BONUS AUDIO ONLY EPISODE: Lauren Langston & Jared Haleck | The Auto Repair Industry Earned Its Bad Reputation

0:00There are some bad actors in any industry, and so a portion of the— our reputation as an industry comes from some of those bad actors, right? But I believe that we have earned a lot of that lack of trust in the industry through unintentional incompetence. The following program features a bunch of doofuses talking about the automotive aftermarket. The stuff we or our guests may say do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of our peers, our sponsors, or any other associations we may have.

0:34There may be some spicy language in this show, so if you get your feelings hurt easily, you should probably just move along. So without further ado, here's your host, Mike Allen, with Confessions of a Shop Owner, presented by TechMetric— simply the best software ever made. So here's the painful truth: a lot of shops are not losing money on some giant mystery. They're losing it and the boring stuff that they keep putting off.

0:59Follow-up, declined work, customer communications, making sure people actually come back. None of that is flashy. It's not fun. It's also the stuff that keeps a shop running effectively. TechMetric helps with that by bringing shop management, payments, and marketing together in one system. So instead of stuff falling through the cracks because one tool handles one piece and another handles the rest, the whole setup ends up needing constant babysitting.

1:24Your team can actually stay at the top of what needs to be done next. That means better follow-through, a better customer experience, and fewer missed opportunities you don't notice until it's too late. Learn more at techmetric.com, use the link in the show notes, or scan the QR code on your screen now. ASTA Expo 2026 coming at you September 24th, 25th, and 26th, just around the corner.

1:46If you've been hiding under a rock and you don't know what that is, it is only the very best networking, training, and trade show event in the country, or at least east of the Mississippi. So I believe that you need to be there. It's bigger every year. It's better every year. And to top it all off, Confessions of a Shop Owner is hosting the hospitality suite for the 2nd consecutive year.

2:08If you hadn't heard, it was the best freaking hospitality suite in the history of the automotive industry, hands down, no doubt. And if you also haven't heard, we are giving tickets away to the expo this year. The podcast is, thanks to the generosity of our sponsors. Astausa.org to learn more and to buy tickets. Be there or be square, dog. Yeah, I just— I, I caught the first part of the panel, but I heard the last part of the panel got a little bit spicy.

2:34It did get spicy. And so— and I was talking to Sunil afterwards, and he's like, hey man, you should have thrown some more of those hand grenades into the conversation. Wait, what was the spicy part? Well, and I was like, dude, I didn't know how far I could go because I can get pretty fucked up. Pardon my language, might get some spicy language.

2:49I sure hope you're recording. Oh yeah. Okay, good, good. No, so the spicy part was you asked for shop owners that haven't owned a shop in 10 years, how do you stay relevant? And I thought it was a really, I just thought that was a really insightful question. I just go back to, I think you can be great at something and learn it from different aspects.

3:12Like you can be great learning something from the bottom up. You can be great studying something horizontally. You can be great studying it from a dataset. And if you're just able to bring all those perspectives together, I mean, that's kind of the whole point of Taxonic. So anyways, people got fired up about that question. Phil Jackson was not a great basketball player.

3:31He was one of the best basketball coaches of all time, right? And how many titles does he have? So it was a little bit of a rage bait question, but I wanted a reaction. And the question was actually show of hands, how many of you currently or in the last 10 years have owned a shop? And only 3 of the panelists raised their hand.

3:48And I said, this question is for everyone who didn't raise your hand. The industry has changed dramatically in the last decade plus. You haven't owned a shop in that timeframe. How do you maintain relevance, right? And one of the things that I love doing is rage baiting Cecil Bullard. And 'cause I think Cecil, like when he goes to sleep at night, he thinks, Mike Allen has a very punchable face.

4:16And so I wanted your Will Smith moment. Well, yeah, he references me in some of his online content without naming me. And I always drop into the comments. I'm like, hey, that guy, whoever you're talking about, sounds like he's awesome. What's his name? That's too funny. Now I wish I caught it. I did miss the last part of it. But I do agree that you can become an expert on something in more than one way.

4:40Yeah, for sure. For sure. But, you know, one of the things that I did at the beginning of the panel is I gave the call-in number for the podcast and I said, if you have a question that you want to hear asked, text me and I'll scroll on my phone while people are answering questions. And that was already on my cue cards as a question to ask.

4:58But that came up 3 times in inbound text. I got 28 text messages from people in the audience with questions. What other questions did you get? Some of them were just not appropriate, you know. You know, which, which of you has the highest revenue on coaching income? Yeah, that doesn't matter to whether or not they're a quality coach, right? There was, there were some snarky questions that were, you know, just silliness, but I got a couple of them in there.

5:26Okay. Okay. If you want to see, if you want, if you're listening to this and you hate that you missed it, you just need to come to Tectonic 27. Absolutely. And bigger, better than ever, right? So I heard that we're going across the street next year. Is there truth to that? We're going across the street to the convention center. Yeah, this place is huge.

5:42It's huge, but we're already outgrowing it. Yeah, these are happy problems. That room was full. So like, yeah, we got a big space next year. Yeah. Props to the whole team. This, this event has been the most well-run, well-produced event that I've been to in a long time. And that includes Uh, you know, SEMA and Apex, uh, the, the professionalism of the setup and the execute, the quality of the food has been really great.

6:08And look, your attendees care about the quality of the food, which is— I hear about it, I tell you. So, um, we heard that on social too, for what it's worth. No, I mean, hats off to our marketing team. I mean, they have been working on this night and day for a year now, and it is just so to see it come together the way it did.

6:27And I mean, really the TechMetric community made it what it is. So it's really special. All right, so I think we should immediately jump into, and I actually, when I watched your keynote earlier, it was great, thank you, by the way, excited about the features, but I made some questions that I wanted to ask you. Let's do it. I wanna review those new features because I wanna tell people who weren't able to be here about it.

6:53I'm sure that you've got your methodologies to spread the, spread the good news otherwise. But so digital ads, do I have to— so I'm Shop Genie still. I haven't converted to marketing yet. Do I have to be converted to marketing before I can run digital ads? No, you actually don't even need to own or be on one of the Techmetric marketing products.

