Are Your Service Advisors Killing Technician Production?

0:00Welcome to Repair Shop Reckoning: From Chaos to Control. Because too many shops today are running on chaos. Phones ringing, technicians frustrated, front counters overwhelmed, owners buried in problems with nobody to call. Kevin Brown has spent over 30 years in the trenches learning how to take that chaos and turn it into control. Shop owner, operator, consultant, leader. Through industry shifts, insurance games, bad hires, great hires, and lessons learned the hard way, This isn't theory.

0:29This isn't corporate training fluff. This is real shop experience, unfiltered. On this show, Kevin breaks down what actually works: running profitable shops, front counter control, training technicians, negotiating with insurance companies, building systems that make your shop run instead of burn, and the mistakes that quietly bankrupt shop owners every single day. No corporate scripts, no sugarcoating. And yeah, somebody might get offended. That's okay.

0:58Disney's 2 doors down. But if you want the truth about this industry, buckle up. This is Repair Shop Reckoning: From Chaos to Control. Let's get started. All right, welcome back. So today we're going to do a pretty cool episode on something I keep— that keeps coming up and keeps coming up over and over again when I'm doing a reckoning on these shops that I'm taking on numbers.

1:20You know, very first thing I do is go through everything front door to back door, like I've talked about several times, to make sure everything's correct. And 9 times out of 10, it's been not correct. And I'm finding all kinds of stuff. But one thing that keeps happening over and over again that I haven't heard anybody talk about yet besides what I'm about to talk about, but I'm sure everybody's going to be talking about it.

1:41I was going to say, you'll make it the hot topic. Right. So first I'd like to start out with our phone training. So we're 5 weeks down training on some— down weeks downstream on some of these trainings for these guys. And, uh, We've been getting really good feedback, and I wanted to read one of the, uh, comments we got back from one of them today.

2:02Uh, this is Justin at 281, which he's like, since we started going through this control framework, phone calls have become a lot less stressful. I don't feel like I have to answer every question anymore. Instead, I'm focused on asking better questions, listening, and guiding customers through the process. It's really simplified everything for me and made my Made me much more confident on the phone and my life easier.

2:26How about that? You know, who knew? Yeah, right? My guys, I listened to Lincoln the other day, like I told you. Holy shit! He took the guy right down the path, opened the gate, walked him into the corral, shut the gate, gave him the grain. Like it was just like wow! I just watched step by step unfold because I've been doing it for so long.

2:46These steps anyway that we came up with, I don't even think about it. But now that we've been having it on the forefront where we talk about the different Letters every week. I see it. I laughed because I was talking about the client that came into the podcast to you yesterday, and you're like— I was talking about what happened. You're like, oh, you went, you took the command, you did the— you know, you're taking me through the steps.

3:03Good job, you went through the steps. He did it in the Trump voice. Nobody commands like you command, Jason. You're a commander. So the process on all this is when I start taking on shops, the very first thing I do is check their shop management program. Check their metrics and see if they're right. 9 times out of 10, they're not right. Their costs are off.

3:26I talked about this last week. Their costs are off. They're just, their percentages, all kinds of stuff that's not right. You have these shop, these software companies setting up these programs. Like they told the one client, we don't need to really go set everything up for you. I mean, your shop's kicking ass already. Okay. So there's no room for improvement at all.

3:46So basically you're not going to set the man's shop management program up. He's good to go. That's a consultant. That's bullshit. That's a consultant. That's a tech metric that said— was supposedly told him. I don't know. This is what he told me. So I'm like, well, I don't know, but here we are. So I start going through these numbers, and one thing I keep hearing over and over again is my mechanics just don't produce enough.

4:13And then I hear from the mechanics, we're getting screwed on flat rate. Right? Yep. So when I started looking at these, these numbers, I got my beautiful notes, right? Um, I want to go through this podcast and I want to do it strategically. Once again, I want to go section by section so I don't miss anything. Now I'm going to try to do it as slow as possible.

4:31We all know when I get passionate, shit starts flying, the F-bomb and everything. I think that's when people like you the most, so it's good. What's that? I think it's when people like you the most, so that's good. Except for people who get offended by swearing. Yeah, one thing I've been getting a lot of feedback from is from a lot of the shop owners.

4:46The reason they like me and they like my podcast and come to me because I'm relatable. They say I talk like them, you know, and I think that I'm not knocking any of the other coaches, but a lot of these guys that are coaches for these big companies have never been in a shop life. I started out as a tech. Yeah. Okay.

5:08So I have all the certifications and all that stuff. I've never been ASC certified. I think I had my AC certification for ASC years ago. That's it. It's just nothing that I ever would have made a ton more money being ASC. Yeah. Yeah. Not knocking ASC. Don't really care one way or the other. Right. But I'm relatable to these guys because I talk to them, not down to them, not at them.

5:35You know how you like when you listen to Sean Hannity? I can't stand listening to him because he fucking seems like he's yelling at you all the time. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Um, Dan Bongino, you know, he seems like he's just fucking pissed off all the time. Um, but some of these other newscasts, the other news guys you listen to, they're like, okay, you could listen to them.

5:51Like Joe Rogan. I could listen to Joe Rogan because Joe Rogan is not accusatory. He's not yelling at people. He's— he— I like him because he's straight to the point and he calls it as he sees it. Yep. Sean Ryan Show, same way, calls it as he sees it, doesn't give a shit if he offends people or not. That's kind of how I am, you know.

6:08Um, now I've gotten a lot better to say, you know, not all coaches are bad, but you, you understand what I'm saying. So I do things different. I'm very hands-on with it. And that's a lot— I get a lot of feedback from these guys, man, I talk to you a lot. Well, you're paying me to do a job. Well, and that's why, um, you said it a few times in a few different ways last week, and that's why I put those clips out to, you know, is because you talk about walking everybody through the whole entire process and how their numbers are wrong and how when you go in you do a deep dive.

6:38And I think a lot of A lot of companies, small businesses, whether they're in the shop world or not, you know, we talked about before the consulting type of consulting you could do, you could do in any business because there are consultants that are not diving in and looking at the full picture, you know? And even me, you know, I've done sales leadership, that kind of thing, but I'm not typically going in and looking at their back numbers.

6:56And so I think what the complete picture is, is like I could teach them to sell all day long, but if that money's just being dumped into a sandpit, it doesn't really matter. Right. I always like the term the owner's carrying it out the back doors as fast as it's coming in the front door. Yep. So it can't— the business can't sustain it, right?

7:13And I think that's one of the problems we have, that it's amazing to me. It's, it's almost like a, um, it's almost like a roadmap, how it just— you look at it, there's just lines everywhere. Like every— my God, my cord came unplugged. I'm glad I had headphones on. This one too. Yeah, something happened. Hello? Hello? Here we go. Boom. So what I'm— it's kind of like a roadmap right now, and it's like, uh Every time I look at a different set of metrics, I'm like, "Wait a second!

7:40There's a whole other problem. There's so many problems through these numbers that are causing other problems, that are causing morale problems and all kinds of stuff with these technicians and service advisors." And da da da da da. So every time I come up with one of these, I say, "Okay, let's go ahead and just do a podcast on it to try to help people."

7:58Okay. So I started out this week because last week I took on three new clients and. I started looking at their things and I kept seeing, hearing the same thing. So I'm like, okay, well, wait a second here. I've known this has been a problem in shops, but let's talk about it. And I think that these informational podcasts that me and you don't have a fucking guest— okay, let's talk about flat rate.

8:19Jason's an ex-flat rate tech. Now he's not. Now he works at McDonald's and he's happier because he's a mechanic. He left the industry because of flat rate. And that's what, like, everybody just jumps on this bandwagon. Flat rate, flat rate, flat rate's the devil. It doesn't work for me anymore. I switched it a few months ago, right? Let's just go ahead and clear that up.

8:38Everybody knows it. So I say there's a line in the sand though. This was probably about 4 or 5 months ago, 6 months ago where you said, you know what, I'm tired of seeing all the negative stuff and all the stuff that's really not being productive and helping anything. It's not changing anything. It's not making the place better. This is still a good opportunity.

8:54You still love what you do. There are people that still love what they do. There are still, still good companies out there. Let's create content that helps these companies change their industry, you know, like change what their results as opposed to just the bullshit that like doesn't empower them. Yeah. I hate that fucking word. I know. I hate every time we're not liberals.

9:13Every time I use that word now, I'm gonna think of you. So yeah, you, you, you frustrate me, Jason. You frustrate me when you say that. Now I'm frustrated. But like, didn't, didn't you just sign somebody on that said, man, I've been, I've been rebuilding my business just by listening to your podcast? Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. It seems like I've got to the point now where I'm like out of, I just don't know how to go any further.

9:32So I called you. Yeah. And you know, the funny thing is when people call me, they're like, uh, can you talk? And I'm like, yeah, what's up? Well, like, here I am, the guy on the podcast. Let's talk. Like lately, you know, I haven't been at the shops really here and there. Like this week today I showed up, it's Wednesday. Yeah. I have a meeting with the guys.

