Deferred Work: The Most Overlooked Growth Opportunity in Auto Repair [RR 1101]

0:00This is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. Hey everybody, welcome back. It's Carm Capriato, episodic education for the professional automotive repair industry. Been doing this 11 years. Thank you so much to you for being here. You've stepped up to a heightened level of professionalism by adopting our language shift, and thank you so much for buying into the word specialist and how specialist rules in your business.

0:31And done a great episode recently, Town Hall Academy 485, discussing the specialist in depth. We've got a lot of stuff going on. In fact, I'm going to tell you a little bit about our app once we give a great high five to our partners. Hey, you know the technician shortage is real, but NAPA Autocare has a solution at no cost to members.

0:54The NAPA Autocare Apprentice Program builds tomorrow's technicians through a year, 9-stage curriculum. Learn more at member.nappaautocare.com or talk to your NAPA representative today. Hey, did you know that NAPA Trax has on-site training plus 6 days a week support? It all starts when a local representative meets with you to learn about your business and how you run it. After all, it's your shop, so it's your choice.

1:20Let us prove to you that Trax is the single best shop management system in the business. Find NAPA Trax on the web at at napatracs.com. Hey everybody, look, our app is there for you. It's a very powerful tool. You know what, for your smartphone, ARPN, which is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network, of which I am a member of— arpn.app for your smartphone, the ultimate professional automotive repair playlist.

1:53Get it. Have a blast, share episodes and ideas, even download in case you're in an airplane somewhere and you can't get to something. I have a really cool guy, Jimmy Luria. We're gonna be talking about deferred work as a sales growth tactic. Jimmy's from 3A Automotive and Diesel Repair. I'm glad you're here. Phoenix, Arizona. How's business? We're in our hot season now, so we're the devils in the city of Phoenix that are just praying for 110-degree heat.

2:25Because it really does that much more for business. So yeah, it does damage. Yes. Cars don't like heat. They don't like heat. Humans don't either. No, we don't. And humans don't like being in cars that don't have good cold air conditioning. So Jimmy, listen, I got this thing set at 64 and it feels warm. We had one come in the other day.

2:53It's a black truck that's sitting out in the sun and the guy's complaining that it's not ice cold when he gets in it. It's like, look, it's gonna take about 10 minutes to cool this sucker down. So, oh, I imagine. Wow. Just blowing 40 outta the ducts. All right. Hey, look, I am excited to get here and talk about declined, or we can call it deferred.

3:14And I, I do believe there's an interesting dichotomy between those 2 words where declined means never and deferred means later. And we can talk about that. But is declined or deferred work— is it a sales issue? Is it a communication issue? Or is it a leadership issue? And I know you have the passion to discuss all of this. Okay, man. So are we widely underusing this whole information we get from our DVIs?

3:46Oh, 100%. The digital inspections are Amazing. You've spearheaded a lot of conversations about this technology and how transparency has helped the industry and being able to do that. But one of the things that I've seen, and I've seen this even before digital inspections, was that, you know, you're doing a full vehicle inspection and you're not doing a full vehicle inspection to have a $5,000 average RO.

4:11You're doing a full vehicle inspection to educate the customer. So we now, we have all this data and what do they need right now? What are they in for? What do they need right now? But then there's all these other items that they could be red items that they really should do right now, but they can't afford it or they don't have the time.

4:30And then there's the yellow items that let's keep an eye on this stuff, or this is what's upcoming. Absolutely. I mean, I sent you some talking points, but this is a hot button for me. Yeah, I know. When I reached out to Jimmy, he like responded in 30 seconds. I'm on, baby. Let's do this thing. You know, what I just heard you say reminded me of the old, would your grandma do this scenario?

4:54You know, you look at your bathroom, would your grandma want to go in there and use that facility? And if I did a digital vehicle inspection and I found very important things to keep grandma's car on the road, Not having to buy a new one, very reliable and very safe. Would I skip anything if it was grandma's car? And then once I sat down with grandma and I'd say, listen, Nonnie, I want to tell you what's going on here.

5:22We got to do this now. We can do this maybe in a couple of months. And we see in the future this stuff coming up. I'd love to be able to set some appointments with you right now. And we'll work that out if you can or cannot make it. This whole dental thing. I always say yes to any, some, appointments. Okay, great.

5:39Yeah, I want something locked down and I'll worry about how to work around it. Why are we afraid to make that happen? It's in our head. It's the fact that, you know, you go into other industries, you go to the chiropractor, you go to the dentist, you go to— I'm in Arizona and I'm, you know, fairly light-skinned. I go to the dermatologist.

