Rob Eskew’s Rollercoaster Turnaround - Bonus Zoom Episode 1

0:00We got a special guest this morning. Not really a guest, he's on every time, but Mr. Rob Esquire. Yo, yo, good morning. Good morning. Good morning. So man, we're gonna do something fun this morning. We'll probably start doing this going forward. Really wanna kind of pick the brains of everybody that's come through and kind of, you know, we share our journey quite often and kind of this carnival ride, as Todd likes to call it, with everybody.

0:40And I thought it'd be fun if we got some different perspectives, right? There's a lot of different, a lot of different situations and different companies, whether it be in size or location, demographics, all the different things that are applicable. And when we come through Key2Key, there's a lot of things that we'll hear from different people like, "That won't work in my area," or, "You don't understand my situation," anything from rust to pits to demographics to, uh, you know, you name it, we've heard everything.

1:31Uh, but the cool thing about it now is, uh, I feel like it's been, it's been proven in all markets. And so we're going to start doing some interviews to try and get different perspectives of different people. And so this morning we were going to start with Mr. Rob Eskew, Superstar. Good morning. Good morning, Superstar. Great news. True Autobahn. True, let's go.

1:58Starting with True, I got to spend some time with True a few weeks ago. It was just a lot of fun. And Rob's obviously just an incredible, incredible guy. So So anyway, good morning, Mr. Rob. Good morning. Thanks for having me on here. Good morning. Yes, absolutely, man. So I just want to kind of hear where it all start for you, if you could kind of dive into that.

2:26I know it's been several years, just kind of a brief story. Yeah, I'll fast forward through some of it. So, you know, we started the business. I always say we started at the bottom with a $100 mixed bag of tools in the basement of an out-of-business strip mall. Up in an area of the north suburbs of Atlanta called Lawrenceville. In fact, I was embarrassed to tell people where my business was because everyone would say, where's Lawrenceville?

2:50And I'm like, it's Gwinnett. It's Gwinnett. So kind of quaint, humble beginnings. Bought our first building in 2016, got involved with the ShopFix people right around 2018, in which we bought our second location. In Marietta, Georgia. Basically, it was a real estate deal. We bought the business for a dollar because it was doing about $40,000 to $55,000 in revenue a month. And the owner wanted out and, you know, none of his kids wanted it.

3:21You know, the typical really dirty, scary shop that had no legacy plan. We then bought two more stores because we were in ShopFix. We bought two more stores and the end of 2019, right before COVID which almost wiped us out. And then we got involved with some other people from ShopFix. We partnered up to make 4 of us as a group, and then we started buying stores like crazy.

3:48And I remember always kind of waving flags and like, guys, we don't even have these set up yet. And, you know, they just wanted more revenue, more and more revenue. Fast forward, we got to 15 stores across 3 states, and the most expensive deals we did, because we were just kind of high off our success, if you will, we did several deals that went really well.

4:14When we bought our Decatur store, you know, we doubled it in a month and everything went well. You know, no change in marketing, no change in a lot of things other than, you know, saying yes. But, you know, we really did not have a system in place. So we finally did a couple of deals and the wheels just fell off the bus.

4:34And we did— we ultimately did about $42 million in revenue in 2024. And as I said during the Adam Coffee event, we made no money. In fact, we made negative money on $42 million, which is absolutely terrifying. And so, you know, I got to give credit where it's due. Aaron Stokes was like, hey, you know, you guys need to break your business up.

4:58And I remember being a little bit nervous because I had been so far removed from the business. I kind of helped do legal stuff and quote unquote looking for acquisitions and then remodeling all the stores once we bought them and things like that. So I was so far removed from operations. You know, I would want to go in the trenches with the wrenches, but anytime I visited stores, my partners would fuss and say, you know, that's not how we want to do our, that's not how we want to run our operations.

5:27You know, we want to have managers in place and regional managers and things like that. And I'm thinking, can't even go to my stores? That doesn't make any sense. And so we were, amicably willing to separate the business. We drew a line and I took Georgia along with my original partner, and my ex-partners took what was west of the Mississippi in Colorado and Texas.

5:56And, you know, the business had gotten so complicated because of my, my original business partner, absolutely brilliant soul, but just made everything 10 more steps, 20 more steps even. Than things needed to be. And so, you know, we really didn't have a framework like Auto Shop Answers. I had visited Todd Hayes way back when, probably 5 years ago when they did the trainings upstairs at 1010.

