Stop Hiring in Panic Mode: Build a Recruiting Pipeline for Your Shop [RR 1094]

0:00This is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. Hello, my friend. Carm Capriato, Remarkable Results Radio. 11 years in, having more fun than I ever, ever have. We appreciate you being here. You know, we're committed to delivering for you authentic, actionable content that evolves and helps your challenges that you have each and every day. And And we know that there's an awful lot of top shops that constantly listen to hone their skills and grab new ideas.

0:36Glad to have you here. Oh, by the way, just in case, you know, we have a YouTube channel at Carm Capriato. Like and/or subscribe. You can, so you can basically see if you're listening through audio only, then we sure do appreciate that you may listen through and watch the video. And don't forget about our great app, the Automotive Repair Podcast Network app.

0:58It's so cool. All the episodes in one place, all the shows in one place. You can watch the video, you can create your own playlist, you can share great episodes with people. We spend a lot of time fine-tuning and honing all the details. Anyway, please do that. Look at— I'm with Chris Lawson, the founder of Technician Find and Easy Bench, and we are going to talk about why the smartest shops never scramble to hire.

1:24God, that's a problem that I seem to have every minute of the day. Yeah, you're right. Hang out there. We got some really cool stuff to talk about with Chris Lawson. Are you looking to take your shop to the next level? With NAPA Autocare, you can deliver unbeatable customer confidence through the Peace of Mind Warranty. Learn how to upgrade your service and grow your business.

1:47Connect with your local NAPA rep today. 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 the business. Find Napa Trax on the web at napatrax.com. Hey, welcome back. Hello, Chris, how are you, my friend?

2:15Hey, I'm doing fantastic, Carm. Always love hanging out with you. Yeah, me too. Hey, look, Chris has spent nearly 8 years helping independent auto repair shops hire technicians, specialists, through hundreds of conversations. God, I'd love to be a fly on the wall with that stuff with shop owners and technician specialists. He's identified a pattern. Smart man. He basically says the shops that never panic when the tech leaves aren't doing anything complicated.

2:46They're just doing something consistent. And one of the things that we're going to talk about here in this episode is what's called EZbench. It's something Chris just recently launched, and I'm so excited to hear a whole lot more about it. And so the listeners should walk away with our goal, Chris, the difference between reactive hiring, like a fire alarm approach, and proactive bench building, or, as you call it, the heartbeat.

3:10We're gonna talk about the 3 reasons technicians leave shops, a dead simple system any owner can start this week, the concept of becoming 10-mile famous. I love that. I can't wait to hear about that. And why the best technician specialists are not on Indeed. Ooh. So let's do this thing, my friend. We've had hundreds of conversations with shop owners about hiring. What's the one pattern, Chris, that you see over and over that most owners don't realize they're stuck?

3:44That's the question, right? I would say that it is the, the fire alarm syndrome. It is when a technician leaves or when one of their employees leaves, it sets off a fire alarm and everybody scrambles. And that's a problem for a bunch of reasons. I mean, stress aside, I mean, it's very stressful, but it's also a problem because when you're in stress, and I've talked to, I mean, hundreds of shop owners at this point and GMs.

4:09When you're in stress, you don't make the best decisions. And that's when the poor hires happen. That's when you hire a warm body or somebody that can fog a mirror. And then what ends up happening is if you're lucky, they'll stick for 6 months and then you're in the same position all over again. You said that the crisis isn't the tech who leaves.

4:27Uh, what do you mean by that? Yeah, it's not the technician that leaves. It's having no one to call when they do. I can tell you, when you've got a deep bench and you've got half a dozen people that you can call, if that happens, it completely changes the whole perspective of that situation. It's not— and, and not only does it change the perspective if the technician leaves, but it also changes the perspective when you're fully staffed.

4:53If you're fully staffed and then you've got a bench, then what ends up happening is you're not worried about being, you know, held hostage over raises or people threatening to leave, it puts you in a much more calm and more confident position. So there's shops that don't scramble at all. That's right. If you're treating it like— we call it passive recruiting. You know, it's passive recruiting has been around forever.

