Key-to-Key-to-Callbacks: How Gary Walker Turned Callbacks into $1.7M - Bonus Zoom Episode 9

0:00Good morning, Glenn Piccolo here with Adams Automotive bringing you another episode of Master Tech to Millionaire presented by Auto Shop Answers. Today on the line, man, we have a long overdue podcast. We've got Gary Walker, managing partner of Auto Shop Callbacks, aka the BDC man. What an absolute stud at what he does. Just literally built Auto Shop Callbacks, which Todd says is the hardest project he's ever had to complete.

0:31And man, I got to see that happen and what Gary was able to pull off and where we are today. So man, what an absolute stud. I'm so thankful to have Gary on the line this morning. So we're going to get to it. Let's dive in. All right. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning, man. What an exciting morning. We've got Mr. Gary Walker.

0:53Aka the BBC Man, on the line this morning. This is a long overdue podcast to have Gary on the line. Gary started with us— how long ago, Gary? It's about 3 and a half years now. 3 and a half years. 3 and a half years ago. And I'll get into kind of how the whole deal started on our end. But I do want to hear from Gary a little bit first.

1:22But 3.5 years ago, Gary came on board and he, you know, perfected the project that Todd said was the hardest one he had ever done. And I got to watch it and it's been absolutely amazing. So we'll get into that here in just a bit. But man, before we get started, how we doing, Gary? That's an amazing morning. Thank you for having me.

1:46Yes, yes. I've been flying under the radar for so long and then all of a sudden I got the message from you. I'm like, all right, here we go. Yeah, well, you know, every time we have one, you're just booking appointments, so you're kind of busy. So, so tell, let's, let's, let's tell everybody a little bit about Mr. Gary, kind of how you got started.

2:10You were the BDC man. I know 20 years ago that was your email. The BDC, man. And kind of your story and how it all got you to this point. Yeah, well, I appreciate that opportunity. Right after high school, I didn't know what I was going to do. I grew up in a very, very small town in New England. Got out of high school and joined the United States Air Force, became an aircraft armament systems specialist, which is a fancy way to say that I loaded bombs on F-16s.

2:45I got out of that after Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and there's not really a whole lot of bomb loader on aircraft positions out there in the civilian life. So my buddy was selling cars and said, "You should try selling cars." And I spent 30 years at the car dealerships. At one point, we were getting faxes. There's probably enough people old enough to remember fax machines, but we used to get faxes, "What's your best price?"

3:13And then all of a sudden, the internet came along, we launched websites, and we started getting thousands of emails, what's your best price? Nobody wanted to deal with those. We, we started a department to handle that, that new form of traffic. I was part of a team that was perfecting that process. And someone came along and I believe it was Traber Technologies, which was a Houston company.

3:41I was doing this in Utah. And Traeger Technologies came along and said, hey, you know, you should turn this into what we call a BDC, and became the, a national known BDC manager for a big Toyota dealership. And the rest is kind of history. I just really loved that part of the business. Own an email. And then, yeah, and then all of a sudden I kind of just didn't like it anymore.

4:18I basically retired from that, wasn't sure what to do. And now Todd Hayes comes into my life with Joe Adams and Glenn Piccolo. Yeah. And what a wild story, you know, Todd sold his company back in— I'm going to tell you kind of my aha moment about callbacks and how this all happened. So Todd started his company in '86. Everybody's heard the story.

4:45And then he sold his company in '97. And in 1998, I started working for that company and they had stripped away a lot of the concept. Okay. So it was a very diluted version of Todd's concept that I learned. Although I thought I was learning Todd's concept, it wasn't until many, many years later that I learned I was learning a very, very diluted version of Todd's concept.

5:08Well, part of his concept was pre-booking the next visit, and that's where the whole concept of key-to-key to callbacks, you know, the name comes from, right? It's like we teach all the time about key-to-key, right? It's like when they drop off the key to when they pick up the key. And, you know, we've perfected obviously that business model, and we don't talk enough about the callback side of it.

5:35And so it's key to key to callbacks, and the callback is what actually generates the key to come back by way of the next appointment. And so I'm at Todd's old company. Todd is gone. Todd is no longer with the company, and the company starts struggling. And so they decide, we're going to start implementing pieces of Todd's concept, which are these callbacks.

