The “Monster” in Your Head Is Costing Your Shop Money [RR 1086]

0:00This is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. Hey, welcome everyone. Carm Capriato, good to see you. Good to have you here. Always appreciative to your support and your listenership over all these years. As we're heading into celebrating our 11th year of doing this podcast, I have to tell you, you know, we're so committed to deliver— delivering authentic and actionable content that directly addresses the evolving challenges that you have inside of our great professional automotive industry.

0:33We're gonna do a Coffee with Carmen, a Coach episode today. I'm with Greg Bunch. Can't wait to introduce Greg, but don't forget, we have our really cool app that we've worked on so patiently over the last year for your smartphone, the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. All the shows that are on the network are there. You can save favorites, you can build category libraries, you can see your recently played.

0:59Just go subscribe, go to Google Play, go to Apple, go to automotiverepairpodcastnetwork.com/app. We put these QR code links all over the place so you can get up and on for that. And don't forget, in case you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe. We'd always love to have you as a subscriber. So when we do release this, listen, thank you so much to NAPA Autocare and NAPA Tracks.

1:25Hey, 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. Hey, did you know that NAPA Tracks has onsite 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.

1:54After all, it's your shop, so it's your choice. Let us prove to you that TRACS is the single best shop management system in the business. Find NAPA TRACS on the web at napatracs.com. Okay, let's get on with Greg. Hi, Greg. Hello, hello. Glad to be here, sir. Thank you. Good to have you here. Oh, by the way, so this is Coffee with Carmen Acoach.

2:22I love that graphic that I made. That is so cool. Absolutely. That is just too cool. And then we have this really cool background that you're all gonna see in a little bit with a brewing cup of coffee. And I said, Greg, you gotta have your coffee. And he said he has his. I got my coffee here. And I have mine. So, okay.

2:44This is going to be a very powerful framework of a leadership episode. It's kind of like this, everyone, because Greg and I have already discussed this and I was blown away by what he's bringing to you. It's like we all have two voices inside of us that every shop owner, every specialist, every service advisor has. One voice builds you and the other one destroys you.

3:08And Greg is gonna teach you how to have those pillars, if you will, of voices help build you, right, Greg? Yes. We're gonna go as far as we can. This is great. All these people inside of us and all these particular pillars. I just love your premise. This is really going to elevate our listener. You bet. Now, I'm excited to bring this to the table.

3:30And really, you know, we're not obviously going to get quote unquote religious on the show here, but, you know, we've got our inner voice, right? Which is that wants us to succeed, that wants us to do well, that wants us to be successful, the true essence of who we are. But we have some other voices that go on in our head that try and tell us, nah, you don't really want to do that, right?

3:52And if you study neuroscience, and I don't claim to be one, I don't play one on TV, but I've been reading a lot about human behavior as a business coach. And really, you become a life coach in a lot of different ways. The question becomes, okay, why as human beings, if we know what we're supposed to do, why don't we do it?

4:11Right? So, there's a lot to unpack there. And I think we have this, what I call the monster voice, And that is that voice, and I give a whole presentation on this, but it's the overprotective security guard. And so when we were kids, whether it was, "Hey, I don't want to be the one not picked on kickball," or, "I don't want to be the one that's ostracized for saying something that I believe," or you're figuring out socially who you want to be, who your friends are, what life is going to be like.

4:45Maybe you've got parents that were a certain way, right? Whether they were helicopter parents, whether they were super authoritative type, maybe they were absentee and you had to be the adult in the family. This overprotective security guard is always talking to us about how to make us comfortable and how to make us safe. And you go all the way back into human behavior and go, why do we behave the way we do?

5:09Why do we do things the way we do? And the only way man has survived thousands of years has been because we survive in tribes. If you're in a tribe and you're all gathered around the campfire, you're not going to want to get kicked out of that because literally you could be kicked out into the jungle and eaten by a wild animal.

5:28And not only you lose your own life but lose your legacy, your offspring. Becoming part of a tribe and staying within that tribe literally was a point of life and death back in the day. Well, now, it may have an emotional pain, but it's not necessarily life or death, but You see somebody's willing to share their opinion just between you and that person, but you put them in a crowd and they may have a strong belief they're not going to voice.

5:54And that it really traces back to, hey, I don't want to rock the boat. I don't want to be seen by the quote-unquote tribe as being an outsider. And so this voice that we have, it's not really designed to make us successful. It's not designed to push the envelope. It's not designed to push us out of our comfort zone. It's designed to keep us safe.

