Don't Send Your Service Advisor Into A Battle Unarmed

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.

0:28This isn't theory. This 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.

0:57That's okay. Disney'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. Welcome back to Repair Shop Reckoning: From Chaos to Control. Today we're gonna talk about selling and what it takes to actually be a good salesman. I mean, you can say the psychology of selling. Whatever you want to put it.

1:21But the bottom line is what we're starting to realize when we're doing all this training now, we're doing the phone training, we're doing service advisor training and stuff like that. These people aren't even trained. They're not trained. Yeah. You're putting these people at the front of your business. Their hair's messed up. They're wearing wrinkled shirts. They don't know how to talk to customers.

1:37They don't know how to answer your phone. They don't know how to sell. 9 out of 10, there's only been one shop so far that's actually had a target profit margin on the repair order. These other guys are just winging it. They don't even know what they should be charging. Okay, so if you have a service advisor who's not trained, he doesn't know what to charge due to your overhead and everything else, right?

2:00As a business owner, you should be giving these guys that number, right? Here's your target number. Here's the range you can go. Here's a whole graph of where jobs should fall in depending on dollar amounts, like a matrix of Overall price jobs, not a parts matrix, a labor matrix, an overall dollar amount per jobs, right? Yep. That's what my guys have. None of these guys are having it.

2:21So I've said it before and I'll say it again, every seminar you go to, and we learned it, the service advisor is the gatekeeper of the business. They walk in the door, who's sitting at the front desk? The service advisor. It's not the owner. Well, sometimes it could be the owner, but he's a service advisor. It's not the mechanics. Okay. The service advisor not selling jobs could cost the mechanic money.

2:46We've talked about that before. So the service advisor plays a very, very big role in a business. Okay. That's the gatekeeper of the kingdom. Okay. That's the guy who does the drawbridge, right? Yep. Okay. Because think about it. If he's not doing a good job, you're spending money right now. It's costing me $26 a phone call on my keywords for Garrett Auto Trucks phone to ring.

3:07Okay. Think about that. Yep. It could cost me what, $104 on 4 phone calls if we blow it. Okay. Money down quick. Yeah. So we have to be careful. We have to train these guys. So you guys, when you're sitting here going, man, I'm paying all this money in marketing, it's not working. Well, wait a second here. Let's back up. Marketing not working means what?

3:29If marketing wasn't working, your phone wouldn't ring. How do you guys ever look and say, okay, is my phone ringing? Do you have a phone log? Do you go and say, okay, I got 13 calls today, 30, whatever the number is. Okay. And then just say, okay, what happened to these phone calls? Out of all these phone calls, we'll just say we had 13 phone calls.

3:48How many people are on the schedule for tomorrow? Right. Yeah. 10. I've got 10. We got 10 out of 13. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's shocking how bad they're blowing it. I will tell you, I didn't think it was going to be this bad when we started calling shops. I knew it was because I've been spending my, like, the last 8 and a half years with all kinds of small businesses, working with their sales and service teams and even the business owners.

4:13The business owners, if the business owners, if a business owner can't sell, then your people are almost guaranteed that they're not gonna sell because they're most likely learning from the business owner. And so, and we said this before, if the business owner comes in and he's a jerk, most likely your people are gonna be jerks. And it's the same thing if your owner doesn't know how to sell, most likely your people aren't.

4:32Your people aren't gonna sell either. And so when I'm thinking about this industry, who's, who's, who's above the average? Who's actually putting training into their, into their service advisors? You? Yeah. Everybody talks about training their people. Yeah. How many people get on a podcast and actually say, this is what we did this week for training? And I said this at my truck shop.

4:50I said, when we have a problem that arises that I think is something worthy of training that week, we stay an hour after work and we train 'em on it. Whether it's, you know, uh, how to adjust the wheel bearing on a freaking trailer. I'm using this as an example, guys. Yeah. Uh, you know what I mean? Any type of problem that we've seen arise, I'm like, okay, we need to deal with this.

5:09Okay. And then we do training on it and then we do a policy on it. Then we do SOP, standard operating procedure. We have everybody sign it and we get on with our life. But if we don't fix these problems, they never get fixed. Yeah. And that's the big problem with these shop owners. Like they did, they just don't want to deal with it.