7:18You could be on a different product and use this alongside that. Of course, we'd love it if it were integrated into your full stack, but yeah, you'll be able to use it alongside your current marketing product if you'd like. We also, one of the questions that's come up is, does this replace my agency? And the answer to that is, that's up to you.

7:41If you want to, yes, but I would recommend you kind of just take us up on, so one of the things we talked about for those who weren't in the audience today, this Techmetric Digital Ads product is something that we're allowing people to try, early customers, and to see if it works for you. And you'll be able to see the attribution of your ad spend down to how many ROs and gross profit dollars it drove for new and existing customers.

8:06And it's focused exclusively on Google Maps Ads, right? It works on Google Search, but the reason why we, focused on Maps is the cost per ad, oddly enough, is actually lower on Maps. 'Cause a lot of people who build ad products, they're not really on ads, sorry, on Google Maps as much as they are on Search. Search is like the big behemoth, right?

8:31Search is everything, and Maps is services for the most part. That's right, that's right. And a lot of local stuff. So look, there's still a lot of competition there, but if you were to compare that to, the sort of return on investment for just focusing on just the core Google search engine, Maps is, we thought would give our customers a better return, and that's why we decided to focus there.

8:50What about Apple Maps or Waze? Doesn't work there yet because we don't have like good enough connection to those yet. We actually have it working on Yelp. We know that not a lot of people are using Yelp, but we're looking at other platforms like Facebook. Well, Yelp is, Apple's default business listing on their mapping software, right? So I hate Yelp. I think we all do.

9:18I was sitting at dinner last night, and they're like, oh, well, can we turn that off? I was like, well, you can if you want. And the complaint was is they didn't like the Yelp customers. But everyone has their own opinions, right? Yelp's rate of integration with the general public is pretty widely variable geographically. I think it's huge on the West Coast, right?

9:40Or more well adopted on the West Coast. Yeah, it's definitely a California thing. Yeah, and Maps has just gotten to be so good and so pervasive. It's a great service for people who are looking to find new destinations. It's one of the first things I download when I get a new iPhone is I download Maps. That's right. So the thing that I got really excited about, and the integrated ads is cool and the reporting is cool, but I know that My Google Ads guy is going to be geeked out about it because he's got a user ID within our system already so he can track our sourcing and that kind of thing.

10:15But Smart DVI is pretty exciting. Yeah. So I have these great big fantasies about what it will be in another 12 and 18 months. But just for our listeners. Yeah, I'm sure you do. Right. For our listeners, just kind of give me the rundown of what Smart DVI is. Yeah. So I'll just start. DVI is so essential to running a high-performance shop.

10:42Lauren talked about going through our data and trying to understand the impact that DVI has. Actually, we have a little bit more time, so we'll kind of share with you a little bit more about what we see in our data. We see that about 50% of shops are only doing DVIs on about 25% of vehicles that come into their shop. That's crazy.

11:02Isn't that crazy? And that is so wild because— We know if shops do a DVI at least 75% of the time, their ARO goes up 30%. Yeah. So let's just take that math, apply it to the average car count in the US. That's about $265K of additional revenue into a shop. And if that shop is breakeven or better, then that's $150,000 a year extra net, right?

11:27So yeah, well, there's one more thing. Um, so we just looked at— we had this question Because we've gotten a lot of varying answers on how long people spend on DVIs. There, there's the camp that's like, look, in order to do it right, it's gotta be 30+ minutes. And then there's a camp that's, hey, if my techs are spending more than 10 minutes on a DVI, they're doing it wrong.

11:48So we went and looked at the data and we found that shops that are doing DVIs that in a— on average last longer than 30 minutes, there's almost a $200 increase in ARO. Yeah, because look, they're just, they're just writing up more work. That's really what it boils down to, right? And so that was kind of the genesis of SmartDVI, is this kind of question of, especially in an age of AI, how could we help shops do more DVIs, um, by helping them do it faster but also helping them do it at a higher level of quality?

12:23And so the basic gist of it is, is We imagined this future, and we did this in partnership with a number of shops that we have been riding along with for the last several months, where you pull out your camera, and you walk around the vehicle, just narrating what you're seeing as a technician, and then just pressing done, and having AI pull out the pictures, take your voice, translate it into customer-facing text, because the other thing, We've actually learned 2 things about videos that are interesting.

12:55Number one, techs don't really love the video format because they feel like they're on stage and they have to perform. That sort of removes that from the whole situation. And the other thing that we have learned more about is we've talked to customers who are using video as a medium. And one of the things that we're seeing is that customers aren't watching the videos as much as they're just looking at the pictures.

13:20But the video is just so easy for the tech to walk around and just kind of uninterrupted walk through the vehicle, point out the things, and then just press submit. And then the AI will essentially pull out the images, annotate the images, and then write the text in a customer-facing format. And that's the longest one. When we look at where the time is at with DVIs, it's not walking around the car, it's not actually even going through the punch list so much, it's the write-up.

13:47Hey guys, Carrie Lynn with Turnkey Marketing. If you are looking to increase cars and you're looking for the right demographic to go after, you want to get the right people who need auto repair right now, then give us a call. We have a service called Direct Track and it utilizes AI to find people in your area who are the great demographic that you want to go after, have raised their hand and opted in saying, I need auto repair help right now.

14:12We send them an email. As soon as they open the email, we then get their physical address. Follow it up with commercial ads on all their streaming services like Hulu and YouTube and ESPN, Fox News, all those different things. And then we also get their physical address and we start sending banner ads and display ads to every single device in that house.

14:34It has been incredibly effective. It has made shops seem like they're everywhere to those people who need repairs right then and I mean, I'm telling you guys, the return on investment has been huge. So if you want to increase car count, you want to get great people in the door, give us a call or reach out to us and ask us about direct track marketing.

14:55You know what drives me crazy is scrolling my social feed, and obviously I follow a ton of shops like a lot of you do, and you see the exact same image, generic photo, generic holiday post, or whatever it might be across 40 or 50 shops around the country because none of them have unique to their business material. That's not building a brand.