6:11And then, you can, again, maybe just hovering a little bit on the religious side of things that we all have a sin nature and it doesn't matter what you take all the religions of the world or all the philosophical views in the world. I think everybody knows that human beings have a propensity to be selfish, to do things in our own self-interest that could be harmful to ourselves, to other people.

6:35So, I think that voice is in there too, but I As I've been studying this and learning this, really there's a separation between those two voices, three voices really, right? That your authentic self, you've got this overprotective security guard in our brain, and then we have what I'm going to call the sin nature that says, "Hey, you know what? You can get away with this," or just that selfishness really that I think we all are born with and we all have to fight.

7:00Greg, ever since you told me about the monster voice, I started to really think about it a lot. And I started to think that, do we get that? Does it overwhelm us when we have fatigue or stress, or maybe we're a little bit in isolation or we're overwhelmed, we're financially pressured, we're exhausted, we're unsupported, and that monster voice has a chance to take over a little bit of our world.

7:25Absolutely. I was talking to a, a client yesterday and, um, he's involved in a family business. He's got some frustrations that his wife is sharing about the family dynamics and it's a multi-store generational business. So she's pressuring him, "Hey, you're part of it, right? You do more than your brothers that are involved in the business." So you got a family dynamic, you've got a business dynamic, you've got a marital dynamic in there.

7:56And I'm sure that his monster is saying, hey, I want to keep the peace. I don't want to rock that boat. What if I have this really tough conversation with my dad and it doesn't go well, right? What if I don't have that conversation and now I'm at odds with my wife? What if I have this conversation and Dad agrees and the wife agrees, but my brothers are now going to push back and think that there's favoritism?

8:15So that monster is in there saying, well, just let it go, just keep the status quo. And then what's happening, it's eating him up inside. That he's not speaking up. So it can get really heavy. Wow, you just described a huge issue that goes on inside of family businesses every day, right? We do a lot of service advisor training, and it's not that a service advisor doesn't know what to do all the time, but it's getting them to do it.

8:43I always joke around at our company, right? You know what, I forgot to properly introduce you in the beginning. I'm embarrassed. Greg Bunch, Transformers Institute, and the owner of Aspen Auto Clinics. And we've, we've known each other for so many, so many years, done so many episodes together. So yes, this guy's the real deal. All right, go ahead. So I'm looking at my own business, right?

9:07My 6 repair shops, even though I feel like we do a pretty darn good job, there's, you know, because I've got 6 locations, there's approximately $1 million a month of work that doesn't get sold immediately, right? And I think everybody knows, right, that if you had 100% close ratio on every single thing everybody recommended, right, we're going to show up at your shop and say, show me, right?

9:28That, you know, if you've got service advisors, right, they— we all look at our average written, you know, it's $2,500, right? If our service advisor closed 50% of that, right, they're a rock star, $1,200. You know, most general repair shops aren't even at that level, right? They're maybe $800, $900. So all of that additional work that doesn't get sold, what happens? Right.

9:48And I ask my coaching clients and I ask the industry, like, what do you do? And people are like, well, you know, we got a CRM. They get a follow-up email, they get a text message, maybe. And a lot of people are literally just relying that that customer is going to remember it and come back. You know what bothers the hell out of me?

10:07I don't mean to interrupt you, but I wrote this great blog about protocols. And I said, you know, maybe it's possible that you're not being able to install the processes inside of your system because you're in a little too deep. Now, if you thought up top as a protocol, what's the protocol for follow-up and follow-through? What's the protocol? And then you can design your processes under it.

10:29My thought was that maybe we would get more done or respect what those processes are because, hey, we've got a protocol on QC. What's the process underneath that that actually makes it work? Anyway, I didn't mean to bump into you, but you're exactly right. Well, so let's take this from the Monster perspective, right? Psychological. And I'll go into my other pillars that you referenced earlier in the show here.

10:52$1 million of work that's not being sold, right? If you go to your advisor and just say, hey, why don't you jump on the phone, right? Kind of have a slow day today, you know, not a lot on the schedule tomorrow. Why don't you call some of that declined work? And try and fill up the schedule. Well, the reality is, and, and I'm sure shop owners are going to shake their head when I say this, your service writers would probably rather go clean the bathroom than go do that.

11:15Okay, they're going to find every reason. Let me do a parts return, let me do an inventory check, let me clean the bathroom. So the question is again, why aren't they doing that? And to me and the service advisors that I've talked to, right, it goes back to that monster voice going, well, you don't want to bug people. You don't want to annoy people because once in a while you're going to step on a landmine, right?

11:37You're going to find out that they took it to their Uncle Sam. You're going to find out that they don't believe the repair that was done, that you charge more than the guy down the street, and you get a few of those calls and now your protective monster says, well, don't do that again. That hurts. Nobody likes to feel rejected. You just got rejected.