6:25And I remember being like, guys, this is the truth. This is where even all the ShopFix stuff comes from. You know, this is, this is, this is it. Like, we need to roll out this model., and we sent several people and they would just want to pick and choose at it and they weren't willing to surrender and go all in, which fast forward, after breaking up with the old partners, I started taking over the company and my mission was to simplify everything.

6:55Simplify, simplify, simplify. In fact, I have a picture of a rocket booster. It's the Raptor 1 versus the Raptor 3. And if anyone Googles that really quick, you'll see the Raptor 1 engine looks scary as all get out. There's hoses and pipes and tubings and all this stuff wrapped all around this engine. And you can tell it's probably powerful, but it's definitely not reliable and it definitely looks like a mess.

7:18And then the Raptor 3 engine is just like this smooth machine. And I remember going around all the stores being like, all right, guys, this is what we're going to do. We're going to simplify this business and we're going to turn it up. And at the time it was just a dream. And I was obviously quite nervous taking over as well as having to get in front of everybody and say, you know, we, we kind of went out of business.

7:41Uh, we didn't break up because money was good. Let's just be honest. Um, and, uh, you know, in fact, the accounting was so bad. We spent over $1 million in accounting around about maybe $800, maybe up to over $1 million. Regardless, I just call it a million for the story's sake. And we couldn't even get P&Ls in time and the balance sheets were all a mess and things like that.

8:07And so I said, all right, look, everyone, Georgia alone did $15.6 million last year. So, and we, and we, and we still netted $1 million. So we're still, we're still good. Well, by the time they finished closing out the books, I said they forgot to put the negative sign. So we still lost $1 million. Which was a delta of 2, right? You know, so I thought we made a million, but in fact we had lost over $1 million in 2024.

8:33And so we were in debt up to our eyeballs. Every line of credit was tapped out. We were in forbearance with the banks. They wanted all their money now. And I'm like, holy cow. Like, I've never missed a payment on anything. I've never missed payroll. I've never missed any of my personal payments on anything. Like, how could we be in this situation?

8:50Well, they violated bank covenants. Even though we never paid late on anything, we were not in compliance with their regulations. And so we had real estate debt and they wanted all that money now. And I said, holy cow, like, I got to raise $9 million. And so I ended up having to borrow some money from my dad. In the meantime, like, while doing all this, I'm like, all right, either we got to break this business up.

9:20You can take 3 stores, I'll take 3 stores, or, you know, I got to buy you out or you got to buy me out. And so my business partner agreed. Obviously, I didn't want to screw him over because we had a really long marriage. And so he gave me a number which the business was not worth at all. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna figure out how to get you this number.

9:45Just so we could part ways amicably. In fact, at the time I was his next door neighbor, which made things even more fun. We had chicken coops together, so, and a bunch of kids. He had 3 boys under 3 and I had a daughter who was probably 1 at the time. And I'll never forget my mortgage payment bounced and that was pretty much my rock bottom.

10:11Sorry, I'm gonna cry. But yeah, I called Todd Wesserlund with the same tone of voice I have right now, freaking out, and said, Todd, I gotta come back and see y'all. And Todd's— and I was like, I don't know. You know, Todd's like, he's like, come, man, we'll make it work. You gotta come. And so we brought Jordy and Kevin Lynch out there in May 2025, and the lights, the light bulb went off.

10:38And we decided we're going to go all in. And ever since then, it's been great. We've been learning every day. I think we got 5 or 6 or 7 of us coming out this weekend. Try to not miss them. I have missed several, but I made a promise to myself I'm not going to miss any more going forward because it's just so good.

11:00Still, though, in November, we were hitting records, but we weren't making any money. And I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Bill Broussard and obviously Charlie. Love those guys. And they go, man, you're not parping. So what the hell's parping? They said, you don't know what parping is? How do you— how long you been going? You don't even know what parping is?

11:21And so we did $1.38 million in November and only made about $12 grand after we had to pay $6 grand for a hood on a Range Rover that blew up. Blew up and on a test drive. So I was like, holy cow, that's a lot of risk to have a 3-year warranty and da da da da da. And, you know, we had gone from about 47% margin prior, we were up to about 52-ish, 53.