15:17Nobody's ever won a customer with a generic Labor Day social media post, right? Look, I've personally been watching 47 and what they've been doing for Greg Buckley at Buckley's Auto Care in Delaware, and I'm super impressed. That's exactly why I've made the choice to sign up with them myself in my business, because I want to dominate the community here in Raleigh, just like the other clients of theirs are doing, like Greg is doing in Delaware.

15:40If you want your shop to stand out, go to 47consultants.com/confessions. It's 47consultants.com/confessions. Tell them Big Daddy Mike sent you. And sorry guys, they're not going to do any free diag for you, you know. All right, I have functionality questions, uh, from a user perspective. Um, there are some things that on a DVI are much more effectively shown in video format than photos.

16:07Uh, wheel bearing super loose and you shake the wheel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Or an engine mount is bad and you see the engine jumping when you rev the engine. Yeah, um, pictures don't illustrate that. So do I have the ability to still have video within the DVI when I'm using SmartDVI? Yeah, so we're working on that. We're trying to understand like what are the right thresholds for when to, you know, make the images kind of the primary source or the primary media, and also when to just cut up portions of the video.

16:35Okay, so like we, we understand that there's going to be different media that will tell different stories. And so you'll see us start to add, you know, progressively different capability that'll likely start with still images, then will likely allow you to upload video snippets, then will likely allow you to just walk around the video, walk around with your, with your camera. Let's say that I'm doing SmartDVI and I just want to add a 10-second video.

17:01I have the ability to go in and post-production after it's done its thing and add a video at this point, or is that coming? Yeah, because likely what's going to happen is there'll be a couple of ways to do this. One is just walk around, just take what it gives you. The other is, hey, I actually still want to upload different media, but without having to do the write-up, because it's wild.

17:21In fact, this is just so amazing with this technology that's available now. You can give it an image. You don't even have to tell it a make, model, and vehicle for it to get close. Yeah. Now, when you add Techemetric data to it, It already knows the VIN code, so it knows exactly what's going on. We have the VIN numbers, we have the make model.

17:39We actually have— we've seen that instance of that vehicle and that issue across 15,000 shops, probably 100 to several thousand different times. So you add the TechMetric data set, now we not only can get close, we can get real close. Yeah. And it will only continue to get better every time as it gets more data. I mean, this stuff is moving so fast.

17:59It's so exciting. But also, our data set just keeps getting richer too. So we have 15,000 shops running on TechMetric today. We can actually go in and see if you present DVI in different ways, how much content you have, how many pictures you have, whether or not you use video. We can tell, even for these types of customers, what resonates with them and what doesn't.

18:19So it'll get smarter for that reason too. Yeah. Okay, so let's say my technician is from Deep South and he talks like he's been chewing a bag of marbles all day. Rawr, rawr, rawr, rawr, rawr. How quickly does it take to learn our speech patterns and be able to interpret what we're saying. These models are so good. The one thing I didn't talk about on stage is like the ability, like let's say you have someone who doesn't even speak English as a first language.

18:46They're doing the DVI in a different language. Like, yeah, it knows. Okay, magic translates it. Now, depending on how, like I lived in the South for a while and I've heard some of those real deep accents. But yeah, look, these models have been trained and they're so, so, so good. So picking up on different dialects, You know, look, it might not catch all of them, but, you know, for the most part, multi-language, multi-dialect.

19:12Okay. And so we're really, really excited about what's possible there. Any issues with, uh, translation hallucination from background noise? Because shops can be very noisy places. Anything like that you're experiencing yet? Yeah, so that'll be one of the things, because again, um, you know, this actually predated a lot of the, uh, LLMs out there. For those who aren't you know, following AI that closely.

19:35LLM is the kind of acronym for these core AI models, large language models. But the ability to suppress background noise is— differentiate between what is background noise and not, right? Yeah, yeah. And we already see some of that capability out there. There's some folks out there that will allow you to take a video and suppress the air guns and kind of the loud noises and so forth.

19:56So that's going to kind of all factor into you know, helping develop a great solution. Okay. So you guys are big now. You're a big business and getting bigger every day. And one of the things that I see, I try to put myself in your shoes. I have no concept of what it's like to operate an organization the size of what you're operating and what you're operating.

20:21But there's a constant drive from users and employees of users that are on the forums and everything else. Ah, you need to change this feature or change this feature or change that feature or add this feature because we all do it a different way and we all think that the perfect software should work the way that we want to do it. At the same time, that type of development and evolution all costs money but doesn't generate new revenue.

20:49Whereas building out a feature that generates new revenue helps you have the money you need to be able to build new features and to be able to hire a director of AI and put the things in place to make these incredible new tools. How do you balance that enriching the features or systems that are already there versus bringing in new features? And we actually approach it the opposite way.

21:19So we first start with What is the result that shop owners, technicians, service advisors care most about? And we talked about some of those results today. So we're really focused on how do we partner with a shop to drive up their car count, optimize their ARO, improve the driver experience, help them be more efficient. So we start with that, but then we also know when we put software into the hands of anyone, it's pretty hard to adjust your way of working overnight.

21:48So you can only consume so much of that change at once. And so what great people who work in technology do is they're really thoughtful about saying, okay, how can I partner with my customer to help them consume enough software to really get them to real results without trying to put way too much on their plate for change management? And so what we've really done is we obviously have a lot of capability in our product, but we've broken it up into these chunks of you get these results from the SMS, these results from payments, these results from tech metric marketing, for example.

22:23And so we approach it the opposite way of saying, how do we get results to customers? And then what does that mean in terms of packaging and pricing based on how much people want to consume at different points in time? Gotcha. The cool part is though, we have so many customers now, like we're super grateful for that. And we, we can see the trends across a variety of different input sources.

22:49So yeah, you're going to get kind of some people that are really loud about a certain thing. But we've— like, what you don't want us— meaning the proverbial you, customers— what they really don't want us to do, and maybe some don't know it, is to build everything that everybody asks for, because then the product just becomes super complicated, super bloated, super bloated, kind of a mess.

23:13But having said that, customers have, like, I mean, they're living it every day. They have great, great ideas and suggestions. And so we do our best to really try to synthesize that into sort of the core themes that we see across that. I mean, I guess this kind of shortest answer to the question and kind of dovetailing into what Lauren said is, in spite of the fact that, you know, we're always excited to work on new things and expand the product offering, The core still is the core, and there's always a lot of investment in continuing to develop and mature the core of the product.