11:53You got kicked out of the village, per se, of your customer base, not realizing that 95% of those people are going to be thankful that you called and got them rescheduled. But we hone in on those people that we had a negative experience with. The other pillars that you were talking about, and I can go as deep as we can. I know we're going to have a short amount of time here together for how deep this can really go.

12:14But as I did a study, I was inspired by a book and really took that on and really studied the book of Proverbs. And again, not trying to get religious, but there's a lot of wisdom that is packed into Proverbs. And so part of the premise of the book is this guy had told his friend that had been fired from like 9 different jobs and was really struggling with his career to say, you know what, read the book of Proverbs for 2 years.

12:41There's 31 proverbs. You read one a day and you just work on applying those principles to your life. You'll see that within a couple years, right, your life is going to look differently. And he tells the story that took him probably about a year to really turn things around in his life. The guy's a successful multimillionaire business owner now. And I had been doing that already where, and I'd gone through Seasons of Life, we're kind of reading through those and like, "Okay, there's some cool stuff in here," but digging deeper and going, "Okay, what do these words really mean?"

13:09So there were 4 words that really stood out, and that was wisdom, knowledge, understanding, and diligence. It's peppered throughout all 31 Proverbs. So I'm like, okay, what does that really mean? And I added one from a class I took back in my early 20s, even before I owned any kind of business. And that was when they said, when you're reading something and it says righteous, think of the word right choices.

13:34So I added that pillar in there too. As I was studying this and going, okay, wisdom is really knowing what that right decision is. So Dave Ramsey talks about this on his radio show, right? I provide wisdom. You know, the same thing that your grandmother would've told you. I think we all know wise principles when it comes to money, and that is don't spend as much as you make, save for a rainy day.

13:58Like, we all know that's good wisdom. And so then we have knowledge, right? So knowledge would be, okay, how much do I make? How much are my bills? What can I do? You know, how much do I need to invest? Where can I put an investment? Right? So that's the knowledge component. So somebody could know that and still not do it. Then understanding is, "Okay, what are the interest rates that I can get?

14:20What is the risk level of those investments?" Understanding how money flows in and out of their budget or household or within their business. Now, the key comes up is diligence. Diligence is that guy that doesn't care how you feel. If you read the book Atomic Habits, that's really what it's about. Diligence is doing what you know that needs to be done whether you feel like it or not.

14:43And then right choices would be, hey, I'm not going to do something immoral, illegal to generate money, right? I'm going to do it in an honest, ethical way. It's not going to violate my core values. And so as I looked at these 5 different pillars that come out of there and studying what each of those words mean, one of the things that gets brought up in my coaching calls as we're talking about this is, man, the one I struggle with the most is diligence.

15:09And I'm like, so that goes back to that component of human behavior. If we know the right thing to do, we understand the numbers, we understand our financials, we understand money coming in and out. Why do we not diligently save money? Why do we make impulse purchases? Why do we not do those things that we know what to do? Why do we hold onto that employee that is on our payroll that really isn't earning their keep, right?

15:35All those components go into diligence. And so that's where that study goes, okay, what— there's got to be something holding us back as human beings from doing what we know needs to be done. And that's where I came up with this concept of the monster, right? This overprotective security guard. If you remember the movie The Village by M. Night Shyamalan— oh, right, yeah, I've seen that movie a couple times and it really didn't hit me until I started putting this together.

15:59And if you remember the monsters And maybe people want to go back and watch that movie now, but those monsters, they weren't there to kill people. They were that overprotective security guard. The elders of that village believe that if we scare people, we'll keep them in our little safe village, right? They won't go outside and find out there's a whole nother dangerous world out there.

16:20But they were using this fear tactic that if you go beyond the fence, these monsters are going to eat you, they're going to kill you. So I kind of look at that same kind of a monster. That's what's in our head. Like, Hey, Carm, you don't want to go do this or that, right? You know, what if people don't like it? What if you get rejected?

16:35What if it takes more time? What if it makes— means you got to get up earlier in the morning? Whatever that might be, that— have an uncomfortable conversation. Showing up when it's hard. And so you have to, you have to figure out a way, and there's different protocols to kind of overcome that voice, right, of saying, you know, and one of the tools is literally you take 5 seconds you shut down that voice.

16:58Like, "I know this is the right thing to do. I may not feel like it, but I'm going to do it anyway." And so really where I looked at, and then I've read a lot of leadership books, I've read a lot of business books and self-help books and podcasts and all that. And I go, "Every one of them I've ever listened to all tie back to one of these 5 pillars."

