in up here in Canada and our industry, not even close. They are the biggest player on the block by double to any, the next closest might be Midas and they wouldn't even, Midas wouldn't even be a blip on their radar. Right. In terms of store account. And I remember thinking, wow, if they've got a guy like Harvey that understands that level. And I remember he was like, when I would see him, he would talk about hybrid, knee B and stuff like this. Right. And it's in its early days. And I'm thinking there's a guy, a Canadian tire that actually like knows as much about the Toyota EV or back then the Prius as a Toyota tech would. That's amazing to me. Right. And I just, you know, I would see you guys discussing different things. And I'm like, you know, man, if, if every store had a Harvey, right. What an amazing, like they were already a huge player. They'd have put everybody else out of business. The level that he had, that he just showed through those few posts that I can remember astounded me. It was incredible. Right.
58:25 Matt Fanslow Yeah. I mean, he was a snap on beta tester and he was a flat rate tech. I mean, he was a flat rate tech for the longest time, some Diag, but just the typical Canadian tire work. That's what he did. And he had a knack for the diagnostic stuff. So they would give them a little bit more and they, I think they took care of them. Uh, a, because he was pretty good at it. B, I think he was just a good guy to have in the shop. He got along with everybody. And, um, and I think IATN helped show them too. And this would have been slightly above, slightly before me, what else was really out there and gave them an avenue to find more information. And then the guy was, I mean, he's the smartest person as I've ever met. I mean, he is as smart a person as I've ever met and could retain. Unbelievable amounts of, uh, information, but better yet, he was really good at just, I think it's like that spatial reasoning and that he could think about stuff and think about it and it would make sense. And, uh, and then he was pretty good at like sharing that, but his way of doing it a lot of times is setting you up. You'd ask you a question and it just, he'd be setting you up the whole time. Uh, when I first joined IATN, probably it would have been, well, I mean, it had been mid really late nineties. And yeah. And when I first joined up, I mean, I read some of the forums, but I found the chat room. And, um, I think I was liked, but not generally liked well by the people I would end up looking up to the most because I think I was very, ah, what's the, I mean, is laissez-faire the right word? I mean, it's just a phrase. It's we're here to help everyone out. And it was just like really after this wholesome type of atmosphere and they were a little more hardened. And so I ended up, I would butt heads really hard with the Mac and Harvey a little bit and TL Tim Lena, who else? John Luttenberger and I would go at it a lot. Oh my God. And it was probably that way for a few years. And then one night, it was specifically one night. I remember everything, everything changed. I was desperately trying to help this guy figure out this, um, it was a Ford pickup that was misfiring on one bank under acceleration, and I knew what was wrong with the truck, but I was trying to help him figure it out on his own. And he went on a tirade about what an a-hole I was that I would, I knew what was wrong with that truck and I wouldn't just tell him. Yeah. Yeah. And it was just realization that I ended up writing these really long response after that guy got booted. So Lloyd Jones was a moderator. He booted the guy. And I just remember writing this really long, it's not a post it's in chat, but this response basically apologizing profusely to Harvey Ragsdale, Burnclaw. Kemper Tim Lena, John Luttenberger. I'm sure I'm forgetting a few others that they were little, they would help you, but you had to jump through their hoops. And I apologized profusely to them because it didn't make sense until that night. And that changed everything. That changed everything. All of a sudden it's a whole nother new world opened up. Riggle, John Riggle was another one. And I just remember not that they're all of a sudden so much nicer to me, but I took everything they did much differently. I didn't take it so personally. I don't think they treated me any better.
01:02:16 Jeff Compton They maybe even treated me quote unquote worse, but I didn't take it that way. You made it past the hazing phase, right? And you're now kind of into the, you know, you're now into the, you're still the, the young kick around kid on the team, but at least you're on the team. You know what I mean? We're going to let you. Yeah.
01:02:32 Matt Fanslow Yeah. And I kind of saw stuff from their perspective, like it all of a sudden just made sense, like, Oh, that's okay. Yeah. That's what I, that was, that's what I was doing.
