Failing at Retirement: Building Eight Shops in Eight Years [THA 486]

0:00This is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. Hey everybody, Carm Capriato, Remarkable Results Radio, and another Town Hall Academy. Look, I have Matt and Judy Curry from Craftsman's Auto Care. We're gonna talk about a whole bunch of really cool things, their growth story, what their superpower is. Can't wait to hear that. How they have worked so hard to stand out in a real crowded market.

0:25We're going to talk about culture, personal growth, and the dynamic of this husband and wife team. But before we get going, great words from our sponsors. Hey, for over 30 years, Napa Trax has made selecting the right shop management system easy by offering the best, most comprehensive SMS in the industry. We'll prove to you that Trax is the single best shop management system in in the business.

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1:28Get industry-leading customer support with Kukui. That's K-U-K-U-I dot com. You're probably tired of chasing new customers who never return. We understand. Pit Crew Loyalty ends the one-and-done cycle, turning first visits into lasting, reliable revenue. On the web at pitcrewloyalty.com. Hey everybody, look at— don't forget, we have got our app out there for you to jump on. We got QR code just about anywhere you look.

1:57It's for your smartphone. It's the ultimate professional automotive repair playlist. You can read the show notes, see our videos. It's all there at automotive repair podcast network.com. And we always thank all the great people that have come on the show for 11 years now. And have brought their great stories. And not to be outdone, Matt and Judy Currier here from Craftsman's Auto Care.

2:23Hello, Matt. Hello, Judy. How are you? Hey there. Hello. All right. Here's what I know about you guys. You just don't know when to quit. Yeah, we weren't good quitters. And that's part of the story. There's currently 8 locations in Virginia of Craftsman's Auto. And please correct me if I'm wrong, but they also owned 10 Curry Auto stores Oh, maybe what, 8, 9 years ago?

2:49Well, we had 10 stores, so we started in 1998. We opened 10 stores in 16, almost 17 years, and then we built up 10 stores, we sold, retired when we were 47 years old. Uh, that was in 2013. We weren't very good at retirement, and now we have 8 stores in 8 years, and we've got a few more coming on. So yeah, we're having a lot of fun, man.

3:11We're having a blast with it. So And just when we thought we were done, you know, it's like, what more could you do in this industry? And Matt, I'm sure we'll get into it in more detail. You know, Matt's just opened up a whole new area for us to explore with training and sharing all of our expertise. So that's been kind of fun.

3:28It's keeping us busy for sure. You've won all kinds of great awards. Top Shop in North America, Motor Age, Top 3 Shops in NA by the Tire Review Magazine, Inc. 5000. 5 times. Wow. Cool. Entrepreneur of the Year by NIFTA, Wall Street Journal's bestselling author. Bestselling author. Yeah, that was pretty cool. I mean, one thing I did when I retired for 4 years is 2014, I published a book, The ADD Entrepreneur: How to Harness Your Superpowers to Create a Kick-Ass Company.

4:05Yeah, I was number 8 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. I beat Tom Brokaw. Which is kind of cool. But Tom Brokaw has 27 books and I only have one. So I'm not to his level or anything, but we're number one. I was number one on Amazon in 10 different categories for like 3 weeks too. So super cool. It's a fun book.

4:24It's an ADD book. So it's only 100 pages. It takes an hour to read, but it kind of has like our values and, you know, how we ran our business and how we grew our business and kind of, you know, maybe 10 rules. Each chapter has a rule to it, I think, and, you know, lesson to be learned. And I've gotten a lot of great feedback on the book, so it's pretty cool.

4:42Can we still get it? Got great feedback. Or yeah, I mean, the book still sells. I mean, but not as much. There's a big push in the beginning. Okay, but we can still get the book on Amazon? Absolutely. The ADD Entrepreneur, Matt Curry. Just look it up. It's still available. You know, we're willing to send you a free copy too. It's just a fun story and all that stuff.

5:00And Judy's pushing me to actually write another book and I'll be talking to some publishers here probably shortly. Well, from a marketing perspective, it's brilliant to have free copies of his book in our showrooms. Yeah. Isn't that cool? And I know some other shop owners that have done that, Judy and Matt, and they basically just give it to their clients. Yeah. It's our story and it's something that we love to share.

5:24And like Judy said, we always have like, you know, 10 copies on display at all of our stores. Customers are welcome to take them for free. We're proud of our story. We want the story to be known because a lot of it is also giving back to the community and how we started a whole youth football or athletic program that has 2,000 kids a year participating in it.

5:42And the charities that we support, you know, because if we do good, you know, everybody, we feel like we serve the communities we service. Right. So a lot of it's about giving back and helping people out as well. You guys seem to have either the culture or the strategy that should be emulated by all the other shops in America. And I guess I can't help but think, having done a discovery call with you a couple of weeks ago, and now we're actually in the studio recording, that there's this Matt and Judy dynamic somewhere.

6:15And there's a ton of husband and wives, spouses, significant others that are in business together. How does it work? Where was the magic? How did it happen? Well, back at the beginning I was in corporate and living the life, and I graduated from George Mason University and just had a great time in the corporate environment until I saw some of the flyers that Matt was handing out to some of our customers.