17:17Atomic Habits is about diligence. From Good to Great is all about wisdom and knowledge and understanding, right? That you tie it back and go, man, there's just so much to unpack there. What's the enemy of our success? Right? It's usually not an external force. It's an internal voice that's holding us back from our true potential. 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.

17:48And the best part? It's completely free for members. This program was pioneered by shop owners Pete McNeil and master technician Jake Sorensen at McNeil's Auto Care in Sandy, Utah. They recognized that waiting for skilled technicians to appear wasn't an option, so they built a program to grow their own by recruiting motivated individuals with the right passion and attitude and providing them with structured training.

18:12They proved that apprentices could become the next generation of skilled certified technicians. The program features a comprehensive 9-stage curriculum with in-depth classroom videos, instructor-led NAPA Autotech classes, web-based courses, and hands-on training with a mentor. Apprentices move at their own pace, typically completing the program within 2 years. Graduates earn 4 ASE certifications: the G1, A4, A5, and air conditioning, and are officially registered with the Department of Labor as journeyworkers automotive technicians.

18:46And here's the business benefit: as apprentices gain skills, they generate billable hours, often boosting shop profits as early as Stage 5. Plus, NAPA now offers a new apprentice toolkit developed with Carlisle Tools at an exclusive price, helping break down one of the biggest barriers for new technicians: the cost of tools. Together, NAPA Autocare and your shop can tackle the technician shortage head-on.

19:12Start now, grow your own talent, and build your bench for the future. Visit member.napa.com. Autocare.com or contact your NAPA representative today and get started with your apprentice program. Let's face it, your shop management system is the single most important tool in your shop, period. NAPA Tracks 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.

19:42NAPA Tracks 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. Give 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.

20:07NapaTrax 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 napatracs.com. Greg, it's amazing as I'm sitting here listening to you to discuss diligence, and I think of examples like we've got to follow the processes every time, we have to perform complete inspections, we have to train and educate when we don't want to and when we're tired.

20:43We have to have those hard conversations. And if we can do that and respect that the monster is not talking to us, but we have to be strong in our diligence, we're going to have a lot of success. I think it's also going to build our reputation not only as a business, but as a leader. Absolutely. And you think about consistency in a shop, right?

21:03A lot of shops, the success or whether they have a good day or bad day is truly based on the mood of the owner the manager, the service advisor, the technician, right? That, you know, Carm, you just pencil-whipped an inspection. So I'm old school, started out on paper. I know we all have— probably everybody has DVIs now. So I'm the service advisor, and Carm's kind of that senior tech grumpy guy, but, you know, does good work.

21:26But you pencil-whipped an inspection, and I know it. So the monster is going to say, you know what, just leave Carm alone, he's having a bad day. I don't want to have that confrontation. But what does that do? Cascade that all the way through the customer experience. I don't confront you, so I just, you know, write up the few little things that you wrote down.

21:44I talk about those things with the customer, and now that car's on the road. There's a breakdown. There's, you know, something— the deferred maintenance that caused a further issue. Now that customer's back upset at us, and it all ties back to my unwillingness to have a tough conversation with that master technician and say, We have a protocol here, right? Every single car gets inspected every single time.

22:06There are no shortcuts. I need this thing done correctly, even if that, you know, you're going to bite my head off, right? Like, it doesn't matter. We have a system and a process to follow in my shop. It doesn't matter what mood you're in. Doesn't matter that you don't feel like it. Doesn't matter that you got to pull that car back in and do the job right.

22:22If that system is not followed because it's based on somebody's mood, the customer suffers from that. The business suffers from that. Yeah, I'm just thinking here, here's this guy, Carm, over in the shop who failed to do it completely right. And I'm, if you will, the shop manager knowing this and thinking of what goes on inside of my mind is what kind of conversation can I, should I have with Carm, legacy guy, he knows better.

22:51And I think part of us overthinking what we should do prevents us from doing it a lot of times. Absolutely. Well, if you think about it, right, what does a service advisor really get paid for? They get paid to properly communicate, be the client advocate. So if you are the client advocate, you know, you've got to get this person on your side.

23:15The inspection, okay, it's about safety, reliability, and it's about trust. We can't miss stuff, even though they may not be happy that they may have to have it done. But today in our whole professional world, the DVI, the comprehensive inspection of safety inspection on that vehicle is— it was brilliant when it was discovered. And I think we looked at it as a toy, but it's part of our professionalism.

23:41Carm, have you ever driven a like performance car, like on a track with an instructor or anything like that in your life? I could have, but I didn't. Okay. Well, it's an interesting experience. So I've got an older 2002 911 and took it to the track. I'm not like racing people, right? But it was like a Porsche event and they put a driving instructor in the car with you.