23:50So we're 20 minutes in. It's probably an appropriate time to introduce yourselves. So— Yeah, that's probably a good idea. This is a thing that I do. I always start the conversation and forget to do introductions. And then at some point in the first half hour, I remember that nobody knows who's talking. Absolutely. So I'm Lauren Langston. I'm TechMetrics president. I've been with the business for about 2 years now, and it's been a really exciting 2 years.

24:15And then Jared's our Chief Product Officer. Yeah, been here. So it's funny, Mike, because I actually have a funny story to tell you. Dodging the question? So Jared Hallock, I run the product organization. I work in partnership with Taylor, the CTO. So I'm Chief Product Officer. And my first week on the job was SEMA. And you sat down and recorded. I sat down and recorded.

24:40And I went back to Jenna, who's on our communications team, and was like, I had a great conversation with Mike. And her jaw just dropped. She's like, you did a podcast? You didn't tell me? I was like, oh yeah, man, it was an awesome conversation. We talked a lot of cool things. She's like, hold on, I got to call Mike. So for the listeners— it was like your third day or something.

24:58It was like my third day. And you know what's so funny is if we were to go back and read the tape on that, we talked about phones, we talked about AI. So I will say you've got a really good radar for what we might be working on because ultimately, You know, here we are and we're announcing some of those things we talked about back then.

25:15Well, I mean, I'm excited for it. So I come to the table as a Techmetric user from the perspective of a smaller user. Like I got 3 stores, but they're small stores. And now you've got, you know, you've got Christian Brothers, you've got large organizations, and then you've got the little mom and pop onesies and twosies, right? What percentage would you say of that 15,000 are made up by the ones and twos versus the big corporate groups?

25:45Over 90%. And that's what the market looks like, right? Over 90% of shops are going to have less than 5 locations. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Well, I feel like those are my people. So I try to be a voice for those folks. And so I'm excited to hear that because that means good things for us. Absolutely. You want to be in the majority.

26:10And I would say, actually, a lot of the expansion that we're doing in the product offering is really driven by, you know, the core of our customers. And look, we have a lot of large customers that have a say in sort of a voice in what we're doing. But really, we're listening to, you know, the core more often than not. And a lot of these offerings are really meant to help them run their business.

26:30Some of, some of Uh, you know, what we're working on— these larger, you know, organizations, they, they have engineering teams that are working on that stuff or similar things. But for the 1-shop, 2-shop, 5-shop, even 20-shop operations, you know, they don't have the budget, the time, the interest, the expertise to build out, you know, technical teams to, to do that. And so, uh, we're really pleased to serve those folks.

26:55Yeah, so for the enterprise customers, and I would say this is true both in auto repair, but then in other markets as well. What they really want are strong APIs, access to our data, and they want to go build a bunch of helpful tools on top of that. And so the game in enterprises is very different. I would imagine. So one of the things that has stood out to me in the last couple of days being here with all the attendees, Everybody wants to talk about AI, right?

27:25That's a feature, a major feature that was part of your presentation that y'all did this morning. I've had 3 different people approach me and say, Mike, can you get me linked up with Sunil because I got this great AI tool that I've built? And here's the thing is everybody's discovering it and it's become really easy to code. It hasn't become easy to code.

27:46It's become really easy to use another tool to do the coding for you. Right? And everybody thinks they've got the next great thing figured out because it's so fucking cool to figure out how to do these things. I'm actually hosting a class in Raleigh in a couple of months in one of my shops for building your own AI agents internally. It feels to me like you guys will build out all of the things that I want eventually, but I'm impatient.

28:14And so I want to build my own and use those until it's seamlessly integrated with Tech Metrics. And a lot of the integration partners are that. They're features that you guys are gonna build out eventually, just when you get around to it, right? Feels like that's the case. Am I wrong there, or? I mean, like, if you just looked at history across other kind of platforms, you'd absolutely be right.

28:35And the purpose of having strong APIs is to allow people to be in the ecosystem. But like I said, We're always going to try to do what's right for the customer base. And so we're always following what's the sort of thing that we can do that's going to drive the most value. Will that mean that there are some people that have previously integrated and solved that problem a year earlier that now have to go find another problem to solve?

29:04Yeah, that's probably going to happen. Will that mean that sometimes we'll solve it a slightly different way than they did? Then I have a really kind of clear view on this, which is best product wins. Yeah. Well, and also, like the ones that are paying attention, they know and they're pivoting already. They're trying to figure out what the next problem to solve is.

29:23And maybe the way that you decide to fix it doesn't jive with the way that this customer wants that problem fixed. And so they continue to use that service and those who prefer the way that you fix it use that service. That's okay. It seems like it's okay to me. But I'm one for consolidating. I don't wanna have 37 different logins and 37 different tabs open, and I need 4 screens to be able to run all the different tools.

29:49All of it in one is pretty damn comprehensive. Yeah, you would be normal, right? So to the extent that I think everyone would prefer that it's just under one roof, but look, there will always be things that someone else is gonna be able to focus on sooner than we do. And so yeah, that'll just be something that, you know, both us and our partners will, will need to navigate over.

30:10And the funny part is, is there's so many shop owners— you just described this about how shop owners are actually building this stuff for themselves. And that's what Sunil was. Yeah, that's the stuff that like really excites us. He's just 10 years ahead of all of us. Yeah, yeah. You know, as much as, you know, we get excited about other partners who are kind of building companies trying to develop in this ecosystem, I would say we're as excited and maybe even more excited and just delighted that, that shop owners and some smart people at shops are able to do some of this as well.

30:41So it's cool. Hey, before we jump too much further into today's episode, I've got something I want to talk to you about. Look, if you're serious about building a better shop and not just working harder inside the one you already have, registration is officially open for Ignite 2027. By Elite Worldwide. I'll be in Vegas February 5th and 6th recording interviews with some incredible shop owners and industry experts.

31:03You should really consider going as well. What I really like about Ignite is that it's designed specifically for independent shop owners. Everything from the layout to the sessions to the conversations, it's built around helping you become a stronger leader and build a better business. You'll leave with practical strategies, stronger relationships, and a renewed confidence. And where you're taking your business. The best part is you don't have to be a client of Elite yet to attend.