5:16Big Fortune 500 companies have known this for decades. They do passive recruiting. They do branding ads that just are out there all the time to attract good employees. But it's not something that's really embraced with smaller businesses, with shops, with independents. And we're trying to change that because it puts you in a completely different position when you actually have people to talk to.

5:39And you can think about it. I have this conversation a lot with my marketing buddies. You can think about it like marketing. If you're consistently marketing, if you're consistently out there and you're talking about your brand, you're talking about what you do and the results that you've received, and you're promoting your good reviews. Then customers see that and it's consistent. And you don't want to start marketing when your car count is way down, you know, you want to be marketing all the way through so that you can have deep roots in the community and you can have a consistent flow of business.

6:10It's the exact same thing with employment. You're marketing your shop to potential employees that are maybe 6 months, maybe 2 years, maybe 5 years down the road. So this always be recruiting is, you know, ABR is something that I think top shops really get and know. And by the way, I love the word scramble. It really does define I'm in some deep doo-doo because I haven't planned ahead, right?

6:43Well, that's exactly it. You know, it's the old saying, you repair your roof before it starts raining. This is exactly the same situation. And the best time is when you've got everything fully staffed, you've got everybody in place, and then you can just do it very incrementally. I think of this also like the train. I mean, if you've ever seen a train start from a standstill, one of these big long trains, it's a mile long and has coal and everything, these really heavy trains, and they've got 6 or 7 engines, it takes so much pull to get these things moving.

7:19But once it gets moving, the momentum keeps going. And it's the exact same thing. If you can build that momentum while you're fully staffed, then you're in a much better situation when someone leaves, because now you don't have to start from zero. A perpetual wheel. Yeah, flywheel. And I don't know if that flywheel should be named recruitment or retention, but probably both.

7:43The R&R wheel. R&R. I love it. Yeah, the R&R perpetual wheel. You can use that anytime. I love it. You have a story about a tech who watched a shop's Facebook page for 2 years before they applied. That's so interesting. You know what, it's funny, I've heard this story now several different times from several different shop owners, and I'll tell you what, the first time I heard it was On April 27th, 2024, when we spoke together, we had a panel and it was shop owner Rory Neamey had mentioned that there was a technician that watched his Facebook business page for 2 years before he applied.

8:27And I've heard different iterations of that. And here's the deal. The deal is they are watching you. Your future employees are watching what you do. And it's important to have culture pieces out there. And what I mean by culture pieces is show what a day in the life looks like. Show when you recognize your technical specialists for ASE certifications. Take a picture of them, recognize them.

8:54Show what it looks like when you go out as a group and do team outings. Show what it looks like when you dress up the waiting room for holidays and decorate. Show what it's like to work on a regular basis, and then it gives them an idea of, hey, this is a shop that really cares about what goes on. And I'll tell you, extra bonus points is if you can show how you are taking care of your employees' lives inside and outside of the shop, you get extra bonus points.

9:25That's something I can tell you right now that big chains and dealers are not doing. And that is one of the ways that you can really differentiate yourself as an independent shop against other larger shops in your area. It's a point well taken. And I think a lot of the marketers get that the culture that we have inside the shop, that's indicative to being happy and excited, come to work happy, leave work happy.

9:50And I'm not saying everything is peaches and cream on a daily basis, but at least the attitude should always be uplifting and to get that out and in the face of not only a potential client, but someone who may want to come to work for you. You've talked to hundreds of technician specialists directly. What do they actually want? I think a lot of owners assume it's all about money.

10:15That's the common thought for sure. And how much of a sign-on bonus do I have to offer? I take a different perspective on that. I never lead with a sign-on bonus. I think sometimes it's important to have because it's just because of competition. If you've got a bunch of shops in your area that are offering sign-on bonuses, you've got to be competitive.

10:34But by this point, technicians that I've talked to, they understand that a $15,000 or $20,000 sign-on bonus is— they're never going to see it. They understand that that's just kind of a carrot that's dangled in front of them, and there's going to be so many hoops and strings attached that that it's just not believable. But I would say that what they're really looking at is it falls into 3 different categories.