5:59We're going to bring back the callbacks. Now, The difference between when Todd was doing it then, uh, before he sold the company and what he has taught us today is that, man, these are very, very important calls and these are calls that you want to make and that you love to make. Well, for us, they became kind of a punishment. Okay. So the way it was set up was like, if your store was under goal, you had to have a certain amount of appointments or you weren't able to leave.

6:26And so. You know, we were there really late at night and the difference of a callback that you're preparing your customer for with an invoice review and just a random phone call is the difference of whether you're going to really connect with these customers. And so we're just trying to set appointments. It's like, we're like, hey, uh, can you, you know, can you bring your car in?

6:47You know, you're due for service. It was, it was a punishment. Nobody wanted to do it. And so Everybody's heard of callbacks and everybody's taught, hey, look, you do callbacks when you have low car count days and everybody knows that you can call your customers and get them back in. But people don't really understand the proper way to do it. And you were able to help us launch that.

7:14And now it's obviously just a huge, huge part of our business and many other shops out there. So, My aha moment, just for a second, we're doing callbacks. It's a low car count day. This is probably 4 years ago. And we're doing this low car count day and we're gonna grab all the state inspection reminders from the previous year. It's a stack of papers and we get that stack and we're gonna start taking turns and we're gonna start calling these customers.

7:46And we call 1, 2, 3, 4 customers. First 3 are voicemail. The 4th one answers the phone. He says, "Oh my gosh, thank you so much for reminding me my state inspection is due. I'll bring it in tomorrow." And we offered to pick the car up and do it today like we do. And he said, "No, I'll just bring it in tomorrow.

8:05Thank you so much." And no problem. Boom, we set the appointment. So after that phone call, the phone rang and then somebody walked in and then, you know, a technician needed help with something and it was just like, We just started getting busy and we never went back to that stack. I'll never forget the end of that day, that stack being sitting underneath the computer monitor and it was just kind of just like shoved underneath the monitor and we didn't touch it.

8:34One call. Well, the next day that guy came in and we PMI'd the car, we rack-attacked the car like always, we find a safety concern on the car and that ticket left for $2,500. And for me, that was my aha moment. I was like, oh my gosh, I understand now. I understand. We need to be doing callbacks on days when we're slammed, not days when we have low car count days.

9:00Because look, if you have a low car count day and you are doing callbacks, nobody is just like jumping up like, oh my gosh, everybody grab this, grab the kids, honey, grab the kids. The oil change is due. Let's head to Adams. Let's go. That's not happening. And so what happens is it, it, it generates appointments, right? And I believe that the effort generates activity.

9:24I do believe that you start making phone calls, all of a sudden people start coming in. It's not the people you're calling, but people do start coming in and all of a sudden you can't do the callbacks anymore. And so I was like, man, we need to be doing callbacks when we're slammed. And so we hired a kid. A great kid, but his system was probably very similar to people that are trying to do callbacks on their own, which is just hire a college kid or hire a, you know, a spouse or hire, you know, somebody that can just kind of part-time do callbacks.

10:00And it's not a good system. And I'll let Gary kind of tell why, all the pitfalls. Of what we were running into. Even though he set a lot of appointments, there's a lot of pitfalls and a lot of things that will come off as unprofessional if you don't do it right. So can you touch on some of those things that we were running into at the beginning?

10:22Yeah. And anyone who's trying to do this at the unit level, I mean, you know how difficult it is to keep that consistency. And One of the things, and I met that young man when I first started and he turned to me one day, I was like, man, you're really good at this. You're setting a lot of appointments. He's like, yeah, I really just want to go outside and throw the football though.

10:46You know? And so it takes a certain, that's one of the main pitfalls, right? Is you try to do this in-house and you're, it's not a glorious job. You got a headset on if you're doing it right. You're in a chair all day long and you're getting hung up on and it, and it's easy to want to be distracted. And so that's one of the pitfalls is it's so easy to just get distracted and try to find something to break up that day.

11:15So you've got to love making phone calls. If you don't love making phone calls, it's, it's just not going to work. And then there's, then there's other things that are actually damaging, uh, a business, which is you're calling customers that have a, a vehicle already in the shop And they're like, yeah, can I get an update? I'm glad you called. And then it creates a lot of chaos for the advisors because they weren't ready for that yet.

