Episode 260 - Navigating Family Legacy and Change in the Automotive Business With Jackie & Darryl Beech

0:02Hey folks, David here, and I'd like to thank you for joining us for the Changing the Industry podcast. Lucas and I started this podcast with the goal of capturing the frank and open conversations you typically have at industry events. Those conversations cover the challenges we face in our business and lives, as well as difficult repairs, new products and services, and everything in between.

0:26We hoped that these recordings would spur our listeners to enact the change they'd like to see in their own lives and businesses. That's also why we've partnered with the Institute for Automotive Business Excellence. My first management class was with Cecil Bullard, and his genuine passion for helping others in an honest and ethical manner permeates his entire organization. And if you need some of the Institute's help, they have a special offer for our listeners.

1:00Click the link in the show notes and get signed up for a free business analysis. They'll go over your current situation and give you advice on your next steps. And they have everything from free resources and online classes to peer groups, one-on-one coaching, and specific help for MSOs. So don't miss out on this great offer. Click the link in the show notes.

1:26And now on to the podcast. Radio is a hard business. Okay, I'm just telling you, my family owned two radio stations and got rid of them. And is there anything your family didn't own? No, not at this point. There's lots of things my family owned that they never made any money with. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's hard to make any money on radio.

1:52We were part of a— they were part of a small group, right? So not one of the big conglomerates. And it was pretty tight on the budget, which I was feeling as well after a while. Yeah, for sure. And like the entire organization is pushed in. And I think what ends up happening if you watch radio, they are so pushed on budget that they have to squeeze everybody.

2:15They have to get every ad revenue sale they can get. They have to make it work. And if they don't get it, man, like the reason they put so much pressure on the employees is because if they don't get it, buddy, they're done. They're out of money. That's it. There is no option. It's viral too. People see that you don't do it and they don't want to work with you anymore.

2:35Yeah, 100%. You got to keep it moving up. Yeah, it's rough. Automotive, I think it does. It does. And so many of those people, right? So many of the disc jockeys that I know, Braxton, one of our producers, worked for the radio station. I'll never forget when Braxton and I met. I'm not very good at paying my bills. Usually it's not because I don't have money.

2:56It's usually because I am in the situation of I forgot to pay the bill and I've got a lot of stuff going on and I didn't realize that I hadn't paid the bill kind of deal, right? And so they always have to send somebody out here to get money for the bill. And little Braxton comes to the front door of my shop and he is trembling, right?

3:14Like, the kid is shaking. He's developed a lot over the years, but like, he was coming to collect money, and, and I honestly sat down with him and said, dude, I don't know that there's a future in radio. Like, you, you want to do this very badly, but I'll be honest, I just don't see a future in it. The market's changing so fast.

3:34The people you work for, um, the man who owns the company is very old. Daughter's going to take it over. They have a very different perspective of what radio is. This may not be what you think it is a few years down the road. And then he went to work for the biggest Christian station on the East Coast, 106.9 The Light, which is Billy Graham's station, right?

3:56And he went to work for them. And then about a year and a half later, he called me and said, hey, I want to come work for you guys with the podcast. And so now he's one of the producers. So Well guys, Darrell, Jackie, introduce yourselves. Darrell Beach, um, in my 60s, on my sundowning years in the automotive industry, trying to work my way out of it, pass it off to the next generation, um, trying to get the most I can and enjoy it.

4:25Had a pretty good ride at it. Uh, so lucky to be happy and healthy at this point and Glad to have my daughter back in the business. That's awesome, man. That's awesome. Jackie, I know we've heard a little bit of your story. Why don't you tell us who you are and tell us a little more? Well, I'm Darrell's daughter. I grew up in the business.

4:47They started it back in 1990. So I mean, I really, I was 2, right? I really grew up around it. I did not have a lot of interest in it growing up. I was interested in other things, a lot of music things. Things like that. And I graduated, went to Clemson for communication. I got a really good education and then I moved back here to do radio.

5:14And then it's, you know, radio being the state of what it is like, I think there will always be the need for community and there's always the need for that. But it existing is what it was. It just wasn't there for me by the time I got there. Right. So I I ended up, uh, selling shoes for a little while. And then, um, and around, uh, 2013, um, Daryl ran the business with my mother.

5:37Um, she, um, took terminally ill. And so for about a year and a half, um, we took care of her together with the business. Um, okay. And so that was a really hard time. It was a lot of learning for me because I, you know, I, I tried to stay away from the business until that But, um, I, I went in there out of necessity and kind of took over her duties at that time, which was the lot of the behind the desk, um, keeping, um, contact with customers, scheduling appointments, things like that.

6:05Um, and that's where I started stepping in more and learning more about just the automotive. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. And, and, you know, Darrell, to have somebody to step in and help like that is, is a big thing, right? And it sounds like there's a lot of structure. Right? Because one of the things that we dealt with— and everybody knows the story— but like, when my mom got terminally ill, um, and she passed away, uh, year before last, when, when she got terminally ill, like, my dad needed to be there for her.

6:35Like, that was what was important to him. And they had spent their life working in that business, right? I mean, from the time they got married, they were working in the business, doing the thing, right? They were married for 57 years. And it's, it's disappointing how everything turned out. But in our case, the person who was supposed to be there taking care of the business and doing what was best for mom and dad, they didn't have their best interest in mind.

7:00They didn't have the family business's best interest in mind. So to have somebody that you can trust and to be there with them and see they're doing the right thing, man, that's got to be— especially as a dad, that's got to be a really good feeling, right? It was. It really was. Good news is, I mean, we had had enough training. We're ATI members.

7:22Okay. We had completed 90% of the program when my wife fell ill, which meant that we had restructured the business to where we had processes and procedures in place, which made it easier for Jackie to move in. And it's definitely recommendable. You know, 100% anybody that's in business, of any business, to set up standard operating procedures. Uh, and that also meant that we had support.

7:50We had additional outside training we could send her to, to bring her up to what she needed to know in the automotive industry. And then I will credit the fact that we had the management training behind us and we had a business structured the way it was to us being able to allow me the freedom for 2 years to take care of my wife.