10:58And the first one is respect. I can tell you of the conversations I've had, what ends up pushing a technician over the edge and getting them looking at other shops is when they get disrespected or they get disgusted with themselves and the situation that they're in, and it just becomes too much to bear because Technicians, they have broad shoulders and they take a lot of crap, but there gets to be that one point in time where it just gets pushed over the edge and then it's done.

11:29And it usually revolves around respect. The second thing is growth. Is it— are they able to grow? Are they getting new training? Are they getting new opportunities to be enhancing their skills? These are the things that also— is there a pathway to growth? Is there a roadmap to advancement? I mean, are there opportunities for, you know, lead techs, shop foremen, you know, going up into management, doing things like this, shop ownership?

11:57Are these pathways out there? I actually created a GPT that helps map out the career path of a technician because that's a really, really effective retention and a really effective attraction tool is to say, hey, look, Where do you want to go? Let's build you a plan. Let's show you what your toolbox needs to look like if you want to get to this level.

12:18Let's show you what ASE certifications you need to get to. Let's plan this out. Let's figure out what— let's map your growth. So 1, respect. 2, growth. 3, money. Notice how I put money third. Yeah. You talk about a mental culture shift for a shop owner to think that the person sitting across from me and all these people that I've hired in my entire life and since I You know, started turning wrenches at 25.

12:45This is important today. And I love how you outlined it. It is the, if you will, the most sophisticated way to build a great team. And I love your point. I wrote a blog a few weeks ago because I saw a TV ad for a local dealership straight in everyone's face. Hell, to housewives and you name it, whoever had a chance to watch that ad.

13:08During one of the sports games, and it said, best in class pay and benefits. It said cool in the summer, warm in the winter. I'm reading this off my screen. Pay training, plenty of repair orders, all the tools you need to do the job right, a laptop, modern, clean, comfortable facilities, and state-of-the-art equipment. And that's what they said straight away to the community population of Western New York as they're looking to recruit.

13:34New people. And I am sure the wife could be saying, you don't get that over at Bob's place, do you? Boy, you've always been complaining about that. Look, if you go there, you're gonna get that. And so if we're paying attention to what's going on in the real world, and I know that there's an awful lot of upheaval going on at the dealerships, they're losing people to a big and high degree.

13:59And I think it's segmented around the country in certain areas. But Chris, the perpetual wheel, recruitment and retention, and I love— but is some of this knowing change that you continue to preach to shop owners, this outreach, does it help them? Absolutely. To your point, one of the things that I've started doing is every Saturday I post in my school community an independent intelligence briefing, and it's about the roll-ups, the PE activity that's happening in different areas.

14:29And, you know, within EZ Bench, we talk about this a lot too. There are specific things that you can do to position yourself when a roll-up firm comes into your area, when a private equity behemoth comes in and starts purchase— buying up independent shops, because a lot of times it just destroys culture and it goes from an environment that's a family environment or a nice team supportive environment to a corporate environment.

14:57Where there's 3 or 4 levels of management between the technical specialist and the decision maker, where all of a sudden they become a number, all of a sudden they are forced to compete against their peers, and they just, you know, lose their humanity. And it's a prime opportunity to start promoting what makes you different as an independent and attract these folks that will be looking because these corporate management teams are coming in.

15:28As a NAPA Autocare, you already know that your reputation is built on trust, reliability, and service. That's why every member automatically provides customers with the 24-month, 24,000-mile peace of mind nationwide warranty. Now that's coverage your customer counts on and a competitive edge you can't afford to overlook. Want to deliver even more value? Well, you can upgrade to the 36-month, 36,000-mile warranty program.

15:55Even better, that extended coverage is also available when your customers use their NAPA credit card for qualifying repairs and service. With quality NAPA replacement parts built to meet or exceed OEM standards, you're not just offering competitive pricing and reliability, you're standing behind your work with the best warranty in the industry. Give your customers peace of mind wherever the road takes them and give your business the advantage it deserves.

16:21To get started. Connect with your local NAPA representative today. Hey, stay ahead of the curve with NAPA Autocare's newest auto tech initiatives: Fast Track Assessments, Accelerator Immersive Training, and Tech Assist Smart Support. The future of technician training is here. Connect with your local NAPA representative for more information. Hey, when customers choose a NAPA Autocare Center, they get more than a repair. They get trust, savings, and peace of mind.