5:25And most of the service advisors, most of the people don't know that they're bad because they sound friendly. And the ones that I'm working with, they wanna help the customer. The guy that, uh, we posted the video where he transferred, transferred me to the owner right away, and I got to work with him yesterday. And it's not that he doesn't care about the customer or the business, he didn't wanna give the wrong answer.

5:44And so he just wasn't equipped with the, the tools in, in to control that conversation and realize you don't even wanna tell somebody how long it's gonna take to fix their job. You don't wanna quote them, you don't know. And, and so many things can come in the way. So I asked him, what are you setting yourself up for if you actually answer that question?

6:01And he's like, failure. I'm like, yeah, what goes wrong? And he was like, it takes longer than what I promised and then they're mad at me. I'm like, exactly. He's just not equipped. He's not trained. And I think he'll be great because he was taking notes and he's ready to be coached. Anybody who has never done sales doesn't understand sales. Nope. These mechanics that are on our TikToks and on our Facebooks running their fucking mouths saying, Oh, I could do a service advisor job all day long in Toy Center.

6:26There goes a lot more into just writing estimates. Okay. There's a humanity part of it. You're dealing with people that wanna tell you their whole life story. You're dealing with different personalities. You're dealing with pushy personalities. You're dealing with all pushy personalities. You're dealing with all kinds of different personalities that can become taxing. Okay. Going out and turning wrenches and stuff like that is a bitch.

6:49As you get older, it's harder. Your shoulders, everything like that. I don't care a shit what anybody says. It just gets harder. Yes, you gain wisdom. No doubt about it. You become more efficient. So you're not working as hard, but you're still working, right? Yep. The mental aspect of this is still another whole deal because a lot of these guys don't have the mindset because they have not been trained that they give the wrong answer.

7:11It's going to, what did that guy say? They're going to be mad at me. Okay. So you're worried about a customer being mad at you to the point where it's hindering your answer. Do you know what I'm saying? Like at the end of the day, that customer will throw you over for $5. Absolutely. Right. So you're going to do the best you can, but here's the problem.

7:31If you're not trained, you're not trained. You don't know what you don't know. That's what these people don't understand. Okay. And that's why we started— we've morphed. We started as a podcast. Then I started consulting shops and fixing shops. Then I started realizing, oh my God, now that we got these shops fixed, and they're making money. Some of the marketing money is getting wasted.

7:48So let's do a phone. Let's do module number 1 of the phone, you know, how to actually have service advisors talk on the phone. Now we're building another module, how to actually sell the job after the service advisor walking or phone. We gotta do the reception of the customer module. Okay. And then we have to do the sales. Like, this is gonna go on for the rest of our life.

8:09Do you know what I'm saying? Like the phone, The phone system is a minimum of 7 weeks, how to answer your phone. Yeah. That's a minimum of 7 weeks. If you're doing great, if you do everything perfect, you're the best guy at ever answering the phone that ever came along, that's 7 weeks, right? Yep. That's a long time. But here's the thing, guys.

8:24My people are going through the program. We're having our people go through the same program at my shops, my 2 service advisors and the service advisors out here just to see, and it's working. Okay. I ha— I've been doing this since 1990. Okay. I've sold thousands and thousands of jobs, talked to thousands and thousands of people. I've gone through trainings of sales.

8:47I read books, you know, just you name it, the Al Dietz, the Brian Tracy, you know, the Grant Cardones. Like I've read all them books and you know, the number one thing that these guys all— there's a couple of things that you need when you're selling something and I'm not even reading my notes yet. Number one, you have to have confidence. Self-esteem is the number one thing in selling and your self-esteem comes from closing your first deal, then your second deal, then your third deal.

9:11Then all of a sudden you have self-esteem, right? I can sell, right? Confidence and self-esteem go up. Kind of the same thing, but not really, right? Then the number 3 thing, you know your product. Okay. And now I disagree with a lot of these other guys going, yeah, you got to be a mechanic. You got to have mechanical background. You have to do this.

9:31No, you don't. My best service advisor ever was a girl that was smart and knew how to talk to people. She knew nothing about cars. She sold the shit out of everything. She had like a 92% close rate. Her name was Sarah. She was fucking great. That's awesome. Okay. She knew nothing about cars. Okay. My service advisors right now know about this much about cars.

9:48They sell just fine. Okay. Because we have the mechanics write this stuff up. They have the information, they trust their mechanic, what the mechanics are saying. So they believe in the product they're selling. What did we say the other day when we were talking to somebody, one of the people, we had a conversation after you got done, uh, talking to them about being the service advisor that we were doing the phone training.