11:39They already have an appointment. They already got the state inspection done somewhere else or at the shop, which is embarrassing. So, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. But the main thing is that consistency, Glenn, that you touched on, which is, I call it the Terminator. We just keep doing it every single day. We never stop. If you've seen that movie, The Terminator, That's the mindset that it takes to do this right.

12:08Yeah. So when you came along, and so just to kind of back that up just a second. So, you know, we have this kid and he's great and he set us a lot of appointments, but like you said, there's a lot of things that are kind of broken there, right? We didn't have a really, you know, built-in system. To be able to do this.

12:29But the other part about it is this is a young college kid and guess what? He has an outside life too. And so he had a wedding to go to. I remember one time he's like, hey, I need this weekend off. I need to go to this wedding. And I'm like, sure, no problem. I mean, like, I can't, you know, like keep him back from having his personal requests and whatnot.

12:50And so I remember that weekend we have no calls. There's no calls that weekend. Right. And also, so everybody knows this, like your service advisors, your stud salespeople, they don't want to do these calls. They do not want to. They want to hit bombs. I mean, like, that's what they do. They just want to sell jobs and take care of the customer.

13:13That's their world. So you have to have people that absolutely love doing it. So, you know, Zach was his name. And, um, a great recruiting story, by the way. If I get time, I'll circle around to the recruiting story of how I, how I, uh, got Zach. Um, but Zach, I love Zach and, you know, he just doesn't love callbacks. He's doing it and he's great at it.

13:38But see, like you said, he's sitting down in a chair, he's got his little system going and his system is just a, you know, a stack of papers and he's just kind of going through them and just marking them off. Spreadsheet and a Sharpie. And so then Zach decides, you know what? I wanna go stretch my legs. I've been sitting down all day.

13:56I wanna go stretch my legs. So Zach decides he's gonna go take a walk through the parking lot. Well, when Zach takes a walk through the parking lot, somebody spots Zach and guess what? We need that part to finish that job. Or we need someone to go pick up lunch or we need someone to do a shuttle real quick. And it's like, oh, Zach, let's go, Zach.

14:16And Zach's like, sure, yeah, no problem. 'Cause Zach wants to break free to just have a break. Okay. And so having Zach was great, but having Zach is going to create all of those pitfalls that we're talking about. And we've done it with, we had one of our team members' wives do it. I think we had like a, you know, a sister-in-law do it.

14:38And the problem is you're just going to run into these issues. Now, probably, I don't know how long he was doing it for. Maybe he was doing it for 6 months. Maybe it was a year or so Zach was doing it. And, you know, Todd understood that this wasn't going to be a long-term solution. And so what did Todd do? What Todd always does.

14:58Todd prays for the right person to come into our company. And no sooner than that, shortly thereafter, he finds the BDC man on LinkedIn. First person that pops up on his LinkedIn as he's searching. And a lot of people don't even— oh, go ahead. Go ahead. No, no, go ahead. Go ahead, go ahead. A lot of people don't realize that story is so crazy because I actually decided that COVID was kind of over with and I was like, ah, I'm going to get back out there.

15:36And I put my information and resume up and my computer just crashed, right? I mean, it just— It was— it would not turn on. It was my only computer. And so I was like, well, okay, that stinks. I'm going to go— I'm going to go to the lake house and visit my parents. They have a lake house in northern Alabama. So I drive out there, I visit my parents, and I come back.

16:01I walk in the front door after driving 12 hours or 10 and a half hours, whatever it was. And my instinct was just to go over there and to the computer and turn it on. As I push the button, I go, my computer's broken. And I still push the button and it came on and I was like, oh, I'm going to sit down and see if there's any jobs out there.

16:22And that's where, that's where that listing was the top. And I, and I was like, I'd never heard of this dealership before, this Adams Automotive dealership. I've never heard of them before. And I applied for it, not realizing that it was, it was just retail automotive repair. Family-owned, had been around for over, you know, I think about 40 years at the time, maybe a little less.

16:42And I was like, this is crazy. I had never thought for a second to take all of this knowledge and all of these skills and put them into a non-dealership environment. So it was just such a blessing. I could not believe that I had never thought of it before, but that's what we love about Todd Hayes. Yeah, absolutely. It was just definitely a God thing.

17:06It all just came together. It was all just a perfect, perfect perfect timing and you got to just get in there and get going on it. And so Zach had moved on and the whole thing about Zach was Zach was an employee. And so there's a lot of costs that come with an employee, right? You've got a load of costs with an employee.