8:12Yes. Without bankrupting myself. Amen. Amen. Right there. The thing that happens to a lot of people is, yeah, yeah, they don't have those systems and structures in place to support themselves if they need to step away. Yeah, you're, you're exactly right. And that, that is— Lucas and I have been telling you about PartsTech for a while now. And how it gives you access to unlimited parts and tire vendors and direct integration with over 35 shop management systems.

8:41And now they've just launched a new referral program. All you have to do is open your PartsTech account, go to my shop, and click on the rewards tab. There you'll find your referral URL, which you can share via email, text message, or on your social media. If your referral signs up for a new account and places 5 orders in the first 30 days, PartsTech will send you a $100 gift card.

9:05That's it, nothing else is needed. Your referrals can get you $100 just for using PartsTech, which by the way is absolutely free to get started with. So if you're using PartsTech already, start sharing that referral link. And if you haven't signed up for PartsTech yet, what are you waiting for? Click on the link in the description or go to partstech.com/podcast. That's partstech.com/podcast.

9:34Hey, one more thing. If you find out that your shop management system doesn't integrate with PartsTech, it's time to upgrade. David and I use what we believe to be the very best system on the market, Shopware. With unmatched features like Parts GP Optimizer and DVX, which is their digital vehicle experience, Shopware really is way more than just a shop management software. With it, you'll be able to create an immersive and interactive experience for your client.

9:57Setting you apart from everyone else using run-of-the-mill software. Are you ready to upgrade? Click the link in the show notes to get started. Exactly where the family business ended up. And, and my dad was a very, very smart man, but he always ran the, the business on his back, right? Every decision he made it, everything that came up, he didn't need processes, policies, and procedures because everything went through him.

10:21And that sounds well great and good, And we all tell ourselves, it'll be fine. I don't need to spend all the time and energy to do this stuff. Now we'd had discussions. This is not running like a business. There's something wrong. Dad, I'm worried about this thing. And that was right as my mom, we found out she was sick. There was some stuff going on.

10:37And I told him, I said, dude, I'm nervous about this. Now I'm a hothead, right? So I approached it with a little bit of aggression. I approached it, you know, a little louder than I should have. And I feel like if I had approached a little bit differently, maybe I could have had more traction and we, we could have done something better.

10:55But I'll just tell you that now we're looking at about $3.5 million worth of tax debt from the past 7 years that somebody else didn't pay, and $140,000 a month in credit card spend that, um, 1,500 Amazon packages a month went somewhere. They didn't come here, right? And so there were a lot of things that happened. There was a lot of, of, pressure put on my parents.

11:20And a lot of internet cable, Lucas. Yeah, right. I mean, we just yesterday, we took about— we— the first picture was 100 pounds. We actually weighed how much ethernet cable we took out of the family business that literally made circles back to itself, and it was about 250 pounds of ethernet cable and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment that wasn't even hooked up that's just sitting out here on shelves.

11:43And it was this concept of, I mean, all you can call it is mismanagement, right? At the end of the day, all you can call it is mismanagement. And it's because there was no structure. It's because the books weren't clean. It's because there were no processes, policies, and procedures. And Dad says, why would somebody do that? And I said, Dad, because you didn't tell them not to.

12:04And he said, son, I shouldn't have to tell them not to. And I'm like, Dad, I know you're right. You shouldn't have to tell them not to, but you do have to tell them not to, right? Like, if they don't know, they don't know. You can't expect them to know. You can't expect them to have your experiences, been through what you've been through.

12:19They don't know what they don't know. Yeah. So they don't even know what to ask you. 100%. And it's like, you know, the shop, yes, of course I've got a P&L and I've got cash flow statements and I can pull those up and I can say I'm not supposed to spend more than 10% here and this many percent there. Now, of course I don't follow my own like recommendations and advice, but if, if there was structure to the family business, We wouldn't be here.

12:44Right. And so it sounds like you had enough training and enough structure that it was seamless. Jackie, did that make it easier for you? Oh, it did. Yeah. Well, we're also blessed that we lived in a time where the technology aided us. Yeah. Uh, you know, we were able to reach out to remote systems to where if she had an estimate or a problem she was trying to deal with, I could actually just turn around and log in from wherever I was on my phone and look at what she's looking at and give her a, for sure, or a direction to go.

13:17And it makes it a lot easier instead of like you, you ran into where you have somebody else that's having to make these decisions and you're completely out of the loop. So you have to trust what they're doing. At least with the technology today, that employee can reach out and say, hey, you know, I need some help with this. What do you think I should do?

13:37Or these numbers don't look right, or I just did this. Do I need to do this again? You know, we just paid this. Did we really pay it? Can you check? Yes. Uh, you, you are so right. And with the shop, that has been a lifesaver for me because I've had to dedicate all my time to cleaning that mess up. Right. My dad's 70-some years old and it, it's really tough because they put all this technology in and he doesn't know how to use any of the technology up there..

14:04And so I, my team down here, I can support them remotely and do the things that I need to do remotely to help them while also making sure we don't lose that up there. And so that has been huge for us. And I, I, that man, if it wasn't for Shopware, I'd be in a world of hurt right now because to be able to do that, and I, I don't think a lot of people experienced the non, like some of our listeners did, but very few of them have experienced that non, web-based SMS.

14:33And Darrell, if you've been in business that long, I know you used to use the pen and paper method and then you went to the one that was, you know, a database on the computer and you're like, this sucks. I can't even see this anywhere else. We were actually computerized from day one. We bought an existing business. Really? And when we knew we were headed for the automotive industry, I broke out a program for my Tandy 1000 and we set up an operating system to run the business in.

14:59I've got pictures of her sitting on my lap in the back bedroom while I was setting the software up. That is phenomenal, dude. That's awesome. Yeah. And it, uh, you know, I've always been a techno geek. My background is I'm an ex-Navy nuclear power electrician. So very cool. I'm, I was an early adopter at everything. I mean, I've had computers all the way back into the '70s.