10:07He said, Uh, I got in trouble for lowering the prices. Yeah. Okay. There's a guy that doesn't know what's expected of him because if his boss would have trained him and said, do not lower the prices no matter what, these are the set prices for us to afford to pay your wage, vacation, all the— right? Instead, he was looking at that brakes going, oh man, $400.

10:30$400 is a lot of money to me because I'm broke. So let me think about this. Maybe if I make it— I think it should be about $300. 'Cause that's where I would be comfortable with. So that way that comfortable will be that customer. Number one, your self-esteem, your confidence is everything out the window. Number one. And number two, you've taken it personally and looked at that job and say, ah, that's what I could afford.

10:50You cannot sell outta your pocket as a service advisor. That's where the training comes in. Garbage in, garbage out. If you don't have the information of where you're supposed to be, the number you're supposed to be from your boss, 'cause you're not trained, how do you know where to be? Absolutely. Well, and if I can paint the picture and go just a little bit deeper and describe what these people, what these owner shop owners are sending their people out to without being trained, you're sending them out to war without a gun.

11:15You're sending them out to war without how to even use the gun, how to use their equipment. And what I mean by that is there's one of my favorite, one of my favorite movies ever that has to do with sales. There's a movie called Boiler Room, and there's a lot of great quotes out of there. But there's one quote, and Ben Affleck is the character.

11:31He's the sales manager. And he said, Either you're being sold either way on this call, a sale is being done. Either you're selling them on why they need to get the job done, or they're selling you on why you need to drop the price, or, you know, or why you need to, you know, um, why you're not gonna do the sale. And that's what's happening is you, you described it yourself.

11:51These people come in or they, they call up and they have all this sob story. Do you think they're telling the sob story for a purpose? Yeah, they're selling you. They fucking role-played it. They role-played it with his wife. He, he was ready. He was more prepared and role-played than what your service advisor was. He called up and he's telling this sob story and, oh my God, we don't have any money.

12:09And then this happened because he's playing at the heartstrings of that service advisor. And I'm not telling you not to have a heart, but there's a skill to this. And if you're not prepared, you're gonna drop your pants and you're gonna lose every single time. The customer's gonna beat you every single time. I agree. And you know, the funny thing is going a little bit further with that, even deeper than that, think about The person on the personal level, if these guys aren't trained, you got the— okay, let me back up.

12:37You have these shop owners going, Jason, we need to feed Bob, Mark, Fred, and Tom. You have to hit these numbers. You have to do this. You have to do this. Okay, uh, give me your gun. You're a soldier. Give me your gun. Give me your knife. Give me your shield. Go up there and deal with it and make this all happen, right?

12:53Because that— they don't have no— like you said, they have no gun or anything. They're going to war without a gun. Yep. Training is key here. How can you push sales if you don't have your salespeople trained? And I like that book, uh, when he talks about a, um, 90% of the sales— what is it, how did it go? Basically, 90% of the sales in these companies are done by one salesman.

13:18The other 10% get the leftovers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he uses the analogy, uh, Brian Tracy uses the analogy of a racehorse. Yeah. They said you have horses in a race, right? That would be all your salesmen. You have the number one salesman, the number one horse wins by a nose. He wins by a nose, but he gets 10 times the pay than the number 2 horse, even than the 3 horses, right?

13:40And they talk— he goes into talking about, uh, safety glass for Dow Corning and how the salesmen, they said, okay, we came out with safety glass, go out and sell it. So this guy goes, gets 6 by 8 pieces of glass cut, and he gets a ball-peen hammer. And he goes into these sales presentations in these offices and says, have you ever seen glass that won't break with a hammer?

13:58They're like, no. Whack! Doesn't break. He sells it. He sells the shit out of it. He wins all the awards, right? They take him to the big award thing and they say, how did you do it? He said, well, I bought the glass, I did the hammer. So they went and bought everybody hammers and glass. He still sold more than everybody else.

14:17They brought him back and said, what happened? He said, well, I had to up my game because you took my idea. He said, so what I started doing now, I bought safety glasses and I gave the hammer and the safety glasses to the guys who tried to break that. And I would watch them beat on their own desk with a hammer smiling.