11:44And they were like, you can't, you can't run world-class service on 52% margin, you gotta make 62.5%. And I always thought some of the people's numbers on the Moneyball chat weren't accurate. Or they didn't have their tech costs right and tech metric or what have you. But they were right. You do need to make over 60%. So we got the whole company around it.

12:05This is where I got to give my team huge amounts of credit. I said, guys, we got to make 62.5%. And everyone said, heck yes. And we've been putting attention on that and we've made crazy money every month since. So I've paid back the loan to my family. They're paid off. All of our lines of credit are all paid off. All the parts centers are all paid off.

12:30We pay the credit card every week now, which is cool. We got taxes coming up. Obviously, we had to file a little extension because of all the complexities of the old business that we're still working to wrap up. But I'm not worried about paying our tax bill this year, you know, and I can send 6 people out to Texas confidently. Knowing that we can pay the bill as soon as Todd Wessel sends it over.

12:57So, but yeah, I'd love to get any more details than that. I can happily deep dive, but it's a dream come true, pun intended. I appreciate you, you know, just being so honest about that because, you know, everybody sees you now and sees true. And it's like we're on Moneyball and everybody's, you know, just cheering you on. And, uh, we see this happy smile and man, like Rob's crushing it.

13:30And, you know, people just don't understand, especially people on here, you know, that wanna, wanna run their business one day or own their own business one day or whatever that is. Um, to understand, like, there's always a backstory. Everybody sees You know, it's kind of like they say, you know, it took Charlie, it took you 20 years to be an overnight success, right?

13:51Yeah. And so that's right. And people don't, they don't really see that and understand that. And so I didn't know any of that. We actually talked about that. Yeah, I didn't know any of that. I mean, you shared a lot with me when I was out there, when you took me back to my hotel and I was like, wow, man, that's, that's incredible.

14:11I didn't know all that. And, um, we're just so happy. Go ahead. Thank you. I just wanted to tell him thank you for being so transparent, man, because people gotta hear these stories. You know, it's not all, uh, roses, right? We all start somewhere, and nobody, nobody started successful. Nobody, nobody started the big company. Nobody started successful. It's just the way the world works.

14:35But you got to stick with it. It's impressive, man, what you've done. But I don't know how many owners are here, even the non-owners, you got to hear this because it's hard to believe when you're not an owner. How could you possibly get to work, work your butt off all months, right? You see cars in and out, parts moving, this and that, and then at the end of the month you have to pay money.

14:59I was actually in the car the other day with somebody, I'm telling him this, they're like, no way. I'm like, yep, the day you go through that, it is the most painful day of your life. You're like I worked my butt off, you know, fixed so many cars, I dealt with so many people, and I have to pay money. That's insane, you know.

15:18So, so you have to fix that. But then once you get— once you get to figure out the system, like I said, and right now we all know your numbers are very positive, great job. But it just gives you this comfort level, it gives you this, this swag. You're, you're actually able to make better business decisions too. When you're under the gun and you have all that pressure, you make dumb decisions.

15:42We all do. So don't you feel that way, Rob? Oh, I mean, it was scary. In fact, I had to, you know, personally, I had to cut all spending. Right. And then in the business, I said, guys, like, you know, I still walk around looking in trash cans and say, hey, these gloves don't have holes in them. Like, why are they in the trash?

16:01And again, I still want to keep that culture of not wasting stuff. But under the previous administration, as I call it, I mean, we were just so wasteful. And in fact, you know, and I still remember how hard it was to earn $100. My goal when starting the business, if I could make $100 a day, I wouldn't default on my rent with my roommate.

16:23Because I told him, I said, hey, one day, because he had a really good job at the time, he made $70 grand a year. And I said, hey, you know, just in case I'm ever late on rent, you know, I'll always pay it. Don't you worry. And he said, if you're ever late on rent, I'll I'll kill you. So I was like, oh, okay, that changed.

16:39Yes, sir, I will never be late on rent. And so, you know, I still respect that $100 bill so, so much. And, you know, getting back to our basics, our roots, whenever having to take this company back over, and I appreciate everyone's buy-in to that. But now, you know, we've been, upgrading the floors, upgrading the lighting, you know, all these kinds of stuff.