15:22So it was just a natural to look at what the automotive business was gonna need. And reach out for what was available, which trust me, back in 1989 and '90 was not much. Yeah, for sure. Point of sale systems that were defined for a business like Shopware just didn't exist. You had to take a generic package and then fine-tune it to do what you needed to do or compromise it to where you could get the information and the tracking you needed out of it.

15:52But, uh, along the way you learn a lot as far as software programming. I've run Lotus, I've run you name any database, dBASE, and a lot of the others that we've had to use for tracking over the years. You're giving me flashbacks of AS/400. I worked with AS/400 for a little bit, and I don't ever, ever want to experience anything like that ever again.

16:14It was terrible. I don't know what you're talking about, dude. AS/400 was the best. I got so fast at 10-keying it, like, I didn't have to look at the screen. I knew exactly, like, the sequence of numbers I needed to get to to get exactly where I needed to go. Let me just explain that only On the user side, AS/400 was okay.

16:32On the IT side, AS/400 made you question all of your life choices. It was miserable. That's only when you wanted to change it. Yeah. If it worked, leave it alone. Until you've worked for a hospital that thinks we need to— Yeah. Good news is technology moves fast. Yes. So you're not there very long. Yeah, absolutely. I, you know, Darryl, I, you said Navy nuclear electrician, I just want to point out that David really hates it when people say things like that because I will spend all day in the Stationary Engineers Group on Facebook.

17:05I asked for the hotel rooms where I can see the cooling towers on the mechanical equipment because that's my kind of thing, right? I love— He's not that interested in technology. He's interested in the disaster behind it. He's like, did you know in 1984 this blew up over here and then this caused this thing? I want to sit next to the thing that might blow up, please.

17:24Yes, exactly. I want to see it. I want to understand how it works and why it does what it does. That's just how my mind works, right? That's how I ended up in automotive, because my mind needs these puzzles to solve. And so observing the puzzles and watching the puzzles and understanding how and why they do what they do is fascinating to me.

17:44David, David doesn't want to hear another word about it. Okay? You have no idea. In a few years, I might find that to be my next rabbit hole. I have no idea. You never know. I don't think so. Failure mode analysis happens on an hourly basis with us. I mean, it's just something you do, you know, you're forensically going through what's showing up at your door to identify what happened to it.

18:13You know, was this a user involved? Was this, you know, just an act of God? Was this environmental? How did this happen? And I think we've been in business so long because a lot of times we can educate our customers. We understand the cars well enough to educate our customers as to what's happening in terms that they can understand. Yes. And then we can also engineer solutions for them so they don't reoccur as often.

18:39We're always finding that better part, that better vendor, the better solution, the faster solution., you know, something that works out better for the customer. And technology has definitely sped that up to a degree, but we are finding that we're spending a lot more time researching now than we actually are with our hands under the hood. Yep. 100%. David, do you take that approach to your repairs?

19:05That is our approach to repairs. And the— I asked that because we were, One of the things we were talking about in the previous recording was the approach to the repair is bottlenecking Lucas, where he's running a very high average repair order. I do too. We run over $1,000 our repair order, and we are sticklers about the part that we use and the repair process.

19:39Because we want the car in better shape than how it came in. I mean, even before it broke down, right? Better than, than original. We want to repair the entire system. And so it's not— it's fine that you can get a ball joint for a lower control arm on a Dodge Ram truck. They're available. The factory replacement, though, is an entire control arm.

20:04And the reason that is, is because that ball joint, if you take it out and press a new one in from the aftermarket, will last a year. And then that mother effer will start to flop around and you'll have to replace it again. Now, most of these shops offer a 1-year warranty. I don't. And so we had to then figure out, hey, why are these failing?

20:25Oh, turns out that these should be whole control arms. Yeah, we're not doing anything wrong in the installation process. It's that these control arms were designed to be replaced as units. And so now we do entire control arms. So the repair is $2,500 instead of $800. We don't see a lot of shops like that. Most shops are like, okay, let's get the car out the door, turn the bay, get the money at the door.

20:55But when you say what you just said, That's what triggers in my mind going, yeah, we take the exact same approach because we do want to analyze the failure. We want to figure out. Yeah, we're, we're definitely more of a holistic shop. When a vehicle comes in the first time, it's like walking into a new doctor that's never seen you. They tend to poke and prod everything.

21:16They want to get a full background in history and, you know, find out how you've been living life. And we do the same thing with the cars and the, the, the reasoning to the customer is the better we know your vehicle, the better we know your use of it, the better we can make educated recommendations in how you need to treat or maintain the car and what level of maintenance you need to maintain to get what your desire is.

21:42Whether you're looking for speed, performance, ultimate reliability, you know, understand there's trade-offs in any one of those that you pick. And it allows us to better fit their need, better fill their need. Sometimes it's not the easiest thing to do because you end up trying to read people a lot. 35, 40 years. We're finally getting into a good roll and here comes Lucas interrupting the episode.

22:09Folks, now you know exactly why I hire Shop Marketing Pros to do my shop marketing. It's that I am spastic and all over the place and I lack consistency. But here's the thing. That doesn't work in marketing. You see, marketing takes 30, 60, sometimes 90 days to be effective, and I was all over the place with my marketing. There was no consistency at all.

22:32Caused these waves in my business because I was so inconsistent. And that's why I am so happy to refer Shop Marketing Pros. They bring consistency. They are true professionals. I'm going to encourage you, go down to the link below and get your free digital marketing inspection. Just like we do digital vehicle evaluations for automobiles, they're doing the same thing about your marketing, and they will help you get your business turned around.

23:03Dealing with people, it's made it a little easier, and Jackie can tell you, sometimes I can tell when they walk in the door what the outcome of the conversation is. Yeah, just turn around. Could you just walk back out, please? Yeah, but you learn tactics for satisfying customers as best possible and understanding when you can't. Yeah. And that doesn't mean that we're elitists.