17:27I've got benefits, I've got insurance, we've got 401, we've got all those things and that's all great. And we want to give all of our employees that, but just think about the difference of having an employee that you're paying by the hour, that if he's sick, you don't get phone calls. If he misses work because of a personal reason, you don't get phone calls.

17:46You're paying him on the P&L. You're paying all of these benefits that go along with it. And by the time you start doing the math on it, it costs quite a bit to have this person that's kind of part-time essentially. And so Gary comes along and now Gary's like, man, I want to do BDC in the service world. Like, and the dealership is totally different.

18:12It's like the dealer's trying to sell you cars and we're just trying to fix your car, right? It's like completely just polar opposites, right? And so Gary wants to do this in the service world and, you know, just really understands how to build the infrastructure that we needed, which is first of all, like, like everything we talk about on here, it's You got to have superstar A players and you have to have people that love what they do.

18:37And Gary absolutely loves doing callbacks. Gary loves having that headset on. Gary loves to connect with the customers where your advisors don't in that way. And so now it's time to start building this call center. And can you kind of walk us through that, the building process of the call center? Yeah, you know, it started with, with the 10-10 Blaylock. And then I remember I was like, oh, could you do another one?

19:06And I was like, yeah, let's do another one. And it was about the, the— I think we took on— it was, I believe, Bill Shop at JB Auto Care up in Boston. And that's when, you know, the, the real challenges surfaced. I knew they were coming. There just wasn't anybody out there that had tried to solve it because what nobody really takes into consideration is you can make thousands of phone calls.

19:39Like just in the last 12 months, Auto Shop Callbacks has made over 325,000 callbacks in the last year. Nobody realizes that you can make a lot of phone calls. It's what happens when the guests start calling you back. That's where it really gets messy because nobody wants to hear, "Let me look you up in my system." Once you're, you know, once you're kind of exposed as a call center, it gets really, especially in the automotive world, it can get really tense.

20:08So, so that was the main thing. It isn't the calls, it's what happens when they call back. And, and once we started getting a shop that was not in the Houston market and then I believe Charlie's 2 Pleasant Car Cares came on board, like it was like November or December, there was some real strategy that, you know, that we had to find partners that understood that, that had the infrastructure to be able to handle that kind of volume across multiple time zones.

20:42And, you know, luckily we were able to get there. And now with 34 shops, I believe, in every time zone in the continental United States. We believe we've solved callbacks. So it's been a really exciting journey. Yeah, no doubt you've solved it. Charlie had commented it's a shared responsibility, and it is, it's a shared responsibility. I remember at the beginning when we started doing some calls for some other shops, and then I was kind of auditing some tickets for these other shops.

21:14And look, the whole point of the callback is to get the car in so you can do a rack attack on the car and follow the process the right way, which in 95% of the cases, when a vehicle comes back in, you know, you haven't seen that vehicle in 6 months, if you inspect that car properly, you are going to find a gotta-have.

21:32Yes. Right? We inspect every car, whether it's come back the next day or if it's come back, if it left our parking lot and came back, we're gonna inspect that car again. It eliminates decision fatigue. But more importantly, it's like, look, I'm about to put this vehicle on the road safe, and it is my professional obligation to make sure that this customer's vehicle is safe.

21:50And everybody knows that, look, There's cars that are going to come in tomorrow. Today's Monday. There are cars that are going to come in tomorrow on Tuesday that have a noise that isn't there today. You got to remember that every car that comes in your shop didn't have a problem probably a day or two ago. And so you have to inspect every single car, but it is a shared responsibility.

22:11So we were auditing some of these tickets of some of these cars. And so, you know, like people always tell me I'm crazy when I say, man, I'd love to have all state inspections. I wish I could have 35 state inspections every day. People look at me kind of sideways. I'm like, no, that's the easiest car in the world because all I have to do is PMI the car, find a guy to have, get it sold, get them home, and then I just have gravy maintenance that's on this car or gravy repairs that are on this car.

22:35And it's not the ABS light that comes on every Tuesday when you're turning left, right? Like, that, that is a much harder car. And so I'd rather have state inspections. But what was happening is you're pre-booking all these state inspections, and then they would come in and then they would just do the inspection, the car would leave. Or an oil change, they would just do the oil change and they wouldn't PMI the car.