01:02:45 Jeff Compton I always tried to do, okay. Cause you know, me, my history in the, in the Facebook groups is I always tried to try and bring what, what I ATN had been about into a Facebook groups. And I've realized now that it is never going to be, it was, I ATN was a very special thing and it was, you know, it's not what it used to be. And it's never going to be that again. We'll probably in this industry, never have anything exactly like that again.
01:03:10 Matt Fanslow Because I didn't want. Yeah. Cause you had the best of the best seeking each other out. The guys who were talking about just earlier where you get done with work and you went home and then you spent your time on work to get better and that was the place. And for a while it was really the criminal criminal decrim. I mean, the cream of the crop. They were the best.
01:03:33 Jeff Compton I always wanted to see people like, cause I believe in that, you know, if you teach a man to fish versus if you, you know, he can, if you teach a man to fish, he can feed himself, right? If you give a man a fit, you feed him for one day. And, and that's what I always just tried to bring is it's like, and dude, I've been letting up, you know, more times that I can count people that have just been infuriated with me. Why don't you just give them the answer? Well, it's not identifix, right? Like, first of all, we're all here and have our own volunteer. We're not getting paid for this. So if I have the answer, I want you to understand how I got it. Right. And I might've just got it by some fluke thing, or maybe there was a process to how I got the answer, but it's more important that I share the process. Then I share the answer, right? That's what I always try to get. And no, it just, this, the newer generation just does not care. They just, and I get it where they're coming from. They just want that nightmare car fixed and gone. Totally understand it. But we, Brian and I talk, Brian Pollock, all the time of, you know, it takes a process, we have to refine our process of how we do it. I, I core, my core belief is that if we refine the process on how we do this job, this industry then changes 1000%. I think that's what it's going to take. And it's, it is, it's, it's a slog man to try and get everybody to, to, because we all are different, right? We all do things different. Your brain works different than mine. My brain works different than Brian's, then Paul's, then Brendan's and Keith's. And it's just Matthew Scudder. It's like, there's another cat that's like, he's on another level of how, when you talk to him and. You know, he's not above calling me and asking me like, Hey, have you had one of these when I was at Nissan, you know, I'm working on a brand new car. He's working on a brand new car. And I'm like, Matt, like I've only been here two months, dude. You're, you're already ahead of me. My, your experience on this, like I can't help you, but it's been fascinating to me to see how many, the different ways that people approach the job and they approach Dyack and it's like, oh, if so many guys are so much better than me. And it's just like, I try to take little nuances of what they do. And, and I, but I realized that like, all of us are all really good. It's just, you know, some people it's like you said, it goes back to the instincts. People go to me and they go, Oh, you're one of the smartest guys. You know, I've talked to him like, man, I just have the most incredible luck. And then I have, I've been doing this a long time now. So I have a lot of experience on what stuff feels like. And then I just have a really good, you know, honed intuition, right? I can kind of drive it and go, it's not that right. Like I, it's, do I know what it is? No, but I know that it's not what you think it is. So it's not your transmission. It's your, you know, you do have a misfire or you're got a, you know, you've got a converter that's plugging up, right. Or something like that, or the timings that you can tell by driving. And that for me, I don't end up always get to take that car and see what's actually wrong, because as soon as it's not going to be fixed with a tune up, a lot of it, the customer's like, okay, well then we're going to, we were going to trade this thing anyway, and you flog it, right. And that can get frustrating, but I got to remember that it's like, I didn't waste a ton of their money doing a tune up just because they wanted it, right. They come in and ask for a tune up and do a tune up on this. I still to this day, don't do that. If the customer comes in and wants to tune up, I go, why do you want to tune up? Oh, you've got to, it's down on power. Okay. That's probably not going to fix it, right? Like let's, you know, let's spend some time and try to figure out what it's actually doing. Let's look at some trims and let's look at some codes and, and go on from there. And financially that's not always been the best method. And I can still see shops now where they struggle with that, right. Because it's like, I don't want you to do dyac. I just want you to fix my car.
01:07:36 Matt Fanslow Oh man. And you're looking at them, like, do you hear yourself?