6:00The next appointment is set before I leave. And whether I agree that I want that or need that, obviously the dentist, I want to go get my teeth cleaned every 6 months, but You know, we don't do that in the industry, and we know what's next. Even if it's the oil change, we know what's next. Is the customer— they don't understand it, they can't afford it, they're not sure they can plan for it.

6:24I remember sitting down at the dentist and he wanted to do 2 crowns. We're talking big money here, okay? We're talking about an ARO, average repair order, for my teeth. And I had some really big expensive things coming up. Actually, I had to do a new septic system on my home. House is 30-some years old and something happened, right? The dentist doesn't know the reason that I said no is I have something coming up.

6:52I didn't say never. And I think that's one of the keys that, and again, let's, maybe we should right now target CRM and our sales counter for how all of this needs to come together. Yeah, well, I think that some of it is just, it's agreements, right? It's the norm. It is the norm in the dental industry to schedule your next cleaning.

7:14It may not be the norm to schedule something that you wanna put off or that is, look, as we get older, those, they're not cavities anymore. Now they're whatever. I mean, I have fake teeth from hockey. So if I gotta do something with that, It's thousands, not hundreds. It's in the industry, it's not common for somebody to be, okay, Mrs. Jones, you know, the brakes are at 4 millimeters and the way that you drive and everything, it's probably within the next 3, 4 months I want to look at these again because we should probably replace the brakes.

7:49And then setting that appointment, they're accustomed to being able to just drop in. They're accustomed to being able to just call up and say, hey, I have a brake job. What shop out there on this planet is going to turn down a brake job that needs to be done today? Right. We've created this environment where we are like just in time. Like we can service things fast, especially the preventative maintenance stuff.

8:15Nobody in their right mind is gonna turn down a brake job. No technician that's working for any sort of commission is going to turn down squeezing in a brake job, even if it's at 4 in the afternoon, but we can get parts. So we've created that environment. So it makes it harder for us to get the agreement from the customer to say, hey, let's schedule you for 6 months now, and we're gonna do these recommendations.

8:39And they don't whip out their calendar and say, okay, yeah, let's do that. Jimmy, do you think trust is a big factor here for saying no? I don't know. I mean, obviously when you have a new customer, it takes some time to build that trust. I don't get that sense with existing customers. Like they know the drill. Now we've had digital inspections.

9:02I think the first ones came out in about 2012, '13, roughly. Oh, okay. I'm with you. Yeah. Yeah. So we've been doing this over 10 years, right? They know the drill of, okay, they're going to see some red, they're going to see some yellow, they're going to see some green. I've surveyed people like, what do you want from your auto repair shop?

9:19What do you expect? And the number one response that they wanted when with like, how do they get value out of what we do? They wanna be prepared. They don't wanna be surprised. Help me plan. Okay? So they don't want the $3,500, $4,500, $5,500 average RO, but they're okay with $1,200. They're okay with $1,500. If they know about it and they can plan for it.

9:47To me, it's not a matter of trusting. Okay. So it's not a lack of money. Maybe it's a lack to get a yes because they just don't understand what you're trying to tell them. Yeah. I mean, there's quite a difference, right? And we have to clarify this with our team, you know, all the time. Like, what is red? If you're going to mark something red on an inspection, what does that mean?

10:09Because if somebody takes my red to another shop and we've got a cracked bushing on a control arm, they're gonna blow me out of the water and make me look like the biggest criminal in town. Okay? If it's just cracked. Now, if we got some movement or we've got it completely broken, you know, now we're gonna have some suspension or steering issues because of that.

10:34Yeah, okay, we can mark that red. But you have to make sure that your standards are set For what is like, what do I need to do right now? I was actually filling in, my manager was out of town for a week and a half, about 3 weeks ago. And we had a new service advisor. So I was up front watching to see what was going on.

10:52Well, I took on a couple of tickets and there was this Jeep that was in there and this guy, it's not even his primary vehicle, but he off-roads it. You know, we're out here in Arizona and people off-road all the time. And I was looking at this inspection and the guy's, and he had $5,000 worth of work, Carm. And I'm like, The guy's like, well, you know, I'm gonna go ahead and do this, but I need to put this.

11:13I'm like, look, I wish I could tell you that some of this stuff could be put off, but none of this stuff can be put off right now. And I can honestly say that it was all red. You know, it came down to, he believed me, but he was going on a big vacation. So I offered financing through the NAPA Synchrony partnership and he didn't even know about it.