22:53And so It is a shared responsibility, right? Gary will get the cars to come in your shop, but the difference is what are you going to do with those cars once they're in your shop? Because otherwise it's just a big waste. It's the same as advertising, shared responsibility. Like advertising will make your phone ring, but if you don't know what to do when the phone rings, then you're kind of dead in the water.

23:16And even if you get the car in the shop and you don't PMI the car properly, well, what's the point of advertising if you get the car in and then you don't actually you know, PMI the car and execute the concept. Okay, so it is a shared responsibility. So you guys are doing auto shop callbacks. You're doing how many shops right now currently are we calling for?

23:37I believe it's 34 right now. 34 shops. Now, so everybody understands the callbacks. People have misunderstood and think that we're calling like declined services. We're not calling declined services. Those are done at the store level. Next day satisfaction callback, reopen this sale. We're talking about callbacks that are pre-booked for your next state inspection, pre-booked for your next oil change, pre-booked for your fluid exchanges, warranty inspection because your car had a repair done, you know, 18 months ago and we want to do a midpoint warranty inspection on it.

24:16Okay, so these are all the set of calls that Gary and his team are doing. These are not Hey, we recommended this and now we're calling you back. So that's a key part for everybody to understand. Okay. But how important, Gary, would an invoice review be for you and your team setting appointments? Yeah, I mean, it's a mission-critical part of it, right?

24:41It's setting the callback up is not only just You know, the invoice review is just, uh, good business, right? It's, it's, here's what we did. It's coming around to the other side of the counter and, and connecting, uh, with the guest, you know, as you're taking their money and letting them understand what just happened as well as what's going to happen. And, uh, it's so critical because we want them to answer the phone call.

25:08And, um, a lot of, uh, a lot of guests But, you know, they're not going to just answer a phone, especially if we're calling by before 10 AM the next morning. They're probably either commuting or dropping kids off to school, at work, at the gym. You know, they— for— we want them to pause that and really sincerely get, thank you so much, we really appreciate you.

25:32Is everything driving okay with the car? And the way to make that happen is at the shop level, letting them know that that's coming the next day? Yeah, when we do, when we do an invoice review, we are setting up that call for Gary and his team. Gary will always tell us our calls in 6 months and our appointments in 6 months are dependent on your invoice review today.

25:58And that is so true. So just to kind of give everybody an understanding of that, the customer gets their car worked on. In most shops, they're doing the walk of shame, as we like to call it. That means the advisor is at the counter, they don't look the customer in the eye, they're scared to tell them the price. You know, they already gave them the price, but they're scared, you know, it's like a lot and they don't want to say it.

26:22And they say the price and then they swipe the credit card and they give them the keys and they say, here, have a great day. You know, thank you. If you need anything, give us a call or whatever that would be in the industry. Whereas our invoice review is much different. We're going to get on their side of the counter. We're going to thank them for their business.

26:39We're going to say, look, we understand you have choices and you chose us, and we appreciate that more than you know. And so let me go through your invoice. And we go line by line by line through their invoice with them. And then we explain to them their warranty. We explain to them their nationwide coverage and what that means for them. We explain to them we are here to serve 7 days a week.

26:57If you need anything, we are here for you. Okay? We explain the whole process to them, but at the end, we explain to them how our free book system works. And we say, look, Mr. Customer, we know you've got a busy schedule and we are going to take this off your page. You don't have to think about your car anymore. So here's what we're going to do.

27:19In 1 year from now, I know, I know it's a long time out, but it goes so fast. We are going to remind you when your state inspection is due. In 6 months, we'll remind you when your oil change is due. In 2 years, we already have you booked for your fluid exchanges. And then once we get halfway through your warranty period, we're going to call you up and we're going to get your vehicle back in and we're going to inspect our work to make sure that everything that we did on your vehicle is still in tip-top shape.

27:47Okay, so be expecting our call because we're going to stay connected with you. And I asked them, how does that sound? And they go, oh my gosh, wow. I had a lady go one time, she goes, my car would literally fall apart if you didn't do that. Okay. And I'm like, that's awesome. Okay. They want that. They need that. Okay. And then also the next day satisfaction callback.

28:05Our team is going to follow up with you tomorrow to make sure everything was great with your visit. Now, everybody listening on the line, think about how much money you spent last year. Now, how many people called you back and thanked you for your business? Think of all the money you spent, all the businesses you went to, everything that you did, every trip you took, every purchase you made.