31:29Find out more via the link in the show notes, or you can head over to eliteworldwide.com. Use the promo code Confessions and save $100 off your registration. I'll see you there. Hey guys, I'm here again to talk to you about another awesome feature from the guys over at Detect Auto. I've been talking to you about Detect Auto for over a year at this point.

31:49You know that I'm a huge fan, but they keep rolling out new features. They keep adding value. And the latest one that they've built is they've built an internal chat system that goes along with the software. And it's like if you've ever used Slack or another tool like Slack, it's very similar in format to that in that every time you open a repair order, it's going to create a new channel within their internal chat system specific to that repair order that includes the people that need to be a part of that repair order's communications, be that technician, service advisor, shop foreman, dispatch, whatever, you know, you set the rules for that.

32:24The cool thing is that it also archives those chat histories and those comm histories. So in the future, you can come back and you can see all of the comms that have been had internally about Ms. Jones's Subaru, even any, any of the chat about that customer specifically. So it's just a really neat tool to one, have clearly siloed internal comms and also to archive them and save them historically.

32:49So that you can find them again in the future. I know that I've had issues in the past where we can't remember what was said about or what the comms were internally about vehicle X, and you go back into your— we use Slack— into your Slack thread and it's thousands of messages ago. This eliminates that problem. So it's just one more tool that the team at Detect Auto are putting in place to help streamline your business, make you more efficient, help you serve your customers faster and more effectively.

33:15If you want to learn more about Detect Auto and the other awesome features they have, just check the link in the show notes. Tell them I sent you. Yeah, I would say focus though is really important. So just as you could go build a version of TechMetric with your agents in-house, we could go build a CRM product for ourselves or a financial product for ourselves.

33:42And even though we could do that and we have the engineers to do it, and now they're so much faster with AI, we don't because it just simply goes back to specialization and focus really benefit us. And I'm a big believer that in any business that will ultimately play out as well. So we're going to focus on building the best software we can for auto repair.

34:03And I do think specialization will help everybody out. And to be fair, I want to I wanna say that I know that you were saying the proverbial you could go build, 'cause I personally— No, I was actually talking about you specifically. Yeah, I still think of ChatGPT as just like my new Google. That's all it is for me. Yeah, a much better one indeed.

34:26I'm not an early adopter. All right, I wanna go back to the features that you guys are talking about because I have more questions and then I wanna fantasize about what's down the road and I want you to tell me if I'm crazy or if it's legitimately an option. With SmartDVI, what's the latency like? What's, um, from the time that you can finish the video till the time it's done creating the DVI write-up?

34:46Yeah, so we're working on that. Um, latency may be up to a couple of minutes, but depending on how long the video is. Now, if you just— we're, we're, we're working on a version where you can just upload pictures and have the text written just from the, uh, from the pictures that are uploaded. So we have that working literally in just like seconds.

35:06Yeah, uploading a picture, it analyzes it, it gives you— draws the arrow. Yeah, draws the arrow, gives you a starting description of that as well. So, so that stuff doesn't take that long. A lot of it will depend on how long a video is. So there'll be some things that we'll have to work through over time on that. But like I said, we're gonna incrementally be able to kind of get to this, this place where we, you know, we have one shop owner who's got Meta glasses, is walking around, you know, walking around.

35:35He's like, look, it's so much easier because now I can have like my finger pointing and my flashlight, and I don't, I don't have to hold the phone. Yeah. So, you know, shop owners are getting really clever and really creative about this stuff. Um, so a lot of it will come down to, um, how long the videos are, you know, what the quality is and so forth.

35:51But our hope is ultimately we're only talking about, you know, maybe, you know, a handful of seconds to at the, at the most, you know, a minute or two. How much of that depends upon the shop side hardware? Well, I think a lot of that will just— so our original approach was, 'cause we've looked at the glasses approach, the challenge with that is that the best glasses out there are the Meta glasses.

36:15And there's 2 challenges with that. Number one, it's a walled garden. They don't, I mean, they're not that focused on this industry. It's hard to get those videos out of it. Number two, the size of the videos because of the compression format that they use is really, really large. We're trying to make this relatively universal so that if you have just a normal cell phone, Android, you know, iPhone, whatever.

36:39All the cool kids use iPhones. That's right. Blue bubbles. That is like really the only tool that you need. There's really no hardware that the shop needs to invest in. But I think it would be pretty cool at some point, you know, if glasses were the thing that, you know, you could apply that to some kind of glasses platform if there was something that was a little bit more open.

37:00Napa is working on auto-tightening glasses. C-Tech Accelerator is a program they're working on, and it's a training program to take you from totally green student to a functional C-Tech, entry-level technician in 6 months or less. And you start with an Oculus headset, or I guess it's Meta now, doing VR, and it evolves to Meta glasses test proctor in your ear looking at what you're looking at and watching you do the job for verification of competency.

37:35You were actually playing with an Oculus the other day. I mean, it's pretty phenomenal technology what folks are able to do on the training side. Absolutely. It's really impressive. So the natural next step of the evolution for smart DVI is it's going to take that video walk around and it's going to grab the screen caps and it's going to know Oh, that's a wheel bearing, or, oh, that's a leaking water pump.

38:01A picture is not good. A video is. And it's drip, drip, drip, right? It's going to know that and it's going to make that selection. So I see that could be a year or so. That would be exciting. Not putting timelines on you. I'm just thinking. Hear that, Jared? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then the next thing is, by the time it's done doing that, it's also built the estimate for me and it's learned my vendor preferences and how much I value speed versus quality versus vendor preference versus whatever else, and it knows my margin desires and all that kind of stuff.

38:35Feels like that can't be that far out because there's a bunch of dudes who are racing to, to build that. Yeah, that's, that, that's the big, I would say, race that's on right now. Um, every shop owner understands how complex these estimates are sometimes, and we all estimate differently. Yeah, everyone estimates differently. Uh, and there's One of the things you mentioned is optimizing for cost or optimizing for time or optimizing for quality.