01:07:39 Jeff Compton I can remember my stepdad's parents. So for all intents and purposes of grandparents, mine, they had an old crown Vic, I want to say around, it probably might've been 96, 97, 98, somewhere around there, 4.6, right. And I can remember that it was, it was having this issue where it would go, it would stall out, lack of power and everything else. And this is there from a rural community, farmers and the family. And I remember that, I remember that, I remember that, I remember that, I think from sitting in the front row of the하�s car. And wanna do a little vocêscens if this net is bugging you. Can you hear that? Spicy phenomenon. Cool. So then his car was, um, the чтобы killed me. And he was like, what happened? I Another Peñote turned the trunk joy scalp, um, the meat. I couldn't explain it. We were able to- The car fix. Yeah. Took it into one day and they changed the ignition coil. And I'm like, and that is so we're talking something that I remember from 25 years ago and that's sticking to my head going, Oh, you could have put a coil in for so much less money. Then, then what you paid to have a fuel pump done. And I don't know the whole scenario, like, you know, what they would have charged or whatever, but I know that that dealership, if they did come to them, that customer and said, I want my fuel pump changed. They had done exactly what the customer said. And this is the thing that I struggle with sometimes. And it's like, even when I work with other managers, sometimes is that they don't get it is that like, I'm not interested in doing something when I know it's not going to fix the car. That's going to leave people jilted and upset because I know sure as the sun's going to come up tomorrow, they're going to be back in, in your service drive, I'm going to be back up here in front of them and they're going to be now upset and I don't want that. So I got labeled a lot of times. I think a lot of us in this industry do when we say that's not going to fix it. I don't want to do it. Well, that's a bad attitude. What's wrong with you? Why am I paying you? But we have the best, like, it's not that we don't have the customer's best intentions at mind, you know, but when I think about, for instance, like that, that post last week about that Volkswagen that that guy, you know, he fixed the oil consumption problem with a set of spark plugs, he didn't fix anything, right? But you know, that tech in that dealership is doing their due diligence. They're doing what they're supposed to. They're letting the customer know, yeah, this thing's got a problem. The customer doesn't want to hear that. So the customer then has to lambast us all like we're a bunch of thieving crooks. I've always been that type where I would tell that customer, you know what? You go pound sand. I'm not going down this rabbit hole with you because I don't feel good about it. Do I need to make the hour that that tune-up is going to pay? And then, no, I don't. Right? Not if it's going to mean that when you're back in six months time and it's doing it again, or fell out the plugs in here, call me everything under the sun. I'd rather you call me lazy. I'd rather you call me difficult. Then you call me a crook. I'm not interested in that conversation anymore. Right. So it's, I struggle with that still. It's so, I don't know if I'll ever get out from underneath it. Right. Just drives me crazy. You know, we want, genuinely, we all want to do what is right. I believe that 100% as I've started a network of more and more people. And I, I'll ambassad some people in a day, man, that I was just like, you know, and there are, there are bad apples for sure, but there are more of us out here that want to do the right thing, but it's the circumstances of the culture or whatever you want to call it. That's not allowing us to. And I think until we get that changed in the industry, the future is scary, man. It really is right. Like, you know, I mean, there's, there's guys coming along like Harvey, right? We see them. They're young cats that are just brilliant. But I mean, you know, I don't know. I don't think they have the longevity because I think it's going to get to them. You know what I mean? When we think about some of the people that have been in the industry and have already gotten out, I know of good friends of mine that made the master status and now they've taken completely different jobs. They're out of the industry. They just can't, they can't survive it. Right. It's too, it's not even about the money. It's just the way some days you come home and you're made to feel it's really hard.
01:12:10 Matt Fanslow Yeah. I mean, uh, I think Ragsdale he's as good, good at tech, die tech, uh, as I've
01:12:17 Jeff Compton ever known, and I think he works for heavy equipment. And I remember his name on ITN all the time. And it was like that dude's smart.