28:24How many people called you back and said, hey, Man, I just want to thank you so much. Not a text message, auto text message, because everybody can do that now. That's easy. Okay. With technology. But called you back and said, hey, Glenn, thank you so much for buying that iPhone. You have no idea how much we appreciate that. We understand that you could have went and bought a Samsung.

28:53No, I would never do that. I'm sorry for— sorry, sorry, sorry. No, no. Right. You could have, you know, like, we just thank you so much for your business. See, people don't do that. And so we do that and we play a call in training and it literally gives me chills when I talk about it. And it's a lady and she says, wow, you do this for every customer?

29:13And it's like, yes, ma'am, we do. She's like, oh my gosh. Wow, wow, wow. She said, I brought another vehicle in last week. And somebody different called me to check on my service. And she's like, wow, wow, this is unheard of. This is crazy. She goes, this is crazy. This in the automotive world, this is crazy, she says. And then you got the difference nowadays, right?

29:37Is someone actually picking up the phone? I mean, I know we're on headsets and clicking buttons, but metaphorically picking up the phone and saying, saying thank you. And you were going to say like the last bit, uh, about what that, that guest said. Oh yeah, she said, oh my gosh, absolutely goes 5-star review. That's what she said. And then she goes, I will definitely be back.

30:03She goes, I'll be back because every time I come in, you guys call and check on me, right? And it's like, that's someone's mother, someone's wife, someone's sister, okay? Like, just imagine that level of service, okay? And the crazy part about it is in 2026, that is crazy service, okay? You know, if you went back probably 50 years ago, that's probably not the most crazy thing in the world.

30:24You know, it was different. It was like people cared more. It was, you know, it was just a different time, you know? And today the bar is so low. It's like all we had to do, we call a lady up and we just say, hey, we just want to check on your vehicle and check on your service. And she's absolutely blown away.

30:42Now, how many people does she tell? You see, people will tell people if they have a bad experience, if they have a bad experience, they tell 10 people, however that saying goes. If they have a good experience, they'll tell maybe one person. But I believe if somebody has an absolutely above and beyond, just blow them away service, they're going to go and tell a bunch of people.

30:59She is going to tell people, they call me every time I bring my car back. Now, how does that translate into sales? How does that translate into hours for your technicians? Well, it's absolutely huge. So, man, Yeah, you guys have really nailed it. 7 days a week calling customers with people that absolutely want to call customers. And the beautiful part about this call center is it costs me less than it costs to have that employee.

31:26I pay on my P&L every single month. All of our stores do. We pay on our P&L for Auto Shop callbacks, and it actually costs us less than it costs to have that employee on staff, which is crazy. And the beautiful part about it is if somebody gets sick, if somebody has to take off, there is a team that just doesn't stop.

31:47They dial nonstop, 7 days a week. So those of you that are listening out there, let's just say you have a shop that's not open 7 days a week. Okay? And everybody wants to do next-day satisfaction callbacks. Everybody believes that's the right thing to do. If you were writing a business model, you would write that in. There's no doubt about it. If you were writing a business model, You would write Todd Hayes's concept.

32:12If auto repair didn't exist and you had a creative business model around auto repair, you would write Todd Hayes's concept if you thought long and hard about it because it's a perfected business model. The problem is that everybody has been taught the wrong way for so long and they're scared to challenge change and the difference. And I'm just telling you, you would write in calling your customers back, any business model for that matter.

32:40And so it's— everybody wants to do callbacks, but let's say it's Monday morning and you want to do callbacks. Well, maybe you can do callbacks Tuesday morning, maybe. But if you're slammed and you're advertising, you don't have time for that, by the way. But what are you going to do on Saturday morning? What are you going to do on Sunday morning? You see, they're dialing.

32:58So imagine you have a shop that's Monday through Friday and you have a call center that is actually calling customers back and booking your next week for you, booking Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Okay? We get to control our business. Todd, Todd said, we control our business. Show me your schedule, I'll show you success. Okay? Now he proved this one day. I think it was the day before Christmas Eve last year.

33:26Todd says, I can throttle my business. And so Todd did a little fun exercise that he didn't tell any of us about. And he went up to the call center and he said, I'm going to give you guys a bonus. And it was a pretty substantial bonus. And he paid it out of his own pocket. And he said, I need 10 appointments per store on, you know, it was, I think it was the day before Christmas Eve, 10 appointments per store.