39:04That's fundamentally something that's called, funny enough, an optimization problem. Airlines have had this problem for a long time. There's been a lot of work on this in the supply chain industry. There are really good approaches to being able to solve that and be able to help you select your weightings for what what, you know, really matters to your shop. But there's still a lot that needs to be sort of connected in order for that, you know, future to become reality.

39:34But one of the things that I think we're really excited about is the possibility that this could be solved a lot more quickly through the use of agents that can reason their way through an estimate versus like some perfectly sort of, in the software space, we call it a deterministic approach, meaning it always follows this pattern every time, versus one of the reasons why humans are so useful in these scenarios is 'cause sometimes the pattern breaks and you have to figure out how to work around that.

40:06But a lot of these agents have actually become pretty proficient in being able to work their way around some of this. I, I'm curious to see, uh, how this evolves in the industry, but one of our hypotheses is that agents is going to help us get to the estimate building a lot faster, and it'll essentially try to replicate not all but some of what the service advisor is doing.

40:30Some of the things the service advisor does you just can't replicate because it actually requires someone to go take a picture of a car, check in a car, or whatever. But some of these things that are done exclusively just just within TechMetric, connected to PartsTech, connected to some of the other systems out there. A lot of that stuff, our hypothesis is that we might be able to get there a lot faster with AI than we would have if we were relying on more traditional means to do that.

40:59So we're certainly not the only people who are thinking about this, but I think one of the advantages that we have is that people really love the product. They're already in the product. And to And so the degree to which we can help people with this, I think it's going to be a real breakthrough for folks. I see a lot of what you and your team are focused on though is how do we take the mundane repetitive tasks that people don't want to spend their time on so they can— so we can free up their time to focus on the higher order stuff.

41:26It's not about taking the, the real trust-based relationship equation out. It's really about how do we focus on the mundane, repetitive tasks so that my advisor can spend more time building trust and rapport and relationships and less time fucking around with estimates and parts and everything else, right? I got to tell you this story. So I was at the shop. It's in Commerce Town, Michigan.

41:53It's right outside of Detroit Motor Works. And there's a service advisor there named Rusty. So shout out to Rusty if he's listening. What's up, Russ? And Rusty is so good, and Matt too. Matt's the other service advisor there as well, and they are phenomenal with people. But Rusty, you're a little bit better. They're so good with their customers, but the pain just to watch them have to build those estimates— and like, you know, actually what we showed on stage relative to the phones product, which I'm sure we'll get to, was really inspired by what I saw there and what our teams have seen at so many other shops is that that these service advisors are

42:32so good engaging with people, but yet they're doing all this clerical work that just takes a lot of time and frankly, like, takes a lot of energy that someone like Matt, someone like Rusty would much rather be focused on other things. For sure. And if you have an advisor who is really good at all the clerical stuff, anecdotally, my experience has been that they're not incredible at the relationship building.

42:56And that makes a lot of sense. That tracks, yeah. So I want to talk about all the features that y'all discussed, and there was a lot that y'all brought, and we got like 15, 20 more minutes. So talk to me about the 3rd feature, the personalized service plans. Just tell the listeners what that's about. Yeah, so we've been working on service recommendations.

43:16So the concept, you know, I don't think it's, you know, totally, it's not a totally new idea. Some people are doing this manually, some people are doing it in other systems, but the core system where all this data is really housed is in TechMetric. And so our goal was to sort of build service recommendations into the product in such a fashion that you could start to implement service recommendations at the DVI level, at the estimate level.

43:44But as we started to sort of dig more into really the core problem of what we're trying to solve here, what we're really trying to solve here is something fundamental to the, the expectations that we're setting with customers. Early on to help them understand how to plan for maintenance expenses, repair expenses into the future. One of the things Lauren talked about on stage is just, you know, this— and look, every, you know, we— the coaches talked about it, other people talked about, you know, this industry has been mired with, you know, trust challenges for years.

44:16And the hypothesis that kind of Lauren put forward is that, um, in large part, it's nobody's fault. The drivers get surprised when they have to do a repair. And so they're uninformed, they don't know a lot about cars, and they feel like they're just sort of— they're in a jam. And, you know, they're being told they should do all these things. And it sort of creates these conditions for, like, trust issues.

44:40I've got to channel my co-host who's not here with me this week. And he's going to take exception to that statement. Because yes, there are some bad actors in any industry. And so a portion of our reputation as an industry comes from some of those bad actors, right? But I believe that we have earned a lot of that lack of trust in the industry through unintentional incompetence.

45:07We don't know that we— obviously, if you're at Tectonic 2026, you're one of the top-level shops in the country already, right? So we learned there's a, there's a ton of shops out there because all it takes to be a shop is to hang a shingle and say, I'm a mechanic, right? Yeah. Who don't know what they're doing technically or from a business perspective.

45:33And so they don't know that they're doing a disservice to the customer until it's too late. And when it has become obvious, they're financially not able to make it right because they don't have the, you know, the cash in reserve. Yeah. And so a lot of the bad reputation that our industry has is earned, I believe, from, not from malicious intent, from ignorance.

45:56Yeah, I think— I think— Go ahead. So yeah, I would just add that I think what makes it, you know, a challenge is that like the conditions for lack of trust are there at the outset. Absolutely, yeah. You know, 'cause drivers weren't planning for this expense. They don't understand cars. They feel like they don't have a choice. It's scary. A non-discretionary expense.

46:18They got to get their car back on the road, so it's a little bit scary for them. So I just think that the conditions are there for there to be a challenge. And one of the things that, you know, look, the industry's done a lot of things to help improve customer trust— DVIs, you know, we talked about explainer videos. You know, there's a lot of things that we've done to help kind of bring the customer along.

46:38But one of the things that we've been thinking about is how can we help customers plan. And our view is, is that a reason why trust is a challenge is that people are surprised. And if people could just plan and just know, hey, you know, you had these— this is— this declined work and you really need to take care of that. I, I know now, you know, you said right now is not the right time, but we're going to send you a service plan.

47:01And this service plan will allow you to book your next appointment for when you have the time availability and/or the means to do this. And then just to help you plan so that you aren't caught off guard by any of this stuff, these are the recommended services that you need to do based off of your mileage, either from service, either from manufacturers' service recommended intervals or from intervals that your shop creates.