6:41He came home and he was so excited. He's like, "Look, honey, I put every flyer on every single car in the whole community." And then he held it up and showed me what it looked like. And I was like, "Eh." It was pretty bad. I was like, "Oh, so you handed this out to everybody?" And I was like, "Eh." So anyway, I knew then that there is definitely something that I can do to help with the shop at that point.

7:04And anyway, so I just loved being able to contribute something that's— he's good at marketing, but I'm even better. So it was something that I just realized that I loved. So the corporate world was fine, but it was time for me to go on to something that allowed me to really, you know, be creative and have a lot of fun doing it.

7:23Well, really what happened, I'm sorry, let me just interject here. So, you know, we started Curry's Auto Service on $103,000 on 13 credit cards and a $35,000 loan from her father in the back of a really terrible industrial park, no visibility and 4 parking spots. It was not a great, you know, when cars are your product with 4 parking spots. So, you know, I was literally working, it was me and 2 technicians.

7:51Open to close 6 days a week. And Sundays I'd come home and Judy taught me how to do like Excel, accounting a little bit. And so paying bills on Sundays and having like the print shop make me flyers and all that. And then Judy started taking over the accounting because she's like, honey, you have no idea what you're doing. And then she saw those flyers and she's really like, no idea what you're doing.

8:12So we just had our second child and she's like, hey, and she worked for a communications company, like I said, in the corporate world. And she's like, hey, you know, we don't want to drop our kids off at childcare. You know, we want to take care, we want to grow our own kids, you know? And she said, I can do the accounting and I can do the marketing.

8:30And it was just a beautiful thing, man. I could concentrate on operations and people and training and being awesome in the automotive shop. And it was great that, you know, while we were raising our kids, when they were young, they were involved in the business. They saw us, you know, Show up and, you know, paint the walls and, you know, visit the locations and— Yeah, clean the bathrooms, dust.

8:52So they got to see firsthand, you know, the hard work and everything that needed to go into this business. You guys just seem, since I've gotten to know you in a very short time, to have fun, number one. And it sounds like what I'm hearing, and I think this is important for our listener, is that you've got a lane. You each have a lane that you stay in.

9:13That you have responsibility for. Matt, if you were going to make a really tough strategic decision, obviously Judy is part of that, right? Yeah. But ultimately that decision is mine. So I get involved in marketing. I like, I love marketing. It's one of the fun sales and marketing, or, you know, I get, this is the most fun part of the business. Right.

9:34So I do get involved in marketing and I have some good ideas, I think, and they run with it. And I, you know, say, hey, I think we should do this, I think we should do that, or whatever. And, but like knowing today's nuances in marketing with AI and just with all the Instagram and Facebook and all that, I can't do any of that.

9:53Judy and her team do that. So she never gets into operations because she doesn't work operations, but she does get involved in like, we're opening a new store up or making the stores— sure, the stores are clean, visiting our stores like I do. And holding, you know, people to standards. So she, we stay in our own lanes, but we merge sometimes as well.

10:13And we have marketing meetings that I'm part of. And we have such an amazing team that Judy put together with Asha and Lindsay. I stay involved, but I don't have to. I mean, they just got it. Well, but the channel that you stay in, Matt, is all about motivating our employees. He shows up and rallies, you know, yeah, let's go team. You know, you guys are rocking it.

10:36You're awesome. And he goes around to all the locations and motivates everybody daily. And so that's something that I'm really not that good at. I'm more behind the scenes. So one of his superpowers is motivation and culture. And obviously, Judy, yours is marketing. Now, when Matt comes to you with this wild-ass idea— That's the right phrase, wild-ass idea. That's generally what it is.

11:03Yeah. I'm relating to you, Matt, in a very big way, by the way, because I do that to my daughter Tracy, who is our executive producer. And I say, Trace, I got an idea. Oh no, Dad. Right, exactly. I get that a lot. And to the point, Judy, where you hear his passion, he's so strong about this, we just have to say, okay, let's take this little seed and make it into a plant.

11:28Yeah, we try to dial it back a little bit because he's always just humongous ideas. And a lot of times, it's the volume of the stuff that he wants to do. It's just, you know, constant returning and trying to get all of these events together and, you know, continue with all of our marketing and everything. So, yeah, it's just more about loving his ideas and then taking it and making it our own.

11:54So you rarely say no? No, usually not. We alter it a little bit. He's got great ideas. He's a good marketer. She's very, very clever and very creative. So, but Matt will say, ooh, this isn't going to work. And sometimes I'll just say, well, I'm just going to try it. And you know, sometimes it turns out great and sometimes it doesn't. Okay.

12:15The top 3 strategic superpowers of the business. I'm going to assume one of them is marketing. Yeah. I think one of them is marketing. I think that relay super duper is a big thing of mine. So, people ask me how I'm doing, I say super duper. So, I think the super duper superpower we have is putting together amazing teams. I mean, we have the best auto repair people on the planet.