33:49And I'm going to give you this bonus. Now he doesn't tell any of us this, but our appointment schedule was stacked. I think my shop had 27 appointments that day. From the call center, 27 appointments. Okay. It was insane. I don't remember what our revenue was that day. Average. Gosh, it was, it was so long ago, but over $25,000 per unit average.

34:18I know that, which is huge. I mean, just imagine that. Now we could have made the decision that we're just going to open the doors and we're going to see who comes in. It's, you know, it's a day before, you know, a holiday. Weekend or whatever it was, and we're going to just kind of see what happens. He does the same thing on Memorial Day, the same thing on Labor Day.

34:38Okay. Every day for that matter. But man, really just emphasizing that, look, we can throttle our business. If we want to be busy, we can be busy. If we, if we don't, we can just open the doors and see what happens. And so can you tell me a little bit about, about that, Gary, about how much control we have over our our business?

34:58Well, I mean, it— they're not— most customers are not expecting to get a callback, first of all, right? And so when they start getting that callback, they, they— it's, it becomes easier to get them back into the shop because it's basically like I say, you're either training your customers to set appointments or you're training or you're not. And so what we when this behavior, this consistency starts happening over months and years, they will come, your guests will come back anytime you want them to basically, right?

35:32You know, because I call those 10 percenters that are, or the 80/20 rule, our 20 percenters are going to be about 80% of your revenue. And once they know that consistency's there to come back to your shop, if you have If you can fulfill a need for them to come in, then they'll absolutely come back. We did what, just a few weeks ago at the beginning or midway through May, it was like, hey, we want to finish strong.

36:07We sent out some promotional stuff and I believe it was like $80,000 in revenue in 2 weeks. Finding the best customers with the best cars and inviting them back in. They, you know, it's, it is that easy, but it is the consistency that, that's going to decide whether or not it works. When you just start doing text blasts and, and AI calling or whatever everyone out there is, uh, wants to do instead of just having real humans making these phone calls, Once they start coming back, now you can just have a slam shop whenever, whenever you want.

36:47And I think that's the key is that everyone's missing is they're using technology so that they don't have to call customers. They're finding technology that removes the human away from the, the responsibility. And what I love about what, what's happening here is we're using technology for the humans to connect with the customer and they will come back at any volume that you ask.

37:15If you want them to come back 3 or 4 times a year, you can put that strategy in place and get your best customers back as many times as you want. Yeah, it's just a math equation, everybody. If you're listening to this, it's a math equation. This concept yields a $1,000 ticket average. It's been proven across multiple locations, regions, demographics, it doesn't matter.

37:41It yields a $1,000 ticket average. And so, uh, if you need to do $500K or $600K or you want to do those numbers, uh, you got to figure out how do I get 500 cars or 600 cars or 700 cars, right? Everything that we've done has never been about the number, it's always been about the cars. So it's like, I need, I need 1,000 cars because I'm gonna do a million, okay?

38:02And so if we get 1,000 cars, we do $1 million. If we do 600 cars, we do $600,000. If we do 800 cars, we do $100,000. This is how it works. Okay. And so it's a math equation. So yes, we get to throttle our business and everybody, like I said, would like to do it. But there's some key things that happen, you know, that you just can't do and you don't have time to do, which is just make all these calls to all these customers running an attrition deal, right, to see who hasn't been in in a certain amount of time.

38:27We had a lady that our call center just sends me a text message. It's like, hey, Glenn, this customer was a good customer and she doesn't come back anymore. Something happened. Can you just go ahead and reach out to her? So I reach out to her. Turns out her husband passed away. Well, her husband passed away and she had some guy helping her go through all of her paperwork and getting kind of her things in order.

38:48And he came across one of our invoices and he said, whoa, look at this invoice. You— so they took advantage of you. Okay. So what it was, it was an evaporative system issue on a Chevy Tahoe. Everybody knows that. And we explained, you know, or we You know, we replaced the purge valve and the canister and the lines and everything. And so I call her up and I'm like, hey, what's going on?

39:12She tells me the story, you know, you guys ripped me off and this guy told me that. And I was like, oh my gosh, no, that's completely wrong. Let me give you some more information. I go through it with her. Next thing you know, she's like, well, they should have a recall on this. I can't believe, you know, General Motors would have this issue and not let anybody know about it.