23:26Jackie can tell you our customer base ranges from people that are in poverty, fixed income, seniors, all the way through to 1%ers. And it's a matter of understanding what their desires and what their goal is and what their pain level is. To, you know, to achieve that. And then we go through and, and tailor as best possible. It does have challenges though.

23:49I, so here, here's my question for you, and, and this is kind of a dual question, Darrell. I wanna start with you though, because for me, this process very much can become an addiction, right? I want to get to the answer, right? I need the answer. I wanna understand why it happened. I want to understand how it happened. That's how my mind works.

24:11And so I even get emails and in my head, my head begins to run through how the system works and why the system did what it did. And how did we end up here? What did you do? How did we get to this point? And then here's what the failure was and this is what caused the failure. Like, I just go down this rabbit hole and I love that.

24:27And but it can be an addiction for me because I really enjoy that process. That's a lot. For somebody else to take over. Do you feel like it's reasonable to expect that from Jackie? And Jackie, do you feel like that's— I mean, that feels like big shoes to fill, right? And I'm looking at my business kind of trying to back myself out of it right now for that very reason, because I'm looking at my staff saying, maybe this is unreasonable for you guys to put this level of attention to detail that I do, because I'm sitting at home at 1 AM with diagrams up on the screen trying to understand how it works based on

25:03an email somebody sent me about, you know, I did this and now a fault light's on. What's up with that? You know? So is that reasonable though? Yeah, I think, going back to the history that, you know, the fact that I had to step out of the business in 2012, 2013, and Jackie had to step in to fill those shoes, she can tell you that probably 80% of the phone calls is, Is Darrell there?

25:27Can I talk to him? Yeah. Yeah. Still at least half of the phone calls. The one thing that came from that experience was it weaned a lot of my customers from having to talk to me directly. They may ask now, but they will accept if someone else has to deal with them. And that really was a good step. In the direction we're going.

25:53We're currently— I have a plan of trying to be out of my business by the time I'm 65 years old, consultant basis. Somebody else is going to be running it, uh, which is why we're restructuring for that. And one of the things we've already determined is that it cannot operate the way it operates now. We are going to have to change the way it operates to make sure that the employees' needs are still met.

26:22And then we taper off the customers that need that personalized handholding because again, there's not going to be somebody there that's going to give them that, that personal service that they've grown to expect. And we don't want to disappoint them. We just need to make them understand, you know, there's an exit going on here and at some point, you know, we may have to part ways.

26:44So, you know, that, that resonates. Very loudly with me because I went through the exact same thing. I had to back away. And I'm curious, was there a point— you've been doing this a lot longer than I have, and it may be that when you hired ATI and brought that in, was there a point where you looked at this and said, this is not sustainable?

27:07Because I definitely had a point where it was like, I feel like all of these people are always coming at me. I couldn't go to Walmart. People were stopping me. Hey, my truck did this, my car did this, this happened, that happened. And I had that reputation for being that guy. My wife finally came to me and she's like, Lucas, like, we can't keep doing this.

27:25This— people are knocking on our door at midnight and, you know, there's people stopping us in Walmart. It takes 2 hours to do a shopping trip because somebody wants to talk about their car and you'll engage them and talk to them. We have to have a healthy work-life balance here and this is not it. Did you ever encounter that? When my wife was part of the business, we were pretty much fully involved and we were running several automotive clubs at the same time doing newsletters.

27:54And these are back in the cut and paste days. Yeah. So we're talking about a significant amount of our time was going toward those. We looked at them partially as soft marketing, but also it was a way for us to develop a social network. Out of the shop. And there were certain events that I was not the happiest to attend because, as you said, you don't get to see the cars.

28:20You don't really get to talk to the new people you'd like to meet because you're being dragged aside by everybody that already knows you that has a problem. Yeah. And, uh, that, that does— there are certain events that we would avoid simply because it was a large social drain and an emotional drain. Yes. You don't like disappointing people and it's easier to just not be there.

28:45Yeah, 100%. 100%. I just want to point something out real quick. Darryl, you're getting up there in age. I don't call you old, but— What, 39 is old? Yes, exactly. I see what he did there. That's hilarious. I did the, the amount of like, you have random knowledge. Like, I don't know. I don't think you understand the, the advantage, Jackie, that you have.

29:18Like your dad's been there, done that kind of thing. Right. So like he survived 90 all the way to now. Right. So it was a long time. And That, that kind of guerrilla marketing that we're putting together newsletters and we're setting up auto clubs with our name attached to it, that's like, that's like old school ground level guerrilla marketing that they teach in textbooks.

29:44He was just doing it because that's what we needed to do to drum up his— but like, you, you get these new guys, this is why we get so frustrated with these like idiot tech texted, are you gonna go open a shop? It's like, dude, you have no idea the ocean of knowledge you don't have. Yes. Like you think, yeah, you're just gonna work on cars and be fine.

30:05It's whatever. Like you have no idea. And it's just stuff like he says randomly. He just said it randomly. He just said it like, I'm just talking and just, it's just a story that came out and it's like, whoa, we could teach a course on just that. Just like, how did you set it up? Where did you do it? How, like, who did you talk to?

30:22Who did you send it out to? You can do an entire course on just the random newsletters and you think, well, that's outdated. It's not 100%. You could start doing it right now, tomorrow, ignore Facebook and stuff like that and do some ground level guerrilla marketing and stuff like that and be perfectly successful at it. Like that is that it's going to jump off real quick though.

30:44And it's a slow start. It's always a slow start on stuff like that. And people don't understand the amount of work that it takes to really pick something up off the ground. Yeah. Oh, 100%. But that's the, that's the point though. Like, yeah, like you're not gonna— you're also not dropping $10,000 a month into Google Ads. You see what I'm saying? Like, it's which one are you gonna take?

31:05Like, I'm a big, I'm a big fan of BNI. And, uh, like, I typically serve as the mentor. So when somebody comes in, like, I try to guide them in how to be successful in BNI. I've been doing that for almost 10 years. And I tell them like, look, you have a choice here. You're going to put in an hour and a half to 2 hours a week of your time in and then spend about $1,000 a year to be in this and get continuous business.