9:49It was the end of the month Friday. I have my meeting with Jim and Jason and Lincoln at the— we go to a nice-ass restaurant. We say, okay, here's the growth this year. Here's what's going on. Here's what's good. Here's what's bad. It was all good. I said, all right, I'll see you guys next week sometime. Okay. Call them, you know, uh, yesterday afternoon.

10:05Hey, you guys need me? No, if we need you, we'll call you, Dad. Or Jim tells me, you know, we're good, you know, and the numbers are still going good. They don't need me. That's what I've built this for, right? So I could have freedom. I've been hauling gravel, been building roads in my backyard, calling shit like that. But think about the freedom I have because of the systems.

10:22And the number one thing that happens when we go outside the systems, we have problems. And my son and everybody will tell you the same thing. We stay inside policy, Dad, we're good. Yep. The minute we go out, oop, new policy needs to be made. And that's a big thing talking about like sales and service advising customers calling in. That's a big thing I've been working with our, with our clients on their coaching is, is like, don't make a customer go outside your process.

10:42You have a process and a system for a reason, and they're rushing you and making their, their, their issue make you guys like have this FOMO, like you're gonna miss out on it if you don't bend your policy and process. And what speaks volumes for you is if you say, we have a process that works, we have a system that works. Works and this is, this is what it is.

10:59You know, like you're gonna go through it. It's not like we're gonna bend the rules because now you're playing defense. You lost all the control. Totally agree with that. And as a matter of fact, like here's like a little tidbit. I've been hauling gravel out of the Demuse, uh, landscaping supply and they take cash or check. Well, I only had so much cash.

11:16I'm like, shit, I have no more cash. So I grabbed the check and I'm like, what is your policy and your process for if I give you a check written out to you, When I'm done, she's like, oh, no problem, honey. Write me the check. I'll keep track of the loads you get. When you're all done, you come in and fill the amount and we're good.

11:31Okay. I didn't walk in and go, this is what I want you to do. I said, what is your policy? And then she knew it. She— that's what she does. Yeah. So I'm that customer walks in. Okay, how do we do this? Here's what we do, sir. Boom. But once she's an older lady, an older gentleman runs the place. So they already— they're smart.

11:45They've been in business for a long time. Yeah. Now, here's where we run into problems like the girl at Dick's Sporting Goods the other day when I'm trying to buy 5 Yeti coolers for NLB's golf outing. The girl's sitting there text messaging, and I say, can you help me? Well, right now I'm texting the people that I'm watching their dog. Tell me this last night.

12:02Yeah, like, what in the fuck is going on in this world where you're allowed to even do that at work? And didn't you say like the manager stepped in and took her place? Yeah, manager stepped in, said, I'll help you, sir. And I started bitching about it. He's like, sir, have a good day. My wife's like, please don't say another word, sir, because he's going to make you return all these coolers, and I really want to get this over with.

12:18So she's just like, come on, hon. And it's just like, wow. Like, that girl got away with being a cashier that's allowed to lean against the counter and tell me basically, yeah, I'm not going to really help you right now, even though it's my job and I'm getting paid to do it. I'm at work. I have something more important on my phone right now, so the manager has to step in.

12:35What does that tell you about that company? They have no control. No control. So anyway, are service advisors setting your techs up for failure is the big question mark. Okay, you're expecting 50 hours but only selling 30. This is happening a lot. Stop yelling at your technicians for not producing if you don't know the metrics. Okay. And here's the problem we run into.

12:55A lot of these guys' front-end programs are not set up right. They're not doing declines and stuff like that. So they look, they have this artificially high, you know, sell-through rate and all this stuff. And they're, oh yeah. But nobody ever takes the time to go, okay, Jason only did 32 hours last week. What the hell is wrong with Jason? Nothing wrong with Jason.

13:14If we had good numbers, we realized we only sold 32 hours. Yep. And that was going on. And then like a couple of these jobs where the customer— the company only sold 32 hours for the technician that week. We're talking shops that don't have backlog, right? So most of these shops don't have backlog. But the one, the guy sold 32 and the guy still did 40 because he had a job that he was finishing up for the week before.

13:35So he still finished that job and still finished the week Right? So my thing is like, these guys are like, okay, we always need to, we need to put another tech on, put another tech. We need more capacity. We need— wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's stop here. Stop the train. Pull the emergency brake. If we had good numbers, we would realize we have a ton of capacity because our guys are there 40 hours.

13:58We're paying them 40 hours and they're there. They're producing 20 because our service advisors are only producing or selling 20 for them. So they can't produce more than you're selling. They can't go pull cars off the street and fix them and say, hey, I got you another 20 hours, right? Yeah. So this is where I talk about the service advisor as a gatekeeper of the business.

14:15And this is where a service advisor can make you and break you. And all the guys in the back are like, that's bullshit. Last week they're like, you're full of shit. You're wrong. You're this, you're that. So let me get this straight. If you go out there and write a good estimate and you give it back and the service advisor doesn't give a shit if he sells it or not, so he doesn't do it or he does it half-assed and only sells half of it.

14:33And doesn't try to really put anything into it to get the whole thing sold. And you quoted a job for 10 hours and he sold 5 hours of it and he sold 5 jobs at half price. That would've been 50 hours for the week, but he sold 25. Well, and like, look at real numbers. We had the one client, what was it like?

14:52He had the, his average invoices that he proposes is $1,289 and he sells $520 or something as an, as an average. So it's not like one time the client's like, oh, I need to hold off on this and that. And on average, He's only getting half the proposed invoices. Yeah, 49%, I think it was, right? Yeah, 47. 47. So he was under, under half he's selling.

15:13Yeah. So just put it in perspective, out of 10 jobs, he's selling 4 and 3/4 jobs. Okay. But you're bitching at your tech. And there's a lot of different variables here, guys. I'm not saying this is an absolute formula. Like I just said, there's jobs finishing up, there's jobs that are getting halfway done through the week, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have tricks of the trade that I've been doing now.

15:36So these guys are knowing exactly outside of their program how much they're selling a day and a week for these guys so that they're kind of making them aware. Yeah. And it's very eye-opening because I've had several of these clients go, well, no matter what, if we do a job and it's booked time and something happens, we get it apart and bolts are stripped and stuff like that, that's on us.

15:59We don't upcharge the customer. We don't call them back with more recommendations. I'm like, what? I go, you can't be in control of something that's been taken apart 5 times by somebody else you bring into your shop. You can't really foresee what's going on because you start taking it apart, then you're like, well, it's missing this gasket, this is gone, this is gone.

16:15Boy, this is a real mess. I have to buy more parts. These bolts are stripped out, or these holes are stripped out. I'm at the Healy coil on them. So you're just going to look at your flat rate tech, if it's a flat rate tech, or an hourly tech even, it doesn't matter. We put metrics on everybody and go, hey Bob, This job paid 2 hours, but you're going to end up having probably another hour and a half on top of this drilling holes and finding all the parts.

16:36So, but that's okay, Bob. We're just going to have you go ahead and eat that hour and a half. You got 2 hours. We don't want to upset the customer. So we're going to eat that. So now we take our effective labor rate and all that. And we look at our productivity and all the numbers we put into it. And Bob took 3 and a half hours to do a 2-hour job.

16:54What is wrong with Bob? Bob's broken. No, your leadership's broken. Bob's fine. You know, Bob, you ever see that commercial or that little, um, picture that's on TikTok and Facebook? The guy holding the balloon? This is Bob. Bob says, fuck you. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, that's kind of how these flat rate techs are starting to get. Yeah. And I don't want to— I'm okay, flat rate techs, whatever, hourly salary, whatever, however pay plan you're on.

17:23What I'm trying to depict here is you have metrics on you. If you're not producing, the one thing the shops notice, everything they'll notice, the one thing the shops, the one number the guys know, all these shops, all pretty much all the time is how much their techs are producing. Yep. And I got shops that their techs are producing literally 15 to 20 hours a week and they're doing 40, they have 40 hours available, right?

17:483 techs, you have 480 hours for the month, right? These guys are producing 200 hours. They're like, we need another fucking tech. I'm like, wait a second, this is a mathematical equation. That's happened? Like, they think they need another tech all the time? I have a client that always thinks he needs to hire another tech. Why don't you fix the efficiency of the techs or the front end or your shop?

18:07Fill the hours of the guys you have. Yeah. So right now, okay, since I have moved from flat rate, which was about 3 months ago now, yeah, to hourly. I have 3 techs out there, so we have 480 hours available for sale every week. My pricing is so good and my pricing is so structured, if my guys all do 480 hours, which they're getting paid for, that means all my techs, their 40 hours, they do 40 hours.

18:37Yep, simple as that. Yep, I'm happy. I am not that guy that says I need to make 120, 130, 140%. If you can get guys that are doing 200%, 9 times out of 10, you're overcharging people. We charge for what we do. There's weeks that these guys might be under, but there's weeks they might be over. But at the end, long as we hit 480 hours at the end of the month or above, I'm cool.