14:30They would buy the shit. And I still sold more. So my point was he just evolved. And the thing is you can give people baseline training and they could put their spin on it as long as they hit their numbers, right? We don't want to ever be dishonest. But we want to actually train these people to sell. And this is the thing I'm going to tell you.

14:50Um, every, almost every business owner I've ever worked with thinks they're going to hire that guy. And that guy is like less, he's you, he's me. He's less than, he's less than 0.5% of the market out there. That person that just thinks differently, that can just go out there and conversate and sell. And they're operating off a framework. They don't even know what they're doing.

15:08They're just, and you know, he might be aware with what he's doing, The rest of everybody else, you need to put some work in. Yeah. And they were just basically saying that, you know, the best ideas that come where people make millions of dollars are just reinventions or making another idea better. Yes. And I kind of thought to myself, that becomes what I just said about the sales.

15:25Yeah. They say, hey, here's the framework, but let's put the Kevin Brown spin on it or the Jason Tracy spin or the Lincoln Brown. Yeah. My 19-year-old son sells better than pretty much 90% of the freaking adults. He's got confidence cuz he's sold, he's sold lots of jobs. But this is the thing is out of all the people I've worked with so far, I know that even though he's young, he has the most experience because he's the only service advisor I'm working with that owns their own business, that's successful in business, that's still operating their own business, plus is doing the service advising role.

15:54And so he's got all this experience from a sales standpoint, but he's taking notes, he's asking questions, he's engaged. And so my point, some people jump on and say, hey, I've been doing this for 20 years, or, hey, I'm so I've got all this experience and that's great, but what are you doing to, to improve your experience? Practice isn't perfect. You could be practicing the wrong way.

16:16I agree. Perfect practice is perfect. It's kind of like learning how to shoot a bow and start out with a bad habit. Nobody— or golf swing a golf club and nobody fricking ever checks that bad habit. That bad habit just stays there. Then that bad habit is also muscle memory. And then you practice 4 hours a day doing it wrong, the wrong way.

16:31Yeah. And you know, the funny thing is you have, and I know you'll resonate with this, I have a salesman personality. I'm always selling something or another. You know, my wife's like, Jesus Christ, you're always selling me on this or selling me on that. She's like, and I'm like, I guess it's kind of true to a certain extent. I want people to see my way.

16:51And if I didn't have a track record, it'd be a whole different story. It's like Dave Ramsey says, you don't take, uh, advice from your broke brother-in-law. You don't take criticism from somebody you wouldn't take advice from, right? I'm here to tell you guys, you shop owners, you need to get on the phone and call us for this freaking training. Okay, it's not that bad.

17:07It's a 7-week course. And then usually it leads into us fixing everything else in your shop too, because we start to feel— but here's the thing, guys, you expect somebody to go up and do a job that's not trained in any— name one industry that you could put somebody in there and not train them some way or another. That's why they come up with onboarding.

17:26They came with, you know, what do they call internships? And they have the other thing, probations. They have all different kinds of weird names for it. Basically it all amounts down to training, right? I'll never forget when I took my game to the next level because I always had the personality for sales and stuff like that, but I always did well or okay.

17:44And I remember I had a mentor that was like, how serious are you taking this? How good do you want to be? And I'm like, I want to be the best. And he was like, well, if you want to be the best, you got to read the books. You got to go to the seminars. You got to practice. You got to put more work into your game.

17:59He's like, does that athlete or does that doctor just show up? No, they've gotta practice. They gotta put a lot of work in to get good at what they're doing. And I'll say that for everybody. It doesn't matter how long you've been doing this. If you're not practicing the right way, chances are you're losing more than not. Right. And you know, you get, you get into situations where customers— here's another finger of this whole thing.

18:22You get into, and you get customers of all different types of personalities. You get the customer who wants to badmouth the shop next door to you that you might possibly know the people. Don't fucking jump on that boat. Just say, you know what? Yes, I understand. You know, Bob's whatever, Bob's Auto Repair does it. Okay, you don't like it. This is why his customers usually end up coming to us.

18:41We do this, this, and this. You don't badmouth them. This is why we're better than them. That's about it. You don't have to trash anybody. Okay, there's enough cars on the road for everybody. And you know, everyone's, oh yeah, we're way better than them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, you keep it on the upper, up, up and up. You know, first off, when you start trashing them, now it's like, now you're rallying them to talk more about what you're not.