12:39I mean, I've got some of the best technicians on the planet. We fix all sorts of different European cars. We work on everything, all your makes and models. Probably 40% of what we do is European. And we do all the hard stuff. We do the diagnostics, we do the programming, we do all— So, you know, I think the number one thing is being able to put together amazing teams because we have 126 people now and keeping them and motivating them and paying them.

13:02And, and just amazing team members attract other amazing team members. So that, I think marketing. And I think, you know, I would like to think that giving back to the communities and the charities that we sponsor is a really big especially at this time of my life, being the second go-around, you know, and kind of not needing the money. So, you know, as we want to, we want to make a bigger impact on the communities and the charities that we support and that we like and where we can do it.

13:32You know, man, I can't help but stop and think of our listener who's listening to you and saying, oh my God, I just can't believe it. He's got the best automotive specialists in the industry working for his company. How's he do it? You started to explain, listen, it's community. It's the core of our team. There's an outreach. People want to come and work for people that are having fun.

13:51Does your social posts reflect that kind of camaraderie and fun that you're having? I think what a lot of it is, is our almost 10,000 5-star reviews and our average 4.9 stars at all of our stores. 7 of our stores have 4.9-star reviews on Google with Some of them over 2,000 reviews and our newest store in Reston, been open about 4 months, has almost 300 5-star reviews, a perfect 5 stars.

14:21So not only do customers want to come to us because 93 to 97%, I just gave a presentation at Tektronix this past weekend to 100 other auto repair shop owners. 93 to 97% of the people on the planet, on the world, will search for a place on Google before they go visit it. So if you're in Houston, Texas, and you want to go to a restaurant, you would say, best restaurants Houston, Texas.

14:46You're probably going to search it number one. I know I do. Right. And you're going to put you something that's 4.5 stars or more. I mean, you must want to eat at a good place, right? I think our reviews, it obviously attracts customers. We work on 5,000 cars a month almost, but it attracts employees too. And other great employees attract employees. Unintended consequences of us being so amazing on Google and having such amazing reviews and having such an amazing team.

15:14It has attracted other employees that say, hey, I want to work there, man. I want to work at this place that has 10,000 people love them and rave about them and all that. Hey, let's face it, your shop management system is the single most important tool in your shop, period. NapaTrax has made selecting the right shop management system easy by offering the industry's best, most comprehensive SM MS.

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18:29Okay, here's the question. Now we understood part of your how. I want to understand, how do you find the talent out of the people who want to come and work there? And how do you continue to keep up the level of education for your current team? So that's a great question. So About probably 40% of the people who work for us now work for us at Currys.

18:52I have people that have been with us for 25, 30 years. Vernon and I, my right-hand man, have been together over 30 years. Andrew Gunn has been with us. He and I have been together probably 25 years, and all 3 of his sons work for us. And we have, yeah, we have some generational employees too, where their brother or their sibling has come to work for us too.

19:12We've got several of those, 2 brothers. We probably have 3 sets of brothers. Besides all the gun kids, 3 gun kids and the father. So we have, like Judy said, generational people that work for us and that's part of the, I want to work there. We pay really well. We pay 80% of their health insurance. We want them to have like a month off a year.

19:35So a talent attracts talent. We're a well-known entity in the, what we call the DMV, District of Columbia, Northern Virginia, and Southern Maryland. So we're a known product in this area for treating people well, paying people well, having the cleanest, the most organized facilities, having the best equipment, having fun, okay? Like doing golf outings. We just had a great annual party like a month ago or a couple weeks ago even, and almost 200 people there with spouses and stuff.

20:04The thing is, is we have 126 employees, but we have to look at it like each of them is married and has at least one kid. So we don't have 126 people that we have to take care of. That we're shepherding, so to speak. We have 400, you know what I mean? So the decisions we make every day can affect the lives of 400 people, and we want to make that intentional and how we affect their lives in a positive way.

20:30The extended family. I absolutely love it. And in fact, if you're listening carefully to Matt and Judy, you're hearing an awful lot of the secrets that they have gotten into, used, and continue to develop to bring in great, great talents, including all the great benefits you mentioned. You have a female-friendly place, Judy. Do you have anything to do with that? Oh, absolutely.

20:53Absolutely, yeah. So, you know, the auto industry is known for like their dark, dingy, dirty showrooms and, I don't know, and the floor, oh, don't get me started. So that was one of the things that I wanted to make sure that every single customer, every time that they come in, they're going to feel like they're in their house, that they're in their family room and they're sitting down and they're relaxed, they're comfortable.

21:19You know, they've got snacks, beverages there, Wi-Fi, a nice TV to watch if they want any programming, just to feel like they can, you know, kick up their feet and just relax. And it's not necessarily about— that's just aesthetically part of the customer experience. But what's more important is the communication. So to be female friendly, it's kind of an old term now.

21:43I don't think it's accepted widely anymore, but basically it's the way you communicate with your customers, whether they be old, young, female, whatever. Every customer has to be treated equally and with respect and with the time. And a lot of, I know from a female perspective that you walk into this male dominated industry You know, you feel like you're going to be taken advantage of, you know, that you're going to ask stupid questions.