11:32And he's like, yeah, 12 months, same as cash. Sure, I'll do it. No problem. Done. So it wasn't a trust issue. Okay. Then let's bring the word risk in it. I can't remember if you did or didn't say it, but maybe risk is part of the issue in our discussion. Listen, if it was cracked, the risk is kind of medium on this.

11:55Maybe that word could come into play as we're discussing. This is a high risk instead of it's a, If it's a red, I love, you says, what is red? Red for us is a risk in the near future that this could get, maybe the crack can get worse. Maybe it is someone else goes, well, it's just a crack, Bobby. You can just don't worry about that.

12:17But we explain what that, maybe it should have been a yellow, who knows? But the word risk in my mind needs to be used. Yes or no? Yeah, I think we are too afraid to get egg on our face sometimes, you know, and, and You know, it's like, look, a battery's testing bad. When is it gonna go out? I don't know, it's testing low, but the car's still starting.

12:39Customer could argue, well, it starts. Yeah, but when is it not going to? That's when, you know, so it's like, okay, so we have certain parameters that we go off of to say that that is a risk. Like our inspections, when they come in, in this order. Number one is we better check out what the customer came in for. Because if we call them about anything else, we don't have answers to that, then we better have that.

13:04But then after that, it's safety, reliability, then maintenance, and then appearance. So what they came in for, then safety, then reliability, then maintenance, you know what I mean? And then appearance, of course, trim's hanging off. I find that if you look at that and you go, okay, well, we have a safety issue here. Brakes are metal to metal. That's a safety issue.

13:29It's a safety for that person and anybody that's around them, you know, on the roads. But reliability, are you talking about grandma? I've got 80-year-old grandma here and she drives across town to go to church and she's got a seep on the radiator. It's not leaking, it's not dripping, but we can see it's crusty, 10-year-old hoses. What do we do? Is that a safety or a reliability issue?

13:58But that determination needs to come from your counter because there's the know, like, and trust thing building together. You know, will we have a soft place in our heart to have her not spend $400 or $500 to get this thing right, just to lift the reliability of her vehicle up? Would I say to Grandma, you don't want to get stuck driving to church?

14:19Is that a hard sale, an emotionally hard sale? If Grandma is driving on the freeway or— it's going to be 110 today. If Grandma has a breakdown and she's on the side of the road for any reason, that is a safety issue. So you have to measure what are we looking at in judgment, in my opinion, is to how I don't have a problem with hard sell.

14:42Like, hard sell is like caring about a person, caring about the fact that they don't have trouble. And look, like, even struts could be sold hard, right? Because the strut is, its job is to keep the tire on the road. If somebody's, you know, got a family full of people in the vehicle and their struts are shot, and they have to brake at 60 miles an hour over some choppy road, That could be a safety issue.

15:10They will lose stopping distance for sure. Remember the old days? Monroe said 50,000 miles, you gotta take a serious look at your ride control. How many people are doing that today? You have to train the people how to sell that type of work. They have to understand it so that they can communicate it to the customer. One of the best, I think Monroe years ago had, and again, I don't know if it's years ago or they still have it today.

15:34I haven't seen. You being able to see the choppiness and, you know, the whole concept of that tire needs to stay, keep contact with the road. And you know what? I don't believe people have a clue what anything, any system does on their vehicle today. And it's our job to help them understand it. Why go to Google to find out something about your vehicle when you could look that person in the eye, Jimmy, right across at your counter and says, I'm your Google for your vehicle.

16:03Please, would you do me a favor? Google me, text me, call me, just Google me. It's a perfect analogy. Yeah. The truth is, is that's where, you know, all of the, you know, you want to look for SEO and, you know, social media and things like that is who are the experts? Like who is giving information that those, that the AI and Google can find that is the authority on that stuff?

16:27You know, so having your own information about it, because I mean, every, every shop owner, every service advisor, manager, we're all having to argue with somebody who is AI or Google educated every day. Every day. And it's not always right. Hey, you know, it's no secret the automotive industry is facing a technician shortage, but NAPA Autocare has stepped up with a powerful solution, the NAPA Autocare Apprentice Program.

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19:22After all, it's your shop, so it's your choice. Visit us on the web at napatrax.com. You were talking about CRMs completely botch the marketing of these deferred work. What did you mean by that? This is something I've been working on for 25 years, Carmine. I mean, my background before I got into auto repair was marketing, right? So my degree was in marketing.