24:03And so, you know, you get warmed up, you go around the track, and we all have like this internal gut of when we hit the brakes, how fast we can take that corner. Now, the instructor that knows another level is saying, okay, hold off, hold off, hold off, now brake, right? Or push, push, push through that corner. And what I found is my car outperformed my gut feeling, meaning that I could— that car could outperform where my level of safety and comfort was.

24:34And I wouldn't have pushed it if I didn't have that person sitting next to me knowing my car better, knowing how to drive on a track like that. And getting more out of that car and out of me. But what I had to do is push past my fear that I'm going to roll the car, spin out of control, going to not be able to brake fast enough.

24:53Right. So we take that analogy and we put it on the sales counter of a lot of service advisors will only talk to a customer, confront that technician up to that level where that knot in their stomach is telling them that that's far enough. But true success comes from pushing past that, having that tough conversation. Again, whether you're a shop owner with your employees, with a vendor, with a customer, being able to push past that fear, that monster that says, hey, if you have this tough conversation, maybe that person isn't going to like you, maybe they quit on you, maybe they badmouth you, whatever that is.

25:30But is it the right thing to do? Is it the wise thing to do? Do you understand the consequences of not doing it? Well, then that means you push past that knot in your stomach and you have that conversation. And believe me, I don't have this mastered either. I'm not perfect at it. There's conversations that I need to be having that I've been putting off because the monster says, "That's going to hurt.

25:53That's going to potentially have a negative effect short-term." But the other voice says, "But Greg, it's the right thing to do. It needs to happen. You've got to address this behavior." So powerful. Hey, I just want to remind everyone, we're here, Coffee with Carmen, a Coach. We're with Greg Bunch from the Transformers Institute. Appreciate you being here, and the CEO of Aspen Auto Clinic, 6 shops out there in Colorado.

26:17This has been brilliant so far. I think you're motivating our listener to dig down deep inside and find— we talk about leadership all the time, but I think this is almost, you know, I don't know if it's Hovering over leadership, if it's supporting, it's the foundation. But there's so much here. Please do a personal reflection on all of Greg's points and say, hey, I am and I'm not.

26:41And if you're not, figure out how to get better at these levels, these pillars. Another one that I run into with shop owners is if they don't want to look at their KPIs, if they're— no, they're not good. They don't want to look at their profit loss statement if it's not good. But you can't manage what you don't measure. And believe me, I've done it too.

27:00Like, "Oh man, this was not a great month." You open up your QuickBooks or your bookkeeper sends you the report and you're like, "Okay, here we go." But I don't want to look. And that head-in-the-sand type mentality. And there's another part of Proverbs where King Solomon writes, "Know the condition of your flocks." That's where the wool from your sheep, that's what they make the clothing, the food, and all that.

27:24It's a call no matter what position we have in life. Like, we have to know, right? And that's that knowledge. Like, do I really know what's going on? Or do I put my head in the sand and I'll— as long as I don't know, it's not going to hurt me. So there's where knowledge says, I'm sorry, I don't mean to get unemotional on you, but you need to know what's really going on.

27:43When you and I were talking, you said something to me I wrote down. You said, business is an emotional math problem. I wish I was the one that said that, but I read that somewhere. I'm let— that was like a big light bulb that went off, right? That everything in the business has emotions tied to it. The emotions of our customers, the emotion of our employees, our emotions.

28:05When really, like you said, it's like a— it's a math problem, right? So that's where knowledge and understanding come in. Go, hey, I know you may feel emotion for this employee,, but they're not pulling their weight or whatever that might be. And are you making a business decision? Are you making an emotional decision? And if you confront that and you ask yourself that question, and some people will literally say, "Gregg, I know I'm making an emotional decision.

28:31This guy's been with me 25 years. He worked for my dad before I took over the business. I am willing to take a hit on my numbers because of the emotional attachment I have to this employee." What am I going to say to that? They own it. They're putting that, that relationship above, right, their profit margin. That's their choice. They're the business owner.

28:51But my job as a coach is to get them to look in the mirror, be able to voice that and admit that, and then understand now I own the consequences of that decision. Someone either on a previous episode or somewhere I read this or heard this— fast nickels, slow dimes. And when I was thinking of the issue that we had with the disgruntled Carm in the bays who didn't do a complete job, he was going for fast nickels and my job is for slow dimes.