22:12So I wanted to make sure that every single person that comes into our store, our employees take the time to listen, you know, to answer the questions. And we have a show-and-tell service that we call it. But if there is something that we can, you know, help them with and see right then and there, we'll walk out to the shop with them, walk to their car.

22:31And show them what we're seeing. We have digital inspections right now that kind of replaces that. But regardless, we want to take the time to make sure that we're providing the knowledge to our customers so that they know exactly the overall health of their vehicle and they understand their options, whether it's, you know, something that is a safety issue or something that they can budget, you know, on down the road.

22:57So it's all about communication. Yeah, the bathrooms have to be clean. I'd like them to be. I mean, it is still a shop environment. You still have that dusty grease that settles on everything, but yeah. I don't know, we don't have that in our bathrooms. They're pretty sparkly. Yeah, so I've had customers come out of our bathrooms and say, "God, that bathroom's nice as my bathroom at home."

23:16I've literally had that happen. It's funny. Our branding is orange, as you could tell. And so we try to infuse our especially our bathrooms with air fresheners that smell orange. So it comes down to the details too, to have fun with it. Oh my gosh. So I was going to ask you a question about what's a great experience for a customer. And I guess they would walk away saying, I feel orange.

23:42Or aren't you glad you came to Craftsman Auto Care? She has a big thing about it. Big marketing. Aren't you glad? You know, so it's in our bathrooms. It's so corny, but it's fun. It made you laugh. It's just a fun way to approach auto repair. Something you would not expect. The legacy is so interesting to me with the 10 stores and so many years later, the 8.

24:04And when I heard you say, oh, they used to work for me at the first place. So obviously the magnet of, of the husband and wife Curry team brought these people with you. What does the dynamic of stepping away? Because I think you talked to me that we want to travel, we want to do things, we got a great leadership team. How many days?

24:26I mean, you're working 3 days, 4 days a week, or are you just staying away? We could leave our business for a year and it would be absolutely fine without us. I mean, we did that once, Carm. I mean, when we sold in 2013, we literally took 12 to 18 months and traveled all over the place and And then after about a year, you know, I was like, what do I do now?

24:47You know what I mean? So now I'm 48 years old. What the hell am I going to do for the rest of, you know, for the next 40 years? So what I realized was I was traveling the world anyway. I mean, I've been to 84 countries. Judy's probably been to 70 or somewhere close to that. So we traveled around anyway. We have the freedom.

25:05Our team is so dialed in and our people are so good. My operations guy's so good. My son's so good. We could walk away from our business for a year. I mean, I would miss it. It wouldn't miss me. Yeah. And I think we're working hard, but I think from our knowledge of being in this career and doing the same thing is that we're just working more efficiently and smarter.

25:29Yeah. So, to answer your question, like, this week's been a busy week for me. We just got back from Tektronix Conference where we won actually a huge award. Unexpected award, but it was super cool in front of 1,200 other auto repair shop owners and over 15,000 TechMetric users. We were the number one, what they call DVI powerhouse, digital vehicle inspection powerhouse, where our Fairfax store took over 300,000 pictures last year to prove our transparency to our customers and show that we actually do the full DVI inspection.

26:00So that was a really incredible award. So I came back from that, met a bunch of people. I've had people contacting me and calling me and emailing, messaging me, you know, hey, I want to talk, I want some advice. And I had a bunch of meetings set up, so I think I have a meeting or two tomorrow. I'll come back to work on Monday.

26:16So we work hard when we need to work hard, dude. We can take a week off, we can take a month off. We have a place in Vail, Colorado. She was out there for 5 weeks skiing, you know. We have a place in Florida that we're going to visit for a couple weeks, so When you have what I said, what I call the 5 Ps— policies, profits, people, procedures— you know, you can rock and roll.

26:36I mean, get all that dialed in and you're in good shape. Have you done much coaching, Matt? I did some coaching after I retired the first time, and I've done quite a bit of consulting. I do it on a limited basis if it's a place I want to go. So I have to go to your location for 2 days and look at everything and We do a lot of stuff in advance of that.

26:56And then I go on site for 2 days and then we do a download. And then I follow up with phone calls and some written reports. Yes, I've done quite a bit of that. It's not a core business of mine. It's only available to certain people in a certain place when I want to go there. You know, just because my time is number one, limited, just like everybody else's.

27:18Number two, it's valuable to me. And number 3, I mean, I've got 400 families to take care of, or 120. When you go to a place, it's like a firestorm. Are they prepared for you? No, I've never found one shop. You know, when I go in there and they're like, holy cow, man, what the hell? You know, but they get a lot of them.

27:37They get results. I mean, they get results. I got people that don't like to hear what everything that you are honestly sharing, or honestly, you know, like you go into a shop and they tell me They tell me they're doing DVIs and you walk in there and you can tell the first hour, I mean, and going through their paperwork before that, they're not doing DVIs.

27:56They're doing like a 40% job. That's typically what we see. We do 100%. That's why we got honored this last weekend from over 300,000 pictures at one store on their DVIs. So, I mean, it's pretty incredible, but there was policy and procedure to make that happen. Yes, absolutely. And people. We were a couple locations, we recommended changing most of their staff, so that didn't go over very well.