19:49When I started working for my dad in 2000, that was the first thing that I did. You know, as we started learning back then, we were doing handwritten inspections, but we had our old Mitchell system and we had recommended services. In the vehicle tab, there was a place to put those recommendations. And We had a heck of a time actually getting that data out of the system and into a format that could be sent to the customer through a postcard, through an email, anything that could prompt us.

20:18And one of the things that we found early on was that even when the early CRMs came out, so let's just say, Carmi, you brought your car into the shop and the brakes were at 3 mil and you said, you know, I'd like to do it, but I don't have time today. Can I come back next month? I'm going out of town.

20:36Okay, good. So that goes in there as a recommendation. Now the CRM knows next month, send Karma reminder. And then we've gotten into this thing where it's not even a physical postcard that you get, it's an email or it's a text. The text doesn't say what it is, it says you have recommendations, you have to click on it to then see what it is.

20:58The email you may or may not open because you've got 1,000 emails in your inbox. And there's no system in place for the service advisors to be calling back. This is something I've been dealing with for 20 years, okay? Now they send that list, so it's June, in July it sends you those reminders. And let's say it sends all of them, it sends a text, it sends an email, it sends a postcard, and even I have a prompt to call the customer.

21:22Where does it go when they don't answer the phone or they don't respond? I mean, it's the what happens next syndrome. They go into the abyss on most of these systems. You have to actually set it up to send them out. Like, I'm looking at a list that we pull— I pull every month because none of the CRMs will do what I want them to do.

21:39So I have to pull it out of TechMetric. I have to then take that information, and, and the way it comes out of that system, I would send 4 postcards for 1 car with 4 recommendations. So I have to then Have somebody, we were having somebody migrate that and put those all into one line item with 4 recommendations. Now I can send a postcard, okay?

22:03While I was just looking at, I have one list, it goes back 2 years. You know how much money in recommendations were there? And those were just the top 4. A million. $3.3 million in potential. Now that's going back 2 years, but the thing is, is most of these CRMs, they'll send 1 or 2 reminders and then it just falls off. And it goes into the abyss and there's no other follow-up on that recommendation or that declined service.

22:30And so what my wife and I have developed over the years is a system where we're going back to those and we're sending those things every month. If they haven't done their declined service, it's still in the system and it will send another reminder. The CRMs don't do it. But Jimmy, but are you doing this manually? You're clicking stuff manually? A lot of it, yeah.

22:51A lot of it's manual. Come on, there's got to be a piece of software out there that can manage that for you. There is. There's a couple of them that you can set them up to remind them, but the problem is they don't give them the ones that you want them to see, right? So they're not in the, in the correct order of importance.

23:12That's kind of the garbage in, garbage out, right? If the service advisors aren't prioritizing Let's just say they have 4 declined services. The first one is a light bulb. Well, is that a safety issue? Maybe, you know what I mean? The most important one is that the brakes are 2 mil. That should be number one on the list. So it won't prioritize them unless you actually do that.

23:35But a lot of times what the link that it goes to, if it's in an email or in a text, it just says you have a recommendation. It doesn't actually give the recommendation. And here's another thing. This one is one I found out the hard way a few years ago when we went to, from our original Mitchell system over to a cloud-based system, was that we used to have to type in what the recommendations were.

24:00Well, that was a blessing and a curse. The curse side of it was time. We had to take the time to put it in the vehicle recommendations for that vehicle. The blessing was, is that we didn't use technical terms. We weren't using these technical terms that are coming out of Mitchell or AllData that are being pulled into the ROs as part of the estimate.

24:23So look, you ask 90% of the people out there what a rack and pinion steering gear is, they have no idea. They have no idea what that means. They don't have an idea what a CV boot is or a DVI or an ADAS or keep going down the list. Right. So now I've originally figured out how to pull the recommendations out. Then we had somebody sorting the list so that would put all those recommendations on one line.

24:56And then, okay, so now my problem is handled there with regards to the postcards, but the CRM won't do the same thing. I'm looking at these things and these explanations are— they're coming out of the labor guides. And it's confusing the customers. So now what I'm doing is I'm pulling those lists, I'm having AI sort them for me, and now I've got a tool in one of my AI tools that what it does is it'll go through and it'll move them around as to safety, reliability, and maintenance, and it puts them in customer ease.