19:02Like, you're, you're getting them to talk more about them. You want to bring the focus back to you. And I think that comes down to confidence too, because when you're confident that you're, you are the best, you don't have to say you're the best. You just operate. You just do. The competition and whoever they're talking about doesn't matter because you know that you're going to take care of them.

19:18Right. And you know, the number one thing before we get into my notes and start this podcast, because we've been talking about for what, 25 minutes? But the number one thing that I kind of, I see is the number one thing, phone call I get is from body shops. They don't have training to sell the jobs, to deal with the insurance companies.

19:38Their service advisor, estimators, whatever, just kind of lay down for this, for the insurance companies. They don't make enough money, so therefore they're broke. So therefore they have to do what the insurance company says just to survive. So it's a circle. Progressive brings a car in, Progressive tells you how much to fix it. You know, Progressive freaking writes you a check, you fix the car, it starts over again.

19:59But the problem they're missing is customer or the employees pay the benefits, everything that's going up. Progressive prices aren't growing up, going up with that. So what ends up happening with the Geico, the Progressives, the Allstates, the State Farms, they have shaved it all the way down to the point where it's better for them. Not you as a shop. So therefore you're just sitting there and it all comes down to one thing, not running your business effectively because you don't know your numbers.

20:25And I always come back to the numbers in this podcast because if you guys think about it, money equals freedom. I don't give a shit what anybody tells you. If you have a pile in the bank of— in the money in the bank at your collision shop, say right now your collision shop had $150,000 in the bank. And your bills were all paid, your employees are paid, and everything was good, and Progressive came and said, I'll give you $64 for that, for that repair, and your labor rate's $128, you'd be like, no, I'm not doing it.

20:54Okay, but instead they have to do it because they're broke. I'm talking to these body shop owners that are doing $1.5 million a year, they're making $40,000 a year in their body shop. Oh, fuck. And I'm like, yeah, you don't have a— you don't have a business, you have a hobby. Okay, you have a job. Okay. And you're underpaid. Underpaid at that job.

21:10Right. But, you know, here's the thing with these guys. You can't fix them. And this goes into the sales thing. You can't fix them just like you can't fix some customers, because I've had these guys where I do the consultation call to see if we're going to take them on as a client. And the whole time they talk about how fucking great they are.

21:25At the end, I said, well, we talked for 40 minutes and you told me how great you are and what you make in your shop and how everything's so wonderful, but you're fucking broke. And I'm not being arrogant here, guys. This is the truth. This happens weekly, okay? If you're gonna call somebody— and I've said this before— if I was in a room with Elon Musk, I wouldn't tell him how great I am.

21:47I would sit there and let Elon Musk fucking talk, and I would close my mouth and open my ears. Yep. And I would just sit there and listen to him because I'm going to learn something from him, okay? Instead, these guys want to call a guy like me who has— let me tell you guys, I have 2 successful shops and a consulting business and several other businesses.

22:03Okay. I know how to make money. There's no doubt about it. You can say I'm arrogant, whatever. The proof is in the pudding. I make money. Yeah. Okay. So why wouldn't you call me and tell me how broke you are for an hour and then tell me, yeah, okay, what do you, what do you got to say about that? You know how great you are.

22:20It's just, it's like, shut your fucking mouth. God gave you one mouth and 2 ears. Close your mouth and listen. Okay. So now we're gonna swing this back to sale. The number one mistake people make is they don't listen. Now I'm going to give you a story, guys, because we all love stories. This happened to me yesterday. Then we're going to get into the podcast.

22:39My iPhone, the charging port is messed up. It'll charge for 3 or 4 minutes, then it'll be like, boop, come back. You know how when you plug it, it makes a charging noise? Yep. All night long, if I plug it into the C port, it charges, not charges. Me being who I am, go grab another charger. It still does it. Okay, well, maybe it's the plug.

23:01Well, the lamp's still working, so highly doubt whatever. Switch plugs, still does it. Put my Cybertruck, it still does it. Put it my freaking brand new truck, it still does it. Different cords in all the trucks, still does it. Make an appointment at the Apple Store, go to the guy, tell him, listen, this is what's going on. Let me tell you what I did.

23:20Yeah. I tell him exactly all the things I did. I tested this, tested that. I'm a freaking mechanic by trade. I do all the diagnostic work myself. I came to him and said, these are all the things. He takes a little clay, plugs it in there, pulls a little bit. Now that's not dirty. Runs a test, everything's good. He's like, did you try a different charger?