28:21You know, nobody wants to hear that, but you have to have a team that works. You have to have the right people in the right positions. I don't know if this was a quote you told me or something I looked up, but you didn't succeed in spite of ADD, you succeeded because of it. That's the whole book. That's what it's about. That's what the book's about.

28:40Yeah. I mean, I was one of the first Ritalin babies. Ritalin was an ADD drug. I was one of the first Ritalin babies back in 1978. My parents took me to Mass General Hospital in Boston. I went through 2 days of testing, putting square pegs in round holes and inkblotter tests, I mean, literally. And then the 3rd day, a couple doctors came in in white lab coats, me and my parents were there, and they said I had severe ADD and slight dyslexia.

29:06That I was going to have to work 2 or 3 times harder than anybody else to have any type of success. So they said, well, we've got this new drug. It's not proven. We don't know what it does really. I mean, it's just on the market, but I was one of the first people to start taking it. And I'd go to the nurse's office every day between 6th and 7th.

29:25I'm in 7th grade. People walk down the hall, my friends after lunch, and I go to the nurse's office, take my magic pill. And that year I've got 5 A's and a B. Every semester. They didn't know the long-term consequences of Ritalin, so they took me off of it. Totally went back to an average PC student, never really studied. I was more into sports and girls and, you know, everything else, and working.

29:46I mean, I've been working in the automotive business since I was 15. I was into cars, and I had cool cars when I was in high school, and I was working changing tires and oil and cleaning bathrooms and mopping floors. I never even thought about it. I mean, I just ADD allows me to go in 10 different directions, allows me to lead teams into firestorms.

30:08It gets people behind you. I mean, so if I didn't have ADD, I mean, I'd be a totally different person, I think, of course. And I wouldn't have all the energy that I have and be able to do what I do, I guess. He's a firestorm. I mean, I love listening to this guy. Well, that's why it's so successful and it works with our company and dynamics with us is that He'll go into one of our locations, and everybody will be like, "Oh, Matt's here.

30:32Matt's here." And Matt will just— He's like the Tasmanian devil. He'll just come in and— Shoo! Chaos just everywhere. He'll say, "Oh, that needs to be done," or, "Oh, we need to do this," and da-da-da-da-da. And then he leaves. And then I come in, and we're kind of like, "Okay, let's figure this out. So, okay, yes, we need to put attention into this area.

30:51We need to work on this." And it's a good thing. I mean, it's something that— you know, you have to get used to, but once it does happen, you're like, oh wow, that was really great. And look at the results that came of that. So Matt's the icing and you're the cake, Judy. I like that. You like that? Oh yeah. Because that's kind of what I'm hearing.

31:09Oh, we gotta do this. This is great. And everybody loves to see Matt, but then we seriously have, well, we got a KPI problem here. We got an issue over here and it doesn't seem like Matt's the man who is going to bring the disciplines or get anybody to want to get in line or online, then someone else, either your son or the general manager, Judy, is going to come in and do the heavy lifting.

31:31To Judy's credit, she visits the stores like I do. I mean, my favorite thing is visiting the stores and visiting my employees and customers and going there and thanking them for coming in and thanking them for their hard work and all that. So when I go to a store, they're not scared that I'm there. They're happy I'm there. I mean, we're friends.

31:49We're generally So, but if a store is dirty, I mean, I came into my McLean store after coming back from Houston and was here Monday and got here about 10 o'clock and they did like $20,000 on a Saturday. They were swamped. We've had windstorms sweeping in all, I mean, it's been 20-mile-an-hour winds for the last like week here. And I was like, and this is our headquarters, this is where my office is.

32:12I'm like, Ray, who's one of our super power managers, guys, I'm like, dude, your shop's a mess, man. You know, you know, you just gotta start, you gotta take everything out, clean it up, sweep it. I know it's been windy. You know, but, you know, it's just a little nudge in the right direction and they know. I mean, the guys keep it there.

32:28I mean, they take pride in having a clean, organized shop, but sometimes you get really busy and it's a messy business, as Judy said. Sometimes you just need the corrective action, you know, here and there, and we just point it out. Yes, the reminder that, you know, we're watching, this is important, is all we need to really do sometimes. And I'll go in and just sit in our showroom from a customer's perspective and just sit there.

32:55And yeah, you just, you kind of look around, you're like, oh, you know, there's some dust that needs to be cleaned up. And usually what I do, I have this detailed checklist that has just every single thing that you could possibly wipe, change, upgrade in our showrooms and a little bit in the shop. And it just kind of reminds everybody that, you know, you need to wash the floorboards down and there's dust underneath this curio cabinet that, that you probably would never clean, but customers might see that.

33:24So, it's little detailed stuff that we'll point out and mention. And I actually, I like showing up with snacks. I'll bring a whole haul of snacks for our teams. We have refuel stations that we set up in the back for the guys. So, I'll come with all their favorite, well, actually they're my favorite snacks, which they turn out to be their favorite snacks too.