25:32So I'm not going to put rack and pinion steering gear It's going to write on the postcard steering repair. Big question. Someone's listening. Oh, I love this episode. Jimmy's so smart. And then he said, well, AI let me do it. How does AI let you do that, Jim? Are you stuffing things up? Did you write some integrated thing? What are you doing?

25:54It's all in communicating to the thing, right? I've used ChatGPT and I've used Claude both, and I've had to correct it. Like, I mean, everything I've done, I've had to correct. I've had to work at it. Look it over. In fact, my wife was telling me that one of the lists that we sent last month, there was like, somebody was sent 3 postcards for the same thing.

26:14And it was like, well, how did it do that? So now I've gotta put a tool or a prompt in there to make sure that it cleans up and it's removing duplicates and things like that. But, you know, we shouldn't have to do this stuff. Like the CRM's, you know, customer relationship management. We should be able to pull that data out of the CRM.

26:36And if somebody has a recommendation that they forgot about that we recommended 14 months ago, that's a safety issue, we should be able to pull that out of the system and be able to know that we need to call that person and say, hey, this is a safety issue. Did you get that thing handled? We don't have that ability right now. You know Mike De La Cruz?

26:57Oh yeah. His company Overdrive Marketing, is he doing anything like what you're talking about? I talked to Mike. He partners with some of the CRM companies, what is what he does. He hasn't built his own CRM, but he understands. Him and I had this conversation, right? They're very limited. Some of them do more than others. The one that he works with, I, I believe we've used them before.

27:21It will do a little bit, but again, it's not sorting the information. It's not breaking it down so that the customer can understand it. It forgets. So, Carm, if you don't come in next month, or you don't come in— maybe it sends it 2 or 3 times, okay? But if you just forget about it, the system's gonna forget about it, the customer's gonna forget about it, and then they go to someplace else out of— while they're out of town, and they get an oil change And the person says, hey, you know, your brakes are really close here.

27:54And now that job that probably should have got done before they left town, you know, is getting done by another shop. So are you going to design this Oz system, all-knowing, all-seeing thing? I mean, you know, Mike Della Cruz, he's a great partner of ours. I know he's got some really cool, fun, different, and aggressive stuff in his program. But what I'm hearing you say is there's this, we have fingers.

28:21If anyone can watch my video, my fingers, and they're almost touching, but they're not, but we need to have them slowly integrated into, if you will, a tight handshake. And then they need to be communicating back and forth, up and down, left and right, in and out, so that if this happens, if this, then that. Type of logic sitting inside this piece of software.

28:46So you're obviously designing this and getting ready to launch this. Yeah, right. And that's the thing, like right now, so I've got a friend who now who is building software that he just recently got his connection to his shop management software so he can pull the data. And that's probably where Mike has more information than a lot because he does have that connection.

29:08To the softwares. And that's the piece that I'm missing, that connection to be able to dig in. These new systems, I can't even pull my entire database out of it. It's absolutely ridiculous. That's why, you know, you sense a little antagonism about the CRMs and how they're botching this communication with the customer in this area specifically. Like, I can't even pull a list of oil changes that are due or past due.

29:33I just find that Tough to accept. It's ridiculous, isn't it? General repair, we're missing out a lot on doing oil change service. You've got some big franchises, some of them been around a long time, some of them that are just popping up, you know, 10-minute oil change, right? And they're advertising heavily. And the auto repair business, we've lost a lot of that business because we didn't make it convenient enough.

29:58We got to the point during COVID when I was watching our oil change, our waiter oil changes take 90 minutes. And you can see people sitting there like looking at their watch going, when am I getting out of here? Is that customer coming back for that next oil change if we delivered that slow a service? And it wasn't like we're slow, it's we're that busy and we're not accommodating them.

30:20How long will a brake job take then? Exactly, right? One of the key things that, you know, the speed of service, we've gotta be able to turn these types of things around. We've gotta be able to get people in the door, Obviously, they have to be scheduled. Like, we can't run an emergency room in our shops, but we need to turn them around fast so that we're not losing out on that opportunity.

30:42Well, I, I appreciate your passion on this integrated CRM based on all these conditions. It makes so much sense, and I hope one day you find your top of the mountain for that. But let's talk about what we have today. We have deferred work. Jimmy, how important is it that our service people at our counter are running the point of the plow on this?

31:10Yeah, they've got to be trained on how to go over the inspections. It's probably the biggest thing that we work on with a new advisor. Somebody who— they have good sale ability, they can make a sale, but how you present what you're seeing is really important because You know, I told you, you know, that getting that recommendation back to the shop starts at the checkout counter.

