From Mechanic to Shop Owner: The First Thing You Have to Fix Is You

0:00Yes, you can. A 5-minute quick and easy calorie burning workout. Give it a try. Come join our sweat sesh on TikTok. Welcome back. Today's episode, we're going to talk about being broke, starting at the beginning, how I was a technician, how I didn't make any money. I wasn't fiscally responsible. I was in debt up to my ears. I couldn't pay my bills.

0:28And then I thought it was my boss's problem to make me make more money or pay me more money because I couldn't handle my finances at home. And then I wanna take that into the ever-growing conversation of these technicians that become business owners that everybody says it's two hats to wear, right? You're a great technician, but you're a terrible business owner. Well, my thought is if you're not fiscally responsible at home, how could you run a business and start paying taxes and stuff like that?

0:55Then these guys get into tax trouble and da da da. So I'm just gonna simply tell my story, how I went from the start of being a tech, being broke, not responsible with my money, in debt, all the way up to the point of where I am today. Because everybody's like, yeah, this guy never fucking turned a wrench in his fucking life.

1:14And once again, I don't care about the haters because these guys are haters. Yeah, you know, you're not going to convert them either way, right? Would you take criticism for somebody you wouldn't take advice from? Okay, a lot of these guys on the other end of the keyboard, that's just all they are. There's another set of fingers that just fucking— with some fucked up viewpoint on the world.

1:30Okay, some of their shit's pretty funny, but it is— I mean, it's stupid, just stupid, you know. Um, so go from there. But one thing I want to talk about, last, uh, week when I talked about the truck being at the dealer and the communication thing and all that, uh, that podcast came out Friday morning at 7, 8 o'clock. I got a call from the dealership.

1:50I love this update. Yeah, the big boss, uh, freaking listens to my podcast and he made sure that truck got handled. Very professional guy. Kudos to him. And I already have the truck back. That's awesome. Wow. Because your big worry was how long it was going to be backordered, how long you're— Right. And it was done in like a week. That's awesome.

2:09So I'm pretty impressed with the dealership. The truck so far is good. We put a couple hundred miles on it, no problems. And, you know, it just goes to show you that people do listen. The power of the podcast. I didn't use their name. Yeah. Anything like that. He knew, though. He knew. He knew because he knows my companies and stuff like that.

2:26But, you know, what a square guy to call me and go, hey, we want to take care of this. I mean, he was calling the shop at 8:05. That's so cool. And the podcast came out at 7. Yeah, I know. I put that clip out and I'm like, oh man, I wonder, I wonder because you talked about the guy listened to it or whatever.

2:40And I wonder. And then you said, right, first you called me first thing in the morning and he called, had called you already. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Some of the actual, some of the professionals think I'm smart. It's all the fricking jackoff technicians that are lube techs or whatever that hate me. But, you know, some of the guys actually know what they're doing and have a career.

2:55In this industry obviously believe what I say because I get compliments all the time when I go to places. Man, I like your stuff. It's real world stuff and stuff we deal with in the shops, blah blah blah blah blah. So, you know, it's nice to know that you're helping some people, giving some people ideas of how you do it. And you're like, oh, you know, I got people going, oh, here, you know, the haters going, uh, you know, here's the best shop owner in the world and stuff like that.

3:20It's like, okay, whatever, dude. Like, it's my opinion. The podcast's free. If you don't like it, turn it the fuck off. But there's also 30,000 people that obviously frickin' like my shit and comment on my stuff too. On the plus side, I get texts all the time going, man, thank you very much. And the collision industry part of it, I've been doing a little bit into that, getting into that.

3:37Them guys are like, oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. It's just not everybody knows everything. But if we put all these ideas out there, you can learn something from everybody, whether it's right or wrong. You can learn something. That's what these arrogant motherfuckers don't realize. Okay. So it's kind of funny because a lot of the guys compliment or stuff I talk about, topics I talk about.

3:59You ever notice a lot of these other guys are talking about the same topics I am all of a sudden? So concerned. So concerned. Walking through fields all like teary-eyed. Yeah, it's just like, come on, you know? And if you're— every single time you put a topic out, all of a sudden there's a new guru that's like talking about what you just said.

4:17I know. And it's crazy. And, you know, the bottom line is Everybody could say they're trying to change the industry. I go around to shops and help guys change their shops and change the way they do business. Now, one thing I will tell you, and I'll say this again, every shop I've gone to, they treat their technicians like gold. Not any of the shops I've gone to, and I've interviewed the guys when I go there, they say they hate their boss.

4:42Everybody's like, my boss is great. And I got 5 shops right now. I have— I got rid of one, six, but I have 5 shops right now, and every one of them people say the same thing. My people are really important and they treat them people like gold. Okay, so everybody online going every shop owner everywhere in the world is bad, that's fucking bullshit.

4:59It's like saying every police officer is dirty, or every painter is a bad painter, or every mechanic's a— there's exceptions to every rule. Well, and I love how the— what the topic for today, because it's like reverse engineering and going back, and you said something like and it was my boss's fault. The way you did things was your boss's fault. And I think it ties into these, all these haters, it's their mindset.

5:18And you were in that mindset to a degree in like what happened in order to get you out. And I got a couple stories I'm going to talk about Rise being a little bitch. Okay, so I'm going to start the whole thing. So in 1989, I graduated from high school. That was 100 fucking years ago, right? Right when, you know, the turn of the century.

5:38Um, I got a— I grew up on a horse farm and worked on equipment and stuff there, you know, backyard. I went to SWOVC, which is Oakland Technical, uh, Center, Southwest Oakland Technical Center. I went to diesel mechanics for 11th and 12th grade and some of after I graduated high school. I went back, um, just for some more of it. And I got a job at a place called Hale's Auto Clinic.

6:02That was my first job. I thought I was knew what I was doing. I didn't know shit. I started out at $400 a week salary. I worked 56 hours a week. Okay, do the math. That's not very much an hour. That was back in '89 or late '89, after, you know, into '90. I worked there for 4 years. Great guy. He's still friends with me today.

6:23Taught me a lot. There's a lot of guys I learned from there. But the one problem I had starting out, nobody ever taught me how to manage my money. Okay, it was like you had $40 in your pocket, you go spend $40. You just make more tomorrow, make it back. 'Cause we used to get paid by the day on the farm. Okay, we're gonna pay you $50 a day, whatever, right?

6:43I don't remember what the end result was before I quit the farm, but I worked there my whole childhood and stuff. So you're making a couple hundred dollars a week at the farm. You're not doing the math where you're making $3 an hour. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? They pulled a car finance trick on you. Right, yeah, exactly. So the only place I could go, me and Shane, my friend, could go after work was to Meijer's on 8 Mile and Haggerty.

7:04The only place open 24 hours to buy shit, knives or whatever, just waste our fucking money. That never got any better. You couldn't even wait, it had to be the 24 hours, right? Exactly. So I remember I used to take home $296.10 after taxes out of my $400. That's what I lived on, and my tool bill was $50 a week, so it doesn't leave me very much for my rent, gas, and everything like that.

7:28Um, if I remember correctly, I used to keep the $296 and I gave my mom the $200. Now remember, I'm just right out out of high school. So I don't manage my money and I don't know what I'm really doing with money. So as we progress, as every young tech, I bought more and more tools. As I would buy more and more tools, the tool bill weekly payment will go up.

7:49So I had the Macman, then I had the Maco Man, then you get financed through the Maco company, then Snap-on, right? So all of a sudden, if you're not paying attention, it's $150 a week. Now keep in mind, I'm taking home $296. Right. And $90 is, you know, my groceries, my gas back and forth to work to $96.10. So $200 going to my mom for my rent, my insurance on my car and stuff like that.

8:11So think about there's no money, no money, no money. So what I ended up doing, I would get behind on the tool guy. I would pay one guy one week that I wouldn't pay the other guy and I would just go back and forth. Well, it got to the point where I remember this vividly. I bought two ratchets. I bought a quarter-inch ratchet and I bought a 3/8 ratchet and they had orange handles on them.

8:29They were Mac. And the guy came in and repoed them. I will tell you what, I felt like such a piece of shit when he came in and repoed them tools. I bet. I didn't change my way though. I just took my licks like, "Ah, fuck it, whatever." And away I went. And, you know, I ended up working at Hal's for like 3 years.

8:50Got some state certifications and stuff, 'cause in Michigan you have to have state certifications. And then I went to one of the guys that worked at Sterling, Performance that was one of my mentors at Hale's. He was a pretty good mechanic. His name was Jeff. He said, hey, we got an opening at Sterling. And at that point I was sick of commission and stuff like that.

9:09So I went to Sterling, but I want to back up because I skipped a good point here. So when I was broke, I had the mindset that I guess I should— I missed the point. I want to make sure I'm very clear on this. I got switched to 45% commission. At some point in them 3 years. I don't really remember. The first year or 2, I was the $400.

9:30Then I'm like, okay, I want to be on commission. So I would work harder and I would make more money on commission. So that fixed my money thing. But I still didn't fix my money thing enough to go to the bar like I was and spending all my money and not giving my mom money after I cashed my check, getting behind on my bills and stuff like that.

9:46I remember I pulled an, uh, Otis Spunkmeyer van. They did cookies in our state. They were Econoline vans. And back in the day, torque converters had drain plugs in 'em. And this thing came in for a leak, transmission leak. And I remember pulling it over in the pit in the one door and I went down there and I'm like looking around and I'm like sitting there thinking and I go out and drive it and I clean it off and I'm like, well, I think the front pump seal's leaking.

10:13And my boss Hale told me, check the drain plug. On it, on the torque converter. It's probably leaking. They always leak. I'm like, yeah, whatever. So I write it up to pull the trans out to replace the front seal. So keep in mind, I'm on commission, right? And I'm broke. So I spend, you know, a couple hours. Back then, the cross members on the Ford vans fucking sucked.

10:35They had the pivots on them and stuff. So it was a lot of bolts to get out. I mean, it was still, you know, probably a couple hours to get the trans out. I get the trans out and Hal walks over to me. And he's like, did you check the plug? And I lied to him. And I'm like, yeah, I checked the fucking plug.