18:57Last month we did like 530. Okay, now here's what the guys are going to say. Well, if I am a technician and I get paid hourly, and I do 40 hours, or I do— I get paid for 40, but I produce 50 hours a week, do I get a bonus? Why would you get a bonus? I get paid for 40, I did 50.

19:18That means the shop owner's lining his pockets. Okay, we'll give you the bonus. Put it right there in that account. So next week when you get fucked because you didn't do this, you didn't do that, and you produce 30 hours and you're there 40, we'll take that extra 10 you produced last week and we'll take it back. And what we'll do with that number, we'll have 2 accounts.

19:34We'll just literally move that 10 hours back and forth. We cannot 100% produce 40 hours without a doubt every week in our business. We have stuff that screws us, wrong parts, backorders, whatever. So we have to look at the average. We can't say, okay, this week he did 50, next week he did 30, next week he did 50, next week he did 20.

19:54Do you know what I'm saying? You're not doing 40 hours a week. So we kind of look at the whole month at my shops. It's really funny because it's like, are you requesting to be on flat rate or do you like, you want to like go back based on your hours you're putting in? That's the problem. That's the mindset we got. Going out here.

20:08And that goes back to the girl texting. Well, they're lucky to have me here. They're lucky to— I'm a technician. There's a technician shortage. And here's the other thing I do hear a lot of the guys say, and I agree with it 100%. A lot of these guys think they're fucking Johnny A-Tech when they're horrible. They're freaking a C-Tech at most. Yeah.

20:24And they come in and demand big money and they can't fix shit. We see them all the time. Well, the dude that had the— that we've read the numbers, the service advisor, he was the least coachable guy that showed up out of all the sessions that we've done. You know, he was, I don't have a problem. Problem. I'm not. So I asked him to pull those numbers.

20:41And then when we did the deep dive, we did the forensics on the numbers and pulled it all together. We're seeing all the opportunities that he's missing and he's walking around like he's like the best salesman ever. And how, how's his attitude now that you pointed that out? I know we're meeting tomorrow, so I'm, I can't wait. So, so you're expecting your technicians to turn 50 or 60 hours a week, but your service advisor's only selling 30.

21:01Then you put them on flat rate and wonder why they're pissed off and underperforming. Okay. Once again, I just use flat rate as a thing. I don't, we're not going to have the flat rate. This is not a flat rate destruction. This is just what's going on. This is what I've seen. All right. That's not a technician problem. Right. Cause if you know, that's a leadership problem and a systems problem.

21:22Once again, we don't know our numbers cause we don't pay attention to our metrics. Garbage in, garbage out. You cannot run stuff nowadays by the way you feel. This is not— we, we— feelings, you have to take feelings out of your running your business. Yeah, you could have empathy, meaning if Jason Tracy goes out and falls down on the weekend because he tripped and he broke his shoulder and he's in a bunch of pain, you could feel bad for him, right?

21:48Yeah, but he's still— you still have a business to run. Yep. Jason, you can't do this. Can you do this with your arm? If not, I'm gonna have to lay you off. Whatever, we can hold you for a couple weeks. Let's find a spot for you. Empathy, right? Yeah. But you can't say, well, Jason, you're going to be out for 10 months.

22:04Well, I'm going to go ahead and pay you because you're a nice guy. You know, there has to be business decisions. I'm not saying cut your people's heads off if something happens like that, but at some point there has to be a stop loss. Yep. Like that stop loss, right? So, and today, so let's talk about this. Okay. The math is most what most shops ignore.

22:23I want to do that. The numbers are what the shops ignore because the numbers don't lie. If you have good numbers in, you're going to have good numbers out. But if you have garbage in, you're going to have garbage out. And that goes to the point where a lot of these guys now are having these artificially high close rates, sell-through rates, because they're saying, okay, we have 3 different brands of tires.

22:44Uh, well, we'll just use tires as, as an example. Yeah. Instead of deleting— let me back up here. That'll be way too confusing for people. Okay. I sell a tune-up, a front brake job, and a rear brake job. The customer declines the front brake job and the tune-up, but they want the rear brakes. So instead of you leaving them declined, you delete them.

23:03Ah, so the program doesn't even know about them at that point because they're gone. So you have to leave them deleted. Yep, garbage in, garbage out. It looks like you're doing great, but you're deleting, right, 30, 40, 50% of the job, right? So here's the other problem is you give them 3 flavors of tires and you freaking— they pick the one and they delete the other 2.

23:22And then they leave them on there, you should have deleted them tires because you just gave them options. Yep. So that drives the numbers down. So we have to be very careful with them numbers. If they're deleted for something like that, that's what we need, exactly what we need to do. Okay. Yep. But if it's a tune-up, front brakes and rear brakes, they decline the tune-up and the front brakes, we definitely have to leave them on there declined, right?

23:46Yep. Because that will be the truth Now, I'm going to repeat this because people are going to get confused. That would be a true decline, right? That would be a true sell-through if you did not sell them 2 things, right? But if you say, Jason said, I want high-dollar tires, medium-dollar tires, and low-dollar tires. I want a price on all 3. So you send them to him.

24:04He says, okay, I'm going to pick the middle and I decline the other 2. Well, you should get rid of the other 2 because you gave them a choice. You still sold the job if you think about it. It was just what flavor tires they wanted. And this may be a stupid question, but if you're deleting this, to me, I'm thinking like if that customer comes in again, you don't have like a past record of like, we recommended the brakes to you last time you were in, right?

24:24Like that would be gone. You wouldn't see that. Yeah. So you're missing a future opportunity. Or if they came in and said, hey, what was that brake quote? Right. You have no idea. You have no record of it. Right. And a lot of them, a lot of them programs call it deferred work or something like that. And the chances are like on our program Shopware, it pops up next time you open a repair order.

24:43Yeah. Hey, deferred work right there. So the bottom line is like, yes, we should probably get rid of— we're picking good, bad, and shitty tires. Good, whatever. However we want. Gold, bronze, silver bronze, whatever. Whatever tires they pick, you get rid of the other 2. Absolutely right. But you wouldn't get rid of deferred work and you need brakes still no matter what.

25:03Just because I delete them doesn't mean you don't need brakes. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So, you know, that's the thing. So if you, A tech can't produce hours that aren't sold. That's what I said earlier, right? If I can't go out there and bitch them, you only did 30 hours. What's the problem? You're here 40. Well, I didn't have the work to go out there and sell it to you.

25:21Right. So flat rate doesn't create hours. It only pays you on what the hours are sold and approved. Right. Flat rate does not create hours. Now you can screw yourself hourly, salary, whatever payment type plan. If you get into a job, for instance, we'll just say, I always like the Ford one because this is always one that screws everybody. The F-350s, 250s, and stuff like that with the screw, you have to have the special fan tool to take the cooling fan off.

25:48People that don't have them tools at these hack shops use an air hammer, and then it chews it all up. So they chew it all up getting it off, then they slam it back on with Loctite, Loctite, and then here comes us going to do a water pump on this thing a year or two later, and we can't get this fan off.

26:04And when the technician checked it, because it came in for a coolant leak, he pumps it up, he sees coolant leaking out there, he looks at the bottom of the water pump's leaking, he doesn't take the time to look at the fan. So he starts doing the water pump that we'll just say pays 2.3 hours, 1.7. I don't know. I don't remember off the top of my head.

26:21It's one or the two, I think. I don't know. So he starts doing it and he says he's got 1.5 hours to do this job, right? I said 2.3, 1.7. I'll say 1.5 hours just to make it easy. He starts messing around with the fan. Now he's an hour into it. I can't get it off. God damn it. He keeps going. Now he's at an hour and a half.

26:39Now he's at 2 hours. Oh, fuck it. I give up. Call the service advisor. I can't get this fucking thing. Well, I don't know what to tell you. We're not calling the guy. We're not gonna sit there and be that shop that keeps creeping up his estimate. Oh, you're gonna have to deal with it. So the guy goes back out there, messes with it for another hour, finally gets it apart.

26:57It's destroyed. So now he's got a destroyed part. He's got 3 hours into a job that paid $1.5. He hasn't even gotten to the water pump bolts or anything. He's got the fan off it, right? Yeah. Wouldn't the better thing to be as a technician Stop, assess the whole landscape of the whole job. Take 5 minutes and sit on top of it.

27:16If you smoke, take a cigarette. If you vape, pull out your douche flute, suck on your douche flute, look at everything and say, okay, that's going to be a problem, that's going to be a problem, whatever. I need to note that for the service advisor. Yep. Hey, this water pump is leaking, but whoever was in here last destroyed the fan, so we're gonna have to quote it for a fan because I'm going to destroy it taking it off.

27:37We all know it. So I'm going to need extra time there. It's going to probably take me an extra hour and a half, 2 hours to do it. Okay. I'm going to use that time as I, as I can to get it off. If I can't get it off, we're going to be calling you to do it. So the service advisor is good.

27:52He calls and says, hey Jason, we got your truck in. When's the last time you had a water pump? Oh man. You know, I was on vacation, a camping trip with my family. The water pump went out. Uh, we were in Florida and some guys at a shop, they were really nice guys. They it was a little podunk town. They slammed the water pump on it for me, and it's been great ever since.