31:31Or you're going to spend $10,000 a month on Google Ads. It's like, would you have that kind of cash to dump into Google Ads? Content has always been king. So if you can get in front of people. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And then, you know, like, they're starting to advocate some of that towards online and like reviews and stuff like that. And people are looking at reviews and online stuff almost as equal as— and I get that, but that costs a lot of money.

31:59And, and yeah, if you're doing enough revenue that you can just go, hey, I'm just gonna write the check, deal with it, I'm all for that. But when you're brand new, and that's what I'm saying, like, these guys start out, these shops and they, they have no idea the grind. Like, buy a shop, take over a shop that's already established, been in business 46 years.

32:20Like, jump on that. Don't start from scratch. You have any idea the amount of time and effort you're gonna have to put in? Yeah, just to build the audience to be able to market to and be effective at it. You have— you don't know, like, you don't— do you know how to put together a newsletter? No, I've never done it before. There you go.

32:38So you got to learn all that skill first. And then come to the table just to get a car in to then be able to work on the car, and maybe you'll make some money on the car. Idiots. Sorry, that was my rant. They don't know what they don't know. You're exactly right. I try to tell them, but they don't listen. I— my senior technician has been with me over 20 years, and I asked him the other day— we just signed back up for management training for doing this transition, which also includes technical training.

33:09To where we can hone everybody's skills a little better. So we turned around and, and I, I asked him, it's like, I'm gonna sign you up for technical training. I said, you know, I have no problem signing you up for the management training program also. Would you like to sign up for those? Completely voluntary, free to him, doesn't matter, you know? And he looked at me and he says, no, I don't want to have anything to do with people.

33:33Right. He's, he's been there. He's tried to do side work at his house on custom jobs and stuff, and he's had to deal with people. He doesn't have the temperament and he knows it. He's a really great guy, you know, he's a fantastic person, he's a fantastic mechanic, but he doesn't have tolerance for people that just are being idiots. Yeah. And you know, like that, at the end of the day, that's— if you're a technician, you need to take a step back and you need to look at it and go, am I really good at working on cars, or do I really enjoy talking to the people around me while I'm working on cars?

34:07And I get way too distracted to try to sit there and just focus in on working on cars. And I want to go do anything but work on the car, where I know plenty of people that can just hone in and get the work done. And that's what they like to do. They like to see the fixed thing. They like to start with something broken, finish with something fixed.

34:26And they derive a lot of satisfaction from that. But if you're deriving satisfaction from that, that's not what you're going to get from running a business. That's not the business. The business is talking to customers and petting the dogs and kissing the babies, going out into the community and all that nonsense. That's what you're signing up for. It's not to fix the cars.

34:48So if you're really good at fixing cars, go fix the cars. We need you. Amen. Absolutely. Jackie? Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. We have seen that. I learned the hard way probably 25 years ago that I couldn't be productive working on cars. Too many interruptions in the business. So at some point you do have to figure out that you have to transition.

35:13Uh, and I've watched other shop owners that have done the smart thing. They own the shop. They hire people to deal with the people. They're like you're saying, David, they want to hone in on that car. They love repairing the cars. They just don't want to deal with the business. So you hire somebody to do that. You just have to figure out where you're gonna be the most productive use to your business.

35:34Yeah, for sure. Jackie, I have a question for you that this feels like really big shoes to fill, right? Um, it's a big deal. And, and as somebody who's like, I, I'll be completely honest, I had no intentions. I always thought the other person involved was gonna take over the family business. I had no want, desire, need anything. And then it was like, hey, this legacy that has been in this family since 1956 is getting ready to be no more.

36:06And that was like heavy for me. That bothered me. And I saw the impact it had on my dad. I saw how much it hurt him. And I was like, well, it ain't— this has gotta happen, right? And so I said, I'll take it on with this and do everything else too. And I also recognize, like, when I didn't care as much, it didn't really seem like it would be that big of a deal to step in.

36:33But then when I stepped in and it was in a mess and I realized how important it was to him and I realized how important it was to the family that it got saved, it felt a whole lot heavier and it felt like a lot more to, to carry this tradition on and carry this honor on. Felt like an honor to have the ability to do it, but it also felt heavy.

36:54How do you feel in this transition? So I recognize that there's a lot of people that are just— they're Darrell's people. And when he ultimately decides to not be there, I'm going to do my best to connect with them and keep going with them. But some of them are going to fall off. I think that's just going to be an inevitable thing.

37:14But I think the important thing is for me to make sure that the relationships that we have with the people that we expect to stay, we need to make sure those are just golden. Um, you know, those people have no reason to go anywhere else. They, you know, they're going to stay with us. They, they don't need to see this transition as the— in the business as anything as like instability or anything like that, because, you know, we don't want them to have that feeling.

37:38So, um, I, I think that's going to be a lot of my focus focus is on, you know, who are my people that we're working with right now that I can keep. And, um, I, you know, we have another technician that's, um, interested in, in more of the management stuff as well. And so, you know, who are his people? Who can we keep that, you know, he can work with?

37:56And then just kind of build and grow from there, because that, that attrition naturally happens anyway, especially, um, we work on smaller cars. Some of our customers are just old and they die. Um, it happens. And so like there is always that natural attrition and you're always looking to find new customers. Generally, we have the advantage of being at a point where actually in this year we had so much backlog that we decided 2026 was a no new customers year.

38:23Oh, wow. We have to catch up and we have to, you know, do right by the customers that we have. Yeah. 35 years is a long time to build a customer base. Space. For sure, for sure. Absolutely. And I, I think that so many of us are in that same situation, right? Is that, that we know we have this attrition to deal with.

38:43I, I'm going through some attrition here in the shop. The guys who wanted to come in and talk to me— and, and I'm sure you see this— like, the ones that I think about are the ones that need that special attention. And Darryl, you know exactly what I'm talking about. They want to talk to me, they're interested in you know, my very complex analysis of the vehicle.