16:51Want your shop to stand out? Connect with your local NAPA representative and get the conversation started to become a NAPA Autocare Center. Hey, you know the technician shortage is real, but NAPA Autocare has a solution at no cost to members. The NAPA Autocare Apprentice Program builds tomorrow's technicians through a 2-year, 9-stage curriculum. Learn more at member.napaautocare.com or talk to your NAPA representative today.

17:18Let's face it, your shop management system is the single most important tool in your shop, period. NapaTrax was built from the ground up to make your business more profitable and efficient. We provide an extensive set of tools to increase and track profitability in real time. NapaTrax offers the industry's best post-sale support, hands down, and we train your people on-site. Yep, on-site. And we offer remote refresher training 10 times a week, and customer support is open 6 days a week.

17:49Give us a call, visit the website, or join our Facebook community today to learn more. We'll prove to you that Trax is the single best shop management system in the business. NapaTrax is always customized and tailored for you, whether you're a one-man shop or a large multi-bay or multi-location company. After all, it's your shop, so it's your choice. Visit us on the web at napatrax.com.

18:14That's N-A-P-A-T-R-A-C-S dot com. Let's talk about the school, the FreeSchool community at school.com/technicianfind. It's cool. I mean, I love your posts. I'm there and sometimes I just can't stop reading. You do such a good job. Tell us what it's for. I started this community a few years back, and so I started actually Technician Find in 2017. Carm, you know my story, but I really had to be a quick study because I didn't know anything about the industry.

18:47Some very, very generous shop owners took me under their wing. They taught me the industry and invited me to join a board of directors in the Twenty Group. And what ended up happening is we started working on what has now become TechnicianFind. And we did a lot of trial and error to figure out what exactly attracts technicians, service advisors, and everything. And part of the process, I found out that 20% of the shops we work with, they were getting really outstanding results.

19:14They were hiring within 2 weeks. They were doing everything right, they had systems in place, they knew how to, you know, sell the dream and communicate the opportunity, they had their offers dialed in, everything was really great. What I wanted to do is I wanted to share those best practices with everybody else. I wanted all of our clients to get results like that.

19:37So that's why I started the school community. And what we do is we drop in all the best practices Shop owners can talk with each other. Right now we're at 486 members, um, all independent shop owners and general managers, and we have great conversations. And that's what it's all about, is sharing what works. Interview questions, standard operating practices, templates, GPTs that help you write ads and do things like that.

20:03I love the whole GPT thing on and using that. We're getting ready to do an episode with, uh, the great guy who, who's very much into software technology, Chris Cloutier, and he is all over AI. I mean, we've done episodes on AI. There's, there's more discussion in our industry about AI good, AI bad. Where's it going? How's it getting there? But I recently read a book, The AI Thought Experiment, and I got it.

20:28It just rocked my world as to how you can use it. And I think there's a benefit. I also think that there's an awful lot of junk going on about how bad unemployment's going to be because AI is going to cripple our world. I'm not worried about our industry. I, we need people to work with their brains and their hands. And yes, can AI help us in some of that heavy diag?

20:49Sure. It may be able to look over things, you know, so quick, all these resources, but you know, I don't wanna go backwards in our discussion, but hey, the FreeSchool community, school is skool.com/technicianfind. We'll make sure we put that link in the show notes. So, Chris, Indeed, we're always going to back up and move into, well, I got to post in Indeed.

21:19Woe is me. Yeah. You know, all roads seem to lead there and, you know, they do some things very, very well. I mean, they're the world's largest resume database. I mean, there's hands down, there's no denying that. And they have a phenomenal interface. It's very easy to use. But the problem is it's just a different pool. It's a job board. You know, if you're hunting a blue marlin, you're hunting somebody that really is maybe not particularly happy, but they're not looking for work.

21:48They're not going to be on a job board if they're not looking for work. And if you're looking for someone that's experienced, someone that has a good attitude, that wants to work, you need to go somewhere else to find them. You know, that's the bottom line. And that's what we built Technician Find on is, hey, look, We need to find technicians that are already working, so we're not gonna do that where they're looking.