31:34It actually starts before that. It starts when you're going over the inspection and going over the recommendations. That's where it starts. And the truth is, is that, you know, like why have average repair orders gone up with digital inspections? Well, it's just human nature. Like, if somebody's looking at, you give them $5,000 worth of work that should be done on their car at some point, and you guys, you go through it and the customer settles on $1,000, they feel like they won.

32:08Whew, don't have to do 5, I did 1, right? And so we're seeing these averages go up because we're working on vehicles, the average age of the vehicle now is 13 years, and that's gone up. From '11, just a few years ago, right? What am I looking on in Arizona? We don't have rust like you have in Buffalo. Are you picking on me?

32:27No, we're working on these cars. They come in here, they're 25 years old, they're still running, they're still together, but we can't even get parts for them, right? But you tell me I can't find $5,000 worth of work on a vehicle that has 200,000 miles on it and it's 15 years old? Like, right? So the point is, is that going over that with them and not scaring them, but going over it with them and saying, okay, here's what we found.

32:58This is what you came in for. Here's the fix to that. We did an inspection. Here's what we found. This is what you should do now. This is what you could do now. You know, this transmission fluid is pretty dark. You don't have to do it now, but you could, right? And these are the things that I'm going to recommend over the next year or 6 months that you start chunking away at if you want to keep this vehicle.

33:25Where does it actually start? Recently had some blood work, annual physical. I go to Quest. Quest sends you the next day. I can't imagine how quick, you know, blood work happens. And then you can start looking at your numbers. Okay. I am not a doctor or a clinician, whatever they're called, but it starts to show me green and red. And there's a question mark near the rating and I could click it and it tells me what the parameters mean.

33:53And if I'm this high or if I'm low, and I'm getting a warmer feeling when I go into the doctor and I say, so, you know, here I am. I've already done the homework. I kind of, I didn't Google it, but Quest gave me a quick overview and a synopsis of where I'm high or low, green or red. You're sitting across from an individual and they're saying, hey, did you ever have a blood test?

34:15Did you ever see the greens and the reds? That's what we're doing right now. Because isn't it, if you are going to keep this vehicle, just like you want to keep your body perfectly strong, everything the way you expect it and you want it for the safe reliability of your vehicle. We've got a green and red, no different than a blood test.

34:35And so let's go over this thing because we're the experts when it comes to your vehicle. And maybe that everybody's saying, okay, here comes the bad news. I'm going to have to get off my wallet, blah, blah, blah. Maybe we take some of the air out of the negative balloon by doing that, by saying that. That's right. And again, it's, that's part of understanding the whole process.

34:59I mean, you've had Jason Stretch on here a couple times, right, from Florida? And Jason wrote a book with his business partner, Mike Watkins. And, you know, one of the steps in their sales process is the check-in, or when you're setting the appointment, like we're setting expectations of what is this customer planning on doing with this car? Do they like the car or do they hate it?

35:23They wanna sell it, they wanna trade it in, I'm ready to kick the door in this thing just to give me a reason to get rid of it. Or are they in a situation where, you know what, I still owe 20 grand on it, it's worth 10, I can't afford to go and trade it in and take the negative equity, I've gotta keep this sucker for the next 5 years until I pay it off.

35:42Because now when we call that customer up and we say, okay, Mr. Jones, I know you gotta keep this car, you wanna keep the car, So what we've done here is we've laid out exactly what it's gonna take to keep this car, I say reliable, safe, and valuable. 'Cause all those 3 things are important nowadays, reliable, safe, and valuable, right? So that conversation starts at the check-in so that you can now use that when you're communicating to them about like, well, look, we looked over the vehicle You said you wanted to keep this thing.

36:19My dad used to say that. We'd have a customer come in and say, Jim, when should I get rid of this car? When is it time to say enough's enough? And my dad would always, his first question is, do you like the car? Because if they don't like the car, there's nothing that you're gonna say to them that's gonna talk them into putting $1,000 or $2,000 or $5,000 into it.

36:39If they hate the car, they're looking for a reason to get rid of it. Help 'em. Right. I mean, I absolutely love it. In fact, if they hate the car, you got a tough chance of trying to sell an oil change. Probably. I know it's the truth. But if they really like the car, you know, when somebody says, you know what, I love this car.

37:01I love this car and I don't want a car payment. Okay. Well, here's what we're going to do. Yeah. Love this car. Doesn't owe me any money. You know, in fact, the design continues even though all this new stuff's coming out. My car still looks really great on the road, blah, blah, blah. Well, this person is telling you about their best friend, the car.