29:20That would've motivated me knowing that we can't do things fast because the slow, the fast nickels could've lost that customer. And we have to do things proper and right. So slow dimes gets us where we ultimately long-term strategically always want to be with our clients. Anyway, you just made me think of that. No, no, that's good. And I remember, you know, getting a little bit more psychology here.

29:46When I was a technician, cars that come in and out, they become a piece of machinery that you're looking at. And so when, when I had the opportunity to meet the family that was going to be in that vehicle or the driver of that vehicle, you know, be able to look them in the eye, shake their hand, it did something to me as a technician to go, you know what, I just met that guy.

30:08I just looked him in the eyes. I shook his hand, told him he's going to be in good hands. I need to do a much better job. I need to be even more thorough. It put a human element into that vehicle that you're driving, knowing that, you know, hey, your mom's in the hospital 2 states away, you're going to be driving it.

30:23I better make sure this thing is just perfect. And so, you know, the technicians, we have to talk about that. We— that there's a human element, that these are not just a piece of machinery. These are people rely on us to make sure their transportation is safe. And so that nickel guy, how could we maybe change that, right? Understand, you know, who drives that car.

30:43Maybe even if they're waiting in the waiting room, bring them back, show them, introduce them. And that may reframe that guy trying to just get through the day and pencil whip something to go, know what, I do need to slow down. I need to do this job correctly for that person. Greg, let's jump into wisdom. Wisdom. So where I started with this, Carmen, I'll have to send you a picture there.

31:03I don't know if you can put it on this, but I went onto Amazon and I bought a costume. I think it was a Moses costume, right? I was looking for that robe and then a long gray beard and gray hair. And so I was at the mastermind meeting and we were on a break. Nobody knew what was going on. So here I come from the back of the room up on stage, you know, people are snickering like, what the heck is going on?

31:24And then I read this monologue as if I'm Father Wisdom, right? Personify this character and talk about that the more we tap into wisdom and people have to define really what wisdom is and what that looks like. But I define like, if you listen to me and I'm here, I'm available. There's a lot of different places to gather wisdom, but the first step in this is wisdom.

31:51And so Proverbs again says, there's wisdom in the multitude of counselors. So one of the reasons we have our mastermind groups is there's wisdom. We had a shop owner that was about to buy a gas station that has a repair shop that the tanks are 39 years old. Well, in the state of Colorado, they're mandatory pulled and replaced at 40 years. Well, obviously the guy knew that while he was trying to sell it.

32:17And so the wisdom in the room said, hey, This is not a good idea. Here's what's going on, right? That, and if they get into those tanks and then they find there's a leak, right? You're now on the hook for all of that. So wisdom in the multitude of counselors and whether that's, you know, hey, a marketing campaign, a, you know, a pay plan change, buying another building or, you know, buying and doing an acquisition, right?

32:40So there's a lot of wisdom out there. And, you know, I think Jim Rohn said it, you become the 5 people you surround yourself with and the 5 books that you read. What that principle is about wisdom. Who are you listening to? The guys that don't have any money in savings and spend it all on beer and pizza on Fridays, or the people that are building success and long-term?

32:58You've got to find out what your source of wisdom is and tap into that and listen to it. And then we have knowledge. CPA is the one that gives us our knowledge, right? That doesn't hold back to say, "You're making money. You're losing money. Here are your margins." your KPIs. Their knowledge is really unemotional. It's either this is the facts and this is the truth, whether you like it or not.

33:20So how willing are we to listen to that voice of knowledge and go, this is where I'm really at in life? Knowledge in my mind is learned and earned. Absolutely. And so is wisdom, right? That, uh, there's an element of— I used to teach my kids this, right? That smart people learn from their own mistakes, wise people learn from other people's mistakes.

33:43Years ago, as I kept going to more and more training and being involved in masterminds and associations, and then all of my selling the business and then working for corporate America, I started to realize that I was a perpetual student. Those two words just flowed out of my mouth. I own them words, I think, and, and I speak about that a lot.

34:08As a leader of any organization, an individual who's— pick the role in the shop, you have to be a perpetual student. How they look at the opportunities that they have as clients and what should be fixed and what shouldn't be fixed. They're out there gaining knowledge and you have to learn how that adapts and how you end up building that relationship. To not be a perpetual student in today's life and/or in this professional industry of ours is wrong and it's truly dangerous for our careers.

34:41So, you know, we've probably both talked to people that said, I don't want anything to do with AI, right? It's the Antichrist or whatever. Well, you better have a knowledge of what AI is now, where it's going, and how it's going to affect our industry, right? That's— you can't put your head in the sand and expect to survive if you don't know what's happening regarding AI and what it's going to do in our industry.