23:39I wanted to scream, what in the hell? I told you all that stuff. You did not even listen. Now you know how your customers feel. Yep. When you're a service advisor, they tell you all this stuff, you're not even paying attention, and they have to repeat yourself. You're like, this fucker's not even listening to me. Second session, step O in the control process.

24:00This is, and I, I tell people, this is the secret sauce. This is the reason why the whole entire thing works because like nobody's listening to people. I, I had, I had a meeting a couple weeks, a couple of years ago with this financial advisor that like I just met in the community and she wanted to meet me and connect with me or whatever.

24:16And she, for, for 30 minutes, our meeting was only scheduled for 30 minutes. For 30 minutes, she sat and told me how she was different than everybody else, how she stops and she listens and she doesn't just sell people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then she hijacked my next 30 minutes and tried to sell me. And I'm like, it doesn't matter what you're saying.

24:31You're not listening. You're not listening to me. You're just talking, talking, talking, talking. And I'm never— not only am I never going to talk to you again, but I'm going to tell a story about you every chance I get. And oh, by the way, she's out of business. She's out of business. Less than 2 years and she's out of business. So here's here's one.

24:48You you witnessed this. That insurance adjuster that came in here. Yeah. And I stopped and I said, "You don't listen to me. You have not been listening the whole time I told you this." Here's a perfect example. He was selling me something, and I was selling him something. Yep. My selling him something was, "I'm not taking your prices. I'm not doing this.

25:05Take it or leave it," was my sales pitch on him. Yep. He was like, "But that that that." I said, "You don't seem to be listening because that guy is not used to an." adversarial customer like me. He used to come in his shop going, we're going to pay you $30 an hour instead of $60. And the guy's like, okay. And then I came in and boom.

25:22And guess what happened today? His brother called. We have another job, Jim. We're going ahead and we're writing this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I understand you're really strict on your pricing. And Jim's like, we're not really strict. Our pricing is our pricing. You don't adjust it. The customer pays the difference. But we laid the groundwork, so they all know now. Yeah, I did in that office that day.

25:44It's like, these people— well, that's a whole nother podcast, but let's get started breaking this whole thing down, right? But I always like, you know, that Apple yesterday, I was just like, are you kidding me? I sat there and told them all this stuff, which you really stop and think about, makes sense. Well, dude, because like— and I said this, I've said this to everybody we worked with this week— you got to think, most of these people calling you, they're like walking around life, their wife doesn't listen to them, their kids aren't listening to them, their employees aren't listening to them.

26:08They feel like nobody's listening to them. If you can just stop and you're listening to what's going on and you're like, oh, so what I hear you saying is this and this and this. Oh, you're valid. That guy doesn't even know why he loves you so much. He just instantly likes you. Yeah. And part— that's part of sales. It's part of sales.

26:23When you leave, the people you're trying to sell stuff to, they just said, wow, what a nice guy. When you leave. Yep. They don't wanna say what an arrogant dick. Yep. What a nice guy. What a nice guy. Okay. So let's do a little bit deeper dive on what I talked about, the appearance. Okay. So when somebody comes walking in, they're already evaluating you when they're walking in your front door.

26:43And this is going to go— we're going to hear this 150 times over the next 10 podcasts, right? Yep. Is the place clean? Women especially, if they're bringing their car and they don't want to go ahead to sit down on a toilet seat that's all greasy with fingerprints all over it, uh, dust bunnies in the corner, a dead plant, you know what I'm saying?

27:01And yeah, uh, they don't like that. So you have to have it clean, put air fresheners in, nice smell and all that stuff. So when they walk in there, automatically they think this is a professional establishment. They care enough to clean, right? Yep. And then the guy behind the counter, he's got his hair combed, he's got a company shirt on, right? He's professional.

27:16His lunch isn't on the counter from yesterday. There's not stacks of repair orders. He's not dirty. Now, obviously mechanics are gonna get dirty, right? There's dirty and then there's dirty. We've all known that one guy in the shop we've called Pink Pen. Pigpen. Yep. You look at him at lunch and you look at him and he's had the same grease smudge in his ear for 3 days.

27:36Okay. Yeah, you can get dirty in our business, but you go home and take a shower before you go to bed. Yeah. Yep, we all do. Yeah, right. Some of my guys take showers at the shop before they even go home. They change their clothes and they go home clean, whatever, right? But what you're conveying without saying is, hello, we're a professional shop.