28:11Okay, well, I'm here to tell you they destroyed your fan. Da da da da da. So we're probably got to put a fan on it because we definitely don't want the fan to come off and go through the radiator if we can't get it back on because it's it's all egg shaped. The big nut and everything that holds it onto the pulley, and you know all that.

28:28So you're going to need you know the water pump pays two hours. We're going to start out an hour and a half. We think we can get it off there from there, but. I'm not 100% sure. I just want to let you know. Oh, absolutely. We'll go ahead and do, you know, I'm gonna send you over the approval and do it. So you start doing it.

28:42It takes you an hour and a half to get the fan off it. You do the water pump, you go to put the new fan on. You don't have a potential warranty problem or anything like that. Why? Because there's communication that I can't convey this enough. Okay. It's not always the service advisor's job. He can't say what he doesn't know. Yeah. Yep.

28:58Yep. Right. If you're as a technician, don't tell him, how can he sell it? So even if he's a great service advisor, he doesn't have the information because you don't want to write a story. Ain't my job to write a story. It is your job to write a story because they don't— they can't sell what they don't know. Yep. So what I'm saying, you know, it's not— what I'm trying to convey here, it's not 100% the front end's problem, okay?

29:20You could probably get your hours up on a lot of the cases by using your pencil and your eyes and looking at everything and say, hey, this is what up. So here's the other thing. What if you did write that up? Here's the other— we'll flip it now. What if you write all that stuff up and the customer doesn't know about the fan and it comes back for the hour and a half for the water pump, we'll just say, and you look at it, you're like, I— me, and if you have any balls, technicians, I'd walk back up front and go, hey, I wrote this all out that the fan is screwed and all that

29:53stuff. Well, you're gonna have to do the best you can. Way to stock it. Stop. First of all, you're a service advisor. You're not a technician. You've probably never been a technician because if you were a technician, you'd understand what I was saying to you. But I wrote it up clear enough to tell you this is going to be a potential problem for me, the shop, and everybody.

30:12But you ignored it. So now we need to talk to the owner. We need to get the owner involved. Hey, Kevin, come here and look at this. I wrote this up for this. That makes sense. What happened here? Well, I didn't really think it was a big deal. It's not your job. You're not the trained professional that fixes cars. You're the guy that has to say, here's the information the professional gave us.

30:33You need to freaking sell it to the customer. Yeah. Make them aware of the problem. You need to control the process. You failed as a service advisor. You need training. Call Repair Shop Reckoning. You need fucking training. We run into that all the time. I love the— I love how you went right straight into the commercial. That was awesome. It was like flawless, not skipping beat.

30:51It was ridiculous. I was like, oh yeah. But you You nailed the use of the word communication because it's communication. Like you're all on the same team in the shop. Like the, the tech's gotta communicate to the service advisor properly to make sure that they set up the sale right. But then like, what are the things that the service advisor can communicate to the, to the tech as they're onboarding and, uh, bringing the client in, you know, that can set them up for success bringing it in?

31:13Right. It's a back and forth. Absolutely. So what I was, what I told that whole, did that whole little scenario was it's not 100% the service advisor's fault. Sometimes when the jobs go sideways or you don't get billed. But there's other times where the service advisor's just plain pulling his pickle up there and playing video games and talking to his baby girl on the phone and not selling the shit he needs to sell.

31:35And that affects the technicians. So any of these guys go, we don't need a service advisor, you do. I've said this 100 times. Most mechanics are introverts. They can't even fucking talk. Okay. Or they can't spell, they can't read, they can't write, whatever. Not all of them, but there's guys out there, right? It seems to be farther and fewer between as we're going through the generations.

31:52But these people, you have to understand something, that you have to work together. And I'm gonna tell you right now, it doesn't matter at the dealerships. You're fucked. They do not care about you. They do not train your service advisors. If they trained your service advisors, you guys at the dealership would not get screwed so much. Your service advisor would be like, we need to write this up this way for warranty.

32:11We need to do this this way. We need to do this customer pay. We need to do that. They're not trained. Yep. The frickin' somebody leaves that seat, they just slide somebody back in there. It's a numbers game. Okay. They look at it this way. If we could do the law of averages, if we could average, get a new service advisor and they could sell 7 out of 10 jobs, 6 out of 10 jobs for it, it's better than having that seat empty.

32:30Okay. And you know, that's just the way it is. They don't care. That's, it's a perfect example. When they put quotas on these guys, you have to sell 10 alignments a week. Well, what if you get 10 customers that don't need alignments? We all know in the repair world, for whatever reason, it's the universe, it's God, whatever. It'll be water pump week one week.

32:47Yeah. It will be alternator week one week. It'll be gas tank one week. It, it just, it comes in waves. It's really weird how the shit fails. Yeah. But you know, but it's not going and searching for just for alignment issues. Search for like, do the diagnostic on the car and find the problems that actually need to be fixed. Well, yeah. And here's the problem.

33:04A lot of these dealerships and a lot of your person, your shops, they don't have a policy. What is the very first thing that people should do if there's not a safety issue, an engine noise or something like that's gonna hit, cause a safety issue, you should drive the car. The lady brings a car in for whatever, a brake noise. But what if you drive and say, well, God, that's not a brake noise, that's a freaking wheel bearing?

33:26Yeah, okay. But instead you're on flat rate, you're set up for failure at the dealerships, or even hourly salary— I gotta keep saying that— on top of flat rate, and you never drove the car. So you pull it in, pull the wheels off it, You look at everything, brakes are like brand new. Oh, well, they look like the caliper slides are dry and stuff.

33:47I'm gonna do a clean and lube brakes. You clean and lube the brakes, you charge a guy $200, we'll say. He drives out with the same exact noise that you literally would've heard if you would've drove it. You would've heard the wheel bearing. But instead you pulled it in, you didn't test drive it, 'cause there's no policy that you have to test drive cars before you bring 'em in and before you give 'em back to the customer.

34:09You need to drive the cars twice. How do we do that? We get paid for it. We have to build it into, uh, our labor times at 2/10 or 3/10 at a time. You could do that, guys. Nobody says that you have to 100% equivocally go by the book time. Yeah. Okay. Especially us. We're in the Rust Belt. A lot of stuff we look at stuff, go, yeah, I'm going to do that fricking V10 exhaust manifold with broken studs and everything.

34:33Book time is 2.3 on that. It's going to take me 8 hours, 7 hours, 6 hours. That's what they're getting charged. Times 2 is 16 hours. You're ripping the guy off. No, I'm not. I've actually come across shops right now that are writing— some of my new clients, I've had to fix this already— they're writing ABS light inspections for 0.5. You mean to tell me you could do a full diag on the ABS light in 0.5?

34:57Wow, you're losing money, people. Start breaking down how much time it literally takes you to do these things. If I tell you, if you're a technician, take your stopwatch out and say, okay, I have to go pull this car in and I have an hour diag on it. Hit the stopwatch, go out and drive it, then do your normal routine. You have to go out and find it in the lot, you have to move a car, you have to do this, you have to do that.

35:21Okay, then you test drive it, then you come back, then you got to go get the pull the pinpoint test on the code. You need to go through that. I guarantee you're not doing it in an hour. Yep, no way. No way. But then they're like, oh, these technicians aren't freaking doing this, they're not doing that. Did you ever think you're not charging enough?

35:35Because you're scared of the customer, because the guy down the street might do it cheaper, then let him go do it cheaper. Look for your right type of customer. Yep, yep. And they're not— they're so worried about all these guys like, I don't worry about money. I got a couple clients like, I don't worry about money. Yeah, well, why are you kissing every customer's ass to the point where you're doing shit for free?

35:53You are worried about money. You just act like you're fucking not. Yep. Okay, I'm not saying rip people off, but you have to charge for your time. Absolutely. You know So we talked about the math doesn't lie, right? Service advisors are the gatekeeper, right? Your service advisors control the hours that hit the board. What does that mean? That means if a technician gives them all the information they need to write the estimate, they need to write the estimate and sell as much of it as possible.

36:20And if they don't, they need to tell the customers, hey, I really strongly suggest you do X, Y, and Z. We could wait on this. There's ways of sales tools to get 75% of the job. Yeah. You can't hit a slam dunk every time. Yeah. Right. But, and also technicians start looking over these vehicles. I don't get paid for DVIs. Well, put 0.2 on something on a sure thing or walk up there and tell your boss, hey, I'll do these.

36:47It's statistically proven that if you give me 0.2 or whatever, 0.3 on inspection, your sales are going to go up. But I'm flat rate. I can't do it for free. Can we make a deal of some sort? They will, right? Independent guys will. Now, if you're hourly, it doesn't matter. You're just going to get your hours up, right? You're just going to look better.

37:07So, and when you look better and you become indispensable, what does your boss always want to do to you? If you're solving problems for your boss before he knows he's having them, what do bosses, good bosses, tend to do? Promote you, raise you, give you raises. Yes. Yeah. But here's the problem that I run into. Everybody's like, Oh yeah, goddamn, my boss won't do this, my boss will do that.