37:19I love that. The car goals, being able to say— can you imagine the doctor saying, so, Carm, what's your goals? How long do you expect to live? So we need to talk about what you have to do. This whole doctoring thing we've been talking about since I've been podcasting for 11 years has never found such a greater parallel. In most recent episodes, we're trying to explain to the client how there's a— they care about this, they should care about that the same way.

37:49Your car goal. Wow. Right. And it is, it's an educational process and we have to take responsibility for that education because if we let them use ChatGPT or any of the AI tools, Yes, like we can get a lot of education, but if you're not scrutinizing the answer and digging a little deeper 'cause you don't know what to ask, you're gonna get some false data.

38:10We had a complaint on a 6 diesel that was in the shop and I was trying to respond to this person and figure it out. It was an issue with the glow plugs. So I chat it and I come up with this brilliant response on how this could not have been a problem. It was not true that this could have, been caused by what we did.

38:32And I went to my service manager who's our diesel expert and I showed him and he goes, ChatGPT is wrong. I go, what do you mean? He goes, that 6.0, there's 2 engine types on that one. And it was right there on the cusp of that change. ChatGPT didn't know that, right? So that's a real technical example, but for everything, why you need struts or, you know, ChatGPT might say, No, struts are a joke.

38:57You don't need to do struts. Why are they saying what they're saying? I think the gurus of AI are really trying to say you gotta learn to trust your source, or at least find out where your AI got that answer for you. Well, let's face it, if an AI bot's picking up Scotty Kilmer, we're in trouble, right? So there's an interesting perspective coming from Scotty.

39:20You're absolutely right. There's so much to talk about for this, but all I care about in this great discussion that we had, Jimmy, was that the listener can walk away saying, I'm not doing some of this, I could improve that. It was inspired by, you know, the passion Jimmy has for this. And at our counters, we need to get better at knowing what their car goals are.

39:42Do they love or hate the car? And again, Jimmy, I'd love to maybe even do a part 2 and say, How are we training our people to get the right language and confidence? We've got a lot of newer faces in our industry that are on our counters. They're great with customer service, but they may not know exactly how to explain. Now, one of the biggest training programs or educational programs that are out there in our industry is Service Advisor.

40:12And I'm thrilled to see coaching companies formulating you know, groups of service advisor coaches listening to calls. There's so many positive things happening on that side, and I think that's gonna end up becoming a critical component to scheduling and managing deferred work. It is. I mean, and the truth is, is that, you know, there's so much emphasis on getting new customers in the business all the time.

40:39It's like if somebody's having trouble with car count, they instantly wanna look at my new customer marketing when the truth is, is that, like I just, you know, I was just talking about, just in 2 years, and that's not everything that's in there, that's what I have pulled, 'cause it does have, it does pick up the estimates in there, that's how it picks up the declined services.

41:00And, you know, so it has a value there of $3.3 million, more than a year's worth of revenue. I'll take 10%, Jimmy. Right. You know, and again, you start looking at that, Carmen, this is the math that we need to think with as shop owners is like, is it worth it? Would it be worth it to hire somebody full-time to be on that part of your marketing?

41:24Meaning all they're doing is looking at getting the person scheduled and back into the shop for those recommendations. I got the word for you. Your job is to scrutinize all of our deferred work. Scrutinize. That takes some thinking and analysis, scrutinizing does. There's a lot of ways to spend that in the shop too, like, or utilize that in the shop. It's like, you know, people complain about not getting good inspections from their technicians.

41:54Well, if the technician knows you're not going to do anything with the stuff that's not sold, they get frustrated because they never see that work coming back in. But if you, like we emphasize every week, look, the inspections are important. This is what we're doing. This is what's being sent. This is how many people came back in because of your inspections and we got them back in the door for those recommendations.

42:18That's the gravy, right? You know what I mean? You got somebody who's on the schedule for, you know, $2,000 worth of recommendations that the parts are pre-ordered, the technician knows it's coming in, everything's ready to go. You wanna talk about making time on a job? And getting buy-in on why are we looking this car over for what it came in for— safety, reliability, and maintenance.

42:40And that's all part of that whole system. That's a marketing system. Well, Jimmy, I know shop owners that do have full-time— they're fairly large companies, multimillion-dollar companies, but they've got full-time people working on this scheduling, deferred work, follow-through. How was your appointment last week? Phones, texting, all of those tools available to them, and they're just doing fantastic with the follow-up and follow-through.