22:10I have told, I'm sure it's a story I heard from you. Um, by the way, Chris has been on the podcast 9 times. I just recently counted, and I so appreciate you've been on panels. You've been, you and I, one-on-one. You're so smart. Go to my website, remarkableresults.biz, and just type in Lawson in any of the search features there and and catch some additional stuff from Chris.

22:34You said something so big and so important, and that is the great quality people that aren't on Indeed that seem to be happy, but they're not, seem to feel they have a great career, but they're not sure. And I'm not talking about how to poach them, but I'm saying there are some that are good, so good, and they're stuck and they just need a really great owner to bring them in and pull 'em up and, you know, and, and show 'em, bring that continuous education, show 'em the right tools that we have, show 'em that we have enough work orders to make them fruitful every week.

23:17That is, I believe, where you're going with all of this. Absolutely. What's really vivid to me is a conversation I had with a shop owner. He said, "I really want to change the perception of an independent shop." And he said, "What the perception is to a dealer technician is it's some guy with a potbelly and a cigar hanging out of his mouth and a dirty rag in his back pocket."

23:40And I thought that was a really vivid way of saying that. And he said, "It's not." He says, "Look at my shop." I mean, it's immaculate. He picked up his laptop and he pointed to the base and it was immaculate. I mean, you could eat off the floor. I mean, it was sparkling clean. And he's like, what do you think of this?

23:55And I was like, wow, it's beautiful. It doesn't have to be that way. I know. I hear you. You said something really big there, perception. And golly, the word professionalism kind of connects with that. Everyone knows that I'm crazy about this whole language shift in the industry and how important that I know that it needs to be. And yet we have too many people, you know, that just don't want to realize that the perception from the client looking in at us is so critical in how we look and what we do and what we say.

24:30And so if we would just consider how we can grow the professionalism of our business, I know it's a heavy lift. There's probably 30 things to pay attention and look at, If you don't wanna be a strong strategic thinking entrepreneur, then you're just gonna be a hobbyist. But if you want to get up and go and grow, you need people like Chris and all of these great things.

24:53We cover all this stuff on the podcast. If you're listening, by the way, for the first time, you know, we've got you covered from A to Z over the last 11 years. Okay. So let's talk about this 10 Mile Famous thing. I love what it really, in concept, if you know this whole, what it looks like in practice of my shop owner listening right now, what do I actually do to become 10 Mile famous?

25:19Yeah, 10 Mile famous is something that I really coined because it's an idea of getting what you're all about out there and keeping it out there. And it's not from the perspective of your customers, it's from the perspective of potential employees. And it's as simple as just putting $5 a day into a Facebook ad, but these aren't ads for hiring. This is different.

25:43And this is something that we found out the hard way. A lot of, in the early days when we were trying to help shops build their bench, what we would do is we would run employment ads and then they would build their bench. And what happens is when an employee sees an ad and they apply for the ad and they find out that you're just collecting resumes, It creates a lot of bad blood, so you don't want to do that.

26:05This is different. What you're doing is you're doing culture ping ads, and the call to action isn't, hey, come and apply. The call to action is, hey, raise your hand, tell me, you know, comment respect if you really believe that respect is the most important thing in your shop. Comment growth if you think that having a pathway to growth and becoming more and a better version of yourself is important.

26:28So it's just getting these conversations started and then nurturing these conversations with adding value. You don't want to be bugging people all the time. And I see this done the wrong way all the time. It's like, hey, when are you going to come to our shop? Hey, when are you going to come to my shop? No, you want to stay in touch with value.

26:47And that's a big challenge that we had to come across is how do you stay in front of somebody, keep the conversation going, keep adding value and not be a pest? That's powerful. Stay in touch with value. Oof. Absolutely. Will these kinds of ads even help car count and new, new clients? Yes. As a matter of fact, funny you should ask. Couple times a month when we are talking with our clients, they'll say, you know, it's funny, Chris, our car counts go up when we're running these employment ads.

27:18And they say, why is that? It's weird, cuz I'm not running an, you know, an oil change special or, you know, anything that has a direct call to action that's service related. And I say, What it is, is they see that the ad is so well-written and that you care so much about your employees and they're showing what's going on inside of your culture.