10:50He's like, well, I'm looking and it's fucking dripping right now. And I'm like, oh. And he fucking go get a wrench. So I go grab a wrench. It was fucking loose. So he's like, fucking tighten it up and put it back in. You're not getting fucking paid. So that was a big chunk out of my paycheck that week. And I remember being mad at him.

11:11Yeah, like, what a fucking asshole. Not gonna fucking pay me to take the trans in and out. Nobody will know. But that taught me a fucking lesson. Number one, it was my responsibility. When he said check it out, he had more experience than me. His name was on the front of the building. But me being the arrogant little dick I was, well, I'm gonna take the trans out of it because obviously it can't be leaking, right?

11:30I should have checked. So instead of me getting a half an hour and moving on to something else, or an hour— I could probably nowadays, like, you probably get an hour for that, right? I ended up spending probably, what, 4 or 5 hours doing that. And back then that would have been, you know, quite a bit of money in my paycheck. And like, once again, I remember to myself, like, me being mad at him.

11:49Yeah, it was just— that's a mindset, right? I'm broke because I can't run my finances. I had a guy that was more experienced than me that owned the business telling me to do something. Fuck him, I'm not doing it. Okay. And after it was all said and done, I got taken to the office, my ass fucking reamed. You will fucking do what I tell you when you're in my shop.

12:10You fucking work for me, you fucking asshole. Basically, you're arrogant, you're this, you're that, you know, you think you know shit, you don't know nothing, you only been doing this a couple years. Just, you berated me. Did I deserve it? Yes. Now today, that could never happen. You could never correct somebody, even if you took them in there and held their hand and said, okay, you didn't do this and this is why, it would still be You're an asshole boss.

12:35Yeah. Nobody takes personal responsibility ever. And I was that guy when I was younger. Okay. I think everybody does to a certain point. Oh, for sure. But nowadays it's so much worse because we have this entitlement disease going on with these young techs. Yep. Okay. They need me. If they're not a tech, they can't fix cars. Well, did you ever notice the dealerships will fire fucking people quick as shit and they'll find somebody else?

12:58They don't even worry about it. They have 20 more techs, so If they're down one tech, they'll find somebody else. They could get somebody else for a dollar or something more an hour flat rate. They'll move dealerships. They move all over the place. Independence is a little bit, independent shops, it's a little bit harder. So at Hal's, I ended up getting sick and tired of, you know, the commission game and all that stuff like that.

13:20Um, I was working hard. I was working a lot of hours. I was doing heavy engines. I was doing 2 or 3 engines a week at this point. By the time I just said, I said, you know what, Sterling offered me more money and they offered me hourly. I'm like, okay, I can go work on race boats. So we worked on Don Q.

13:34Crystal, Victory Team, Wonderbar. You know the guy who invented the guns on the bar with the buttons? Yeah. Wonderbar, they did cars, race cars, V6 cars. We had the boats, you know, Don Q. Crystal did rum distillery. Victory Team is a Sheikh in Dubai. Sheikh Mana Ben Khalifa Al Maktoum is his name. You know, I went over— Did you pronounce that right?

13:56Yeah. That's crazy. Holy shit. Yeah. I just remember 'cause we used to have to write it on the boxes and you know, we were dynoing these high performance engines and stuff. It was pretty cool. You know, I was in the part, in the engine. We were in the part where after they dynoed the stuff, me and Jeff would take 'em, we would dress 'em before they went out.

14:11We'd put all the coolers on 'em, all the stuff, all the, you know what I mean? Get 'em ready to ship overseas. So we would build the motors after they're done as far as dynoing 'em, putting all the accessories, drive the crash box on it and all that stuff. And I did that for 3 or 4 years. Actually 3 years, and I learned a lot there.

14:28I rebuilt a lot of carburetors and stuff like that, but I got to the point where I got kind of sick and tired of that because when you're dealing with these engines that are lots of money with people, lots of money, there's no downtime. And you work on these engines all week or whatever, and then dyno them, and they ship out, and then here comes race day Sunday, and you'd worry about shit like, here comes Monday, what are you gonna get knicked for.

14:55Like, I remember one time a couple of plug wires got crossed on an engine and they went to start it up in the boat and blew their intake off it and it backfired. Like, you did the plug wires wrong. We had a sheet back then. I did not do the plug wires wrong, but right by one of the hooks was plug wires.

15:11If you weren't careful when you're dropping the straps down to pick it up, you could pop the plug wires off. Somebody might not have been paying attention, switched a couple plug wires, just shit like that. You know what I'm saying? Once again, I was young, so it was never my fucking fault. I still had that. I'm broke. I don't make enough money no matter what.

15:27My boss doesn't pay me enough. Even though shit's getting screwed up, um, the plug wire one I won't believe, but I did leave shit loose. That was blatantly my fault. But once again, not my fucking fault. Um, all the way through this whole thing, you know, it was never my fault up to the point where I quit and I, and then I went to Garrett Auto and Truck in 1995.

15:49So the timeline, you had to kind of figure it was like 2.5, maybe 3 years at Hal's and 2 at Sterling, whatever. You know, it was from what I said, like late '89 to 1995. I started at Garrett Auto and Truck. I started at Garrett Auto and Truck as a mechanic, hourly mechanic for $11.50 an hour. And I could work all the overtime I wanted because the shop was such a shit show.

16:13I was the first legit mechanic they ever hired. So I could work all the hours I wanted. And we used to work, I used to work 60, I used to work 20 hours overtime easy. Like one thing my wife never gave me a hard time about was I would work, work hard, work long. I would get home 9, 10 o'clock at night, the kids would be in bed or whatever, and I would just come in, take a shower, eat, and go to bed.

16:34Do it over. It was like rinse and repeat, rinse. You know what I mean? To the point where it got old. But, you know, my thing was I— there was a way, there was a light at the end of the tunnel that if I could work more, I could pay my bills. But once again, now we bought our first house. Me and my wife did.

16:52We lived there for probably 8 months before we got married. And she was terrible with money too. So the deal was we moved in the house, she was going to pay the utilities and I was going to pay the house payment and stuff. Now the house payment was $613.43. I remember it. Thinking to myself, how the fuck are we gonna pay this bitch?

17:14Yeah, that's a fucking nut. Probably 6 weeks in, we get a shutoff notice on the Edison. Like, what the fuck? She's like, I didn't pay it, we didn't have— I didn't have the money. I said, but the deal was— she's like, yeah, but where the fuck do you think going out to dinner money came from and shit that I was paying for?

17:34Oh shit. Yep. So I was like, fuck. So we just were terrible. We would always have to— I would always have to hustle or work more to get the kids' school clothes. Like, it was always a fucking nightmare because we never had any money. We'd spend it. You know, you got $20, you spent $40. You got a $20 raise, you went and raised all your payments $100.

18:00Like, all the classic fucking stupid shit. Young people do. Credit cards maxed out. Every credit card's maxed out, you know? So we lived there for 3 years and my wife was going to get a job at Detroit Diesel Corporation. We had to go through training and that was going to like double her income. Now, back then I think she was making $9 an hour, right?

18:25So she's got double her income going to work on the assembly line at Diesel. Which back then, '90s, $18 an hour is probably a lot of money. Correct. So my dad was the shop chairman. So he said, I got you an in. You got to go through all these classes and stuff like that at Detroit Diesel. So I'm like, okay. She's like, okay, I'll do it.

18:46So she goes through all these classes and towards the end of it, NLB Corporation comes through and say, we want to fricking give you like a 75% pay raise and keep you. We can't live without you. So my wife's like, well, I'll stay there. I've been there for 15 years already. Why wouldn't I stay? So she stays there. In the meantime, we start looking for another house because the neighborhood we were in was like kind of getting shady.

19:12We had our truck, my truck broken into, my stuff stolen, some tools stolen, stuff like that. So we bought our house in Commerce. That house payment was $1,324 and some change. More than doubled from the— more than double. And I'm thinking, we can't swing this. But once again, we'll figure it out. It broke up to our fucking ears, but fuck it, we'll figure it out.

19:37So move in this house. We get now at this time, our credit's getting better because we just pay our credit card bills, right? It's not like we have money. Well, they give us fucking American Express cards. Well, back in the day with American Express Green Card, when you bought at the end of the month, they're like, Pay up, bitch. There's no interest, but you remember, you need to pay us back when the credit card comes.

20:00So what we would do is we would short other bills to pay our American Express. So we move into this house and we might— we moved into this house, I believe, in like April. We live pretty much like kings on our credit cards. And you know, they're maxed out, just robbing Peter to pay Paul back and forth. To the point where Christmas comes and she's like, what are we doing for Christmas?

20:27I'm like, I don't know, we have no fucking money. I've sold everything I have of any value to pay these fucking American Expresses off. I'm spending, you're spending, we're spending a house payment each. We don't have no fucking money. We can't pay American Express. They fucking shut the cards off. I don't know what the fuck to do. I don't know what to tell you.

20:43We have no fucking money for Christmas. So we got in a huge fucking fight. And I've told this story, but not in depth. We got in a huge fight. And I remember sitting downstairs in the corner where my computer was. And I start searching, you know, financial, this, you know, coaches, whatever. Dave Ramsey came up. So I started looking at Dave Ramsey.

21:06I went on YouTube and looked at it. And I'm like, it was $119 for the Total Money Makeover. So I call her down there. She's still pissed. I go, what do you think of this? She's like, I think it's a fucking scam. It's this and that. I said, but people, they say they follow it. It works. I said, how about I borrow some money off my mom and dad for Christmas?

21:25Because her mom was a fucking bitch and still is, would not loan her money or me money. My mom and dad would. I'm like, hey, will you loan me some fucking money for— they're like, absolutely. They loan us money for Christmas. We get Christmas handle. But I'm like, if I borrow the money, You're doing the Dave Ramsey thing. We're not doing it half-assed.