35:04You've had him on the show before. We've done episodes on AI. We have, marketing perspective on, and you know, instead of SEO, it's AEO. But we also, I'm getting ready to do an episode with Chris Cloutier. I mean, this guy's deep in AI. He's told me a book to read that I read on it and I fell in love with what AI is today, where it came from, what it is today and where it's going and how it can help you.

35:29So. Yeah, we can ignore it to your point. So you've had him on our, you know, he's a friend of our network here, right? Brian Sump's been on your show before. And so, yeah, so he was in the room. We're talking about knowledge, right? Let's get real personal here. He was at some kind of a conference or something and they had this, you know, as a husband, how would your wife rate you from 1 to 10, right?

35:531, you're a piece of crap. 10, you're Prince Charming, the best thing in the world. So the speaker challenged everybody, text your wife right now and get what that number is. You talk about knowledge, not wanting to know, like who is brave enough to do that? Brian Sump was brave enough to do that. Right. And I think the number came back at a 7, which is, I think, pretty darn good.

36:14And then he had a conversation with his wife. Okay. What do I need to do to make that an 8 or 9? So that's taking wisdom. Don't get shocked if your relationship's not where it is. Knowledge is your wife's really telling you where things are at. And then understanding is understanding what do I need to do? And if that means for my wife and I that I stop working at 6:00 at night, even though I could work till midnight, I need to cap it off.

36:41That becomes that time. Wisdom, knowledge, understanding, diligence says, "Okay, it's 6:00. I know that Carm wants to talk, but let's postpone that till tomorrow." Right? Like, honor that commitment diligently. And maybe there's room for, you know, once in a while that, you know, hey, there's just an exception to the rule. But right now, that number can go up. Tying all of those things together for improving your relationship, improving your business.

37:10Okay, so a great episode. But what we have to do right now is to challenge every listener, male, female, whatever job it is in the industry, to go out and get rated. Go ask 1 to 10. Ask your employees, ask your peers, ask your significant other, ask your family, and collect those pieces of data and find out what your maybe— maybe averages at work, averages at home.

37:39And I love what Brian said: what can I do to go from 7 maybe to 8? Honey, I know I'm not perfect, but I have to do. And, you know, I think that— well, what a learning curve. You can't let your ego get in the way. And that's the monster I don't want to face out. And so, you know, asking our employees— I've got another client that recently did an anonymous survey, right?

38:03SurveyMonkey or something like that, a net promoter score internal for his employees, right? And learned a lot of very valuable information, right? I think I'm the best employer in the world. Well, 30% of my team doesn't. Why not? And it's not always pay, right? It's whatever. Hey, I wanted, you know, you told me we were going to get more education when I came to work here, or work environment, or whatever that might be.

38:28We can't fix things if we don't have those numbers, right? Sending out a survey to our customers. I'm, you know, we just had our mastermind meeting a couple weeks ago and we sent out a survey and it's like, okay, let's find out what people said. Now, me, I really didn't wanna do it because I'm like, "No, it was a great meeting, everybody's happy."

38:44Well, I think everybody was, but there was a few that like, "Okay, there's some good points that we need to listen to." You and I both do industry events and speaking, and there's always those surveys, and human nature is we're gonna gravitate towards the negative ones, but we need to know what they are. We need to look at, you know, is that just an outlier or did I really say, "Um," way too many times?

39:06Or did I not respect— I got in trouble one time and I made an inappropriate crack about, you know, that a shop was full of ex-cons or something like that, where, you know, that, you know, people have people's perception of a shop. And I had a gentleman come up and I sincerely apologized. It wasn't part of my script, but like, you know, he was an ex-con and he had some that worked for him, but he's like, look, we all turned our lives around, right?

39:30It was 20 years ago. We made some mistakes. Like, And I'm like, you know what? That was absolutely wrong of me to go down that road. Learned a lesson from that. Greg, listen, it's happened to me. I've been there and I've done that. Felt so ashamed, if you will, after I apologized and I said, you ass. I just kept being down on myself, but it didn't stop me.

39:53Okay? It honed my skills, if you will. It, it honed my better judgment. It honed my, if you will, impromptu-ness of, you just thought it, it doesn't mean you have to say it moment, right? And part of what I think has helped me over the last 3 years is when we formed our Toastmasters group, Remarkable Results Toastmasters. And it makes you value the words that come out of you if they're important and if they're not and how you can speak.

40:24And a lot of times in Toastmasters, it's not what you say, but it's how you say it. My dad used to say that all the time. You can tell somebody to go to hell and they punch you in the face, or they high-five you and laugh. It's a lot of how you say it. Hey, thanks for letting me know where I gotta go.