39:03They want that personal connection with exactly what's happening, how we're going to do this. They know that I can work some magic on like, well, we don't have to do this, but maybe we could do this instead. And I'm providing options and I'm navigating going around it to create the outcome that they want. But that's a lot of work. And those guys, man, some of them are really hard-headed and some of them can be jackasses if they don't exactly get their way right away.

39:31And my, my service manager came to me a while back and she said, you know, I think that you're accustomed to dealing with these people. I think you're accustomed to, to working this hard to make this sale work and to make this thing happen with this client, to please this client. She said, I'm not, and I don't think you understand how much of a jerk this dude is being, and you're just used to it because the same.

39:54Yeah. I actually have, I have had conversations with our customers. One day they'll talk to me, they'll be upset, they'll be absolutely just, you know, just, you know, whatever's going on. And then, like maybe mere hours later, they'll call back again and talk to Darryl or— And it's a completely different story. Because I'll say, you know, so such and such was upset, you know, maybe, you know, help smooth this over.

40:19And they— the conversation, the demeanor that they have is nowhere— it's not in the same room. Yeah, what they were talking to me like, 100%. I'm telling them in my mind the same things that Daryl's telling them, and they just don't want to hear it from me. Yeah, absolutely, to the T. We have fired customers for misogyny. Yeah, we have literally fired customers.

40:44Simply because of the way they've treated Jackie on the phone, or when my wife was around, when they treated her on the phone. It's like, I, I have plenty of customers, I don't need you. Yeah, exactly, dude. I had, I had somebody tell my wife one time that her place was in the kitchen, and I carried him out the front door of the shop.

41:03And, uh, he, he would— he refused to talk to her, said that he would only speak to me, and was being a complete jerk. And I literally picked him up and carried him right out the front door of the shop and said, we no longer do business together. And I set him down and I shut the door and went on back in.

41:20And the sad part about that is I taught technical college, the automotive training here, for about 3 years. And I can tell you that I've had half a dozen female students come through that were more on the ball and more intelligent than the males that we're trying to get into the business. Absolutely. So by excluding females from your technician base, you're missing a lot.

41:47They have a different perspective, they have a different discipline, you know, they, they have a whole different mindset. And a lot of times it's because they don't have the strength, they don't have the desire to get dirty and stay dirty. So they find a better, smarter, easier way to do the same job. Yep, 100%. Did you know that Jasper had done studies on gender in their repair process or in their remanufacturing process, and that they had found that women repaired transmissions and engines far more effectively with less warranty work than the men did because they paid more attention to detail?

42:26They asked more questions, right? Like, I will blunt force my way through a problem., and my wife is over here asking all these questions. I'm like, this all, this takes too much time to ask these questions. What are you doing? And like, she's asking very in-depth questions. And then I'm like, oh, well, that makes sense. Like, I wouldn't have ever got there that easily, you know?

42:47But I, I don't take the time to— Yeah, exactly. This is crazy. Uh, you know, I think that's, that's common in our industry too. And, and we, you know, in For instance, like Jackie taking over for you. Um, one of the things that was a wake-up call for me was at some point or another, I became comfortable with saying, I don't know.

43:10I became comfortable with saying, I'm not as strong at this as I thought I was. For the longest time, I really thought like I was the reason the business was going to be successful. And now I look at Jade, who is our manager, and I'm like, she's way better at a lot of things than I am.. And I think that when a shop owner can finally get to the point that they acknowledge that and they can acknowledge like, I'm not the smartest person in the room, I'm not the smartest person in the shop.

43:34I think that is a powerful moment. I know it was powerful for me because I started to recognize I was the roadblock, right? I was the bottleneck in the shop and, and for the shop to truly reach its potential, I'm gonna have to step out of it. I'm gonna have to turn it over to them and let them do what they need to do.

43:52To make the shop great because they have skills that I don't, you know. Jackie, what are you thinking about? I'm really just wondering, I'm kind of trying to like peek into Darryl's head right now because I'm thinking like, well, you know, he knows he's getting out at a certain point, these cars take a certain amount of time, and I'm like, does he have a car countdown?

44:13Like, you like 50 cars and you're done? Like, I think she's calling you old now, Darryl. 50 cars. I mean, like, I don't know, he's working on one a year. So are you going to be done like you're going to get on a cruise and you're not going to come back? Like, I'm going to be in Mexico, or I'm going to be in Australia, don't call me, that kind of thing?

44:36I think one of the, uh, I think a lot of things that are missing with some shop owners, and I'm sure y'all will agree with this, is they fail to diversify early enough in their careers. They don't have other revenue streams to support them. They're not making the investments, you know, the personal investments they should be to where they can actually get out.

44:58And I've lived long enough and I've seen enough other shop owners around me try to get out. And these are the guys that ran businesses for 35 years and they're delivering parts for AutoZone. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They did 40 years and they're just too old to finish the projects they need to finish because they didn't get out early enough. And in my case, uh, through a series of unfortunate events, uh, I was provided with enough financial means to comfortably pick a date and say when I can get out.

45:33But I like the industry. I like the business. I like the customers. I like what we're doing so well. I'm gonna be available for that phone call. You know, you have that project that needs a little extra attention that you need some experience on, I'm not going anywhere. You know, the nice thing about technology is, is I could be on that cruise ship and then you can turn around and we can Zoom call or you can show me what you're looking at and I can give you an idea of where to go for the next step.

46:02And, uh, that I don't think goes away. The, uh, uh, let me tell you how much I'm gonna try not to do that though. Jackie says, what I'm trying to say is, is like maybe like You could take a cruise for 6 months or something, and maybe we could just get some distance first. Okay. And the thing is, I also have the option of not taking the phone call.

46:26Yeah, there you go. As a guy that used to hire the delivery drivers, I'm just telling you, they just get bored. They have plenty of money. They don't need the job. And so they dictate the hours. They're like, I'll work from this time to this time. And don't bother me on these days. And they just, they get bored out of their minds.