21:43If we do it, we're fucking doing it. So I don't know if they do it now, but you would find a church around you and they would, they would have, you know, twice a week or once a week, whatever it was. It might have been twice. They have you go to the church for class. There's a guy teaching the curriculum and you do that, you know, you do the checkbook and stuff like that, the books and stuff like that.

22:02And, you know, he teaches you to basically sell everything. So the dog thinks he's next. Like, you sell everything on eBay to try to get yourself out. And they do the debt snowball. You start out with your smallest bill, you pay that, then you take the money you were paying on the smallest bill, put on the next bill, the next bill, till you get to the big bills.

22:18And all of a sudden you're paying 5 times the payment on the big bills, right? Stop your contributing to your 401. Just pause it right now because you need all the money you can get with Gonzalo, Gonzalo intensity to pay off all your bills. Put $1,000 in your savings account as quick as you can. Now call that an emergency fund. That way when you're paying all these bills off, if something happens, you have $1,000.

22:42So I'm like, man, look at this, is some fucking confusing shit. She's like, yeah. So we start doing the classes and we start, you know, like, okay, we got the $1,000 in the bank, in the savings account. And I'm going to tell you something now. You got to remember, no, a guy with no savings account, saves up $1,000 back in, you know, '98.

23:03Yeah. $1,000 in the bank when you're a guy that's been living fucking paycheck to paycheck and can't come up with $20, having $1,000 in the bank, you're looking at property, investment properties and shit. You're like, yeah, I might need to buy it. You know what I mean? It changes your mindset. Yeah. So we start doing the Total Money Makeover. I went outside the lines a little bit.

23:24I took that $1,000 and went and bought— would look online and go buy a four-wheeler. And I would fix the four-wheeler that wouldn't run. I would paint it and all of a sudden I would make money on it. I would put the $1,000 back and then I would pay the other, what I made on the bill. Yeah. So I kept doing that.

23:39And we did that for 2 years, 2 years. We did not go out to dinner with our friends. We did not do concerts. We did not do nothing. And my wife said something the other day. She said that was the start of our financial freedom and our success. She's like, we had everything under control. Now he takes— he doesn't want you to live like a bum.

23:58So he's like, okay, if you want to go to the movies, take— you get envelopes and say grocery cash, put the cash in there for gas, put the cash in there for entertainment. That way you have cash. You're not tempted to swipe the debit card. Every dollar has a name and has a purpose. So you take your paycheck, you write out a budget where everything goes.

24:14You get X amount of money for this for a week, right? And when that money's gone, it's gone. And he said to us in the class, I remember it. If you, you have a mental string hooked to a dollar bill, think about it. He said when McDonald's and all these fast food places came out with a credit card, their sales went up like 30%.

24:32Because if you're standing at the counter at McDonald's and you have $3 in your pocket and a Coke is a dollar, a hamburger is a dollar, and a fries is a dollar, you're going to be very careful not to go over, right? But if you're swiping with a credit card, give me 2 of them, give me 2 of them. I don't have to pay for it.

24:48There's no mental connection when you swipe. And that's how people get in trouble because it's not real money. Now you tap, it's even easier. Yeah. Now you tap. Right. So I lost my train of thought. I kind of went off on the McDonald's thing, but the whole thing was we kept paying. Every dollar had a name. Every dollar had a name. And you know, when the envelopes were empty, you had to wait until next week.

25:11So what that taught you to do is, is okay, do I really need this? You know, this is entertainment money. Marilyn, do we really need to do this? Or we could take this $40 and go do this, or, Right. It would teach you to clip coupons at the grocery store. Say you had a $100 bill for groceries. Well, if we get everything we need and we don't buy anything extra, we might be able to save $30.

25:30So it taught you to manage your money and to really watch where it was going. And inadvertently, he's— you're doing this, but you're not thinking you're doing it. Yeah. But you start to become a little bit more frugal, a little bit smart, like, okay, this goes here. Okay, I'm not going to waste this. So we did that for 2 years. And by the time we got out of it, when we were done, um, we had nothing.

25:53We owed on nothing but our house. And we started to pay our house off quite a bit. After 2 years, we paid off pretty much anything. And I will tell you, that was a point where it taught us discipline with our money. And it also taught us that when you get to keep your paycheck and you don't give it away every week, you feel better about your life.

26:12Now, I will say it seems to be harder nowadays for people because everything's more expensive. But, but, but, but the money goes the same way. Inflation, wages have gone up. Now here people are going to say, oh, that's bullshit. Mechanics still don't make money. Good mechanics make good money. Smart people make— in our business make good money. My guys all make good money.

26:32I know the guys. I know a bunch of people in this business that make me— if you don't make good money in this business, probably because you fucking suck. Yeah. Or you don't know how to write a repair order, or you're at the wrong place, or you just think you're better than you really are, and you think you should be paid more than you are getting paid, but you're really not that good.

26:52Yep. I don't know if that makes sense, but I hear other influencers starting to say that now. A lot of these mechanics think they're way better than they really are. Yeah, they're like a C-level tech. They think they're A-tech. You're better. Yeah. Okay. And they think that shop can't live without you. Let me tell you something. The shop can live without you.

27:08Yeah. Okay. Yep. The problem is a lot of these guys have the entitlement thing. So now let's go ahead and let's go ahead and hook this together. So I'm a kid that was never told no. I'm of the trophy generation. I got a trophy for being third and fourth place. You go to a tournament. If you remember correctly, when we were growing up, it was first, second, and maybe third, right?

27:29And then runner-up got dick. Yep. Now everybody gets a trophy. Everybody goes to these tournaments and plays, gets a trophy. Okay, that's the problem, guys. That is a problem. Now the comments are going to say, well, your generation gave us the trophies. Let me tell you something. My fucking generation did not give my kids the trophies. Maybe other guys did, but I didn't.

27:51Okay, I made my kids all toe the line. We get them all on there. They're like, Dad made us toe the fucking line. And I still make them toe the line. Okay. My son is more successful than most people at 18 years old. And he's not an arrogant dick at all. He's a nice kid because I make him, I keep him grounded.

28:06You know, I'm like, listen, you could be successful, wealthy, but you don't have to be a dick. You don't have to be arrogant. You don't have to put people down. Okay. So let's back this up to these guys are not fiscally responsible. They have 2 or 3 baby mamas. They can't keep their junk in their pants. They're mediocre mechanic. They have a bad attitude.

28:26They won't take anything into consideration, nor did I when they were younger, 'cause they knew everything. So, but when we were younger, your boss could take you in the office and fricking light you on fire and you would walk out with your tail between your legs and say, yeah, I need to keep my job because I don't have time to go find another one.

28:41'Cause I can't afford not to have one paycheck one week. These other kids live in their mommy and daddy's basements 'cause their mom and daddy never kicked 'em out so they could job hop. So the minute somebody gives them a hard time, even though they might be right or wrong, the boss, who knows, they flame out and they quit and go somewhere else.

28:57So they never grow roots and they never get anywhere far. They just literally jump job to job. Like the dude that cried and quit. Yeah. They do the cry. Yeah. You just see it happening all the time. So, you know, these people need to stop and think about like, Managing your money is the start of having a good life. If you manage your money, I know, like, my uncles, they were Detroit cops.

29:25I got one uncle, this Detroit cop. I got two uncles that were Detroit cops. The one uncle is very smart with his money, always, always saved, always, you know, did without, but he always seemed to be okay. Had the nice house, nice car as it went on, right? The other uncle, terrible with his money, gambles and stuff like that, broke all the time.

29:44Okay, there's two guys that made the same amount of money and lived in the same neighborhood. Because if you remember correctly, Detroit police officers had to live within the city limits for a long time, right? So they live on Lampere and stuff like that on the other side of Rouge Park in the decent areas. But you have two guys that made the same money, and you look at one guy, always had money to do everything he wanted, and the other guy's always broke.

30:06That was— they all had the same amount of— both made the same amount of kids. Actually, the broke guy had one less kid. Wow. Wow. Okay. Yeah. But it's all about managing your money. So let's take this and put it with a guy once again, that's a, uh, uh, okay mechanic who thinks he should be making way more than he should, that has no financial literacy.

30:28How's that? He doesn't manage his money. He just blows everything on the tool truck like I used to. And here's the thing, I am not sitting here preaching like, motherfucker, you need to do that. I'm telling you, I was that guy. Yep. Right. I was broke. Broke as a fucking joke. I told the story the other day, yesterday to Nick. We were joking.

30:48There's a truck that came in. He said the marker lights aren't working. The headlight switch is— the pin in the headlight switch is bad. I go, just hook the fucking— hook a wire from the low beam headlights over to the marker lights and it'll turn everything on. He looked at me. I said I had to do that in my Buick Century because I couldn't afford a headlight switch back in the day.

31:02It was $80. I didn't have $80 for a fucking headlight switch. So I had to find a way to rig it. You know, they were all laughing and stuff like that. Like, I've been there. Yeah. I'm not sitting here being arrogant on a podcast. I've been there. I've been broke. Okay. So fast forward to me going through Dave Ramsey and all that stuff.

31:22It opened a lot of stuff up. You know, we didn't go buy fancy cars. We didn't do that. We started saving money. We started saving money. Things got better. I ended up becoming a partner at the shop, so I started making a little bit more money. We didn't go blow it. We didn't— when I started making more money, we didn't say, okay, we need to go buy the Cadillac, we need to go buy this.

31:41We— none of that shit happened. You know, when we were doing the Total Money Makeover, we sold our cars and bought beaters and all that shit. Had no car payments. Like, we were fucking— we were committed. Yeah. So what we did after we got through that, we changed our life so much, we started fucking sponsoring people. I told all my all my guys I worked with, I said at this time, you know, when I got out of there, I became partners at the shop.

32:03So I'm like, listen, the shop will pay for you to go through Dave Ramsey. Wow. Jim Hines, the guy that quit, that worked for me for a long time, went through Dave Ramsey. So did my brother. Both of them became debt-free. Jim Hines retired, left me, quit a couple of years ago, but he said he had enough money where he didn't have to work anymore because he had been investing and putting all his money in investments for years.