27:39They think, you know what, if that shop takes care of their employees that well, they're going to take care of my vehicle. I'm going to say something. Don't crush me for saying this. Never. But what you just said seems like A warmth, and, and that's the word I just started to think about. I'm gonna go there because there's something really warm going on between their people and their clients and what they do and, and the, the value that they have.

28:07So I don't know why, just boop, the word warmth came to me anyway. Okay. Because Carm is the kind of a guy that I listen so intently to people and then all of a sudden I form my own shape of what I just heard and keywords. And then I say, what does this mean? And what about that word? Anyway, let's jump into EZ bench.

28:27I love this. I mean, where did this thing incubate from? Yeah, you know, over the years I've been asked over and over again, hey Chris, we're fully staffed, but we really want to have a bench so we don't have to start from zero. Can you do that for us? I tried. We did a lot with that, but it's like this, and this is how I describe it now.

28:46Let's say you wanted to get married. You hire somebody to go on a bunch of dates for you and you say, you know what, I'll show up when you're at the altar, I'll bring the ring. You can't do it that way. It doesn't work that way because you're building a relationship. You're building a relationship with the technician. You're building that relationship with the service advisor.

29:05You're building the relationship over time and it has to be you building the relationship. And so when I made that shift, It all changed. What we do is we remove as much of the heavy lifting as possible. We have pre-printed messages that you can grab and that are proven, that you can grab and you can send. We have a dashboard that's set up so that you can keep track of all the individuals and you can keep track of the last time you had a communication, the next communication, and what you should be saying.

29:33And then we have weekly implementation workshops where we troubleshoot. Hey, what happened? I got ghosted. What did you do? And we troubleshoot and we figure out, okay, let's get through this issue. What I call it is, I call it, it's staffing insurance for independent automotive repair shops. Staffing insurance. Staffing insurance for automotive repair shops. I thought of the word portal, a bench portal, a hiring bench portal.

30:00Yep, we do. It's actually a portal that you get to through the Technician Find School community. And there's a lot of resources in there. There's swipe and deploy ads. So the ads that we're talking about, about becoming 10 Mile famous, you just come in, you grab the text, you grab the image, you boost it, and you're done. You're good to go. And the cadence is what's really important, is continuing to do this.

30:26And it only takes 20 minutes a week. The idea is that you want to keep 5 to 10 pre-qualified texts warm on your bench so that when that inevitable happens, you're not starting from zero. So it's kind of like an easy button and some— I'm thinking it's almost like a reliability thing. I know I've got tools there and I sense, I feel I'm going to grow.

30:54I need somebody. I sense, I feel I have a problem in the shop and I need to do something about it. And all of those particular feels that you have, those moments of, oh, what do I do now? You can go back and rely on the EZ bench because a lot of the tools that you need to start a drive for a new person is there.

31:18Any success stories from someone that's been using this? Yeah, absolutely. The service is relatively new, but I'll tell you one that, I mean, it was very dramatic. What happened is we had a new shop owner join in during the launch. I shouldn't say new shop owner, he's been in the business for years. He's got 2 stores, he's an MSO, he's got a 3rd store on the way, was fully staffed when he joined, but he said, you know what, this is really what I need because I don't want to have to start from zero if I lose someone.

31:467 days later, we hop on one of the first implementation clinic calls and he lost 3 technicians in that 7 days, all for different reasons. And quite frankly, none of were he had any control over. But he said, you know what, we were able from the first implementation clinic to the second implementation clinic to add 17 names to our bench board. We've hired 3 techs.

32:12So he ended up hiring 1 B and I believe 2 A technicians based upon what he had the tools that he'd used inside of the bench and the fact that he had 17 technicians on his bench board within that first 2 weeks. Man. Wow. It had to excite the hell out of you. It certainly did. And I tell everybody, I say, you know what, this is what happens when you work it.

32:37I mean, he went in and he got 17 technicians. He did what we talked about in the meeting. He had 17 techs on his bench board. And then he worked with the tools and his outreach was solid. The big thing is a lot of shop owners ask me, hey, how do I keep from getting ghosted? And I say, that's all in the messaging.