01:12:30 Matt Fanslow Oh, dude. He was super, super, super smart, either for a, for real deal, photographic memory or darn close in access. He had access that a lot of us would have killed for. I mean, I think he went to a really good, uh, trade school or technical college. And then I think he worked at a Nissan dealer for a while, which ended up, I think helping them because some of the wording they would use like base fuel schedule, that was something I never really heard of, but that's a Nissan thing and that, that helped them. And then he ends up with burn claw working for a Randy burn claws shop. And that guy, you know, Randy's wife, I think is a chemist and he's best friends with Jim Kemper, who worked for the Colorado state department of health. And he's a engineer and he's a genius. So Randy's super smart, maybe, you know, I compliment really meaning a genius. And then I think Kemper legitimately is, I think, burn clouds, wife legitimately is, and they know all about, you know, SAE documents and studying patents. And they have the equipment investments. They also have access to the Colorado state department of health facilities. I mean, man, you talk about a perfect scenario for creating a, uh, just a juggernaut of a technician that there it is. I mean, it hits on so many things. His, just his own unique personal skills and attributes. And then the, the environment and culture he worked in, it's just, wow, no wonder. And then his reward is there's more money in fixing heavy equipment. And I'm sure he's fricking brilliant at it. Absolutely brilliant at it. Um, another one, like a friend of mine, uh, he's, he was a Napa automotive technician of the year, I think ASC technician of the year, Tom Myers worked for independent shops in Chicago. He'd have to buy his own uniforms or at least rent them. And I'm pretty sure he's flat rate and all that never had a retirement. I don't think he had health insurance, but he may not have needed it because his wife had it, but still, I don't think it was ever offered. And, uh, he ends up moving more out East from Chicago and he's working for a shop
01:14:59 Jeff Compton out there and kind of all the same, same type of national award is one of the top in your industry recognized, you know, for your ability to do what it is, repair the automobile well, not just get it cobbled back together, but you actually fix it well, like dealer level repair, right. Or above that. And you're working for somebody that you've got to supply your own uniforms. And the industry wonders why it has a retention problem and an attraction problem to the next generation.
01:15:36 Matt Fanslow But he goes, you know what he does now? Well, he got a job. So he got it, went to an interview, an off friend or a friend of a friend, name dropped them and it's a forklift dealership, multi-stores. I don't know if you would necessarily consider that a franchise or a conglomerate or whatever, but they have multiple dealerships. He gets hired on as a, uh, forklift or fork truck technician. And I told him, you'll be running the, you'll be running the, you'll be shop foreman in a year. And he laughs me off like, yeah, whatever. Be lucky if I figure out how to drive one of these stupid things. All right. But he doesn't have to buy his uniforms. They provide his uniforms. I think they give them money for boots and he has, so they, you know, work the system a little bit, they pay for eyeglasses if they're safety, but nowadays you can get really nice looking safety glasses that you clip the sides on and whatever, so they take care of that. I still don't know if he needed the health insurance or took their health insurance, but for the first time in his life, he had a 401k. It never had one before. At least employee or sorry, employer contributions and stuff like that. So he's digging it and turns out a lot of these fork trucks have. Like Chevy V8 engines in them. So he's immediately fairly comfortable and immediately above everyone else on how they work, what to do. He's got a Pico scope boom calls me up. I don't know. I mean, we had to talk periodically throughout the year, but he calls me up and he goes, well, you were wrong. Oh yeah. He's like, yeah, uh, I'm shop for him and I did it in 11 months. This is why I was off by a month, but now he's the director of like training. So he goes around and trains all their techs at all these different dealers. And he takes on all the hard case trucks or, you know, forklift, fork trucks and he's killing it. So yeah, he wins this award and his reward was we drove him out. Exactly.