32:25My brother's gone through a couple of divorces and stuff like that. So he's a different story. But, um, you know, these guys that went through The Total Money Makeover, all of a sudden they had, they were, they had financial freedom. They weren't beholden to work. They'd go on vacation and stuff like that. So they see this, you know, so we kept going.

32:42So once I got to the point where I ended up needing to buy my partner out, I talked about the story of everything, how, um, You had to get into the books and build the accounting system, stuff like that. What would have happened if you would have turned me loose? Not now. Oh, man. I already said there's no money in the shop.

33:00You remember correctly? Because Vicki made the mistakes because of the brain cancer and stuff like that. There was no money in the account. But start thinking about this. All of a sudden I'm in charge of this company. I have no financial literacy. I spend every dime I get, and all of a sudden cash jobs are coming in and stuff like that. Okay, I would have started stealing, taking cash.

33:18Literally stealing cash from the company, not stealing, but, you know, taking the cash, right? Yep. I never did. Cause I'm like, I knew the importance of getting the business healthy. But if I didn't have— think about it. If I was behind on all my bills and suddenly an $800 or $900 job came in, I'm like, well, I can make that money disappear.

33:36Tell my partner or whatever, hey, here's, here's your half. And let's put this in our pocket. Think about it. Cause all of a sudden you just start feeding the beast. So start, you start feeding the beast by taking cash out of the business cause you have no, control home financially, right? You're behind the 8-ball at home. You need to pay this, you need— so that money starts coming, you start taking it from the business, right?

33:55So you're taking it from here, which this company's not doing very good because we had our problems, remember? And we start taking it out of here, we were paying a little bit, and start paying the bills here. Yes, that's going to get better. What's going to happen here? This is going to get worse. So you have to get your personal life in order financially before you become a business owner, or if you are a business owner, you better get your life in order at home so you don't take every fucking dime out of your company because the company's not going to last.

34:24Yep. And I think that's where we run into the problems with these guys where they just think, well, I'll just take this cash job, I'll just take this cash job. They don't even know the numbers and they're just taking from the company, taking from the company, and all of a sudden they bankrupt the company. Well, You don't just earn these skills just because you're a business owner.

34:42Like, you still see the world and your money the way that you would have saw it as a broke person. And you, again, to your point, you would've just been taking the cash because you owed bills or you wanted to go to the movies or you wanted to go to dinner. You know, there's times when we were going through the Total Money Makeover, we weren't shy about it.

34:58We're like, yeah, we're, we're going through Dave Ramsey. You're paying off our debt. People, our friends laughed at us. You can't go to a fucking concert. You're that broke. Oof. And yeah, I'd be like, yeah, I'm that fucking broke. I was fucking stupid with my money. Yeah. Okay. I would. But one thing that strikes me now when I think about it, I was thinking about, uh, there's a couple, a family that grew up with my older kids and they lived in these, the subs down the street and their big houses and stuff like that.

35:27When we got debt-free, we lived in Commerce. In Commerce, our house was on like 3/4 of an acre. It was like 1,300 square foot. It was a nice house, had a garage, a nice yard and everything. They kind of like looked down on us, right? But, you know, I got to remember, the only thing we had was a house payment at this point after we got laughed at and everything.

35:45But we would go over their house. They would live in these houses that back then in the '90s were half a million dollars. Yeah. Okay. And we'd be like, what's going on? We went over the one thing. I'm like, where's all the furniture? Oh, we don't have the money to buy the furniture right now after we bought the house. And you look in their driveway and their fucking car's leaking oil.

36:02I remember it was like an old What is the thing Walter White drives? Aztec. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. An Aztec and a fucking old, like, Bonneville in the driveway, you know what I mean? Like, fucking muffler dragging and shit. But they live in a million— half a million dollar house, right? But with no furniture in it. And I remember getting in the car, my wife, and we were driving home and I'm like, did you notice they had no fucking furniture and they can't go to the concert with us?

36:26And, you know, da da da da. I go, they were the opposite of us. They went and bought a house they couldn't afford. I go, now we're looking at them going, look at the fucking people. Like, they can't go to a concert. They're in debt up their ass. I go, that was us, but we decided to do something about it. Wow. You know what I mean?

36:42So we dove in and I'm going to tell you that couple of years, the first 6 months of that was hell. I bet. Because think about it. You're used to buying whatever the fuck you want. Whip out the American Express, go to Circuit City, open a Circuit City credit card to buy this or that for 90 days, same as cash. You go over here.

36:5990 days, same as cash. 90 days comes due sooner or later, then all that interest is there. Boom, you're fucked. Yeah. You know, but we got past all that and we were upside down on our cars. Like, I remember my wife's Explorer. We were upside down. I think we had to, like, pay $3,000 on top of selling the car to Bacchus Motors in Howell to get rid of the car.

37:19But we had the money because of total money made, you know what I'm saying? We're getting rid of this shit, right? Yeah. That, that car payment was like $600. Like, We're doing all this stuff to get, to get by. And you know, you have to sacrifice. Well, that is a true statement. At some point in your life, you're going to have to sacrifice for the better good that's coming.

37:39But see, the problem is right now we live in the right now. We're in the church of right now, the Amazon right now. I get $4 more, I can get a beer in 3 hours. So these younger kids have a lot more against them than we did. I don't want to sound old, but I'm going to. Life is a little bit easier in the '90s, in the 2000s.

37:56After COVID, shit's fucking through the roof. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Now, if you're a mechanic and you're good and you keep your training up and you keep your nose clean and you find a good place where they'll treat you well, you could do very well. But the problem is nobody wants to stay places long enough. They want to sit there and, you know, sit there and hold it over the owner's head.

38:16You know, I'm this, I'm that, I'm the other thing. Great. I'm talking about two different topics here. I'm talking about finances, you know, and I'm talking about how you should act as a mechanic. You know, you gotta find a place where you're valued. It's no different. I always use the water bottle analogy, right? Water is a dollar at Walmart in the cooler, but you go to the frickin' Kid Rock concert, it's $18 for the water.

38:36You know what I mean? I started out at Geared Auto and Truck at $11.50 an hour. I should pull up my sheet. It went, my raise went like every 40 days. Every 30 days he kept giving me more and more money because I was just making him more and more money doing work and work and work and work. And, you know, so I made myself very valuable.

38:53Then once I started getting other guys in there, we started getting other mechanics in there. All of a sudden I said, okay, I need to do this. I'm going to start writing the estimates because you guys aren't writing. And I did. And I only had this much experience at writing estimates from house, but I had that much more experience than writing estimates than the owners of that Garrett's did.

39:10Steve and his dad, they never wrote estimates. They would just be like, oh yeah, your car needed brakes. Here you go. The customer's like, what the fuck? Well, I don't know, you owe me $400. And then they would never pay. And it just, they were always broke. So when I started doing the billing, I started doing estimates and selling these jobs. And I talked about the one time where the old man, I sold a brake job, we'll just say it was $400.

39:31The customer came in to pay and he looked at it and said, that's ridiculous. And took the bill and cut it in half. And only charge a guy $200. And I talk about on the podcast with the Jaded Mechanic, you know, you know, stuff like that. Like, but once I, once he retired and then Steve let me start doing it, I worked my way into running the shop.

39:51Now all of a sudden I'm doing the estimate, I'm doing the service advising, I'm selling the jobs, I'm helping the mechanics. What did I do? I built value into myself. At that point, he could go on vacation, he could do this, he could do that. And I kept going. To the point where I said, listen, I need to be the guy that buys a shop from you and I need to become partners with you.

40:09So how are we going to structure this? Okay. And this is where I was telling these guys, if you get to a shop where there's an older gentleman that's just tired and you go in there and you prove to him that you could do the work and you can help him run the shop, you can make a deal like I did. And then you end up becoming, you know, a minority owner.

40:29Then you get more and more percentage every year. However you structure it, there's lawyers out there. Like we have good lawyers. I've done this, what, 3 times now, me and my 2 guys, that you can start, you know, getting ownership in the business and every year more or however you structure it to the point where that guy retires. Scott, you could be a trustworthy employee.

40:51What he sells it to you, you could do a land— he could be an owner, fine, do an owner finance and you can start paying him out of the business so you don't have to come up with a big chunk of money. Or there's SBA loans. If the business is doing well, you put it together, it's, it's good. You can get an SBA loan.

41:08You might have to take a 10%, uh, note on the business, but the SBA will pay the other 90% to you. So you're only on the hook for 10%. There's lots of different ways you could do it. A lot of these older gentlemen own their buildings, so you could sell them the building, or I mean, you could sell the build or keep the building, but charge them rent.

41:24They can make you a business payment. Nobody's going to want to buy a lot of these shops, these smaller shops. They're hard to sell. But if you have a guy already that's already in there working and already a face that's well known and, you know, all of a sudden Kevin was there, but now, you know, Bob's there. Bob's been there with Kevin for 5 years.

41:42Bob bought the place. It's not a different face. Yeah. So you just keep dealing with Bob. The business keeps going. Yeah. But you cannot turn your business over to a guy that's financially irresponsible and broke. 'Cause he will take every dime outta that fricking business and break it because he's not stable at home. So you have to find the right person that's stable financially, personally, before you could just start giving 'em your business or sell 'em your business and then turn your back.

42:10'Cause how many of these second or third generation shops that the father built or the grandfather built, third generation kid comes in there, never had to work for a fucking thing in his life. Takes all the money out and bankrupts it. 100%. Yeah. You see it happen all the time. This is not me talking shit. I've seen it happen. Worldwide Appliance happened.

42:29Norm Paulsen, he made fricking millions. He turned over to his two kids. They bankrupted that thing in 5 years. They came to the bankruptcy auction. Steve Garrett was telling me, or bankruptcy hearing with fucking alligator, you know, shoes on back in the day and the briefcases and the gold chains and shit. But they took everything out of the company they possibly could.