32:57You're saying the wrong things at the wrong time in the wrong way. And once you have that dialed in, you don't get ghosted as often and your offers stick. Ghosting. Oh, so if someone's listening right now, Hey, I need this. What should they do next? Join us over at the SKOOL community. We, you can see, get a feel really quickly what it's all about.

33:21There's a lot of detail on it, and you can also mix it up with all other shop owners in the community. And you can sign up right through the Technician Find community. There's a link right on the right-hand side of the homepage, and it's very simple. So it's SKOOL.com/technicianfind or technicianfind.com, and you've got links there. I do, yes. We have links directly from the main website.

33:46So if you had all the clients that were in our listening, uh, listening audience, what would you tell them to do next? I would tell them to come check out the community. I'm really proud of this community. I'm proud of the shop owners that are participating in there, and we're just putting some really good content there. And there's so many— what I love most, and I think I'm like you in this respect, Carm, is I love it when people take my ideas and run with them and get results.

34:16And I see that every day inside the community, and it's just so amazing. That's why I do what I do. You're a giver just like me. Here, free-flowing thoughts. Enjoy them. Do something with them. Okay. I love this episode. Thank you so much. I learned a lot, but I want to go one step further on something you said about, about 10 or 15 minutes ago.

34:40Allow me to ask this question. We were talking about sign-on bonuses, okay? And you were going with some crazy, crazy numbers. Are there any hooks to a good sign-on bonus that you know of? Yeah. In a sense of putting teeth in them so that they don't get abused. They're not outlandish that someone's, well, well, 15, 20 grand, you know, they just want to get me in a seat and interview me.

35:06And if someone does have, say, a $5,000 sign-on bonus, but there's probably hooks to it, you know, we need to accomplish so many things. Is it an immediate? Is it a 6-month? What do you hear about those kinds of things? Between $3,000 and $5,000 is really the spot. It's believable, it's achievable. And then from there, most of the time when I'm talking with a shop owner, what I'll say is what you want to do is you want to put some teeth into it..

35:34And you want to, if you have a probationary period, have it correspond to your probationary period. If you have a 30, 60, or 90-day window, you can do it that way. I've seen shops that say, okay, we're going to pay out over a year, you know, and you got to stay for a year. I've seen tools, you know, that will give you tools and will forgive a certain, you know, percentage of that, those tools over, you know, certain periods if you meet certain benchmarks.

35:59Here's what you want to do though. You want to have it in writing and you want to have it up front because people's memory gets fuzzy. And I can tell you, I've seen this personally. What ends up happening is the technician thinks that they're going to get this money and you think that you're going to get this production or you think you're going to get, you know, these benchmarks.

36:21And the technician doesn't remember the benchmarks, but they remember the money. You always want to make sure that you have this in place and that you're monitoring it. That's the other thing that I see is If you're not having regular meetings and you're not monitoring the progress, then it's a problem because it all goes out of existence. And they'll say, "Oh, remember, you had to do a certain amount of training," or, "Remember, we needed you at this certain level and be able to handle these specific skills or these specific jobs by yourself, and you're not quite there yet, so we can't release this portion of the bonus."

36:59It's however you wanna structure it, put teeth in it. Makes all kinds of sense, Chris. Thank you for that. And the thing I think about is you said it in writing, it's gotta be well thought out. If say it was a 6-month payout and at 90 days you're ready to part ways, but that individual says, hey, you owe me the rest of that money.

37:17If it's not written and signed, then you probably will lose. Everybody's memory gets fuzzy when it comes to that. I know that's what happens. Hey, look, thanks for all the great things you're doing for the industry. Thank you for being my friend and thank you for working so hard. I love the EZbench concept. I love the idea. I think it's probably the next level in this whole recruitment thing that we're doing in our industry.

37:41And thank you so much, Chris Lawson, the Technician Find and EZbench, technicianfind.com. Thanks for being here, my friend. Thank you for everything you do for the industry, Carm. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. 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.

38:08Also enjoy the podcast on our Carm Capriato YouTube channel. Carm is all for advancing the professional automotive service industry. Until next time.