27:54We take the time to clean. It smells nice in here. Would you like some coffee? Let's go ahead and get started here. Da da da da da, right? You're starting the sales when you walk in the door, even though you don't think you're selling walking in the door. You're selling a brand, right? That'd be brand recognition. Yep. Right. So a very well-spoken service advisor is going to lay everything out loud.

28:13And I've said this 100 times over and over again, but I'm leading into the sales, right? So people are coming in and they already have something on their mind, right? You have to understand how important people's cars are to them. Cars equal what, people? Freedom. Yep. Without a car, think about it. Like right now, like when your whole motorcycle is broke down, you didn't really have to freaking get around.

28:35You're like, it gets a little taxing on your mind. Oh yeah, for sure. I can't just jump in a car and do this. I can't get on the bike, go, right? Yeah. People get irritated. All right. Not everybody has 6 cars like myself, so I just get in a different one. Right. But that's just for the haters. Yeah. You know, but cars equal freedom, right?

28:54So, and I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, that might equate, you know, it could blow dance lessons, could blow taekwondo, baseball games, grocery shopping. Okay. So it's a big deal when somebody's brakes or whatever start grinding or whatever, and they got to bring it to the shop. Your job as a service advisor, close your mouth, open your ears. 9 times out of 10, you could get the Freudian slip to happen where they tell you exactly what's on their mind.

29:19Yep. Okay. And it's not, oh, I woke up this morning, opened my eyes and said, damn, I want to buy brakes for my car. Maybe it made a noise 2 weeks ago. And most people, I'm busy. I ignored it. Did I really hear the noise? They start playing the game. So they might've been thinking about this problem for 2 weeks. Right. So then it starts to get really bad.

29:38They hit us like, they're like, oh shit, I'm using brakes as an example. So you walk in, they walk in and they're upset in their mind, but you really don't know. They look irritated. Agitated, whatever, pissed off. You're like, "How can I help you?" Well, my brakes are making noise. Okay, you ask the question. How long has this been going on? Well, it happened two weeks ago.

29:59Okay, then you start asking questions, and then you listen. Questions, you listen. And then chances are you're gonna get to the point where she's like, "My God, I'm so upset! My daughter's got dance." Da da da da. Now you're on a personal level with them. Yep. No problem, man, ma'am. We do these all the time. We'll get you taken care of. Let's get you written up.

30:17Da da da da. Go on with the whole process, right? The psychological part of everybody's human. This goes back to everybody needs that personal touch, which you said and I said last week. Like it's not hard to be a rock star in today's world. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to talk. Some of these young kids cannot even communicate without sending you a text.

30:36Yep. Is that not crazy? It's crazy. How many people? And I sound like a broken fucking record, but how many times have you? Call these younger kids and they don't answer the phone, you get a text back, hey, what's up? You called? They don't even know how to communicate, and communication is a big problem. And they don't even realize 90% of communication starts with body language.

30:58People don't even take that into consideration. Yep. Facial expressions. We talked about the, the call we posted where the guy was sighing the whole time. Didn't even know he was sighing. Didn't even know he was doing it. And I don't even know what his— we were obviously have a crystal ball. We couldn't see what was going on, but he was just— to me, he sounded exasperated.

31:16Yeah. Like I was bothering him. Like you were bothering him making the phone call. Yeah. Don't you think? Yeah. So him doing that and that shop we're working with, they say their sales are down. They're the ones that just booked today, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But their sales are down. Go figure. And they don't know why. Do you ever stop as an owner and sit there and listen?

31:40That's part of our program. Sit there and listen what's going on in your front office. You'll be horrified. And don't interrupt them right in the middle of it. That— you'll be horrified. Trust me when I tell you this, 99.9% of the people need our phone training. Now, we had one guy that was a B+. He did pretty good. Yeah. And he's getting better, obviously, as we train him, right?

32:00Yep. Or actually, you haven't even trained him yet, have you? I have no— start with him, right? Yep. You know, 9 times out of 10, when you talk to these people like human beings and listen to what they have to say, they'll tell you exactly what's on their mind. And it makes it so much easier to make that personal connection. And then the next time they're like, wow, I really liked that place.

32:21That guy took the time to listen to me. I got a 1-star review. You guys can go look on Garrett Auto and Truck last week from a guy who did not listen. We tried to explain it to him. He would not listen. He gave us a 1-star review. He brings his truck in. We send him a courtesy inspection and we send him an hour labor to check it out.