17:05So I'm trying to pay it back to the guys. You know, we just had an amazing celebratory dinner with our Sandy Springs store after they hit a record. You know, we all went and ate, you know, one of the most baller steakhouses in Atlanta. Took the whole team there. So more to come for the other stores if you're listening. Yeah, definitely want to keep celebrating, listening to Jack Wellsch's book Winning right now, and he says most companies don't celebrate enough.

17:32So we're definitely going to make sure we keep celebrating all these wins. So you mentioned something. Oh, go ahead, Charlie. No, I was going to say it's very emotional, man. You kind of make me go back memory lane and it's scary. I remember with Phil once we visited a store and whatever store that was, somebody else's story kind of reminded him of back of his days, and he started like freaking out.

18:00We had to leave in a hurry. I mean, uh, Rob, you bring it back, memories. We've all been there, man. We've all been there. It's real. And you know, you love winning or you hate losing, and if you hate losing a lot, man, it will push you further than you think. So amazing. Absolutely. And for anyone, anyone listening who hasn't yet been through Key2Key, I'll spot you the money if you can't go.

18:22Just call me. You know, it's worth it. I've got, I've got some first-timers coming out this weekend. You know who you are. I've been telling you, you need to go, you need to go. Money's been tight for them. And I just kept telling them, you know, you better go. And they're starting to set records and they haven't even gone yet. And so anyone can do it.

18:45I like what Glenn said, you know, you guys have implemented it now in enough markets to prove it. You know, there's no excuses. You just surrender to the process. It's the best darn business model. It's God-given, like Todd Hayes says. So it most certainly is. Yeah. You had made a mention that you guys had a bunch of stores and Some were really good and some weren't.

19:14And that's very typical of going multi-unit. You see that all the time. People that have a store and it's successful and then they start growing and overexpanding and it can actually destroy your company because we've all heard the story and I know it. Like I ask people in Key to Key all the time, Hey, how many people here multi-unit? And then the hands go up.

19:42And then I say, so let me just kind of tell you, because I already know you have a few stores that are really good. You have a few stores that are just really bad. And the good stores take care of the bad stores. And then everybody starts cracking up laughing because they know it's true because they don't know how to scale business properly.

20:00They just think it's all about store count. And at the end of the day. I mean, I was with the company that we were printing more money to the bottom line, 6 stores and 10 stores with way more exposure, you know, and so— Well, I got to say one thing real quick, especially about being able to go into your stores. So each of my partners had stores, like they had one store, each of them, that probably net $1 million each.

20:28And they literally threw that away to try to do this big multi-unit thing. And, you know, it wasn't scalable. And so someone at the Adam Coffee thing said, well, how many units do I need to be valuable to private equity? It's like one. One. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, sure. Yeah. People can do it with multiple locations. But I jokingly say it's like, hell, if, if we had half the stores we had, it would have been a lot easier to roll this out.

20:58But hell, we're still doing it across 6 stores. But Regardless, like my partners had stores that netted $1 million. And then after we added, did all these add-ons, they weren't bringing home $200 grand. They'd probably bring home less than that. And obviously digging themselves really deep in a hole with debt. So yeah, start slow, guys. Like one store is amazing. I love what Todd says, you know, one spectacular store a year.

21:24Don't move on to the next store until you've got that one absolutely dialed in doing $500K a month. Um, you know, Charlie's perfect example. Yeah. And be ready and be staffed. And so like one thing that we do when we open up a store is, um, we overstaff. I mean, I remember when we were opening up the Sienna location, I mean, I had 15 people at my store at 10:10 and we're paying these people, right?

21:47And this is big money because it's still got to be A players. You can't start with B players and work your way up to A players. So, um, we started advertising, you know, immediately $25,000 a month for advertising. We've got all these high-paid guys at my store training at 10:10. And so when we open up the store, we are staffed for success, you know, and a lot of people, they want to start with a couple of people and work their way into that.

22:15And I tell the story all the time. Hey, look, if we're going to start an NFL franchise, you're not going to start with 8 players and say, hey, look, when we start winning games, we'll put 11 on the field. It just doesn't work. So you have to be able to have the capital to be able to invest. You gotta be able to go and lose some money for a while to be able to make big money.

22:35And people just don't understand that. And they can literally destroy somebody, uh, very, very quickly. Um, you know, you said the Land Rover hood flew open and that's $6,000, right? And that's a lot of money when you're printing $12,000 to the bottom line for the whole company. Um, and that's, you know, $6,000 is, I mean, that's like almost like a best case scenario for a catastrophe.