42:48The company can only sustain so much, right? Yeah. So if it's structured right and the guy's financially responsible, he's going to have a budget like we talked about, and he's going to look at the P&Ls and say, okay, I can afford to pay— this is a business payment. I can afford to pay this. Now, the salary that the owner was taking out of that could be the business payment.

43:10So say the business payment would be $4,000 a month and the owner was making $1,000 a week. All of a sudden the owner's gone. That $4,000 is locked there. You could structure it so the $4,000 is the payment with interest. You know what I'm saying? I'm not going to get into all that, but yeah, you could structure it so the business could sustain and go on.

43:31And you, at that point, you bought the shop. Boom. 5-year note, 6-year note. But you have to find the right shop. And I'm going to tell you something, guys. If you're a good mechanic, there's plenty of independent shops out there. That the owner is tired, that you can make a deal if you're, if you're a smart guy and you work hard and you're trustworthy.

43:50But I'm going to tell you, if you're a piece of shit, that your credit cards are all maxed out and you're a terrible person and everything is everybody else's fault, never your fucking fault. And you cannot believe the 3 baby mamas you have all got pregnant 3 different times. You know what I'm saying? Like, these guys are a fucking disaster. Yep. So take it from me, it can be done, but it's a slow process.

44:14And the problem we have right now, I'm gonna say this again, from the church right now, everything has to happen right now. Think about this, this, my journey started in 1995, and I can't remember, I should probably go pull up the paperwork. I'd have to say I was there 10 years, 7 years before this all happened. So it took me that long to get to the point where he would go on vacation for 2 weeks and I would run the shop.

44:39I couldn't do fucking payroll cause I couldn't get into QuickBooks. You know, he would have his kids come in there and do it in the later years. Like it just got to the point where I was like, you know, fuck this. So how I ended up becoming to the point where I got him off top dead center on the becoming a partner, his wife and me didn't get along and he really didn't want He wanted me to be locked in there, but his wife didn't like it.

45:08They went on vacation for 2 weeks, and I remember like I couldn't do payroll and I didn't have no checks to write for parts or stuff like that. And I didn't have a credit card back then. And I said, you know what, this is fucking bullshit. I'm killing myself, getting fucking sick, working all these hours. I'm getting paid, yes, but I'm kind of going above and beyond, right?

45:27I'm not partner. I'm not profit sharing. I'm not getting anything besides, yeah, you, I could be out in the shop making the same money, have no headaches versus I'm running the shop, running the crews, dealing with the customers. You're probably already doing a lot of things that the owner would do. Like to his point, your point, he could go on vacation and do all these things.

45:44You're running it. He doesn't have to worry about it, but you're, it's not your shop. You're running it like it's your shop, but it's not your shop. Right. And so the Matco man came in and I got talking to him. He's like, we're looking for people to buy routes. I'm like, huh, really? He's like, yeah, you have to be sponsored. I go, would you sponsor me?

46:00He's like, yeah, I'd sponsor you. So the ball, ball cut. This has happened in a 2-week period. So I didn't think it would happen this fast. So I reach out to Macko. They know who I am. I talk to them. They said, yep, you're pretty much, you're good. You have a great credit score and stuff. How about we get you on the route?

46:15You would end up, I would've ended up on the route. It was over on Square Lake Road and stuff like that where all them dealers were and all in that area out there. Rochester, I think, out that way. If you're in Michigan, maybe by Great Lakes Crossing, all the dealers around there, you could have that route and we could finance you for this Isuzu truck.

46:33Your payment would be this. You did it. We get you started. So I went through the whole thing. So he came back and I'm like, hey, listen, I mean, I'm going to give you 2 weeks, but I'm going to become a Macco Toolman. And he looked at me, he's like, what? I'm like, I'm going to become a Macco Toolman. I said, I'm not going to fucking sit here, run the shop.

46:52And do all the stuff an owner would do. And I'm not getting profit sharing. So like, I get paid hourly and, you know, I don't remember what I made back then. Maybe $1,300 a week salary. Yeah. Which was decent money back then. Right. I think I was making like $70 grand a year. And I— but I was running everything, running 5 guys, running the shop.

47:11The only thing I wasn't doing was paying the bills, doing estimates, selling jobs, you know, troubleshooting shops, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He said, well, I'll go out of business without you. I said, well, I don't know what to tell you. This is your business. I can't sit here and kill myself. Well, how about we come, you become, you know, we do a deal where you become 10%, da da da da.

47:33And I'm like, okay. So we kind of squashed the Macko thing. I didn't really want to leave anyway. I like what I do. And a year came around. He was like, the lawyers are working. I said, I'm fucking done. I'm done with the lawyers fucking working on it. Either we need to get it fucking done or I'm out of here. So within 30 days, guess what happened?

47:51It was fucking done. And his wife was so fucking mad that I was a partner, she could not fucking stand it. But she was so nearsighted, she wasn't realizing I was fucking doing— doing everything, all the work. Now, don't get me wrong, he took all the risk, right? It's his business still. But I'm doing all the fucking work. Now you might say, well, you're being an asshole.

48:12You're being this, you're being that. Like, you're being like, you, you mean to tell me you're running that whole shop? I could bring my guys in here. They thought I owned the place and I would hire them. I did so much. When the day-to-day operational things came up and I wasn't there, for whatever reason, Steel would be like, you need to wait till Kevin gets back so he can make the decision.

48:32I made all the decisions when I was not the owner. I would come back from vacation, the whole shop would be plugged right the fuck up with jobs. Nothing would be done because, oh, we had to wait till fucking Kevin gets back. When the guys were on flat rate, when I'd be on vacation, they hated when I went on vacation because they would make no money because he wouldn't write any estimates, wouldn't do anything, or he would just tell them to fucking do it.

48:55They'd end up putting $5,000 into a guy's trailer that was worth $1,200. That happened several times, and I could bring the guys in here to tell you this story because they all still work there. Yeah. So if anybody thinks, oh yeah, here we go, you know, he's doing everything. I was literally doing everything. The only thing I was not doing was paying the bills once again, because she was— I didn't have no way to go into the checkbook.

49:14So after all this, I become 10% owner. And, you know, I went on for 10 more, 10, another 10 years to the point where when I end up bottom out, I own 20% of the company. But I was at that point, I was running it 100% of the time. We had started Carry Deck Crane Company, which is in— that was in this building.

49:34We were refurbishing cranes and stuff like that. So that was 2010 because that's when this bit— 2010 is when Carry Deck Cranes was in this building. Yes. We ended up renting this building, the warehouse. We ended up renting the warehouse for $700 a month. It was to a mason company. And I ended up running an office over here for $250 and Steve running one for $150.

49:59About a year and a half, we're doing good rebuilding cranes. Garrett's is going good. My brother's running Garrett's. All the same guys that are there now except for one were there. Everything's going good. And, well, actually no, there's one guy left there. Nick and Jody and all of them are new. And we bought a paint booth, we financed a paint booth. It was $150 grand.

50:21We had it bolted to the floor. We got it. Everything's going good. The landlord comes to us and says, they ran their business in here. We can't afford the building anymore. We're going to sell it. We're like, fuck, we just put this paint booth in. My God. So they're like, we'll sell it to you. We're like, perfect. So we call the banker up.

50:41The price they gave us on this building was fucking stupid. They built this building for $1 million with the property and did not sell it nowhere near that to us. We sell the building. So in the meantime, once again, me being me, I'm like, okay, now we have this building payment coming up. How are we going to manage it? Well, this is on 3.5 acres.

51:01So one of my clients, one of our customers, needed storage. I went over there and made a deal. I rented that whole yard, side of the yard, for like $4,000 a month, which covered our building payment before we even closed on it. They're moving in. These people are like, we could have fucking did that. Like, why didn't you then? They're like, well, we, you know, you don't own the building.

51:18I'm like, I don't know what to tell you. So that went on for like a year. They rented this and we rented some of the upstairs to them and stuff. So I had this place making money, paying the building payment and stuff before we even owned it. So once we owned it, the building payment wasn't a problem. You got to remember when you're rebuilding cranes, it's very labor intensive.

51:34You might take 4 months to build a crane. You're putting money out, putting money out, putting money out, and you're getting started. So you sell one, you put the back, It's kind of like redoing a house. Yes. And the problem with that was I kept telling Steve, I go, we have a flawed business plan here. We only could do 8 cranes a year.

51:50So no matter what, we can't, we can't scale this place. We can't add more guys. We can't add more cranes. There's no more room. We just cannot do this. So it got to the point where I said, you know what? We need to start a collision shop. I don't know if it was my, I think it might've been Steve's idea. He's like, we have the paint booth.

52:09Why don't we do a collision shop? You have collision. Experience. I'm like, okay, but not much, but okay. So we started a collision shop. We had the paint booth. That's where Motor City Truck Collision came from. So as he got older, his wife got sick. That's when she got sick and all that stuff. He started being here less and less, to the point where I'm like, okay, it's time for you to fucking go.

52:31So in the meantime, his wife dies. About a year, he comes to work. Then he finds another lady, starts dating her. And then, you know, they're going to get married and stuff like that. I'm like, all right, it's time for you to go. So I bought him out of Garrett's in 2019. In 2020, I bought him out of this place. 2021, I bought Garrett's building.

53:002022, I paid him out of this building. So I've been busy. Yeah. And I'm going to tell you something. You know how people say old mindsets are a problem? Conservative mindsets are a problem. I'm a conservative guy. You've seen the house I lived in, my first house, my house now, to the house I just bought. Yeah. I'm 55 years old. I finally bought the house I wanted because I knew I was comfortable at buying that magnitude of a house right at 55.

53:27Most people say you're fucking crazy. You should be downsizing. Fuck it, right? But I did not start making all my money till I had no partners. Mm. Because we had two different mindsets. Mm-hmm. He used to always say to me, you're always moving the goalpost. If you make $80,000, you wanna make $160,000. If you make $160,000, you wanna make $300,000. He said, you're never happy.

53:53Well, when you read any book about entrepreneur mindsets, You always have to grow. If you're not growing, you're dying. Yeah. Yeah. I'm always going and pushing and pushing, and I expect my guys to make more if I make more, if I make smart decisions. Okay. I mean, look at the consulting thing. Okay. I started coaching people and I've changed their lives. Okay.