47:24And like, look, hey, we're going to just let you know, we're going to just, you know, you've been, you know, one of the things we talked about is this service plan will auto-enroll them into future reminders that that upcoming work is due and sort of what the— if you caught it in the demo, sort of a range of what that would cost.

47:40Because we were trying to be careful of being super prescriptive of price because those prices may change, parts, cost of parts may go up, you know, that type of thing. And the only goal there is to help people understand how to plan for this and at what time intervals. So what tool are you using to get to that range? Is it from estimates that were declined on the repair order?

48:02Is it RepairPal's estimator? Service, or— No, so we're, we're using— so it's a combination of decline jobs and data sources that we're using for, uh, the manufacturer-recommended intervals. And then one of the things we've heard pretty loud and clear from some shops are like, look, I can't— like, that's not for me because I live in a climate where stuff rusts, rusts. And so the intervals need to be different, or I use these chemicals or these, uh, fluids or these lubes, and these have different recommended intervals.

48:30So the goal is, is that we'll be able to— we'll likely start with some, you know, core data from manufacturers and then ultimately allow people to create their own schedules or adopt schedules that we might have as templates. So one of the, one of the points of pushback that you're going to get with this, I can already see it coming, is I don't want to send a message to my customer who just declined these engine mounts that says, hey, you need to get these engine mounts done.

48:58It's going to be $1,300 because I'm giving that customer the tool that they need to go price shop? Because right now I can build value and, and really, and, you know, let them understand why it's different. But in 2 months, they might have forgotten all that. And all they know is $1,300. And they're going to call and find the dude who says $1,100 and they're going to go to that guy.

49:22How do we overcome that hurdle? Because that will be a hurdle. Look, I think it just boils down to, you know, the service that you're able to give on those initial visits, because the idea behind service plans is these are for future visits, right? Yeah. So I would say, you know, it's on us as a, as an industry to deliver the best service so that people aren't trying to shop around.

49:44Yeah. You know, the other thing too, just look, um, look, you know, it's, it's just sort of inevitable. Information is free now. Um, it's been free for a long time, but it's even freer and easier to get. Oh, that ParaPals estimator tool is out there. Yeah, it's out there. And you know what also works? Customers can just open up ChatGPT and just have a conversation with it and say, hey, how much should this cost?

50:05Yeah, but I do think that works in the industry's favor though, as it relates to building trust. I mean, compare it to real estate, for example. You can just go on Zillow and get more information than what your realtor showed you. So therefore there's less of this information asymmetry or an information gap that leads to the trust gap. So we think about how Priceline killed the, you know, the travel agent industry, right?

50:31So, uh, if you're building into the software a tool, well, maybe that's not a good— I think it's a little different because at the end of the day, these are physical assets that need to be taken to a physical place. And at the end of the day, I mean, the average American doesn't know a lot about their vehicle. I mean, I, I'm certainly in that category, so to a certain extent, the trust gap's a bit of a compliment in a way, but I think it's pretty different because I do believe the average American can book a flight, book a hotel room just fine.

51:04Yeah, and I think you'll find that people who have built a relationship, who have already gotten their car serviced by you and had a good relationship, and look, if they're the kind of customer that doesn't value that and is only looking for price shopping, the cheapest, cheapest service. And if they're going to go to— they're going to go drive 50 miles to save $20, well then that might not be the kind of customer that you want anyways.

51:30Service needs to differentiate you. Service plans are going to be nested inside of marketing or is it another tab or menu? Well, so we're going to start with service recommendations and that's going to be embedded in the estimates flow and in the deal KPI flow. Okay. And how this comes together into service plans, we're still working through how that's going to be packaged up.

51:51Okay. Our goal is, is that it'll, it'll likely, uh, be, you know, part of the core offering. In terms of how it gets distributed, um, you know, could be something that's done manually just in part of the core offering, or it might get rolled into— in terms of being able to do that automatically, being able to do that on more of a shotgun approach through the marketing tools.

52:11I'm excited about it either way because it's something that I know I should be doing, but I just don't. Yeah, because it gets lost in the shuffle. Again, not a new idea. This is, um, this is a job that, uh, that shops are doing already. They're creating service plans in many cases. We talked to really high-performing shops and they do this already.

52:29They do it annually. BDC does at large organizations and everything else. So I think, yeah, I think it's great. Yeah. Um, target for that end of this year or soon? Sooner? Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, I want a date, damn it. I've got a room full of engineers behind me. Jared gets the same questions from me. Well, I would just tell you, look, the other side of this too, of the whole AI question, is the benefit for people who are focused on running auto repair shops— this kind of goes back to what Lauren said— is, yes, some people will be able to build some of their own stuff, but it also means TechMetric is going to

53:03go faster. Absolutely. And so, yeah, I don't want to give a date because I hope that we can actually give it sooner than what I would be able to share with you. So you heard it here first, July 30th. It'll be live. Um, okay, so let's— we got to move on to the last one because I don't want to run out of time.

53:21And this is the big one, I think. I mean, they're all big, but phones is exciting. Phones is really big. Yeah, because it opens the door to so much other super cool stuff. Um, so who wants to give me the rundown on phones? You want to start? No, go for it. Yeah, so phones, um, you and I talked about— this is one of those items that we talked— we talked about automated estimates, we talked about AI, We also talked about phones when we had our last conversation back at SEMA.

53:45And phones is just such an obvious area for us to invest in and be a part of, because that's where all the action is. You know, look, we have a lot of capability in communicating with customers over SMS and email, but there's this big gap in these conversations that are happening over the phone. So what we announced today is that we're in the process of rolling out our initial phones product.

54:13And the goal is super simple. It's meant to be a very, very simple product that integrates with your phone system. And the initial focus is going to be to just save time. Going back to what Lauren talked about, there's all these moments within these shops that are so frenetic. If we can reduce some of these friction points. So the first one I'll give you an the example.

54:39Somebody calls in, uh, and right now the way that it works, that the advisor or whoever's answering the call has to look at the caller ID, has to like mind palace whether or not they remember who this person is, and, um, and then pick up the phone. Hey, hold on a second, let me look up your customer record just to get you that information.