33:43I mean, who doesn't like a bag of cookies? What is it? Give me an idea. Butterfingers, Oreos? Oh, it's no Snickers and Doritos, donuts, and cookies, basically. Can I rely on you if I see you, Judy, to open your purse and get me a Snickers? No, she's not gonna give it up. She's not gonna give it up to you. So it's all about the guys.

34:07You have to support them and make and have it fun. So when Matt does visit, sometimes it'll leave it a little chaotic, and I come back come in and, you know, calm everybody down with snacks and say, hey, you know, let's get this done. Is paperless in our future? I hope so. It's not my future. This is a thing where we disagree, and I thought it'd be fun to go back and forth on it.

34:30So we work on almost 5,000 cars a month, right? I mean, I've got cars that we're working 50 cars a day, and I want to be able to follow the paper trail. We have a way of doing things, a work order ticket. I wanna follow through the shop and all that. And I like having that now. I know shop owners that are successful have done it and it's being done.

34:51It's out there. We're closer to that than we've ever been in terms of updating everything in the computer to like in progress, waiting for parts, done. My guys are really good at that. I mean, just, I maybe call me old school, you know, it's not that much paper. It's one piece of paper per customer per day. And you know, I just, I couldn't imagine trying to keep up with 50 cars a day without having a paper trail.

35:16But Judy, I'll let you talk about— Well, with the technology that's evolved in our industry, I'm just so excited about it. And it allows us to be able to enhance the customer experience, you know, to make it more efficient and more convenient for our customers. You know, to be able to literally drop your car off and not even, you know, you make the appointment, but you can drop it off.

35:38You don't have to, you know, some people just don't like talking with people. They just don't want that interaction. So, you know, to be able to drop their car off and then pick it up the next day and, you know, pay online or, you know, text to pay and have the DVIs sent to you so you can see exactly what's going on, authorize whatever work you want done.

35:57I just think that whole experience is really, really cool. And, you know, people are expecting it nowadays. How many times have people asked you when you check out, you know, wherever you are, a retail location, they'll say, would you like a print receipt or emailed? So, you know, we kind of have to accommodate what the expectation is out there now. The problem is, though, and just like I said, we're playing devil's advocate in this, and Judy's exactly right.

36:25I mean, text-to-pay and all that stuff, the text-to-pay, number one, it costs 0.5% more to do it. Merchants Services Company charges you for that. And number two, if there's a credit card dispute, you'll probably lose because you don't have a signature on it. So there's other reasons from an operational standpoint that you don't want to do that. We don't— I mean, our customers love us.

36:45We get very few chargebacks, but I'm just saying you do open yourself up for other possible liabilities. Guys, text-to-pay was big during COVID You know, it really found its legs. Is it still big now? Not really. I think people like the option, but yeah, I think that the use of it is not— hasn't been so explosive as we thought it would be.

37:05Let's go back to the 1998 to 2013 and your growth of 10 shops in 15 years, and then you retired and you decided, hey, we're gonna come back and we're gonna become Craftsman's Auto Care. What did you learn that you took into building Craftsman from that period of time? Because you didn't just start on day one, cuz you, you know, you told us the story, you know, you were in the end of an industrial park.

37:31What were the magical pieces or the great strategies you took to come up to your 8 stores today so quickly? We really dialed it in at Curry's Auto Service. I mean, again, I've been doing this from, from since I was 15 and I had some really good bosses and some really shitty bosses. So I took the lessons I learned from the good bosses and threw out any of the bad ones.

37:53And I've been perfecting this operationally for 30 years plus. Okay.. And we know what works. We know that inspecting cars, we didn't do it digitally before. We did it with an inspection ticket that the technicians used to get. They had to check it out, good, bad, red, green, or yellow. We did that on paper for 17 years. We didn't change how we approached anything.

38:19We still test drive every vehicle before we work on it. We do a full inspection on every car. But from day one, when we opened up, we were doing full digital inspections. We're embracing the technology and all that, but as far as operationally how we run our stores and how we go to market and really the policies and procedures and processes are the same and we just repeated it and made it better with our partners like TechMetric and other partners that we have that have this technology and we utilize technology Judy said to keep in amazing communication with our customers so they can clearly and precisely understand what they need and why they need it.

39:02And then we're just honest and we prioritize stuff for them and we come up with a game plan. And so I hit on something before and I didn't do it right. I said something I teach in most of my classes is called the 5 Ps. I think I only gave you 4 of them, but it's all about the people. Policies, processes, procedures, and profits.

39:23Because you gotta have all 5 of those things dialed in. You gotta have, obviously, amazing people, really good policies, a process to carry out those policies, procedures to carry out those policies and what happens if something goes wrong, and you gotta have profits so that you can treat your people really well and be able to expand and do all the great things that you wanna do.

39:44So, That's really, you know, it's kind of a key to the way we look at things. And we look at things for our people, I think, and for our customers first. We make decisions in this order. Is it good for the customer? Make the customer feel good about Craftsman Auto Care. Is it good for the company? Does it put our company in good light?