54:15It's not like I have some magic wand where I know what I'm— it's like, you have to be smart with your numbers. You have to be smart with your money. So once I got rid of him out of the business, I could do the things I wanted. I could advertise that I want, because I was like, you know, we need to do this with the website.

54:29Ah, we don't really need to spend that money. And he owned more of the company than I did. So, ah, now I owned half of Motor City and half of Carry Deck Cranes from the beginning. We each put $50 bill in, so we were good there. I had say, but we would still fight because he always still wanted to be like, well, you know, we shouldn't take this paycheck right now.

54:47We got to keep growing the company. I remember going to his office. I go, I'm fucking done coming here every day and working for a fucking hobby when you keep saying, oh, well, we can't really take a paycheck. I go, I'm fucking done. So we had something happen at the other shop towards the end. I'm kind of jumping around here because it's kind of coming to my mind that we ended up losing a key employee down there.

55:14So I went back down there to run that shop. And when he ran this shop, the shop crashed. My wife called me. In the meantime, she was doing payroll for this and getting involved in this. She said, there's only $900 in the bank at Carry That Cranes in Motor City. We don't have enough money for payroll. Holy shit. And I'm down there at the other shop.

55:32It's fucking killing it because I'm down there working the front desk. All the customers are happy. The techs are happy. Everybody's happy, right? Yeah. And I call him. I'm like, dude, what the fuck? He's like, well, we got this one engine. You know, it's giving us a hard time. I don't have the parts to finish it. I go, what do you need?

55:46He's like, well, it's oil pressure setting unit. So I'm like, when the fuck did you know you needed that? A couple of days ago. I said, we got around to doing it. I got around to fucking doing it. We could have did this. And so we get the oil pressure sending you and then you start up and the head gasket's fucked up.

55:58It's leaking coolant out of the side of the Continental engine because they didn't put one of the seals in it. So the one company had to loan the other company money to pay payroll. And I'm like, you know what? This just isn't fucking working. So you're not into this. So you need to fucking just retire. I'll handle that. So I ended up hiring people down there, getting that going in the next few months.

56:18Then I started coming out here, getting this going. I had a really good guy here towards the start of Motor City, and the body shop was going good. We had a big customer and we went out of town to a training thing and he got drunk and told me what a piece of shit I was and how I can't believe the deal I gave him to be 10% owner.

56:38I fucked him. And all this stuff. I said, well, when you get back, then you could buy— he said, I got a guy that'll buy you out right now. I said, great. I said, when I get back, fucking tell him, bring his checkbook, and you could take over fucking, you know, next week. Yeah, yeah. As soon as the paperwork is done. Well, that— we were in New Jersey when this happened, and we were with our one service advisor, Sarah.

57:00And he goes off on me, and she's like— she basically stopped him. She's like, you're a fucking asshole. He's fucking— my life's been better since I worked for him. He made you 10% owner of that other company. You're acting like this. You're a fucking piece of shit. So, you know, everybody's drinking and stuff like that. So it was a long ride home from New Jersey.

57:18So I'm kind of like, okay, what the fuck do I do? And he's like, yeah, and by the way, when I leave, everybody in the shop's leaving too. I'm like, oh fuck, I'm gonna have to do this shit by myself, I guess, you know. So we drove home that Sunday and nobody talked. You only imagine how fucking— Oh my God. Tension was like you can cut it with a knife.

57:41You're kidding. Long-ass drive. And we got back Monday. I'm thinking to myself, well, here we go, right? Monday he comes in and I'm like, okay, so we got— where's the guy? Oh, there ain't really no guy. I was drunk, running my mouth and this and that. And I'm like, okay. So I'm like thinking to myself, I'm going to keep this guy, keep everything intact right now and keep the place going.

58:06So this is where Jim Gray's son calls me, James, and says, my dad, Quit his job at the dealership. He had enough. He's a manager. Can he come by for an interview? Huh. And this was like maybe 2 weeks after all this happened. And he called me on a Saturday. I said, have him come in tomorrow morning. I'll meet him here Sunday.

58:22I called Chris. I said, I'm gonna come in and have you, we're gonna interview this guy. So he came in Sunday. I interviewed Jim and Chris is like, He told me that I was, I was hiring my replacement. You're, you're interviewing my replacement, my wife told me. Said, no, I really don't have any plans of that. And then Jim came in, started getting to know the place, and Chris just kept doing less and less to the point where I'm like, here's the money.

58:52Here's what I owe you for the stock on the buyout. Here's some more money for a severance package. You need to sign this. You need to fucking get lost. And he did. And I thought, well, the rest of the guys are leaving, right? Rest of the guys stayed. He was— he treated you pretty bad the way you treated him. So they stayed for a while.

59:10And in the meantime, I cycle new guys in here. They quit eventually. You know, the one guy I still deal with, great guy. He fucking gave me everything he said he was going to. Just— he said, I just want to live closer to home. It was an hour drive for him. I'm like, cool. I still deal with him. He still brings his stuff for us to do, paint and stuff at the company he works for.

59:27You know, and here we are. You know, I mean, it was my point to this whole story. You just never know where you're going to end up. But you know, the one thing I never changed, I never changed. I never fucking did anything dishonest. Yeah, I held my integrity and I worked hard. And, you know, problems present themselves, but often solutions present themselves too.

59:49They might not be the solution you're looking for. It might be hard. You might have to get dirty. You know, like Henry Ford says, opportunity knocks. Just might be wearing dirty overalls one day when it knocks on your door. You know, I can't tell you how many times that I've lost guys at the other shop. I pulled my toolbox out of my barn at home and took it back down there, worked in the shop for 6 months or so with the guys when I had a good service advisor.

1:00:11Like I've done in all of my companies. So for me to sit here and everybody say, oh, you're a fucking blowhard, you're this. Okay, I am a mechanic by trade. I did collision, I did trucks, I did, I did. I'm a mechanic by trade, right? I learned how to be a business owner secondhand. Okay. It wasn't fucking easy. There was a lot of nights that I was up thinking, and there's still a lot of nights.

1:00:35Like the guy was sitting there saying, oh, you know, we were talking to Eric the other day and he's like, a lot of times I wake up in the middle of the night and sit there and think about the shop. I'm the same way. Okay. I always still feel like I'm one, like one problem away from going out of business, even though I'm not.

1:00:48I have money in my savings, but you know what I mean? Like, you just never stop worrying when you're a business owner. When you stop wearing it, you have a fucking problem. When you stop going to work, you have a problem. Yeah. Now, I haven't been to work in like 3 weeks, as you know. Okay. The shop's been on autopilot with the guys.

1:01:07You know, they call me if there's a real big problem, like that's in my job description, basically, as owner. Besides that, my shop's all been on autopilot for the last 3 weeks. I set up my new house and I had problems, just pool, fucking, you name it. You know, you know, pool problems, pool problems, the auto cover was fucked up, you know, uh, just whatever, you know what I mean?

1:01:28But a lot of guys want to start a business. They want to pay peanuts, then they want to not be there. Then they want to call and blame it all on somebody else. Like I told you before, the problems in your business are usually caused by you at top because you're the ones that set the tone. You're the one that sets the policies and everything like that.

1:01:48Okay. You can't pay people peanuts and expect them to do what you would do. Now, nobody's going to do what you would do at your business. It's your business. You can get them close by training them. But if they were as good as you, they would own their own business. Yeah. Yep. You should be working on your business, not in your business.

1:02:06Like, here it is. It's May. So usually at the end, right after Memorial Day, I don't work Fridays. I take Fridays off. I go up to my house up north on the boat. Da da da da da, right? But my guys are all taken care of. They're not mad at me. They don't fucking hate me. They didn't get mad when I bought the fucking new house.

1:02:24Yeah, they helped me move. They're all coming over for a barbecue in a couple of weeks, like, because I treat them good. So anybody sitting there in the comments going, oh, you're the blowhard, you're this— listen to me very carefully. I started at the fucking bottom and worked my way up. I'm no different than that guy that talked about starting making fries at McDonald's back in the day and ended up owning franchises.

1:02:42It takes hard work. The problem is nowadays a lot of guys don't have the fucking balls. Okay? They're always— do you ever notice these guys always give me advice? You know what I always say back to them all the time? What's the name of your shop? How many of these fucking people answer me? Yeah, it's either what's the name of your shop or like, I'll let your mom know when I see her tonight, right?

1:03:02Depending on the tone level, right? You know, and I have no— I have another mobile guy going, you know, you're charging people for this, you're charging people that? Yeah, we are. We have fucking overhead. We take care of our customers. Yes, we charge them for this. You can't tell me that we— he's like, you're nickel and dime them to death. I'm like, it's a flat rate post, me telling people they need to learn to write a repair order when you're on flat rate so you could actually pay your bills as a tech.

1:03:26That was the fucking theme of that whole thing. If you do not know how to write a repair order and you don't make any money on flat rate, it's probably because you don't know how to write a repair order, meaning If the water pump's gonna take you 2 extra hours, you need to convey it. It's gonna take me 2 extra hours. He's saying it's nickel and diming people to death.

1:03:42I'm saying that you need to get paid for what you do when you're on flat rate. Nobody gives a fuck if you can't pay your Edison bill. Nope. Do you think the customer is going to call, here's another $200 because you didn't charge me for that water pump? They don't give a fuck about you. They will fuck you over and leave to go to another shop to save $10.

1:03:58So you, you know, you got to charge. You don't rip people off, you got to charge. For what you're doing and your time. That's what my shirt says. Maybe for my experience in my time. Love it. You know what I'm saying? It's like dirty hands, clean money. Yep. It's like, that's what these guys need to start realizing. It's like, you only have one life.

1:04:20Maximize it. Do smart things with it. Okay. Don't abuse alcohol. Don't abuse drugs. Yes. Drink beer, whatever. I get it. I do. But I don't fucking sit there and sit here and preach like I'm on my soapbox that it was just so fucking easy. And I will tell you one thing with closing. My mommy and daddy didn't give me a fucking business.