22:57Um, you know, you could have so many things happen, um, that could literally just, uh, just crush you. So you've got to be prepared. Yeah. You don't have to have a bunch of stores. You just have to have, um, you know, one successful store at a time. And so it's very important. So let me ask you this. So when you started, when you guys had the When you guys went your separate ways, you had your stores, what was your revenue basically when you said, hey, look, I'm ready to come back to Pete and Keith, what revenue were you doing?

23:29I need to do the math really quick. So I would love even Jordy to chime in 'cause he's super focused. I remember, I think, so I remember this is kind of funny, but our goal was $47,000 GP a month because of Donald Trump. And, and that was like a wish list. And now, now our goal— or was that for— I'm sorry, it was $47,000 a day, but we've hit like $100,000.

23:58Actually, I'm misspeaking. I think I'm misspeaking. Yeah, it was our goal. Our goal at the time was $47K. That's what we would post up in our Slack channels thinking that that was like so impossible to get to. Now it's our average. Yeah, um, so many stories like this, man. I mean, we have so many people like JJ. He nets more money than he used to gross.

24:21Those are the stories. See, now it becomes normal. And you guys, you guys are really just finding your stride. So imagine what it's going to be in a year from today, right? Well, one more cool thing too. It used to be— there used to be such huge swings in the cash flow because, you know, we didn't have good cash flow management back then.

24:42So, you know, we'd get a whole bunch of money and it's gone. We get some money and it's gone, right? Like, we, we, we just hit an all-time high score. I sent Todd Hayes a screenshot of my, you know, little cash flow spreadsheet. And then we did a huge $150,000 payroll and, and it didn't really change the number. Because it just— because now we're paying credit cards weekly instead of every month, you know.

25:08So it's just like this nice smooth linear curve now, whereas before it was just this roller coaster of fear and uncertainty. In fact, when, when we took the company back over in January, my business partner took a HELOC out on his house to make payroll in January. I mean, we were broke. Wow, man, you got— everybody's got to hear that. So Um, you gotta make payroll, man.

25:32It's like, man, you're running the company and the employees, you know, they don't understand. Um, they think if you— I mean, you could be doing $150,000 in a month, okay? And your employees can look at that and go, wow, we did $150,000 this month or $200,000 this month or whatever it is. And then, um, they think that you are just living the dream, man.

25:54And, and you're the owner and man, this guy's got no worries in the world. And meanwhile, they're taking out a line of credit on their house to make payroll. And people don't really understand. Well, we had a— yeah, we had a really good teammate who actually thought we made— because they thought the gross profit was how much we made. They're like, we made $1 million in gross profit last year.

26:15I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You actually probably earned more as your salary than what we earned as the business. You know, and I want you to earn a whole lot of money, but at the end of the day too, the business needs to make money or it's just not worth the risk. And, you know, can you go do something else?

26:32Um, but yeah, now we're trying to teach all of our people more. We've got a completely transparent, open set of books and, you know, we're getting the P&Ls done by the 9th or the 10th of each month. And, uh, and hopefully out to all the, all the teammates before the 15th. So going from spending a million dollars in accounting to, Having 2.5 kind of teammates in accounting to get P&Ls accurate and on time is also a dream.

26:57So yes, sir. Charlie, let me back up one second, Rob, what you just said about the swings in the cash flow. Yeah, because I've been there and it's the scariest thing. So what happens is if you have a good month, now the next month you better follow it up with another good month because what happens all the bills from the previous month come in and it sucks away all your cash flow.

27:20Now, if you have a bad month going and there's not enough good cash flow, your bank account just gets drained so fast and you're like, what's going on here? So wherever you ramp up your numbers, make sure they're sustainable numbers. And pay your bills. Yeah. You know, it's a, you know, it's a funny story about that. Like when it comes to like, man, wanting to pay your bills and pay them on time.

27:42Like, you know, like with me, I know at our shop I have vendors that sometimes are a little bit lackadaisical on collecting their money, which is crazy to me. Whether, like, if I do a job and I owe somebody something for that job, I sometimes have to chase them down to pay that bill. And you might think that's crazy, but I want that off my page.