37:24All the shops— I have 11 shops right now— every one of them guys take care of their people. Yeah, I've not ran into one of my customers yet that don't care about their technicians. Yep. So I'm starting to wonder about the whole big thing of, are these guys assholes? I guarantee there's bad shop owners out there. I'm not saying that. Yeah, but is it bad gloom and doom like everybody says?

37:43Absolutely not. Okay, we're here to tell you A lot of people love what they do and they still love this industry and stuff like that. Are the dealerships ruining it? Yes, the dealerships don't care about you. You're just another number until you guys get them to get you off a flat rate and all their bullshit cutback times. Why the fuck should you sit there and do a job that pays 3 hours regular book time for Ford or for 1.3 because Ford fucked up on building it or engineering it?

38:08Why does it need to come out of your home personal bank account? Yeah, GM, Chrysler, why are you as a technician okay with these warranty times when it comes out of your purse, you do realize that you're saving Chrysler, Ford, GM, whoever warranty company you work for, dealer you work for. You're saving the big guy in the ivory tower who's a multi-billionaire money.

38:27You're giving the shareholders more money in their pocket on your back, on your family's missed soccer games, missed games and everything. You're a chump. You need to push back. You guys all cry about it. You guys have the power. You just don't have the balls to do it. Tell all the— start walking out of these dealerships, everybody. I tell them, start a Facebook group and set a date where everybody's gonna sit on their bucket at the dealership and say, we're not fucking doing nothing because we're sick of getting screwed by all the shit by all these manufacturers.

38:55Like, you're not in charge as a technician of designing this stuff. You have to fix it though when some guy that's making 3, 4 times what you're making is designing it and he wants to change a wheel that used to be round for a billion years. Now he wants it square and so he could put his name on. I'm the guy that maker of the square wheel.

39:15That doesn't work. Also, here comes Bobby the flat rate tech going, hey Bobby, you know, it's 0.5 to change these square wheels, but since ass fuck over there on TikTok said he could do it in 2 tenths, our interns found that. So now it's not 0.5, now it's 2 tenths. So now you're doing it for 2 tenths. Like, guys, screw your balls on, deal with this shit.

39:34Don't put up with the warranty stuff. And they do chargebacks on these guys. They'll put the warranty time back, they'll get paid for a job, then go, hey, I got to take this out of your check, it got charged back for warranty. So some guy in an ivory tower decided that what you did he doesn't like, so he's going to take it right out of your family's bank account.

39:51And you guys all put up with this. So instead of fighting back and making the industry better, you guys are all crying, I'm leaving, the industry's mean to me. Let's talk about it, let's have a podcast, let's talk about how, how bad this industry is. Independence where it's at. Independent shops where you got owners that care about their people. Yeah. Is where it's at.

40:11The dealerships is not where it's at. They treat people like dog shit. Let's face it. And if you're good, you're, you're gonna, you can find a job anywhere you can go from. We've talked about in detail how you found your opportunity and, and made your opportunity. You know, there's opportunities like that if you're good, if you're as good as you think you are.

40:29What is out there right now? What does everybody say? There is a tech Shortage. If you walk out of the dealership and go to an independent shop, chances are you're going to probably make more money and you're not going to have to deal with all the bureaucracy bullshit. Yep. And eventually the dealerships are going to have to change their coat. They're going to start paying people.

40:51But right now, you guys at the dealership— look at Curtis. Yeah, he was a dealer guy, dealer guy, dealer guy. All of a sudden now he's independent. He's like, it was the best move I ever made in my life. Okay, so enough now that we shit all over the dealers. But you know, back to what we're talking about, you got poor systems, you got blind owners, you got owners that maybe made a little bit of money or they don't really know what they're looking at, so they just basically have no systems in place.

41:21They don't know what their service advisors are selling per day. They don't know— all they know is they need more money because their boat needs freaking a new engine. They might as well replace the other engine because it's a twin engine. Um, they might as well just spend the extra money, just get it all done at once. But they look at it and go, well, wait a second, I don't have enough money to do that because Jason and Kevin aren't producing enough hours.

41:41You guys need to work faster. What the hell is the problem? Now, I'm not saying mechanics aren't some of the problem, the technicians aren't some of the problem, missed diag warranties, whatever. Yeah, but it's not— the percentage isn't higher than the service advisor not selling the hours. Yeah, yeah. Yep. You know, so here's the other thing. Poor systems lead to poor hours, right?

41:59Because you don't know your numbers. And also poor owners when they're not doing their marketing right, so they're not getting people in the door. Or they do the great marketing. Once again, we go over to the service advisor. Bob's Tire, Frank speaking. Hey, I got a— uh, what, what, what, what, bud? What'd you say, partner? Partner? Well, you know, I, I think my— you know, I got a death leak.

42:22You don't even know what death is. What'd you say about your wheel bearing? Hey Bob, let's come and listen to this dumb fuck on the phone. And then you wonder why you have no appointments because your people answer the phone like that. And it happens more than you think when you're not there as an absentee owner. People start to adapt to their own styles.

42:42Absolutely. Okay, that's why we have phone scripts. That's why we have a lot of different things we put in place so we could go ahead and put these policies These SOPs so the service advisors do it the same way every time. So we're not there and we come find out, we call secret shopper, call our shop once in a while, and they don't answer the phone to script.

43:00Go, hey, what's the problem here? You have a script, you have a policy, why are you not following it? Yeah. Do I need to write you up? No. Okay, then follow the damn policy. But a lot of these shop owners think, oh, I'm making enough money, I'm not going to go there, everything's running good, the bank account's full. Everything's great until it's not great.

43:18Yep. And you've heard me say this before, I'm the best business owner in the world till we hit April of this year when all of a sudden I'm like, man, we're quiet. Yeah. What did you guys do? If you service advisors, what'd you do? You know, how'd you answer the phone? Have you made people mad? I don't worry about that at my shops because I know my guys do their job when I'm not there.

43:39Yeah. Um, but A lot of these shops, the owner's the problem. A lot of these shops, the owners are such a micromanager, nobody can even do their job. And a lot of times they're selling out of their pocket too. Oh yeah. Like, and you see that happen a lot, or they're just nice guys, they want to help everybody. And so they, they have this empathy for their customers and they're selling out of their pockets.

44:03And if they're doing that, we talked about a little bit in the previous weeks, if they're doing that, they're their service advisors, their whole team's gonna do that. Absolutely. And that we, I, I see it all the time when, you know, I talked to a client last week and he is like, man, you know, I just, I just think, you know, it's really hard for me to, to, this is a Michigan shop.

44:24He is like, it's really hard for me to, to, uh, compete with, um, this shop, this, you know, MSO, this kind of like, I don't really wanna say a name. They're, they're doing brakes for X amount of dollars. And I can't meet that. I said, you do realizing the brake pad quality has a big thing to do with this. They're putting on a white box China brake pad and you're trying to sell them Wagners.

44:45I said, so they're selling a brake pad they paid $12 for, for $70. You're buying a brake pad for $50 and selling it for $70. Okay, there's a big difference here, but they're okay with that. You're not. Yeah. So what do you do to your customer? You educate them. Yes, we could do it for this price. We're more because we use quality brake pads.

45:09We have a lifetime warranty on our brake pads. Well, they have a lifetime warranty right up to the point where you come back and, well, your rotors caused your brake pads to wear out. Your calipers caused your brake pads to wear out. We're honest. We're a mom and dad shop. We're a family business, which I don't really use that anymore because nobody really gives a shit.

45:23They care about price. But you're— now you're dealing with emotional things. Yeah. Stopping power, stuff like that. A lot of these companies, these— they don't sell a burnished the brakes, which if you look at most of the manufacturers now as they're coming in, that is definitely a procedure that has to be done. You need to bed them into the calipers, you need to burnish the brakes.

45:41That pays 0.5. So you could get 0.5 out of a brake job by the manufacturer's recommendations. They're saying you get full braking power, stopping power, if you do this. Go look it up. Yeah. I'm like, okay, not all of them are like that, but there's a couple of them like that. I'm like, okay, so you can get a half an hour for that.

45:59Um, you know, now all of a sudden your brake pads a little bit more, but you build value into the job. Okay, it goes hand in hand with the guy last week. Did you see that one post I put up, or you put up with, uh, the $6,000 estimate? The guy said, oh hell no, but $7,000 he said, oh hell yes. Yeah, it was a matter of the verbiage.

46:15Somebody had the balls to go, why was it $1,000 more? I don't fucking know. Maybe because they get the other price, didn't have their pricing right. I don't know, maybe they missed something. But the bottom line is a customer bought $1,000 more on a job. Okay, because of presentation, value. He thought it was— he liked the value, he liked the look of the repair, he liked how the explanation was.

46:35Yep. Nobody wants to buy when they're confused. And some guy hit it right on the head. He said, no buyer— nobody buys when they're confused. And think about how disjointed some of this shit is that these people— like that piece of shit that we had in here, that invoice we had in here a few weeks ago. That confused me. Oh my God.