1:04:38There's a lot of guys out there that get on fucking line that are shop owners that run their mouth. They're third generation. They stepped into their daddy's shop or their mommy shop that already had the money. I started out with a broke-ass fucking shop that couldn't pay its bills. And I'll say, because you said you, you You started off as a mechanic, you grew into a business owner, but going back to even like the tie at the very beginning is that you had to master your money and your personal finances or you never would've been able to step in that role no matter how good, how good you were with the other things, the sales

1:05:08and everything else. You had to have that, that, that personal finance in order to carry that over into business finance or you would've never made it. Right. Like once again, you have to go be a business owner that you're fucking so broke at home, you can't pay your house payment, you have no credit. How are you gonna get a credit card in today's world?

1:05:22If you have no personal credit at home and you're a business owner, how are you going to get a credit card with a $50,000 limit, $20,000 limit, or whatever? Yeah. A lot of these small companies now that sell parts have gone to corporations that bought them. They run your fucking personal credit and make you personally guarantee the paper or the bill. So what happens if you don't have no personal credit and you're Jason Tracy that opens Jason Tracy's?

1:05:48Hey, I'm opening a shop. I need $10,000 worth of credit and they run your credit, go, this motherfucker's got a 600 credit score, we ain't loaning them fucking money. So all of a sudden you're going to have to do a job, pay for a job, do a job, pay for a job. That's not, that's not efficient. You have to have trade credit.

1:06:03Yep. So if you're broke and you can't pay your bills and you have all kinds of late payments on your credit report and they pull it, are they going to give you credit? Maybe you could have got away with it back in the day when it was Bill from Glendale, Dan for fucking Great Lakes, or You know, relationship, Dale from Radiator Hospital, right?

1:06:21When you knew that they knew you, but nowadays you're a number to the corporations. You have to have a good credit score to have a business. Yep. It's just the way it is. The banks won't loan you money when you want to buy equipment. You have no credit, personal credit. What are they going to do? Do you know that I don't have debt, but when they pull my credit report for my new house, From the start to finish was 15 days before I got to clear to close.

1:06:47Wow. 15 fucking days. Now, granted, a lot of that is the new electronics, the way shit happens nowadays, but 15 days from start to finish. Do you know when I bought my cabin? It was 15 days start to finish, and that was a cash deal. Wow. So a mortgage was 15 days too. Wow. That's crazy. Great credit score. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Clean credit report process, right?

1:07:11They just— it's the numbers. You fall in here, your debt-to-income ratio is like— he's like, I don't remember what it was, but he was like, yeah, most people are here and you're like, like you had nothing. Because our house was paid for. Yeah, but why was our house paid for? Because when we bought our fucking house, we paid for it because we saved money.

1:07:27We had equity in our other house, so we lived there for 22 years. Our house is almost paid for in commerce when we sold it. Right. So we got all this money when we bought— we built our new house. It was already built. It was a spec. We moved into it. We put all that money down with some money we saved. We paid for it.

1:07:44The only reason I had a mortgage on my house that I just paid off again is when we had to buy this building, I had to come up with a down payment. I just took it out of the house, then paid it, you know what I'm saying? Paid it back. But that was not all me just like, ah, fuck it. That was us like planning.

1:08:01We planned, we did, you know, we made smart money decisions once again. I'm not being arrogant because I started at the bottom. It's just a matter of your earning potential and stuff like that. Here's the fucking thing. Me, Lincoln, and Jason were sitting in my office today. We were going over all the numbers because I haven't been there for 3 weeks. And I was telling them what a great job they're doing.

1:08:23And we started talking about different people in our lives. And I said, you know, the people in this office and the guy up front, which is Phil, I said, Jason, you're the lead tech here. You're 10% owner. You have a shop in your barn. You go home after work and you work on cars till 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock at night. Why do you do that?

1:08:44Well, I want more for my family. I want to make more money. I want to be financially successful. I want to put money in my savings account every week. A lot of money for retirement. He has a boat. He has an RV. He has a nice— you know what I'm saying? He has a nice-ass house. Lincoln, my son is 19 years old.

1:09:02Lincoln, what are you doing? Well, Dad, I take the money I make here and I put in my savings account. I'm saving for a house. All the money I make after work going to detailing, you know, I live on, I save that. Lincoln has a pretty sizable— he has annuities already. He's 19. He's going to be a millionaire here the next 5 years because he's been putting money— he got an inheritance.

1:09:20He invested it, right? He bought Tesla stock. Like, okay. The reason I'm saying that these guys are all after work, they go do something for extra money, just like I used to, right? Then you got other people in your life. I ain't fucking doing that. I worked my 8 hours. I'm going home and I'm going to sit on the couch and watch Mary Wood Children and pick my fucking lint out of my belly button.

1:09:41Okay? Then they wonder why they're in the position they're in. You see some of these guys that fucking hustle all the time. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like, okay, now I know why they're in the position they're in. Yeah. If you start to take a look at people's lives and you look at where they're at, what they have, then you ask, what do they do?

1:09:58What do you do after work? Oh, I don't go do this. I go do that. And I'm not saying you're not supposed to. I'm not saying you're supposed to go after work and every day and go work because Jason has a balance. His daughters are in dance. They do this, they travel, they do whatever. Right. But when he can, he's out there in that bar working, making money.

1:10:15He has a life. He doesn't overdo it. I never overdid it at my house. I would just buy stuff, paint it, fix it, sell it, buy it, pay it, Craigslist it back in the day, right? eBay. I would buy cell phones that were broken. I would fix cell phones, I would sell them. I would just do a lot of different stuff to make a couple hundred dollars at a time to keep— this is after we got financial, even after we got financially stable, to keep the extra money coming.

1:10:37And when I wasn't making it and we would save it, we would pay shit off like we were debt-free. So later we were just saving it, right? So we moved around a new house. We took the equity, you know what I'm saying? Like, You have to hustle. Nobody's going to give you anything nowadays unless you get inheritance from your wealthy parents. You know that.

1:10:54I'm still waiting for that. Yeah. You know that if you don't fucking earn it, you don't respect it. Now I'm going to give you an example. The fucking house I just bought, that kid was— yeah, that kid was in his 30s. He had that fucking house. Why did he have that house? His mom bought it for him. His mom not only bought it for him, she gave him a stipend every fucking week and gave him a credit card.

1:11:20The heating and cooling guy came over to fix the thermostats and stuff like that. That whole thing was all fucked up. He said, yeah, that guy would call me up and he's like, yeah, I want a mini split in my garage. He's like, that's $10 grand. He's like, that's fine, come and do it. When can you do it? Well, we're booked a week.

1:11:34How much more to come tomorrow? Well, I can't really do it. Yeah, you got a number? What's the number? The guy would tell him, yep, come and do it. So my garage is air conditioning and fucking heated. What the fuck? I have this fucking security system that fucking has AI that like wakes you up in the middle of the night. Like, if you came walking down my driveway with a fucking ladder, they'd be like, you with the ladder, if you're not well, if you're not allowed here, you need to leave now.

1:12:00You're being recorded. It fucking can tell you what you're carrying. You with the bucket. My wife was pushing, uh, carrying a bucket home. You with the bucket. She's like, I will walk around with the leaf blower, you with the leaf blower. Like, this guy just spent stupid fucking money on shit, but it wasn't his money. Yeah, he would sit— so the neighbor was telling me he was moving out of the house, there were so many Apple products that were in boxes, never even opened, he was carrying out of the house.

1:12:27This guy had so much fucking money that wasn't his, he just bought whatever. That's so crazy. But it's not your money, what do you fucking care? But then like, there's no respect for anything, one. There wasn't. And you gotta be so bored 'cause you can just do whatever. Yeah, they said that like when I went and looked at that house, there was so many trailers around there.

1:12:50I thought, man, this guy must own a construction company. I'm not even exaggerating. There's probably 12 trailers around there and they're all different types of trailers, like one for everything. And I asked the neighbor, he said, he just went, he said, well, he needed trailers to move, so mom bought 'em. He had a John Deere tractor delivered with every fucking implement known to man.

1:13:11Talk about a guy that did not care. He rented a skid steer and that place on 10 acres, he went through the woods and mowed trails and he even went out to the neighbor's property and mowed shit down with the neighbor wasn't even there. Pushed big berms of dirt up, had $20,000 worth of gravel or $10,000 worth of gravel delivered, pushed it all over everywhere, fucked everything up to make this driveway.

1:13:30I mean, just spending money like nothing. Why? It's not your money. That is insane. And you don't respect it because you didn't earn it. Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, I guess I— nobody's ever given me anything. I've worked for everything I have. I am self-made 100%. I started out at Hales at $400 a week. I was that fucking number 17 horse in the race that everybody talks about.

1:13:55I was the guy that just won the Kentucky Derby. Yeah. They came from the back. Nobody see me coming. I swear to God to you, I had problems in school. You know, he's fucking broke all the time. He has a fucking mouth. He does it. But the one thing that he couldn't take, I worked hard all the time. That's one thing people said, this fuck guy works all the time.

1:14:13Like, they, you know, even working, I'm 55 years old. My kids are like, holy fuck, Dad. My wife's like, I feel like I'm at the concentration camp because I worked. I'm like, we have X amount of time to do this move and Yeah, but that's one thing people don't do. I just outwork everybody because that's what I do. Sunday mornings I get up, I do all the numbers for all the consulting clients, send them all the emails.

1:14:33Like, I get shit done a lot quick, but I have never stopped doing what I do. I've never gone outside the scope of repairing stuff. Yes, I had the martial arts schools just because I fucking like martial arts. And we did taekwondo. Me and Shane opened that school. Then I did jiu-jitsu. I opened a jiu-jitsu school. And they were both successful. Yeah, I ended up selling the one and closing the other one.

1:14:55We sold— me and Shane sold the one and closed the other one. He reopened it in a different name, but he's doing it. I don't want to do it anymore. But what happened there? We would go from 4:00 to 9:00 every night of the week and work. So you'd leave here? I would leave Garrett's and go there. I would leave Garrett's at 3:00.