40:39Oh my God. And again, this sounds like, uh, Pastor Greg here speaking. I don't mean it to be that way, but again, a proverb: power— life and death are in the power of the tongue, right? So our words have power, and the words that we speak and the words we don't speak. This is a perfect end, what you just said. And I know you could go on for 2 hours and dive really deep in this.

41:06Do you give this class when you're out at conferences? Not yet. So I have, for my internal Transformers group, you know, I created this notebook or, you know, with a dialogue. And so when I came out on stage, I read and I didn't memorize it because it was like a page and a half. Where I'm that character. And then I had Doris, who's on my team.

41:26So I think she was knowledge. I had Seth Thorson, who was understanding. I had Fernando, who's on my team, was right choices. And who am I missing? Diligence. I had somebody else stand up and do diligence, right? So we all read our parts. And then as we went through it, we made notes. Okay, what came out of that? What spoke to you?

41:46And then on the last mastermind group, I actually, even though I bought a monster mask, I was going to do the monologue as the monster. But I created an AI monster with the creepy background music and everything and the character. So I started with the monster dialogue and then we went into a group discussion on, you know, listening to our monster. What's he saying to us?

42:08Where's that monster voice holding us back from being more successful in our life? And where did that programming come from? And going back and understanding, you know, as kids, you know, the, like I said earlier, the kid that their parents were kids themselves or weren't there, those kids had to grow up fast. And a lot of those turned into what we now know as our control freaks, which can be— you can leverage that for success.

42:31That, you know, there's an element of being in control that brings business success and life success, but it can also go too far and stunt your growth. That the people pleaser, right? That, hey, I wasn't accepted in my social circle. Maybe I wasn't accepted very well in my family. And I knew that I had to walk on eggshells and just be agreeable to everybody.

42:51Well, great, you know, that can be great to a certain extent for bringing on employees and being a good service writer and all that, but it can be detrimental when you're putting that ahead of what's right for the business, what's right for that customer, you know, whether it's asking for that money, asking for that sale, letting that employee go that shouldn't be there.

43:09So you've got these strengths and weaknesses that are all birthed out of our childhood experiences. And you're never going to silence the monster, but you got to put them in its place and say, what am I really listening to? Am I listening to this overprotective security guard? You know, again, that you could use the Scooby-Doo analogy too, right? That there was always this monster that was scary, and really what it was is you pull the mask off and it's just some guy trying to protect his comfort zone.

43:33I'm going to encourage you to create this and take this on the road. And I think the title of it is Silence the Monster. And I think people, you know, and once you put your Subtitle below that. I think you'll pack the class because every single one of us knows that we have this alter ego, sometimes not good, the monster side that gets in our way of being super successful.

43:57I think you could pack the classes all the time. And I gotta go back to the monster mask and that whole thing. You know, I've given my keynote on, uh, the Rise of the Specialist a bunch of times, a bunch of times, a dozen, 14, 15 times in the last year and a half. And probably half of them might come out in a chef's jacket.

44:14And it's kind of, if you will, a uniform, because the whole concept of this thing came out from the professionalism of the, the food industry and what respect chefs have. And then you think about what we look like in our industry to take the chef's jacket off. And, and I usually have another kind of uniform on under that. I don't wanna give away the whole premise of what the keynote's about, but I encourage you Silence the monster.

44:38What a great seminar that would be. Thank you so much, Greg Bunch, Transformers Institute. How do they get a hold of you? TransformersInstitute.com. Got our phone number, got my email on there. Fill out a form, let us know how we can definitely help. And whether that's service advisor training, mastermind group, we have online training, we have online groups, we have in-person groups, you name it, you know, somebody's Got, you know, if they're from $800,000 and they want to grow, and we've got programs that help people grow multi-store.

45:09We help multi-store owners. We've got, you know, clients that are doing over $20 million in sales and, you know, helping them build their leadership team, train their leadership team, whether it's, you know, shop foreman, store managers, COOs, director of operations. In fact, you know, the COO group is heading down to Texas to be with one of our multi-store shops down there and learn from each other.

45:29So we got You know, really the only thing that we don't work on is the technical training. There's plenty of great people out there and great companies doing that, but everything else we cover to help a shop owner and their team be successful. Well, thank you so much for being here with me. Coffee with Carm and a Coach. Thanks, Greg. Thanks for being on board to listen and learn from the premier automotive repair business podcast, Remarkable Results Radio.

45:55Get your episodic education on the ARPN listening app. At automotive-repair-podcast-network.com. Also enjoy the podcast on our Carm Capriato YouTube channel. Carm is all for advancing the professional automotive service industry. Until next time.