28:04I want that bill paid because it's going to hit me at some point. And a lot of people hold off and probably think that that's great. Like, Hey, I just had this service done, right? Like, I just had my, like, my lift fixed or something. It was $2,000. And like, the vendor's not even like sending me a bill for it yet. Like, just kind of— I'm calling that vendor.

28:25I'm like, hey, man, I want to pay my bills as they happen. Like, I want to pay this like the day you do the job. I want you to charge my card because I want it done. I want it off my page. It's done. It's accounted for. And so that's a really good point, Charlie. Yeah, these bills, they will, uh, they will come in and they will definitely pile up.

28:44Um, oh yeah, on taxes too, uh, just a little nugget, um, I know Fallon takes notes, that you can actually have like a separate bank account. Take like 10% of your income, of the business income, and just put it in an account. Just save that for taxes. So then at the end of the year or quarterly, however to your taxes, you know, scrambling to find the money.

29:11It's a little nagging, like, you know, you're going to have to pay taxes, right? So just prepare for them. You cannot avoid them. Yep. Two things you can't avoid: death and taxes. There's a great book called Profits First by Michael Michalowicz that if you're, if you're small, that's a great book to kind of get you going. So that way you're putting those monies aside because you definitely never want to get blindsided by tax bill.

29:34So yeah. Now let me ask you this, Rob. I know you've been to the Accounting First, the fraud and prevention program, and that's something that not nearly enough people sign up for, I think, because they're probably a little bit intimidated by it and scared about it, you know. And so can you share anything about that and maybe what you took from that and what you've learned from that?

29:57Yeah, absolutely. And I got tripped up on my numbers here a second ago just because I'm pacing outside and it's cold. I'm all excited on the call here, but yeah, if you don't know your numbers, if you don't, if you're not counting your money, someone else is. And it's really, it is definitely intimidating at first, but as soon as you start really learning it, and so yeah, definitely everyone needs to go to that class.

30:19It's a shame that more people don't know more about their numbers in our industry. And, you know, be humble. Like, you can always learn and get better every day.. I'm certainly learning every day, but I've definitely made sure to put a lot more emphasis on that. In fact, my dad was really fussing at me a lot. I'm like, ah, you know, 'cause he's a big kind of just run your business from your numbers kind of guy.

30:43I'm more of an in the trenches with the wrenches kind of guy. But you still need to know your numbers and you can look at your numbers from day one. Go figure. Yes. You nailed it. Let's freaking go. That's what me and Jordy were talking about. Yeah, me and Jordy are like, all right, from now on, you know, we're not lining up in the loser lounge.

31:01We're gonna, we're gonna get our printouts and we can look at them on day one. So yeah, full transparency too. So, and, and if you think anybody online that owns the business and thinks that nobody's stealing from them, you are in a different planet. You're not living in reality. I am telling you the truth. I'm not trying to scare you, but it's just the truth.

31:25But you should be scared, by the way, anyway. You're so big brain, bro. And even sometimes not maliciously. Like, I was sending back some parts and I saw WorldPac gave us a $16 credit for a $300 battery. And I was like, oh my God, they just took that as a core. You're right. I guess. I caught it real time. But that's also happened across 6 stores.

31:44So that's going to be my next goal is parts. Yes. I know we're losing a lot on parts right now. Man, thank you so much. As you guys came and visited me, asked Jordy how's my parts in Utah. I, I got rid of the parts shelf. We're like, man, if there's no shelf for cores and returns, there won't be any money getting lost.

32:04So we got rid of it. We just have a little like 2x2 area that you can put parts on, so you can only have a couple of parts. That's it. Everything else has to go by now. One funny thing, and Glenn, you might be about to say it, So obviously we knew Glenn was coming. It was a short notice, but everyone stayed late, everyone cleaned up, everyone, you know, sent back or hid all the parts at Lawrenceville.

32:28And the first thing that Glenn said when he got in my car was, Rob, you got to get your parts together, man. I was like, oh crap, you don't even know. We got it cleaned up for your visit. He said they cleaned it up for you. I was like, oh boy, man, that's, that's rough, dude. So here's— and let me— and I'll chime in on parts because Uh, I'm gonna tell you kind of what happened with us.

32:47So, um, as we grew, we had a parts person, and, um, I kind of gave up that control of parts to a parts person. And, um, you know, even though they were monitoring everything incoming, outgoing, and all that, I felt like I had no control over it. Okay. Um, because it's a lot, it's a lot to handle. Now I've switched it up where now I have my parts shelf in Bay 1, okay?