46:47They have nothing to do. Well, I've watched people travel that way. Uh, I've talked to service writers and service managers that when they retire, they'll go to another town somewhere and they'll just sit behind somebody's counter to let them go to vacation, you know? And meanwhile, they'll go out and, you know, see the town and just do the light, easy work of taking care of customers to relieve somebody else.

47:08And then when the guy gets back from vacation, go somewhere else. Yes. Well, Malan Newton did that. Malan did the, Malan did the remote service advising, went all over the country doing remote service advising. Um, and like, so he would, he would go to shops or he would work remotely, either one. And he wrote service for hundreds of shops like that. So I mean, I could see that.

47:29It makes sense. Yeah. I don't know. Jackie's got this look on her face that's like, dad needs to, we need some distance here. I don't know. I, I can tell you that, uh, when I came back to the shop after my wife passed, uh, it— she tolerated me for probably a year and a half before she started working more remotely. And it took me a while to finally get my feet under me and realize I needed to leave her alone a little bit more and not unload as much.

48:00Uh, there's a lot of transition you go through after a loss like that. Yes. And I've been through a few iterations of change on the personal side since then. And I'm not the same person I was even 10 years ago. So it's, you know, that is one of the things you just have to live and grow with. And I think the changing perspective of knowing that I've set a date to get out, it changes what my focus is.

48:28Yeah. As a result, I know that I have to offload more of this to Jackie and just trust her ability to do what she feels is the best thing to do and then support that. Because at some point it's going to be all of her decisions, or she's going to be developing those decision processes with the people that are still going to be standing after I leave.

48:50Yeah. Well, and I mean, if you don't give her that opportunity to make those decisions and see the results of those decisions, Right? I think that's a dangerous place to be. We try to save everybody from bad decisions, and all we end up with is more bad decisions because we never gave them the opportunity to learn and grow. And I, you know, I've watched my dad go through, like I said, the exact same thing, except after Mom died, then he found out all kinds of terrible things that happened.

49:18My dad retired in 1989, and the building burnt down right after he retired. And he came back and he said, I'll never retire again. Every time I try and retire, something bad happens. So I'm just not doing it anymore. And, and there was something very different this time after mom passed away. There was a, there was a change in his mentality that, that said, I have to leave them successful.

49:44I have to leave them in a better place than they're in right now. I have to do something to make this different. Right? It— you, you— I don't want to get into too much of the personal stuff, and, and I know it's hard to talk about. What did you learn from that experience, Darryl? Well, one of them was that I could walk away.

50:04The second one is people are more important than things or businesses. Amen. And it's the relationships in our life that are really critical. Uh, some of my customer relationships were even though they were financially fruitful, were toxic. Some of my personal relationships that I had before the time were a lot shallower than I anticipated. There are always people in your life that will step up that you don't expect, you know, to have a customer walk in and drop a $30,000 home modification on you, you know, and not ask for anything.

50:40So it's, uh, you start learning that people are definitely the most important thing, and that family is a precious item. Amen. It is a finite supply for most of us, and if you live long enough, it's a dwindling supply. So you need to take advantage of, of the time you have with them. And businesses can be a huge drain on that if you let it.

51:04Yeah, you have to be able to separate it. You have to be able to have that personal life on the outside. You can't live in the business. You know, I did, I, I can't even say I have respect for the guys that can put in those 18-hour days because it just means they don't have work-life balance. Right. You know, they're either not doing something right so they can earn the money they need to, to where they can have the family time, or they're not prioritizing the right things in their lives.

51:34Yeah, absolutely. You're so right. And I, You know, when I first started trying to make the change in my business, I wasn't being the dad I wanted to be. I wasn't being the husband I wanted to be. The shop consumed all of me, right? And it's taken me a long time to be able to walk into the house and, and say nothing about the shop, right?

51:53We don't talk about it. And there's times we talk about the money struggles and everything else, but it's not, it's not what it was, right? I used to walk through that door and it was, I This is so frustrating and this is wrong and I should have done this and I wish I'd have done that. And we got this problem over here.

52:09And it was just those flowing out at the end of the day, the frustrations that I couldn't share with the staff or anybody else. And now I've learned to build a support system around me that I can call David or I can call whoever and say, man, I'm really frustrated about this, but it doesn't need to go home. And I think the wake-up call— and Jackie, you may have experienced some of this being younger— the wake-up call for me was, is At some point my wife looked at me and said, hey, I think you're giving our daughter anxiety.

52:35I think you're making her nervous about money. I think you're making her nervous about all these things. Now we're not struggling for money. Like the past couple of weeks have been really slow and it was hard, but I mean, we're, we're back up on top of it and things are going well. But like, she didn't hear about the good times. She heard about the times that I was stressed out and it was impacting her.

52:55But I didn't think about that as a dad. Right. And I think that's something that we miss sometimes. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Jackie, did that impact you at all when you were younger? Yeah. Um, I mean, I, I don't, I don't bring as much of my work home. Like I, I had a lot bigger problem when I was still working in radio, to be quite frank, of just, you know, like you're constantly rolling over in your head, what's next?

53:19What's next? What's next? What's next? And so I knew stepping away from that, that, that I wanted to move away from that. So I don't have a big problem with transitioning between work and home. Yeah. Um, but I, I do see it. Yeah. It, it causes a lot of, of troubles between families. Darrell, you got a lot of experience. What are the— I, I guess I've got two questions for you.

53:43The first one is, what are the things that you don't ever want Jackie to have to experience in the business? What are the big ones that you think, here's where I don't want you to be in 5 years, 10 years, or here's the thing that I don't want you to have to go through? We've suffered through 3 major recessions in this local market, to the point that, uh, at the second one, which followed within about a year and a half of the first one— these were local market, one of them was national, 2 of them were local, uh, After the second one, we actually looked at going bankrupt because we were just about tapped out

54:22with all of our finances. Reserves were gone. There were no customers. Every time they would, you know, we had a shipyard close. Every time they'd say shipyard closure, our phones wouldn't ring for 2 days. So we didn't have the customer base at the time to help tide us through that other project backlog. That we do now. That's, I don't want Jackie to have to have that fear of how are you going to feed your family?