01:17:36 Jeff Compton Exactly. You know, and imagine, cause I've seen that more than once. I can remember when I, when I was trying to get on at the Goodyear plant here and the Goodyear plant was full of guys that had left automotive to go work in the plant to fix the machineries. It was in the plant, whether it was a stationary, you know, it becomes more like mill, right work or whatever, but it was just like, they're all old tax. And, you know, isn't it funny when you can go in, so you get out of the automotive industry and you say you go to work equipment or something, right. And there's so many guys that are trainers and you're like, well, what did you do before you got with the company? I was an automotive mechanic. And they say it like it's, oh, I was just not a motor mechanic. And immediately our brain thinks of one thing, but when you start to dig into the background and you start to ask them some questions or something, it's like, no, they weren't just the typical mechanic, right? They were the guy that it never seemed to be that hard for them. Right. And that's why they're training somebody else. And that's this industry. We tend to chew those people up and then they go somewhere where they get appreciated. And they're trying to bring, you know, the process to a different industry, a way of fixing the machine, a way of diagnosing the machine, a way of looking after the fleet, whatever you want to call it. This industry has to stop doing that. We have to stop pushing these guys out just based on, you know, the guy you're speaking of last week, Michael, the flat rate master, like, you know, I hope to have him on and, uh, you know, the, the idea that as we get older and we slow down, our value becomes less to the people that are employing us to me is just the most ridiculous thing you can think about and I can't, I can't put my head on it where else in anything in life that happens except in sports.
01:19:37 Matt Fanslow You know what I mean? Yeah. I was thinking sports and I suppose like modeling, you know, right.
01:19:44 Jeff Compton I mean, the only other thing I can really think of like that, like a Wayne Gretzky couldn't, couldn't lace them up tomorrow. I mean, he could, he could lace them up tomorrow and go out on the skates and, and, you know, he could put the moves on quite a few of the guys still and go around them, you know what I mean? And make it down the ice, but he won't move as fast, right? He won't, his reflexes won't be there. This industry is like, oh, you used to turn 60. Damn it. You're down to 45. And I pay you what? You're gone. Like the wealth of knowledge that we have probably fired out of this industry or drove them out or whatever term you want to use, it must rival anything else. That there must be nothing that even comes close to what we have probably done to some of the smartest people in this industry. And I don't care if it's just like, you know, they, they, they worked at a dealer, they only knew that product. Right. And they just got sick of it and they drove them out of there or whatever or management change. You still took somebody that knew everything that parked on that lot and knew it inside and out, frontwards to backwards, both sides knew the operating system, knew the common failures, knew how the shortcuts and you run that guy out of there or girl because of a, of a dollar amount, it's so ridiculous that like, I'm not saying that they have to be put on a pedestal and should be allowed to do nothing and produce nothing, but there's like the idea that you're training your replacement. I, I'm still on the fence about that because you know, I've mentored a lot of texts and I have taught them a lot, but I'll, I'll come right out and say it. I haven't taught them everything that I know. Right. If I have a fine process, I don't necessarily teach them my process because I have to protect what I had to donate to get, because if I give it away and I saw it happen, you know, I, I've been through it, everybody, this is all you. You shouldn't, you know, you should be training them. Well, I'm wondering if you've worked in the same kind of places that I have, because when I started to show them little things, then everybody started to do what I did and then there wasn't as much for me, right. And we're talking about production. We're talking about money. We all have to keep that in mind that, you know, most of us are still going to judge us on what we produce. And.
01:22:17 Matt Fanslow Yeah. And it's a very military type of a thought process of training somebody or training your successor because you're, if that's going to happen. Okay. I suppose on one extreme you diet and battle, but the others, you got promoted and somebody trained you to succeed them because they're moving on up this chain or this ladder, they're moving up this ladder. They're moving up this ladder. Well, in our most repair shops, if you're kind of one of the main texts, one of the main line texts, if you will, where do you get promoted to? Where else is there to go? So you're training someone to be your six to succeed you or replace you, if you will, but you're not necessarily getting promoted. Now it doesn't make sense. So like what I'm doing is, you know, I need help in my area. There's, there's too much stuff, too much time I get pulled away on for lack of a better description, we'll just say easy diags that I, you know, I have to do those. So I want to train somebody to kind of take, take more and more of that stuff off my plate and if it gets more complex, of course you can, I'll help you out. Or if I have to, I'll take over and you get back to this other, you know, the other stuff and, but while I'm doing that, I'm also. Trying to learn more and more about other things like, you know, currently it's a lot of keys, immobilizer, EEPROM. Uh, and I guess I've been doing programming for quite a while, but maybe delving into other, uh, tools, scan tools, car lines, and then ADOS. So as I'm moving into that stuff, I need somebody to kind of take over what I was doing so I have time to dedicate to that. Plus I'm in this managerial role, like a lot of the marketing stuff's on me and I do not have time to do it. If I'm working on marketing stuff, guess what I'm doing it. Yeah. I'm sitting at home and yeah, my, my hourly pay doesn't reflect that, you know, I don't get to stay punched in. Uh, so I got to hope my ideas work so that the shop profits and I'll see it in a profit sharing check. But, um, you know, the, the idea is that I have a place to migrate towards. I don't think a lot of techs have that. There's nowhere for them to go.