46:53So if you have a guy that's talking fast and hands you a piece of paper that you don't even understand what it says, are you willing to give him money? No. That was a fun one where we broke down, went over the, the P and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. But would you give a guy money when you're all confused when he's trying to buy something?

47:10You like to know what you're getting for your money. You know, it's kind of like these doctors come in and I've used this analogy before. They come in, they use all these big words and all this stuff. Before ChatGPT, you're like, wow, okay, oh, a hematoma. I have a hematoma on my leg? Yeah, it's a bruise. Chat's like, yo bro, it's a bruise, calm down.

47:30Yeah, but homeboy's over here trying to make it sound like it's a life or death situation, and because of his 8 years of medical school, he could call it a hematoma. You know what I mean? Customers don't want to hear that. Customers don't want to hear us break down a whole pinpoint test, start talking about, you know, exhaust gas temperatures and EGR systems and nitrates of oxygen, the cylinder temperature.

47:48They don't care. They don't give a shit. They give a shit about, okay, what am I getting for my money and how good of a job are you going to do it? Yeah, that's what— and am I going to be safe? Is this a professional shop? You know what I mean? It's like, so the service advisor, like, once again, is the gatekeeper of the company, but the technician has to do his job too.

48:11But we have to make sure the service advisor is selling the hours that you expect. The technician to do. You can't not sell 20 hours and go back and yell at Bobby because he only produced 20, or you're paying him for 40. And that's the problem we run into. So how do we fix that? Well, first of all, you decide what a realistic target is for each one of your technicians.

48:31What's a realistic target? With everything going on, I would have to say 32 hours out of 40 hours would be 85%. Anything above that, I consider that's to be pretty good. Yeah, man, this guy has low expectations. Think about it. If you have an hourly tech, you mean to tell me that he's going to be able to do tit for tat? For every hour he's there, he's going to be producing an hour?

48:57It's going to be tough. We do it, but there has to be good variables. There's some weeks that you just hit 35, 38, but the next week you might hit 45. Yeah, it all ebbs and flows. So some of these guys are like, well, you know, what I do is I have them punch in and out on each job. I don't like that method because it causes chaos in their front office because they're like, hey, yeah, well, hey, I forgot to punch out on this job and I went over to this job and now, you know, can you fix this?

49:25Now the service advisor's like, fuck it, hey, you know, I gotta stop and change this. And they really don't even know what times they actually spent on anything because it's so convoluted now. So now it's a guess. Yeah. Not to mention, okay, what if you did, what if you did pay a, give a job, a guy, a tech at a job for 2 hours and it took him 3?

49:46Do you take him out back to the whipping pole or do you sit there as an owner, which none of you guys do, and sit down and pull all the repair orders out for this week and say, okay, everything went perfect. He punched in and out on every job. We paid 2 hours on this job. We got paid 2 hours on this job.

50:02He took 3. What happened? What happened? Well, you know, this happened. Uh, my wife called. This had like, the bolts were rounded off. I had the service advisor. The parts weren't here on time. It was the wrong water pump. We put it back. We had to send it back and get another one. There's a lot of different things that can happen in a shop.

50:23And here's where I, and I'm a firm believer in this. I understand this because I was a technician. Okay. A lot of these business owners are coming out now. The other way where they just buy a shop because they think there's a lot of money. There's a guy around us that was an accountant that sees how much shops made, so he bought 3 shops.

50:41Oh, he destroyed them. Oh wow. He bought really popular shops that were kicking ass. He bought them and destroyed them. Okay, there's other guys that were mechanics that became business owners, and they're just as dangerous. The only thing different with them is they can actually fix the car. They can't fix their own numbers, and that happens a lot. Um, so if I'm going to say anything, and I'll be completely honest, I've learned a lot in the last year just talking to different shop owners of like looking at the numbers in different aspects.

51:09But I've always looked at— I've always been a metrics guy. I always like to look at stuff. I always prepare. But I've learned a lot looking at different scenarios and going, wow, this is a real mess right now. And it all comes back to not knowing your numbers. Yep. That's what this show is literally all about, is we don't know our numbers.

51:26We can't run our business. And that's why my coaching is taking off to the point where I take the time to say, okay, Jason, you hired me to do a job. I'm not only just going to tell you what you need to do, I'm going to tell you why you're doing it. And if I tell you to do something, I don't explain it to you, you stop.

51:43And your, your next question to me should be why. Why? Yep. A lot of these other coaches, from what I gather, they call up and they go, here's your numbers, this is wrong, this is wrong, you need to do this, you need to do that. And they say okay. They don't tell these guys, hey, you got to be in this range or this range.

51:56They don't give them a piece of paper like I do, say, give this to your service advisors for right now till we get everything figured out. These are the overall ranges you need to be on your jobs to be profitable. And then I start teaching them that. I start teaching them effective labor rate. I start teaching these shop owners sell-through. I start teaching them all the front-end numbers, which are relatively easy to read.

52:16Yeah, certain ones affect other ones, obviously. But then we get all done with that, we go back to the back end. We go to the back office, we open QuickBooks. Here's what I'm finding out in QuickBooks. I can't get any of these accountants to play ball with us. The number one hangup, once I get these guys fixed on the front end, we can't get their QuickBooks fixed.

52:41It's been going on and on. We tried an outside booking, uh, bookkeeping company for one of our clients. It was an absolute fucking disaster. They don't really know the business, even though they're good at accounting and good at numbers. There's certain things you have to know about our business to kind of make sure stuff's right. Yeah, they don't do it. So what we ended up having to do, we have such a need with our clients need bookkeeping now, we started Metrics Accounting Services, which is my wife, because she does all of our books at all of our companies.

53:09So we have our system. So she started an accounting company to start taking on our clients to fix their backend books because we can get everything fixed up front. Yep. But we don't know what's happening out back. We can be carrying it in the front door with bushel baskets, but we're taking it out in gravel trains out the back door as an owner, and we're breaking the shop and it's going to go out of business.

53:30And you don't know your numbers. You don't realize that you're taking so much as of an owner. You're literally taking it to a deficit. And you're looking at your service advisors going, the technicians aren't freaking doing enough numbers. And the service advisors not knowing, it's gonna be like, yeah, you know, Jason's over there on his phone, he's this, he's that. And you— and I'm like, well, I look at some of these shops that I go to and the technicians are running around like maniacs and the service advisor's up there smoking a cigarette.

53:59Well, wait a second here, buddy. What do you— what do you got going on here? Then all of a sudden we get the service advisors producing. All of a sudden the hours are going up with the guys, or we fix the guy's story so they give the guys the information they need to write to sell the customer and then it fixes it.

54:14So it kind of goes back. It's like a teeter-totter. Yeah. The shops, you know, so I always tell them, pump the front, fix the back, fix the back, pump the front. What does that mean? It means go back and forth, guys. Teeter-totter. Go work with your service advisors and owner. What are you doing? Get phone training. Get these people trained like we're training them.

54:31Then go back to your technicians. Hey, okay, where are you having a problem writing your repair order? Give them the information. If you're a tech, you should know— if you're an owner, you're a tech, you should know how to write a preparer. If you're not, hire somebody to teach you. It will save you lots of money. You will stop giving and bleeding your money away.

54:51That's what people don't do. And it all comes back to just having a simple set of numbers to look at, or somebody to hold you accountable as a business owner to say, hey, this is a real problem. You can't fix what you refuse to measure. That was the episode title from last week, and this just really ties into it. If you're not watching it or measuring it, how do you fix your business?

55:12Right. So think about this. You got a guy that's a great employee, a great person and stuff. We'll just say he's an hourly employee. He comes in, he's got a great attitude. What happens to a guy with a great attitude if you bitch at him every day for something that's beyond his control? You kill him like a flower. Right. He starts to wilt, right?

55:28He comes in, he has a great attitude. He's a company man. He wants to do everything for the company. Succeed. And you look at him and go, bro, you're only doing 31 hours a week, you're killing me. He's like, but it's— and I'm not saying all of them, but some of these guys aren't smart enough to realize that, hey, yep, you— he's not selling me enough work.

55:45Now some of these guys are smart enough, and I guarantee you some of the guys that are bitching online going, this shit only sold 4 hours out of my 8 hours because he's lazy. Yep. And I've heard a lot of the times, well, they just took the trans flush off there, they just took that off there, they just took that off there.

55:59You know, we had one at Garrett's today. Uh, I think Lincoln's gonna do a video. Uh, it's a 6.4 truck and it needs a bunch of engine work, exhaust manifolds, and a bunch of shit, which is really, really expensive. It needs a bunch of brake work. So we called the guy and we're like, listen, we got an hour to check this out.

56:16It's gonna need— the exhaust leak is X, Y, and Z. It's going to be a lot of money. Not to mention, we have not even gotten to the brakes yet. You're going to spend a lot of money on this truck. We could write this whole estimate and sell it to you and not say nothing about the brakes, but your brakes are still bad.