54:50Because we were pretty much, besides my wife's part-time income working for other business owners, we wouldn't have had enough to have paid the mortgage, paid all the bills or anything else. And that's a struggle and a fear I don't want her to have to feel. And then, uh, as a secondary on that, I want her to feel the freedom or have the freedom to actually take time to enjoy her children, to spend time with her husband, you know, to have that life outside of the shop.

55:22And that's been part of my conscious effort not to expand the business so large to a point that it requires an exorbitant amount of your time. Or requires you, you know, to manage a dozen different managers. Uh, we could have easily had probably 6 locations in our local area, uh, by this point in our time. But I discovered third year I was in business that I didn't like handling more than 7 or 8 employees.

55:50That was about the maximum that I wanted to handle. And that's probably about any, you know, you could realistically expect most locations to run. But yeah, that's the big thing is I don't want her to have to have that fear that I'm not going to be able to feed my family or I'm going to have to completely uproot and, you know, lose everything to do it.

56:13It sounded like there may have been a little bit of emotion in the, the, I want her to be able to have quality time with her family. Do you feel like you got the quality time? Do you feel like you were there and present and you feel good about where you were there? And actually it's funny because we had, as I mentioned, we were involved in all these automotive pursuits, you know, all these clubs, you know, a little bit of travel here and there.

56:42Jackie was always, I'll have to put it mildly, she was always extremely competitive and very self-starting and very motivated. So there was always an activity to go do with her, and I tried to make as many of those as I could, to the point that I— we for a while did vintage racing, and the demands in the vintage racing community got so strong because you are on severe deadlines during the racing seasons that there were events that I would have missed.

57:17One case in point her birthday. We ended up having her birthday at a racetrack, which I think she enjoyed, but it's still— it's a birthday at a racetrack instead of a birthday. Yeah, yeah. I mean, she agreed to it, but, uh, so we actually— we had, uh, we were able to provide her with a really good life and shield her from a lot of the financial struggles that were going on in the background.

57:45So I don't think that she ever felt that she really wanted— there were things that other kids around her were doing, uh, that we couldn't afford. Take the cruises, the overseas vacations, you know, the, the 3-week-long vacations during the summertime, things like that. She had friends that were doing those things and we couldn't provide those, but she never really questioned it. You know, she accepted what normal was.

58:13And a lot of times she was proactive enough to find those activities on her own. You know, she did develop a strong friend base and things like that. So, so I don't feel on the family side that we really sacrificed a ton. It's just that fear that that family life that we had cultivated could have been lost at several points along the way because of Number one, things that I didn't know.

58:42I mean, I thought I knew everything back then. I didn't know what I didn't know. And then number two, outside environment, you know, bigger system things such as government closures of bases where you lose 30% of your customer base overnight. Yeah. And there's a point here in Charleston, just a big industry thing. For everybody to ponder. When they closed our shipyard here in Charleston, I was talking to one of my vendors from Napa and he walks in and Sonny had this gray look on his face and it's like, what's up today, Sonny?

59:19And Sonny says, I just came back from Firestone. He said they padlocked all 6 of their stores in Charleston. Holy cow. They owe us almost $1 million. My God. So he was in fear for his job because he's watching his customers They were bankrupting at the rate of 1.5 shops a day for almost 3 months. A lot of the guys just rolled over.

59:45It was horrible for about a year. Uh, then unfortunately we did the stupid thing. You know, we kept spending money and we kept working on cars and kept our nose down almost to the point of bankruptcy, but it turned out okay in the end. And that was mostly not wanting to upset the family cart. You know, we wanted to maintain the structure, the stability, and the family life that we had.

1:00:11And, uh, it's, you know, every business I think has its trials like that. The big thing is, as we were saying earlier, developing that separation, not bringing it home. Yeah. Well, you know, Darrell, I'll tell you that the best times in my life were in the family business. Like as a kid growing up, I look back now and I think, man, how blessed I was to have those opportunities to spend with my mom and my dad and learn from them and learn the customer service aspect and grow and develop, right?

1:00:40Like, so I, I think that that's a win in my book. Jackie, is there anything you want dad to know? Is there anything that, that you would say to him hearing that? Um, well, I wouldn't say I was scathed. Um, but I'm, I'm with you, Lucas, and that I also had a lot of good memories too. Um, you know, like I, uh, I picked up playing flute when I was about 11 years old, and I used to actually practice at the shop, out in the shop while they were trying to fix cars.

1:01:09They had to listen to me, those poor guys. Oh, that's awesome. Um, yeah, so I mean, I just— there's a lot of, um, like they fixed up a little go-kart for me and let me ride it around the cul-de-sac and just little stuff like that that kids enjoy. Like, you know, I got the good side of that too. I mean, honestly, I think the worst part of growing up the way I did was more the fact that I had to eat a lot of ramen noodles and Hamburger Helper, and it did make an effect on my health after a while.

1:01:35So that's probably really the worst stuff. That's awesome. Yeah, but it was— growing up in a shop is a good experience. I know so much more about cars and so many of the other people I grew up with too, that it's just like, even without having to pay to go to school to have that training, I just, I'm the one that a lot of my friends call, you know, like, and I'll tell 'em like, I'm not a mechanic, go have somebody look at it if I don't know.

1:02:00But like, you know, and you know what that's like. So I'm stepping into that role myself now. Well, I think it's phenomenal and I think it's a phenomenal story and I'm so thankful that you guys came on and told it. I'd love to have you guys on again here soon. After the transition happens, maybe we talk a little more about it as things progress throughout.

1:02:19We'd love to have you guys back on and let's talk about it some more. Sounds great. It's been wonderful. All right, he's going to hit end. Thank you for listening to the Changing the Industry podcast. If you enjoy the show, do us a favor and leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. And don't forget to set it to automatically download the latest episode.

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