01:24:48 Jeff Compton It's this is kind of, this will be your shop one day, right? Like you're currently an employee, but that's kind of, is that not your end goal is that it will be yours?
01:25:00 Matt Fanslow I, I mean, I last time I checked, that was the, the goal. He, the shop owner bought a different house. So we'll see how that affects things. Yeah, that's what I did. That same look and nodding my head. It's like, I wonder, so we'll see.
01:25:15 Jeff Compton Remember, listen, if a shop owner wants to buy a boat, we are not supposed to resent them or judge them for the boat that they buy. Okay. That's what somebody is a mutual friend. Explain that to me that like, you know, they've worked really hard to buy that
01:25:31 Matt Fanslow boat. I cannot stress enough how much I sympathize and I'm happy that they've got to buy, uh, this house. So they were looking at building a new house and I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life. The prices they were getting to build this house is like, this made no sense. If you actually go through with this, this is a hundred percent ego, 100% ego. There's so many more houses that you could buy that have, that are bigger, nicer on more property than this new house. But I think you're looking for some sort of, I don't even know, recognition or not on the back.
01:26:14 Jeff Compton Their dream house. It's somebody else's dream house. That's how I see, you know, the, the, the real estate side of things is like, when I see people that are like, I want to build a house, they want to build their dream house. And I think what is hard for me to wrap my head around is like, when I remember people doing that as I was younger, it was like, there's, that was something they started to do almost at retirement age. You know what I mean? Like it was the kids that already gone to school, started their own careers. And then they kind of took that on as it's like, okay, so our first home, you know, the market went really good. We paid that mortgage off, you know, we've had it paid off 15 years. And we'll sell that home. It'll make us a ton of money and we'll build our dream home. Now I'm seeing people in their twenties and I don't fault them for it, but like they get successful, they get some money and they're like, okay, we're in our, you know, or 31 and are going to build our dream home. That's admirable. But man, like these dream homes now around here, Matt, our market is like, it's $2 million. These homes are building. Like, and they were worth, they were worth less than a million eight years ago. That same hurts on that same two products. That's how the market has exploded around here, right? Because around here, if you're, we're two hours from Toronto, two hours from Ottawa. Right? So there are so many people that have retired from those two cities and have moved this way that it's just shot the market up. So now when I see people around me and it's like, we're going to build our dream home. Their dream home that they want to build is like waterfront and you know, and it's, it's a $2 million endeavor. Now it might be a good investment, but it's just, you know what I mean? It's a different, it's a different attitude. It's I can't.
01:28:11 Matt Fanslow Yeah. I am legitimately happy for them because the house they lived in, they've lived in for like 33, 34 years, it's paid off. It's been paid off for awhile. The, the house itself isn't so bad. You know, it's a kind of a Victorian esque, uh, house to, you know, two story limestone basement. They've done a lot of work on it over the years, but it's great. Downtown. Not no separation between neighbors. You know, they're never one, one car garage. They wouldn't have room to build a two car garage on their property. I think if they wanted to, and it's at the bottom of this hill that I'm sure every winter cars go right through their yard. Okay. I'm so I am legitimately very happy for them to get out of there and move into something nice. They got a little bit of space now and outbuilding. She, his wife for the first time in her life is going to have an attached garage that she can pull her vehicle into. She's never had that before. So I am legitimately happy. Yeah. But I'm interested to see how it affects other plans.
01:29:28 Jeff Compton So, well, I keep, I, I'll keep my fingers crossed for you that it, you know, that it pans out for you.