43:06Fantastic. There's an industry that does that same thing that does really well with it, and that's the dental industry. We were talking about dentists, right? Yeah, we're talking about them. They have a position in a dental office called a scheduling coordinator. That's not the person that's checking the person out. That's the person who's looking through and making sure that the shop, the dentist, they have enough cleanings, oil changes, light services, and they have enough work for the technicians, hockey players coming in to get their veneers replaced.

43:42They've got the big stuff, right? So all they're doing is looking in that database to find out who's past due, who's due for getting that crown, Who's got that cracked tooth that they haven't gotten fixed yet? You know, and it's the same thing. We have all that information. It's there if it's, if it's properly organized. So the risk of not doing this in my mind is this.

44:05If all of a sudden my shop is just, I need a bump, I need a top line bump. So I'm gonna go out and become more aggressive. Facebook ads, Google stuff. I'm gonna market my butt off to new potential clients. When here's Carm Postcards doing all this cool, neat stuff. I go to Jimmy Shop and I love Jimmy Shop, but all of a sudden I got this postcard or I got this thing that I saw or something that I clicked on, a loyalty program or something.

44:34Oh, this is cool. And you aren't doing anything about my long-term loyalty or my deferred work because this is where I always hung my hat on Jimmy Shop. If you don't stay and market to and support the safe, reliable maintenance piece of your strategy, you got a great chance of me going to a different church. Yeah. I mean, you're most— the most valuable asset of all of our shops is that database.

45:03Take all the equipment away, take the building away. It's the databases and being able to work it and give someone some responsibility. You listen. In fact, you could do this at home. You could work remote, but here's the software. Here's the stuff. This is what you gotta do. Here's what I expect. I expect $2,000 a day coming from you in deferred work.

45:22I mean, I'm kind of, who knows, it's very possibly a right number, a good number, depending on how big the database is. But an individual should be able to fill your calendar with X amount of dollars per day from your entire database, for your customer base. Just by the fact that I contacted someone says, oh my God, I've been meaning to get in there.

45:42My brakes are squealing. I didn't know that. It's opportunistic. It is. There's so much opportunity and you really gotta start looking at it from a standpoint of it's a marketing function, right? So if we are relying on our service advisors to be the ones that are making these calls, it's gonna go up and down like a roller coaster because Look, when it's 110 degrees out in Phoenix, shops are busy, service advisors are busy.

46:09They don't have time to call a list of, you know, 1,000 people to schedule the, the books out a week or two from now, you know. So yeah, when are the service advisors going to have time to do that? When it's slow. But as soon as it gets busy, what's going to happen to the outflow onto the database, right? And unless you have other marketing campaigns in place, It's not enough to just put a set-it-and-forget-it CRM that you think is doing texts and doing emails.

46:40It's just not enough. Like, you have to educate the people, you have to stay on them. The founder of the company that we used to use back 20 years ago used to say, you know, it was really funny, nobody loves spending money on their cars. Except racers. Racers love spending their money on their cars, right? But nobody wants to spend money. It's like the same thing with the dental.

47:03Nobody wants to go to the dentist. I'm sorry, I don't like the tools. I don't like how it feels. It's expensive. Same thing with our cars, right? So we have to work this all the time. People aren't just going to drop in and say, oh yeah, you know, I think I'm going to go get my transmission flushed this week because that's fun and I love spending $300 on that.

47:19Well, Jimmy, I love this conversation. It's been great to have you on the show. We're here And hopefully we hit a home run here and did talking about, is deferred work a sales issue, a communication issue, or a leadership issue? We may not have hit the leadership side of that as much, Jimmy, but I always say if you are the owner and this is your responsibility to grow the business, then there were a lot of ideas inside of here for you to take away.

47:47What I always believe is that there needs to be an accountability piece. Inside of this to whoever you ask to manage your deferred work. You got to hold them accountable for it. Thank you so much for being here, uh, Jimmy Eloria, uh, from 3A Automotive and Diesel, Phoenix, Arizona, where it's hot, hot, hot. Yes, sir. Thanks, Carmen. Thank you. Thanks for being on board to listen and learn from the premier automotive repair business podcast, Remarkable Results Radio.

48:17Get your episodic education on the RPN listening app at automotiverepairpodcastnetwork.com. Also enjoy the podcast on our Carm Capriato YouTube channel. Carm is all for advancing the professional automotive service industry. Until next time.