56:29So let's talk about what your budget is and where you want to go with this truck. Do you want to put all these engine parts on it, then do all this brake work and have this huge bill on this truck that's possibly not worth it? The customer's answer was no, or the customer's answer was yes. It just depends on what they're doing with that truck.

56:45Yeah. If they— it was their dad's truck, like I've talked about before, and it's sentimental value, yes, let's do the brakes. Let's— I'm aware the brakes are bad, But let's do the exhaust first and next month I'll bring it back. We defer that. It goes on to our deferred work. Your sell-through rate goes down a little bit, but at least that work is there, right?

57:01That's, that's an okay sell-through, not sell-through, right? Yeah. Yep. But you not being— you being a knucklehead where you're just declining this stuff before the customer or deleting it off the repair, even though the tech says you need it, is you shouldn't be doing that. Not at all. You should not even have the rights in your shop management program to delete it.

57:18Yeah, because that's just bullshit. You can't decide— you got a professional technician saying it needs X, Y, and Z. Put the word recommendation. Technician recommends transmission fluid flush per manufacturer's mileage. That's kind of the way we do stuff. Yep. You know, so you tie a reason to it, make it make sense. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the average tech stops caring. After a while you beat him down, he stops caring.

57:46And it comes down from the owner not teaching the service advisor, service advisor not selling the jobs, or the technician not giving the service advisor the right information to do his job. So there's culpability all over the place here, guys. Oh yeah. But the main premise of the thing was, is your service advisor selling enough hours for you to actually produce on a daily basis?

58:06So, you know, if you're a good shop owner and you're listening to this, you're currently yelling at your technicians for not turning enough hours, stop. Take a look at everything. Go look at your sold hours first and see what they're producing. Look at what your service advisors are actually putting on the board every day, because if the work isn't being sold, no amount of pressure on the techs is going to fix it, right?

58:25Fix the front, pump the back. Pump the back, fix the front. It's a teeter-totter. We go to the back, we talk to the techs. We go to the front, we talk— we train. We train everybody in our shop to do a job. We put SOPs in place. Policies. We keep everybody understanding what their job is and what they need to do. Because what ends up happening in a lot of these shops right now, the owner is the only one when he's there that knows what's going on.

58:50So he goes around, he micromanages everything, so nobody does their job. He's an air traffic controller. He's over there, you go do this, you go do this, you go do this. We'll pull that in. Well, wait, I don't have approval for an hour a day. That's okay, I can get it from him. Then he leaves and doesn't come back for 3 days.

59:05And he walks out, he directs all the airplanes all on the runway. Think about it. Think about an air traffic controller, your control freak owner. Oh my God. He gets all the planes on the runway and he's getting ready to say, okay, Bravo 17, 13, 19, 16, you're on this runway. Get ready, right? You're third in line. And all of a sudden he goes, shuts the lights off and leaves.

59:25And they're out on the runway going, control tower, this is Lima 7 Bravo. Are you there? But they can't hear this because the power's off, right? So you as a shop owner, you have to put systems in place so you can back away, let people do their jobs. And I will tell you, I had a real hard time. I still feel guilty when I don't go to the shops because I've worked my whole life.

59:50So now I'm like, man, I'm not at the shops. My guys are like, dude, you built these places, you treat us good, we'll, we'll take care of it. If we need you, we will call you. Yeah. So now I got Repair Shop Bracketing who's taking— it's taking a lot of my time. I got a fuck ton of calls and I'm on the phone.

1:00:04I mean, I'm on the phone all day Monday. Yeah. Well, Sunday we talked in the morning. What was it? That was like 5 hours putting those reports together for those 3 clients. Yeah, it just takes 5 hours to go through everybody's numbers every week to say, hey, this is what's going on. I'm not that guy that goes, yo, put the number in the portal and I'll take a look at it and call you in a month.

1:00:22Yeah. Some of these guys talk to their people once a month. Okay, I talk to them several times a week while we're first onboarding them into getting everything fixed, what they need to do. Then we talk every week, a structured meeting. We fix— we have one goal and we deal with it, but we're getting results. And I even say fuck it, I still get results.

1:00:42And I love— we have— okay, so I love sometimes like pictures get really clear. Like we're literally going through and giving them the full diagnostic. It's not just, uh, oh, we can repair your— we, we can fix your brakes here. We can fix your front counter, we can do sales training, but that might not fix the whole problem. There might be a deeper problem than that.

1:00:59So there's a full diagnostic you do when you onboard a customer or onboard a client and you look and see where are the areas that are— where do we need to start? Right. Because like it doesn't make sense to start with sales training if you're hemorrhaging money over here in the back end or you don't have your margins set right. Right. And here's the other thing we ran into.

1:01:17We've called clients and we've started the phone call training. Portion of what we do. In the very first meeting, the service advisor flames out and quits. Then we call the owner and we say, let's have a meeting about this. And they say, well, she has anxiety, or he has anxiety, he has this and he has that. Yeah, you know what you have, ma'am, sir?

1:01:42You have a 49% close rate. You have an empty bank account. And now you know what the problem is at your company. Now, here's where you being a business owner, right? Talked about earlier, Jason broke his shoulder. I can help you for a couple weeks, but I can't help you for a couple years. I'm a small business. Get rid of that person.

1:02:00Yeah. If they're telling you, I don't want to answer the phone, I can't stand this, the anxiety's killing me, and I have a 49% sell rate, and I don't like talking to customers, I don't like selling jobs, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't. When do you just say as a business owner, This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you, but I have to let you go.

1:02:19Yep. It's no different than you— that came from when you would go spank the kids back in the old day. This is going to hurt me a lot more than it hurts you. I mean, it's going to hurt my feelings that I have to spank you, right? There's no difference. Like, okay, you're not doing what you're paid to do. The metrics are there.

1:02:33I looked at them because I looked at the numbers and I'm like, you have a 49% sell rate, sell-through rate. We need to figure that out. We figured it out the very first phone training when the person was sitting there all pissed off about being on the training, uh, being on a training. I don't need training. Yeah, yeah, baby girl, you do need training because you got a 49% sell rate.

1:02:54You're selling 5 out of 10 jobs and your owner's going broke, and your owner trusts you to do a job and you're not doing it. Now you have a shitty attitude saying you don't need training. And I like the other ones. I have a lot of training experience. I have trainer certificates. Don't care. Don't care. Don't care. Don't care. I have 20 years, 26 years of experience.

1:03:14Don't care. Don't care. Okay. Pretty bad experience. Yeah. Techniques that used to work several years ago don't work. Okay. Dentists always come out with new ways to do fillings. There's new procedures, ongoing training, they call it, right? Do you mean sales is sales is sales? Okay. Not true. Because here's a perfect example. Some of these young kids don't even want to talk on the phone.

1:03:37They're okay with getting a link, clicking a link, going, okay, these— this, this, this, this— there's a price. They never even talk to you. Then there's other people that want to talk. Yeah. Now I will tell these people something: text message is the easy way out for people that don't like to talk. But with text message, you cannot check people's temperature. You don't know if they're mad.

1:03:56You don't know if they're angry— if they're not angry, they're mad, they're happy, they're sad, whatever. We've seen it 100 times between me and you. You've said something to me. I call you up like, what the fuck do you mean by that? You're like, what? You tell me. Yeah. And I've done this. You've done this to me. Like, dude, what's your problem?

1:04:09Yeah. And I'm like, I don't have a problem. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. No, that happens. And, and so like, it could happen for you from the customer interpreting that. It could happen the customer thinks you're being a jerk or whatever, misinterprets what you're saying. It's, it's text. You don't, you're not get hearing the tone of the voice. If you're in person, you can see people like rolling their eyes or you can see like their energy.

1:04:28You can you can see if they're engaged. Like, there's a whole thing. It's a whole complete picture, right? That's why we do video calling. Yep. When we do our meetings or training, we get them on the other side of the screen. There's actually a stat, and I'm going to butcher it. You learn 15% by reading, you learn 50% by tone of voice, and you— but you can learn 80% by— 80% is body language.

1:04:54Yeah, body language. 80% is body language, micro expressions and all that stuff. I agree with that 100%. I just listened to a book where it talks about different types of learning. Yeah. And I'm gonna butcher this, but he talks about Einstein talking about a goldfish, trying to have him climb a pole, and he can't climb a pole. So you tell him he's worthless, he's never going to climb that pole.

1:05:14So what did you put in that goldfish's head? He's worthless. Yeah. But that goldfish, you put him in water, he swims around faster than, we'll just say, a freaking rabbit can in the water, right? Yep. So everybody has their type of learning is what my point is. I am an— I'm a hands-on guy. I'm a visual learner. I listen to audiobooks 9 times out of 10.

1:05:33I cannot sit there and read. I cannot hold my focus long enough to read. But I nonstop listen to informational podcasts and stuff when I'm driving around my truck all the time. My wife's like, you listen to some weird shit. I just listen to all kinds of different stuff because your brain's a sponge. Yeah. Do you realize everybody's a genius? It's just a matter of how you're going to get the information in your head.