33:16Right next off to the, off to the side. It's a very little small cart or a little small shelf. And I manage it all with a couple of team members that we hawk it constantly. Okay. And so same thing for me last week, 2 batteries that I got cores for that should have been, you know, full credits for, sent back 3 parts, got credit for 1, sent back 2 parts, same part number, got credit for 1.

33:46I mean, combined, probably $500, $600 that I was able to find in real time. That money will walk out your door. And knowing where every single part is, and I'm, you know, working on training the entire team to understand and know this and kind of rotating through people to just run parts for a day because it can be overwhelming. But if you are down to— and this is, if you get here, Rob, this will be great, and this will be great for everybody— any freaking part that's in your shop, send it back if it's not accounted for.

34:19If it's a part that you think is going to be something you're going to use one day because you didn't get credit on it for some reason or what, just freaking get rid of it and just move on and start with the clean slate with every single part being either a return or an active part, and then it becomes way easier to manage.

34:40So when I took over the parts, essentially what my last parts guy that I had here was pretty much slacking— I'll tell you, I'll tell you something, you have a parts person and you're not paying attention to this, let me tell you what was happening with my stuff. Uh, um, I'd have a technician that maybe misplaced a part or something like that.

34:58Well, my parts guy— and this is why it's so important to know your stuff, like, and holding people accountable. Like, I have a parts guy that was, um, taking apart— he couldn't find the part for whatever reason. And then instead of bringing it to me and saying, hey, I couldn't find this part, okay, um, he ran it through the system like we got credit for it, okay, pushed it through because his kind of performance review or the visibility we had to his job performance was what's my return screen show?

35:36How many returns do I have coming and how many parts that need to go back? And so we look closely at that number, right? That number should be very, very tight, like under 10 almost at all times in the middle of a busy day. And by the end of the day, it should— there should be like a few parts maybe left carried over that should go back.

35:55And this is— I'm gonna tell you, this is us. We just did— we just wrapped up a million dollar month, right? And at the end of it, there was no parts left over, right? It's all accounted for. What's that? I said, let's go. That is perfect. Yeah, let's freaking go. And so what I found out was I was losing money on the back end because this guy was pushing stuff through, but we were actually never getting the credit for it.

36:16And it creates an accounting nightmare upstairs. So When you have control of it in Bay 1 and you see every part that's coming in, it gives you a much more— it gives you so much more control over the parts and an awareness of every single core that's out there on the floor, every single defect that you're waiting to come back to. You know where everything is at throughout the day.

36:39And so it, you know, we came up with a system which is at my shop, we have— each technician has a rolling basket, you know, and it sits by their cart. And the top shelf is just all incoming parts, and the bottom shelf is, uh, all their parts that need to go back. So we can walk through the shop several times a day and we just hit that bottom shelf and we know everything that needs to go back.

37:05I don't need a tech to bring the part to me or anything. They know my new parts are up top, my return parts are on the bottom. And we just make those sweeps through the shop and we're looking for them. And then they're in tune with Tekmetric knowing, okay, this part has a core or this part doesn't. Plus we tag them all when they come in.

37:20We put a— this has a core or this doesn't. This is a defect. And so they know. And so having control over that, at first it can be overwhelming. I was overwhelmed in your parts room that day and that was after you guys cleaned it up. And I'm like, man, I can see— I see money, right? I see it. I could just see it.

37:38I saw an alternator there. I saw a headlight there. I could just see money just sitting there. Um, and you had brought up something to me, uh, Rob, about an $800 headlight that you had sitting on the shelf. Uh, I remember, and it was sitting there, and, um, I don't remember what the situation was, but it was literally just sitting there, right?

37:54And you just went and took it back, and it was $800. Yeah, we're lucky we got credit for it because, you know, those, those little timelines will run out. Um, yeah, $800 bucks. Yeah, $800, man. And so which could, you know, anywhere that'll, you know, equal anywhere from, you know, depending on your gross margin. I mean, that's, that's, you know, an $8,000 boom, a $4,000 boom, a $6,000 boom, a sale that it takes for you to make that $800 back.