32:42It's a refrigerated truck, box truck. They haul food products and the rear door had a problem. And in our courtesy inspection, the windshield wiper blades are messed up. They're streaking. So that's a DOT infraction. So we just mark it down. We don't try to sell them. Wiper blades. A reefer box, because all the cycles and stuff like that, Morgan recommends— it was a Morgan box, all stainless steel stuff for the heat cycle so it doesn't start to rust and da da da da.

33:11We called the manufacturer. The truck was brought in Monday. We called the manufacturer. We finally got everything all estimated Thursday. Anybody who knows anything about roll-up doors on back of box trucks, the operator, which is the 2 big springs just like your garage door, has cables that go down. It ripped out of the wall, so it was hanging and bent. There's rusted door hardware that somebody replaced with the wrong hardware.

33:33The door seals were hanging out of the back of it, so it was leaking, uh, cold air out. So we wrote him an estimate for like $4,700. He says no, picks the truck up, gives us a 1-star review. Once again, you can go read it on Google. And he basically says that we tried to sell him wiper blades, which we didn't. It was a, it was just courtesy inspection, does not even know how to read the paperwork.

33:56We tried to explain to him why it was very important in today's world to have all the correct parts in this truck with all the different parasites going on and stuff like that. The explosive diarrhea freaking parasite and all that, right? We take food standard trucks very seriously. So yes, it's gonna be way more expensive. It's a shame that you don't wanna take care of your truck.

34:15He basically wrote that he took it to a guy and the guy fixed it for $300. Well, I could have fixed it for $300 if I wanted to hack it together, not put seals in it, not put the correct hardware on it. There's different levels of what's going on. But we sat there, to my guy's defense, sat there and explained this all to the man, and he did not want to hear any of it.

34:33He went and just crashed us and got it fixed for $300. That's not a customer you're ever going to fix. Nope. That is a guy you're never going to fix, that customer. Nope. Yeah, as much as you educate him, he was listening, not even— it was going in one ear and out the other. He was hearing $300. He was, he was price motivated, right?

34:48And them are the problem child customers that no matter what you do, you don't say the right thing. They already come and their feathers are all ruffled up. This is where the body language comes in. They start shaking their head. And chances are 9 times out of 10 in the commercial world, they don't run their business very good because they don't know their numbers, their margins.

35:03So they're broke. So you come at them with a $4,700 estimate to fix their truck, right? They freaking go haywire on you and then you end up getting a bad review. That's why I cannot stand freaking reviews. And if you read my reviews, I go right back after these people. You know what I do now? I go and put the review on their page and I review them and I put all my pictures of their trucks being messed up on their page.

35:25I got 2 of them right now. I review them back because you know what? Yeah, how can you say bullshit to me? So I review them back and I tell everybody, guys, if you're gonna get bad reviews and you're a commercial company, give them a bad review of being a shitty customer. Well, because you, you're talking about this truck and like with everything going on with the food, just Period.

35:43At any time, you want to have the correct parts so you're, you're, you're actually properly refrigerating the food that you have inside, as opposed to getting it fixed for $300. You have— and we talked about this, I know this is part of the list— peace of mind. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, we do quality work and we're not for everybody, you know. There's, there's a— what do they say?

36:01There's a chair for every ass. Yeah. Okay, if you want to go to the $300 guy, that's fine. I'm not saying that the food is all thawing out and it's green. I'm not saying that at all. But what I'm saying, that just kind of paints a picture of what kind of company that man runs. Yeah. If he can't come up with the money to fix his truck correctly, he wants to hack it back together and it's got rusted, seized up door parts.

36:20Not to mention the safety aspect of the cables breaking and stuff, you know, dropping and the doors. You got people going in and out of that all day. There's a whole, whole array of different things that could happen with roll-up doors. Yeah, roll-up doors are dangerous. They have freaking stainless steel cables that are running up there under a lot of tension. So I write it up 100% to fix it correctly, the right way, like it came out of the factory.

36:45Okay, that's not the same way as a guy who put self-tappers in it for $300. Yeah, the, the repair is not the repair. It's a limp-along repair. We patched her, and there's other words for, for it. Yeah, rigging is the end of the other words. Yeah, yeah, you know what I mean? Yep. All right, that's gonna do it for this episode of Repair Shop Reckoning.

37:03If 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.