40:07Is it good for our people in the company? And then is it good for me? Do I feel good about personally doing it? So, That's a part of a class I teach. That's the decision-making order that we go in and we give our managers the authority to make those decisions, to take care of our customers. It sounds incredible that what I heard you say is we got it dialed in and if not, we're always improving it.

40:30And so it's not hard to go from 5 to 6 to 7 to 8, because you're, I hate to say this, but rubber stamping the next operation and continuing to learn. From the ones behind it and bringing it to the new one. And then the new one comes in and you're learning to be a bigger, better company all the time. Well, and we're able to scale so quickly because whenever we do open a store up, we always put at least one store manager and one or two technicians in there who already work for us at another store.

40:58So, and then they help train the new staff. And then we have a training program that I'm really excited about. We've always done training. We've done in-house training. We send people out to training.— but we actually promoted one of our guys to a director of training role, and we're gonna have even more incredible, like, technical in-house training as well as management and sales training.

41:17And we're bringing that in-house. It's something I always wanted to do at Curry's and never really did. And we're super excited about that initiative. And I don't know when you're releasing this, Carm, but I told Judy, I told one of my VP of operations, Richard, my guy who runs operations, and my son, that we're not opening any more stores up this year.

41:36You know, we're just gonna— we just opened a store up 4 months ago, and then I just looked at another store yesterday. So we might be opening another 9 stores in 9 years, and it might happen. Matt, all right, I get it. Something I just learned about you: you like to stretch the truth. Or just came up, I mean, out of the blue, you know.

41:58It was a false narrative. I'm sorry, I was just kidding. One final thing, you mentioned education. I talk a lot about it. Are you paying for all of this for your people? Quick answer: yes, absolutely. We pay for all their education as well as we pay them to go there. So we pay them, pay for the, the classes, we pay for them while they're there to do the classes, we give them a per diem, like, you know, so they can eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and we pay for their hotels, and we pay for their flights there if they need to do fights there.

42:26So yeah, of course, people— how do you do that? Oh, he's got the 5 Ps and the Most important P in there is profit. Okay. Now I got to ask you a final question. You met, you brought up education and training. It seems to me that the CSR, that counter training is becoming more important than ever. You agree with me? Yeah, absolutely.

42:46Customer service reps. So yeah, we call everybody a manager. So we have a store manager, a service manager, an assistant service manager, and maybe in some stores, another assistant service manager, because We call everybody managers because they all need to manage, right? They need to manage our customers, they need to manage our operations, they need to help manage the shop and all that stuff.

43:05So that's why we do what we do. But as soon as somebody walks in the door, you're gonna have a friendly greeting. We have what we call a 10-foot rule. It goes for everybody in the company, every technician to anybody, is if you're within 10 feet of a customer, you stop, you look at them in the eye, and you say, hey, thanks for coming in.

43:22My name's Matt. We appreciate you coming in. We appreciate your business. So We truly like have amazing people that are just friendly and, you know, want to help, you know what I mean? When you come in, you're getting greeted properly. You're, you're in a happy environment where we have a lot of fun with it. I mean, we have a, we have a hell of a lot of fun here.

43:40I don't want to do anything that's not fun. That's what I tell my guys, you know, I don't have to. And part of the fun is taking care of people and, and being so highly rated, being one of the highest rated, most reviewed auto repair shops on the planet. That's— my guys take that very seriously, all of our employees, so that they love it.

43:59We just had a big company bash like 2 or 3 weeks ago. It was so fun. We had— it was casino night and we went to a beautiful country club. Oh, nice. I love it. Judy, does he sleep? Yeah, he does. Like 6 hours a night. Like 6 hours. Yeah. That's enough, Matt. That's what I get. He does stop and relax. That's for sure.

44:22This was a blast. I'm excited to have had you on to learn your story and to have so many of our listeners think through all the stuff that you said and say, I wanna be like Matt. I wanna be like Judy. I think we can do this stuff, but I go back to the 10-foot rule. The point to that is not only is it important in recognizing it, It was a rule.

44:47And there's a lot of us in business today that just don't wanna make rules cuz they don't wanna piss off our people, but they don't necessarily understand that we have rules for marketing. We have rules for cleanliness. We have rules for all this. And I don't care if you call 'em protocols, processes, or procedures. We have to live within all of those if we wanna make a magical company like you guys have.

45:08I didn't make that up. I got that. I was in the 20 group for about 6 years at Curry's Auto Service. It was 20 amazing auto repair entrepreneurs that had multi-shop organizations. Everybody had 2 to 10 stores. We just loved the people, became dear friends with a lot of people in the group. And that was from one of the guys, Kim Sigmund, God rest his soul.

45:29That was from Kim Sigmund of Community Tire in Arizona and Howard Fleischman. And they had that rule. So I stole that rule from them. You asked what I did differently with Craftsman Undercarriage than I did with Currie's. I said, not much. We didn't want to reinvent the wheel. We just want to take all the better ideas that come up and just keep refining what we got, right?

45:47Because we got, we got down is pretty damn good. And, but you can pick up new lessons from other people, you know, you should, right? We want to make sure that, you know, no matter what we do, all of our processes or what have you, that, you know, we're, we're having fun, like Matt said, but we're, you know, respectful to all of our customers.