39:27She's like, thank you so much for explaining that to me. Is there any way I could bring my other car in next week? Okay, now this is a superstar customer. That would have never happened, okay, had we not called and connected with that customer. And everybody may have the intentions on doing it, but actually doing it is a whole different ball game at a pro level, which was what Gary and his team does, okay?

39:52We're gonna find out by connecting and staying connected with our customers, and we're not— it is gonna it's going to have retention, it's going to have us not lose customers. That is a very, very, very big part of this equation. The warranty inspection is so good. We did— what do we do? What are you pushing revenue? Just so I can get that number out.

40:14I know we're running out of time. Last month for all the stores that we call, what type of revenue did we generate for all those stores? Well, so May 2026, 32,384 calls, 2,138 visits influenced back to our shops that we serve for 1.7— over $1.7 million in revenue. It was an $880 ticket average. So 100%, I think callbacks work. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

40:50Pushing $2 million, calling for shops all over the country. The system is so dialed, it's perfected. This is something you can incorporate in your business immediately. Gary and his team can take over. You will see the wins. Gary can tell you a lot about your shop by calling your customers. And I know everybody wants to do it, but trust me when I tell you, it's so much easier to hire the team to do it than to try and do it yourself.

41:21I can't express that enough. It's so huge. Now, one other thing I wanna touch on before we wrap it up, you had mentioned that a lot of people are using AI for low customer contact by way of not calling customers. Everybody gets a text message reminder now. I mean, they'll just go through your texts and you just hit delete, report spam. Like those come through like tons of those, right?

41:47Or your email just filters them automatically. So what are we doing at Gary with AI? AI, just some, just maybe a little sneak peek into some of the AI tools that you're using today to make this system even better. Oh man, this, this is going to, this is going to take an hour. So I'll— AI has made our, our team so much more accurate.

42:12It— we so much— again, it's that customer contact using AI for, for better scripting, for Better pre-booking, more accurate pre-booking. I mean, for every call that we make, we're looking at a Carfax report so we can try to find work on that, uh, so that we can pre-book work in the future. Uh, for example, uh, AI looking at 30-something thousand Carfax's, uh, so that it doesn't create decision fatigue and mistakes on the team because that's a lot of Carfax's to, uh, to, to look at.

42:48So now we can we can pre-book oil changes and state inspections that the, the guest did somewhere else. So they come in to your shop for a, uh, a battery coupon that they found, or, or a Google ad or something like that, uh, they leave for $0. Well, we're taking a look at that Carfax and we're using AI to find work on that so that we have a reason to call in the future.

43:13So if they've been going to a Jiffy Lube or, or a quickie type place for their last oil change, we're going to find it on the CARFAX. We are going to create ourselves a task and try to estimate when that oil change is going to be due. And when it's done right at the shop level with the invoice review and setting the callback up, they're not surprised by it.

43:36We even say it on the next day satisfaction callback. It looks like you'll probably have an oil change coming up in August, so you're going to hear from us then. Have a great day. And then we actually make that call. In August and book that visit to get the oil change done at the shop so that we can break that cycle of them going to these quick lubes and Walmarts and things like that and back to your shop.

43:58And with a $1,000 ticket average, man, is it worth it? Absolutely, man. Auto Shop Callbacks, real people that really care. I see a part 2 in our future, man. We didn't get enough in. I know there's so much more with AI. This was so much fun. This was absolutely good. Yeah, yeah. Find us on autoshopanswers.com. You know, it's a great place to find us.

44:26You can find me on LinkedIn. I could talk callbacks forever, but I know we're out of time, Glenn. I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to visit with you, and I hope to do it again soon. Yes, absolutely. All right, guys, y'all have a great day. This was a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to a part 2 of this. I think we could probably get some more in there.

44:44There's so much cool stuff happening with AI and just next level, just a next level operation, man. It's so good. So thank you all. Everybody have an amazing day. For more information, reach out to Todd Westerland at 925-980-8012 or visit autoshopanswers.com. .com. You can get more information about Key2Key2CallBacks, uh, Courtside. We have a VIP Rack Attack Day where you spend an entire day in the trenches with our team learning this perfected business model.

45:18Uh, we offer leadership classes, we have an AI Academy, and also get more information about Auto Shop Callbacks. Uh, we have auto tech training. We are literally your one-stop shop. Once again, that number for Todd Westerland is 925-980-8012.