01:29:34 Matt Fanslow Cause I mean, I'm interested to see how it affects things with, you know, transfer of ownership or anything, succession planning type stuff. Yeah. The thing is, is I think a lot of it still is looking for validation. And you know, I got to be careful how I word this because it will come off very self-serving and I wish I wasn't talking about my situation because it could be easily misconstrued in I'm looking for validation where the idea isn't so much anything to do with me and everything to do with, and I think this happens to a lot of people, whether they own a business or not, but owners, I think owners are particularly guilty. There should be, they should be a lot more proud of themselves and take a lot more pride in their success attributed to the contributions of the people that they've put around them. Amen. And a lot of times that isn't so much like, you know, I hired Jeff and he can, man, he can crank out the work. And that's really important. Like that should be a factor, but also, you know what? I hired this guy, I hired this gal and they had these ideas and I went with them. I just, it kind of blows my mind. The human ego's inability to allow somebody to do that. Like this idea wasn't mine. I would have never did this. So-and-so she kind of gave me her two cents and I, I wasn't going to do it. And I wasn't going to do it. I wasn't comfortable with it. And then I thought about it and it's like, Oh, what the heck. And it worked. And then we did this and it worked and we did this and it worked. And then I got more courage and I want him and how as much, and then, you know, because of that, because of the confidence built up from going with their ideas, I had this idea of my own and it worked and just, you know, you go back to sports, right? It's usually when they're talking to somebody at the end of the game, they're talking about the team effort because that's what it was. Nobody won the game by themselves unless you're playing tennis or golf. And even at that, right? You would thank your coaches and trainers and all that. But it's, it's crazy to me how hard it is sometimes for them. And I guess I'll pick on my boss a little bit. I think it's hard for him to tell somebody like, you know, the shop's doing really well, we've been doing really well these last 10 years and I got a level with you for 20 years. I, I wasn't doing it right. Right. And I hired somebody that could be really strong. You know, I could phrase stuff quite strongly about what I thought. And I, again, that sounds like I'm trying to really put myself over and I don't necessarily mean it that way. It's more or less that the, my success has more to it than just me. And I could do that with myself. I think I've talked about that where it's wherever I am, how anyone would ever rate that if you would, there's a lot of pure dumb luck involved with me being there or being here and then a lot of other people's efforts to, to
01:32:50 Jeff Compton push me and help me. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this industry is going through such a change right now. It's just like you touched on, right? I think there's a lot of owners now and I think we're really going to see it in the next five years where they look back and they go, I had 10 really good years at the end. Yeah. And I might've had like 20 where I was not doing it right. And they weren't necessarily, you know, right and wrong. They were just doing what everybody else was doing. Right. But I think what it's driven to now is the fact that there is such a shortage of tech technicians, that it's, it's forcing people to really, really rethink the game and I would be lying if I said that I don't take pleasure in seeing that happen because I do, I think we're starting to finally see the value of what somebody like yourself can do or somebody like, you know, we talked about the top guys, what they can bring, you know, and speaking about your friend in the forklift thing, we don't want to continue to see that happen in this industry, right? So we have to get ahead of that problem. And I think that finally, I don't want to see a whole lot of people, you know, make good money for the last five years that they're in it and realize that like the 15 or 25 or whatever the number is, you know, call it a lifetime before that five years, they didn't do it right. But at least they had five good years, right? At least they saw the change, got ahead of it, left it better than they found it for the next people coming in and, you know, made some money. I, you know, I can resonate what your, what your boss is doing because I mean, they've worked really hard, right? It is, this is a, as this, this industry is a grind, you have to embrace the grind and, you know, they want to have something to show when they're thinking about the retirement of like, this is, this is what we, this is what all our hard work got us. You know, I have my dream home. This is what we have. And, but, you know, I don't want to say that, well, I should have everything that they have because they're the owner, right? I'm, I'm an employee. They are the employer. I don't expect that I should have all the accoutrements that they have, but I think that it's, it's, it's gotta come a little bit tighter in terms of what we get paid to what a lot of them, the successful ones are paying themselves. And, and that's a really unpopular opinion to have. And I'm not necessarily as steadfast about it because as I start to talk to more shop owners, I realized that they're not necessarily paying themselves as much as I think they should. Right.