55:01All of that goes away because based off of the caller ID information, we look the person up in TechMetric and we'll pop up a little card that gives you the information about who they are, whether or not they have a car in the shop, what kind of vehicles they have, what's their lifetime spend. That was a conversation I had with a very large shop owner.

55:19He's like, look, we really want to know kind of the lifetime spend of people so we know how to sort of approach those phone calls before they call in. That's kind of the one of the first key capabilities that we're rolling out, including also being able to click to call. It's kind of a small thing, but saves you from having to dial out.

55:41And then also creating the call logs, um, for, uh, you know, who answered what calls in and be able to see that in-tech metric. Well, I have the ability to pull up Miss Jones's repair order and then see every phone call related to that repair order. Yes. And play them through that? Because that's awesome. Yeah, because right now I've got to go over, open another window, go to my VoIP login, search by the phone number and the date range.

56:06And, um, yeah, so that's, that's part of the idea here is that, again, one of the reasons why we wanted to build this phones product is because it creates now kind of the 360-degree view of all the conversations that you have. And the only thing that we're missing would be any conversations you had over the counter. So being able to organize that in the customer record so I can see kind of inline, here's my text, here's my phone call, here's my email, um, that's, you know, so how long until we have a little HAL robot sitting on the counter that's listening to the conversation and taking notes also, right?

56:38So we talked about that. Yeah, we talked about that because, uh, okay, so just do it from your phone, right? And so again, another reason why phones is so, uh, important is because it's a foundation. Because what do you get on phones? You get an audio stream, that you can convert to text, and they can do lots of helpful things with that.

56:55So one of the things we showed on stage is this concept, and we've actually prototyped this, where you're— we're able to get the live transcription of a call. So we— what we showed on stage was the ability to make it so service advisors— let's go back to Rusty for a second. Rusty wants to talk to customers and give them the best service and advice possible.

57:19But what Rusty's contending with is people walking in the front door, someone tapping on his shoulders while he's trying to take notes and stuff like this. So if we can just take one thing off of his plate, so all he's got to do is just have that conversation knowing that those notes are going to be captured, they're going to be put into the appointment and sort of cleaned up, all the customer concerns will be cleaned up and put them in the appointment record and so forth.

57:40Now what I didn't talk about on stage is the possibility of continuing further with that, because again, we're in sort of the the possibility zone right now, right? We're wishing on a star. Jared thinks, don't hold me to this. This is not the possibility. This is so, I mean, look, this would be akin to taking that information that's coming off of the call and literally feeding it into a ChatGPT and saying, hey, what's the next question I should ask?

58:05So that's what I fantasize about is a real-time call assistant. Yes. That, hey, Ms. Jones, sounds like Ms. Jones doesn't trust that it actually needs it right now. Here's our word track on building trust. Or maybe you should say, I suggest you say this. Or Ms. Jones just gave you a price objection, or whatever it might be. So these are capabilities that are totally possible now that we have access to the phone's platform, the phone's capability, and so forth.

58:35And so, look, some people are using other solutions out there that are doing similar things, but again, they're like these decision tree things that have to work perfectly every time for them to be useful for folks. And so that's an area. And then the other thing that we're starting our exploration on is these AI voice agents, you know, for after-hours calls that can pick up the phone and, you know, make sure that those appointments get set.

59:02Overflow and after-hours. Overflow, after-hours. They can answer 90% of the questions and hand— yeah. Yeah, that's kind of like the starting point. Then imagine that's actually connected, 'cause you can get that with RingCentral. You can get that today from RingCentral, but one of the challenges is that it doesn't have— it's not as automotive-oriented. It's just not educated on your data the way it needs to be to do that.

59:25Yeah, and so having that connected to TechMetric, I think, opens up a whole host of possibilities as well. So we're excited about the phones product. As we talked about on stage, we've made an initial decision to integrate with RingCentral instead of building and shipping our own phone system. And this is a really important important point, uh, because as we started looking at what it would take for us to become someone's dial tone, we just knew that we could build faster and innovate and deliver more value for customers if we could focus on the thing that is the bridge between the phone system and Techmetric versus also having to build the phone system.

1:00:02Goes back to— yeah, I mean, also a lot of it goes back to most of our customers, I should say the largest phone system that somebody is using in our customer base is RingCentral. And so it's faster for most folks just to be able to take TechMetric, put it on their existing phone system, as opposed to having to go to us, buy yet another phone system.

1:00:24So it's, it's certainly more advantageous to customers for that reason too. Yeah. So, so excited. Yeah. What we've established is by the end of this year We're going to have fully automated estimating. We're going to have fully integrated call assistant. We're going to have fully integrated call agents. So I'm super excited. That's what I heard, Mike. We're super excited. I don't know.

1:00:49Just kidding. Maybe we'll be there sooner than we think. Yeah. So yeah. Next year this time, TechMetric is going to actually diagnose the car for you. It's going to be amazing. Well, I'm excited. No. I'm not sure we're going to ever be there. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for coming on, guys. I really do appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Superman.

1:01:06Yep. Thanks for listening to Confessions of a Shop Owner, where we lay it all out— the good, the bad, and sometimes the super messed up. I'm your host Mike Allen, here to remind you that even the pros screw it up sometimes. So why not laugh a little bit, learn a little bit, and maybe have another drink? You got a confession of your own or a topic you'd like me to cover, or do you just want to let me know what an idiot I am?

1:01:24Email mike@confessionsofashopowner.com or call and leave a message. The number is 704- confess. That's 704-266-3377. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, or follow. Join us on this crazy journey that is shop ownership. I'll see you on the next episode. If you're still thinking about the shop at 10 PM, you're not alone. You're replaying the day wondering what got missed, what still needs follow-up, how the numbers look, and whether anything is waiting for you first thing tomorrow morning.

1:02:07That part of being a shop owner gets old really quick. TechMetric is built to take some of that off your plate. It brings you shop management, payments, and marketing together in one place, so you're not piecing things together at the end of the day trying to figure out where everything stands. Your team has what they need to keep things moving, your customer communication doesn't stall out, and you have a clearer picture of how your shop is actually performing.

1:02:31See how it works at tekmetric.com. That's T-E-K-M-E-T-R-I-C dot com, or tap the link in the show notes.