46:06We're honest with our employees, with all of our customers. I mean, that's basically You know, the core to everything. Yeah. I just heard Matt say R&D, rip off and duplicate. In a good way. Absolutely. Oh, wow. God, the 10-foot rule. I love it. I'm gonna take it and bring it to be mine. But it doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna smell and look like the person you borrowed that from.

46:30It's gonna become part of your culture and part of the things that you do. And for someone not to want to take an idea from someone else, Embrace it. Maybe even ask Matt, tell me more deep about why you do this and tell me about that rule. And it comes inside into your business and your culture becomes, it takes the flavor on of your business.

46:49So rip off and duplicate is not a negative thing. R&D, baby. I learned that about 10 years ago from a shop owner in California. It's a compliment. If somebody wants to take one of our ideas, I'm like, go for it. Right. Well, I mean, it's great. It's a compliment. And being part of that 20 Group was a really powerful thing for us.

47:07We received even more than we gave, and we gave a hell of a lot to the group. So we had a lot of good ideas, but we got a lot of great ideas from some really good players, and we got to meet some very dear friends, you know, out of it too. So, you know, if you don't have coaching or training or, you know, somebody you can rely on, you know, or you're not involved in the 20 Group, get involved in the 20 Group.

47:27It was one of the best things we ever did. We now teach it, like, dude, we haven't talked about our Level Up. I mean, we'll have 40 people in here in a couple weeks, 40 or 50 other auto repair shop owners that we do, we do a Level Up training. It's a 2-day deal. We give them a tour of our stores, about 3 of our stores.

47:44We go to lunch, we do a half day of training. We might have a speaker or 2 come in. And then we do the next day, a full day of training, a full 10 hours of training. And it's all about how we've done what we've done. And it's called Level Up. We call it Level Up. We charge $1,000 for it. 100% goes to charity.

48:01We actually match $10,000. So we'll hopefully raise $50,000 for charity. We're into food sacrifice. Give back to the food pantries and such, as well as an organization called Great Vibes, which my assistant Susan and Jim Boone started for— Adults with Disabilities. Yeah, it's an event that they put on every— season, hopefully more often, but it just gives those adults just a social atmosphere, something to do because there's nothing out there for them.

48:35So it's a great charity too. So it's for 18 and older adults, you know, that are mentally challenged and all that. It's a great thing because they had a child with Down syndrome, Faith, and she was just amazing, and they're amazing people. We like to give a little All that money that we do for training and consulting, pretty much all of it goes to charity.

48:55So I know it's probably too late this year, but if I wanted to come the next time, how do I get there? Well, we're way overbooked for this time, but we're going to do one in— because I'm getting people that every day we're getting inquiries. I think we're going to do one in August or early September, and I'd like to do another one before the end of the year.

49:12Judy and I are going— that's the chaos— we're going to Australia for a month. So we're going to Australia, New Zealand for a month in September, October. But yeah, we're getting so many requests. Love for you to come out and maybe we're going to try and do one in late August or early September. I'll come in and do my keynote. That would be great.

49:29And really what's cool about this Level Up is that it started just as our internal training. Oh yeah. Matt just invited a couple of people on this Shop Owners Hangout Facebook page that he was just talking about, you know, how he's his policies, and they wanted to learn more. So Matt was like, why don't you come to our sales training that we're doing next month?

49:51So it just turned into a thing. So it's fun to be able to share with anybody in the industry that wants to do better. We're sharing everything that we know. Gina. Gina, great point. I mean, it started as an internal class that we gave to all of our employees, all of our new employees and all that. And then I was getting calls from people on it.

50:09One of my best success stories, and I've got a lot of them, but Real quick, I'll leave with this. A guy had two shops in Ohio. They were doing like $10,000 a week each. So they're $20,000 a week between two shops in Ohio. And he was open 9 to 5. He wasn't open Saturdays. He wasn't doing DVIs. He wasn't— he came back, he's doing it now like $160,000 a month out of each of his shops.

50:36He just took his wife to Thailand. She's from Thailand. For a month after they had their baby. He's allowed to leave. This was within like 6 months after coming to visit us. I mean, he extended his hours. He did everything I told him to do. He did all his DBIs. He brought in some new people, got rid of some people, and just put policies and procedures in place and duplicated her deal.

50:58And quite, you know, his business went from $20,000 a week to $100,000 a week. I mean, basically. So he 5 times his business and now he is living the life that, you know, he can give his wife and children. And just, it's amazing to see. It's amazing to help. What a perfect end to this episode. I mean, you basically summed it up.

51:17Get out there, learn, kick yourself in the ass. Have someone kick yourself in the ass. This was great. Matt, Judy Curry from Craftsman Auto, uh, 8 locations in Virginia. I had a good time. I had a blast. That was so fun. So fun. We love telling our story. And you know how to tell a great story, both of you. Thank you so much.

51:36Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thanks for being on board to listen and learn from the premier automotive repair business podcast, Remarkable Results Radio. Get your episodic education on the ARPN 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.