1:05:51Yep. How much drive you have to get it in your head. Yeah. I, as I got older, I'm a sponge. I want to learn. If I get interested in something, I learn it. Okay. Um, we morphed into just something way more than we ever did. I started out by coming on your podcast. Yeah. Then I'm like, I want my own podcast. I hired that studio.

1:06:09I didn't like them the way they did things. Then I built my own studio with you. And now we have the podcast. Now we have a consulting company. Now I just opened open an accounting company. My wife did. Like, we just kind of fill voids where people need it. But the one thing is we actually do what we say we're gonna do.

1:06:27Is that not something in today's world that people do not do what they say they're gonna do? 5,000%. It is crazy. It's a low bar of entry, you would think, but it's just doing what you say you're gonna do. Yeah, you're right. You know, so back to the service advisor guys, go take a look at your front numbers. See how much your service advisors are actually selling.

1:06:49And if you don't quite know how to do it, put everything in a pile, all the paper, have them print every repair order and then put it on your desk and go through it and start looking at what they're writing and what they're trying to sell and how it's being sold. And you'll probably figure out that you need some help or you could help yourself.

1:07:05But the problem is everybody gets on autopilot. You'll set it and let it go and forget it'll work. People, you always have to pull people in. I sent a group text message to the Garrett guys today. Hey guys, I noticed the pictures are a little bit low. I pulled up a repair order the other day, uh, that we did a job. There's no pictures.

1:07:21What's the problem? Oh man, they're on my phone. I forgot to upload them. That's great. But you know what? Bonuses are coming out for the, for the, uh, for the month sales for the service advisors. If the— if I see this again, there's going to be a problem because we put pictures in there to cover our ass and they've saved us a few times in the last few months.

1:07:39Again, yeah, we just had a motorhome come in here. The guy was in here 4 months ago. The guy messaged us and said, hey, the camera cover is missing off the right side. We're like, okay, we did the left side. Well, I think the camera cover came off while you were working on it. We went back to the repair order, pulled it up.

1:08:01Guess what? No camera cover. No camera cover on the intake pictures. We sent it back to him. Sure, that camera cover was gone. That was an absolute answer to an absolute question. He had the right to ask, hey, what happened? We're like, hey, here's the picture, it wasn't us. If I didn't have that picture, I would have had to try to sell the whole idea of a camera cover.

1:08:23Here's the problem with the camera cover. The camera cover is probably $3 or $4. Yeah, it was painted to match the freaking swoosh on the motorhome. Oh, so I'm going to take and flare up my whole paint booth for a little camera cover after I find it to put, you know, order paint that I'm never going to use again for a fucked up color?

1:08:38I'm going to stop loss that thing right off the to get with a picture. If I didn't have a picture, that could potentially cost me a couple hundred dollars easy. Yeah. But with that picture— here's the picture, sir. Oh wow. Sigh. Not my— we could fix it for you now, sir. Let's get you scheduled in. Get— oh, I'm good, I'm good. But you know what I mean?

1:08:59Like, pictures are clutch because there's no winning a he said, she said with the client. No, no matter what, they're on the offense, you're on the defense. Right away they're on the defense depending how the conversation goes. But it's never good when they call you and go, since you worked on it. This is what's going on. But if you could pull out the pictures and go, yeah bud, that wasn't there, partner.

1:09:20Listen to when I tell you guys this: nobody thinks you're fucking cool when you call them bud. If any man has balls, is not a little beta bitch, and you call him bud, he's gonna be like, my name's not bud, my name's Kevin, my name's not bud, it's Jason. I don't let people call me pet names. Pet names are a way of people talking down to you.

1:09:40Yep. Okay. They think somehow or another in their mind they're superior. That's where the pet names came from. My 19-year-old son, I could hear him up there. There's one guy at the auto parts store calls him Bud because he's younger. He always says, my name's not Bud, my name's Lincoln. I said my name is Lincoln when I called you on the phone.

1:09:54Stop calling me Bud. And I always look at Lincoln and kind of smile. I'm like, dude, do not let people give you pet names. Yeah. Do not let your customers give you pet names. Your name is on your shirt for a reason. My name is Jason, it's not Bud. Yep. Think about it. Think about the sarcasm. Okay, Bud. What is that? Okay, fuck you.

1:10:11Yep. Is it not? Absolutely. Okay, absolutely, partner. I even hated it when I'd come in and like I had this, this one employee that called me boss man, and it was like, it's not something like there— it's like a thing of respect. It's like a, hey boss man, blah blah. So I'd like, hey employee number 5. Yeah. And she was like, what?

1:10:28And I'm like, uh, that's your name, right? Employee number 5. Hello, ex-employee number 5. Hello. But you know, don't let people do it. People have to learn respect. Back in the day, yeah, back when we were younger, and I'm 55, you get your ass kicked, you ran your mouth at school. Nowadays you get a participation trophy for, for going and tattling, you know, tattling.

1:10:49So, you know, there's just a lot of things that in this world as business people or service advisors, stuff like that, you need to be very professional to your customers. Don't let them give you pet names. Do not let them talk down to you. Okay, stand up, shake their hands, look them in the eye. Okay, if you sit down, you act all, you know, like you're depressed and you're this and you're that, you don't have anything under control, they're gonna walk all over you.

1:11:12Yeah, if they start getting all sideways on you, you— in my shop, we don't deal with it. My guys are okay to tell people, you know what, you're just not our customer, you're not talking to us like that. Yep. Uh, we had it happen last week with a motorhome. The guy was just being an absolute jerk right from drop-off, and he started giving us a price about the hard time about the price, gave hard time about the diag and this and that.

1:11:35And I'm sitting there on the camera watching it. So I walked outside out the door and, you know, and, and Phil said, you know, respectfully, sir, you're just not our kind of customer. You're already a problem. You already think you're the only guy here. And if you look out there, this whole parking lot's full. So I suggest you go to the pros at the RV dealer.

1:11:52Are, are you kicking me out of there? Phil's like, no, I'm just telling you we're not a good fit. And the guy left. I'm completely okay with that. No different than I'm selling my other house. The ladies start calling my daughter, who's my realtor, and start giving her a hard time. What about this? What about that? Talk to her like shit. I said, Cooper, what'd you say?

1:12:10She said, well, you know, I told her this and that. I said, you know what you should have told her? I don't want you to look at my dad's house. You're a pain in my ass already. You're rude. You literally said your clients don't even know what they want. So you already think you're better than their clients. You know what? You're not our type of buyer.

1:12:25The reason why I told— I said, you should have told her that. I said, because if she's a problem looking at it, how do you think everything else is going to go with that lady? It's gonna be horrible. And then you're gonna get me in a room with her, and I'm gonna slice her and dice her and make her cry, because I don't put up with people's bullshit.

1:12:37Especially— here's the problem, they don't realize that if I don't sell that house to them, I don't care. Yeah, I'll sell it to somebody else. I am not— I've never been one to let people mistreat me, and I still never will. And that's where most of these business owners get to the point where they don't know their numbers and they don't run their business good So they let people abuse them.

1:12:55Their employees abuse them. Their wife abuses them. They're freaking— everybody abuses them because they're little bitches. They don't stand up. They just rather like, I could just take it. Get to know your shit. Deal with your shit. Look at people, go, no, we're not doing that. Once you fix your numbers, you start making enough money that gives you freedom. I talked about this, okay?

1:13:12It all comes down to you starting at the front, fixing your service advisor, teaching them, training them how to sell enough numbers. Therefore, it's going to go to your techs. Your techs are going to produce enough work if they're good guys. Which 99% of the guys want to make money. Let me hear to tell you that. All of a sudden they do that and guess what happens?

1:13:29It all flows through right down to the bottom line. You make money, everybody's happy. But instead you want to be like, yeah, I'm going to my lake house. I don't really know what to tell you. You guys need to do more hours. Service advisor number 2, how much you sell? Oh, come back down. Come back as a business owner that doesn't know his numbers.

1:13:47Goddamn, you only produced 25 hours last week? Ah, I, I, yeah, that, you know, I, I work, I did everything, I worked my ass off. Yeah, this is bullshit. I can't put up with this with you. You don't have to replace it. You can't produce more hours. You walk up to the front service advisor. What did you do last week? I sold everything that came across the desk, boss.

1:14:06Which rightfully so, they might have or they might not have, right? The mechanic might have wrote them up shitty. It would have been on him. I told that earlier, it's a teeter-totter. Whose fault is it? Yeah, it would go case by case, wouldn't it? But once you do the looking at the repair orders, you can figure it out pretty quick. And that's where the business owner comes in.

1:14:22Run your shit. They don't run their shit because they don't know how to run their shit. They're a technician. They bought a shop. They don't look at their numbers. So I don't know how many different ways I could say it. It's a teeter-totter. Is it the tech or is it the service advisor? From what I've seen from the start here, let's talk about the service advisor.

1:14:39We can talk about the techs later. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's a good one. All right, you guys have a good day. All right, that's gonna do it for this episode of Repair Shop Reckoning. If this helped you, please make sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. We drop real conversations, real systems, and real solutions every week. We'll see you back here next time on Repair Shop Reckoning.