38:26And the employees just don't get that. So open book financials is super important. The employee thinks you're making 6 times what you're actually making. If you don't tell them. And so it's super important to have that open book, you know, open book financials. So, okay, so I know we're running out of time here, but one other question I want to ask you before we jumped off was when you guys made the, made the switch and the commitment, what was it like from like your staffing as far as like the buy-in from the team and what did you have to do to get everybody on board?

39:02And maybe probably some, I would imagine some people— Yeah, absolutely. I think, what, say the last part of your question, sorry. And I was saying, I would imagine some people probably didn't make it. Absolutely. You know, we actually wanted to kind of stick it to Todd or whoever said that we would have to turn over a lot of our team, 'cause you know, we wanted to prove that we can do it with our teammates and get them bought in.

39:25And so yeah, we've definitely had to turn over some people. I'll say, I think at first a lot of people probably thought it was just that next flavor, 'cause in the, you know, I'm not trying to say anything negative about Shotfix, I love it, but it has its, you know, limits. So it was kind of like back in the day, it was like, what's the new color of the month?

39:45What's the new little shiny object that we're gonna try to implement today? And then there wasn't really a lot of follow-up or something else shiny came along., and we're just putting our attention on that, right? So I'm sure a lot of the teammates that were with us through the previous iterations of the business were worried, okay, you know, we've heard this before.

40:06Okay. You know, here it comes again. But what's been so great is, is that we've just been committed to this and you don't have to do a lot of the thinking. I remember Bill Lewandowski getting so excited when he finally understood what paint-by-numbers means. You know, we're just executing now at this point. We don't have to, you know, redesign anything. We're putting something in place that already works, you know, and frankly, I just don't think the other people have figured it out.

40:34And if they had figured it out, they'd be doing the numbers that all of you guys do. And hopefully that I can proudly say that we do. We had 4 of our stores over $300K, and I think it was Charlie or Pardon me if I'm mistaken who was telling me this, but someone at the tech conference was talking about, you know, some of the other coaching groups, like not even hardly any of their companies do $300K.

41:00And I feel like we got 4 of our stores doing $300K and that's just getting started, right? We'll be doing $400K here soon, you know, and ultimately $500K per month per location, so. Definitely want to keep everybody. I think just submitting to the process is huge. And obviously once they go through key to key and they actually see it themselves, you know, that's, that's definitely usually a game changer as well.

41:25You know, you can start seeing those light bulbs go off. So I want to keep getting everybody in my company off to key to key. We still have to run the company while— but I'm like, Jordy, shut it down, baby. Send them out there. Yeah, super important changes. It's changing, especially now with AI. I tell people all the time, look, if you were at the last AI class, I'm sure it was amazing because I know they're all amazing, but you're way behind now because it's happening so fast.

41:55The stuff that's happening, like Joe sent me this report last night on the inbound call center and some of the numbers breaking it down through Codex of all of our calls, thousands of calls, and then level 1, Absolutely is now a good time. Level 2, anytime presentation. Level 3, new customer introductions. Level 4, still pushback. He had the, he sent me over, me and Mike Quinn, thousands of calls with all of the data on the close ratio, conversion ratio on each level of each call, okay?

42:36To just understand If they say, hey, can I do this? And we're like, absolutely, now a good time, is now a good time. We know what the conversion ratio of that, we know if they want a price, what the conversion ratio is on that. And we know where there's some opportunity for us to look at. And so if you were at the last class, you're way behind.

42:54If you haven't been back in 6 months, you're, you mean you're like pre-internet basically based on what's happening right now. With Codex, it's like insane, the stuff that we're able to do with it, and we're just getting started on it. So Rob, I know we're about up on time. Thank you so much for jumping on and sharing your story. We'll have another one next week.

43:20We'll have somebody else featured next week to kind of hear their story. So man, great job out there. Love you guys. Thank you, Rob, and for everybody else. Sorry, there's some echo here. You have to go all in. If you halfway, you're never gonna make it like to this level of success and just to be confident that it's gonna keep getting better, right?

43:44So you have to go in, just surrender. I keep telling people every class I start, I challenge this enough for everybody here. You don't have to challenge it, just go dive in and let some things go, some old habits, and trust me, it's just gonna work out. Boom, sign up, man. There's some, there's some spots available. It's going to be fire. So anyway, get with Todd Westerland.

44:08Got some great stuff coming up. Thank you guys. Y'all have an awesome day. Let's rock. Thanks, everybody, man. See ya.