01:35:40 Matt Fanslow I think that's an important point. I think there's a lot of shop owners that are not, they are not making very good money.
01:35:47 Jeff Compton No. And it's, and I understand it's always, this is a, this is not a big margin industry. It's always going to be a grind. We just have to accept that because of the relationship of the automobile to the customer. And I think the unfortunate thing is with where the tech is going, the car is going to be an elite thing in a very near future. I think that when we, you know, so without rambling for another hour, we'll have to come back into a part two at some point, Matt. But I think that we are starting to finally get this change of where we can entice people to come in and stay in the industry. And it is going to take, it's just going to take money. It's going to take money and better treatment. Like you said, everybody needs benefits. They need a 401k. There's, you shouldn't be an employing attack and him having to buy or her their own $250 Red Wing work boots, right? Like it shouldn't happen. It should just be like, okay, you need a set of boots. Here's the company card. Go get yourself some boots.
01:36:45 Matt Fanslow And we're talking about people. We need people smart enough to do this. They have to be smart enough to fix the cars, whatever level that is, whatever, not even level, just whatever area on the vehicle, they have to be smart enough to do it. Yeah.
01:37:00 Jeff Compton It's a different art to put a set of ball joints in and do it in one quarter of the time. It's a different type of smart than somebody that can go and tackle a can network issue and solve it. And, you know, I hate to say that, you know, because I said it for years that, well, the guy that's solving the can network problem is way more valuable than the guy banging the ball joints in. I'm not completely flipped on that, but I'm realizing more and more. Both are very necessary. Yes. And they're necessary. It doesn't really matter how much we pay one more than the other. The key thing is we got to pay them both enough that they're happy. Sorry.
01:37:43 Matt Fanslow Yeah. Cause otherwise you're asking somebody that is smart enough to do this and do it really well, but they have to be dumb enough to do it for a career, right? They have to overlook a lot of things that they could take that same intelligence and use, and maybe they're flying a desk or maybe not. Maybe they're working on houses. They're wiring houses, they're plumbing houses, they're welding, they're
01:38:12 Jeff Compton construction, whatever. Engineering at some kind of level.
01:38:17 Matt Fanslow Absolutely engineering. And not only are they making more money per hour or per year, they've got health insurance, they have retirements. They have, you know, depending on the situation, the work environment itself is better, you know, let's forget like the skilled trades in that same person is working for a software company and they're, maybe they are working in a cubicle, but it's air conditioned, it's heated. It's not even an eight. It's not an eight to five. It's basically, I need you to get this done within the next week. And if you can get it done in two days, take the rest of the week off the flex time or whatever you want to call it. Like that's what we're competing against. And I'm not saying auto repair is ever going to be able to be flex time. That's not realistic, but we can offer a lot of things that can make that decision more difficult rather than we're waiting for these people that just love to fix cars and all their wife has a really good job or their husband has a really good job where they get the health insurance and the benefits so they can just work for the money that's what we're forcing. Yeah.
01:39:25 Jeff Compton It's and it's like, imagine making your marital decisions on what their health, you know, benefits plan and retirement package looks like. Right. That's how you have to pick, pick your mate. Now is based on that. It shouldn't have to be that way. Right.
01:39:39 Matt Fanslow Especially if you're young and you're starting to have kids and basically, you know, he or she wants, somebody is working darn near for free to pay for childcare, daycare, and the other one's working for benefits. Like not a lot left over at the end to build that dream house. Yeah. So why we have to fix our businesses and our business practices to make enough money to a give somebody enough money to really live in the geographical area of where they live in the shop and all that. Plus outfit the shop properly to do the job that we're professing to be able to do at a professional level in a work environment that is enticing, you know, well lit, clean, probably climate controlled, whatever, and then still more money yet to offer benefits, to compete with all these other professions. That's where we're at. That's what we have to do. There's what's the alternative or otherwise we're just going to suffocate ourselves.