1:15:13I'd go to jiu-jitsu at Scorpion Fighter Systems. I'd take me 45 minutes or a half hour, depending on traffic. I would train with him for an hour, private lessons 3 times a week. Then I would drive back to Commerce to the school and do private lessons. If I wasn't doing private lessons, teach class, then teach taekwondo class, and then go over to the other parking lot and teach jiu-jitsu class for 3 hours.

1:15:33I would get done at like 10:00, 9:30, 10:00 every night. That's crazy. Yeah, but it's the hustle. That was the hustle. And I love it because it's like, it's, it's coming down and you're, you're, you're telling from the beginning is like, you could do this too. Somebody listening can do this too. That person that's like That the stupid people in the comments that are never going to change or learn, and they're not listening to this anyway, so it doesn't really matter, but they're not— they could change if they wanted to.

1:15:57Well, and a question keeps on popping in my head as, uh, as we've talked about this is at what point did you sit and you realize like your mental— how your mentality was broke when you were blaming Hal or whoever for your response, for your, for you being broke? At what point, you know, being a business owner, at what point did you Was there a point where you remember thinking, wow, that was— I could tell you exactly where it was.

1:16:18I was sitting there staring at the wall at my computer downstairs. Couldn't pay for Christmas. Had that argument with my wife when she came down there, started motherfucking me and everything. It was a big blowup. And I started looking at the Dave Ramsey thing. I remember thinking to myself, you're the fucking problem. You're the fucking leader of your household. You're the guy that controls everything in your life.

1:16:39Nobody controls you. You pride yourself in saying, I'm not listening to any motherfucker. But you're sitting here broke, can't pay your fucking bills, and you're the guy in charge. You've been arguing with everybody. They're a fucking asshole getting on me and stuff. You are the fucking problem. I remember thinking to myself, you are the fucking problem. I can tell you another pivotal part in my life that I've never said this out loud, and I'll say it now.

1:17:02I was sitting in the front room at Willowbrook Farms in the chair when you walk through the kitchen, right to the right of the thing, and I had just got motherfucked by one of the boarders down there. I was like 14 or 15 and I was ready to cry. And I was sitting there upset and I wasn't saying nothing. I thought to myself, I will never let another motherfucker talk to me like that again at any cost.

1:17:22The fucking switch flipped that day. I've been me since. Wow. Somebody would say something, I'd be like, fuck you. Yeah. And it was way worse right after that. It was like over the top. But I was just like, not doing it anymore. That fucking year. That was in summertime. I remember it was over a horse. Now, anybody's in the horse business understands this.

1:17:42When you bring the horses in from the pasture and you put them in their box stall during the day, you have morning chores and night chores. Morning chores, you clean the stalls, bed them, put hay in for night, fill the water bottles. A lot of times a horse would come in and drink the fucking water. They come in at 5 o'clock, right?

1:17:58The boarders come out at 7, their water bucket's empty, they're knocking on your door. You didn't fill up my horse's water bucket. I filled up the horse's water bucket. You ever think he fucking drank it? You need to come out here right now and fill it up. You fucking fill it up. I already did it once. Horse drank it. He'll get more tomorrow.

1:18:11I don't know what the fuck to tell you. That was a big fight. I don't remember. I think the lady's name was Dina, and she came and treated me like that. I was like, fuck this. And ever since then, that was it. I went after that summer and I got in a fight. That was in middle school, right out of middle school.

1:18:28I remember a kid named Chris Umlauf came up and started teasing me. Him and Ricky Drin. I punched that motherfucker right in the mouth. The year before and the year before that in the locker room, they tease the shit out of me and never said a thing. He came in and started teasing. I fucking decked him. He's like, who the fuck is that?

1:18:41Yeah, I knocked him on his fucking ass and the gym teacher jumped on my fucking back to stop me. I fucking flipped him over. Now you got to remember, I was sowing hay, cleaning stalls, and I got suspended for 10 days because I fucking threw the teacher over. At that point, my mom was like, what happened to you? I'm like, I am done with people's bullshit.

1:18:57And that was the— so that was the other pivotal point in my fucking life. That's awesome. That's fucking awesome. You got to make a decision. Yeah, I didn't— I didn't— that's so cool because I didn't know, you know, obviously I didn't know the answer to that question, but that's so cool. It was in that moment you're sitting there looking at, you know, just getting the huge fight with your wife.

1:19:15It's like, I'm the problem. Because I don't think you can make a change until you realize that you're the problem. It's looking at the man in the mirror, right? Yeah, I say that shit all the time now. You hear me say it all the time. Yep, I'm fucking wrong. Okay, let's switch gears. What about that insurance guy the other day? Dude. Yeah.

1:19:30That's what I was just thinking about too in that conversation. Yeah. Tell me what you were thinking outside. Let's break down, switch over to your camera. Let's break down what you were thinking about the control. Like we talk, like we're teaching. Yeah. So that's what's funny cuz you know, I've been spending a lot of time in, in the training and building out the training and the framework and everything.

1:19:48And, and my first thing is I was sitting in here and I heard you in, in gym like, all right, get ready. He's coming in. And I'm like, oh shit, I'm about to hear some shit. All right. All right. This is gonna be fun. So I'm like listening to the, uh, listen to it.. And as you're going through it, I'm literally going through my head like, oh, there's the C.

1:20:04Like you took control right away. Like you said, you know, he didn't sit down, but like you, you took control. I didn't let him sit down on purpose. Yeah. Yeah. You controlled whether he was going to sit. And he sat, he stood there uncomfortable the whole time. Yeah. I blocked the chair so he couldn't sit down. Jim's like, why are you blocking the chair?

1:20:18I said, cuz he needs to be uncomfortable for this. He ain't going to come in here and show me what's up. He, I'm going to show him what's up. And the thing that I think honestly, Jason, and that adjuster, everybody bootlicks him. And then all of a sudden he came in, all of a sudden I took control of the conversation. And a couple of times, you remember I said, you're not listening to me.

1:20:34How many times do I need to repeat myself? And I want to reiterate is because like, I think a lot of people, you know, people hear you and they think that you're probably always motherfucker this or motherfucker that. But like, you take control of that situation in like, if I was just listening to you, I would think that like you guys were having a pleasant conversation.

1:20:52Like you, you at one point said, You don't listen very well, do you? But it was like, it wasn't like, motherfucker, you don't listen very well, do you? It was like the way you said it was like kind of a joke, but true. Yeah. And he just, I don't know what he said, but it was like, well, no, cause I told him, he's like, well, I need your receipts.

1:21:07I said, I'm not giving you receipts anymore. We're done. What my receipts are, are my, is my business. My markup is my business. Well, we'll only pay this. I said, that's fine. I said, you write it for what you think is right. I said, and the customer is going to pay the difference, period. I already got a commitment from the customer. You have a commitment for the customer.

1:21:25Absolutely fucking lutely. You're not setting my prices at my business. Well, you really can't do it. I could do whatever I want. That's what's going to happen. Well, I need the tow bill. You're not getting the tow bill. I said, they already paid the tow bill. They did? Yeah. I said, you're not involved in that. It's none of your business. And I went right down the thing.

1:21:44And then he said, then towards the end, yeah, we told him he's not getting a receipt. He says to me, Well, we just need your receipts. I said, obviously you don't listen very well. We are not getting the receipts. Then he came back in. I think by that time he had the door closed. Yeah, he came in. He said, we can repair that hood.

1:21:58And then Jim said, we are the professionals here. We are the ones with the licenses on the wall that have to stand behind this work. You are the guy that's writing an estimate to save the insurance company money, but we're the ones that have to warranty it. We're not fixing it the way you want it. We already told the customer you're going to try to hack it, and here you are trying to hack it.

1:22:17Well, this is a matter of opinion. No, you have no opinion. You're not a professional. You don't do bodywork. You write estimates. We do the bodywork. We have to stand behind it. He was like freaking the fuck out by the time he left. Yeah, he didn't know what to think. Yep. Did you— what ended up happening? We haven't got the estimate yet.

1:22:34So today we sent an email. Yo, Mr. Customer, Mr. Adjuster, he was here X amount of days ago. Your truck is still sitting in limbo because we have not got the receipt back. So the delay in the job getting done is due to his poor performance in getting us the estimate. Yeah, I'm not kissing their fucking ass. Fuck them. Yeah. You know, and I did not yell at that guy.

1:22:59I raised my voice. I stayed completely calm. This is what's going to happen. Take it or leave it. If your estimate comes out at $3,000, ours is $5,000. The customer's paying $2,000. Yep. You know, and a lot of guys online going, yeah, I do that all the time. Bullshit, because a lot of these body shops— not a lot, there's good ones and there's bad ones— but a lot of these body shops can't afford to freaking say, fuck it, I'm not gonna do it.

1:23:22I was talking to, um, Grok today, and I was asking about collision shops. Gerber, for instance, they said they, uh, do a 1% net. They make about $18 million a year profit, but they're doing like $3.6 billion. So think about that, how chiseled down they are to 1%. Now don't get me wrong, 1% on $3.6— it was $18 million or something. Don't quote me, but it was like, it was $18 million.

1:23:50I know it was the net at 1%, it said. Yeah, yeah, that 1% is nice. Can you imagine though how bad the fucking insurance company has their finger down to get through? They're doing that kind of sales, you know what I mean? They're only netting 1%. Now if you're GM netting 1%, that's wonderful, right? But you know what I'm saying? Like $18 million.

1:24:09It's crazy. The insurance company must really have their finger on them pretty hard because they're DRP, you know what I mean? They're in bed, let's face it. Yeah. All these big crash kings and all these guys are, you know, they want to get rid of us, you know, little guys. So anyway, you know, once again, the moral of the story is, guys, if you start at ground zero and you work hard and you work your way up and you're smart with your money, you could do whatever you want to do.

1:24:30It's just a matter of how much you want to put up with. So my suggestion, if you're in your 20s and you are a go-getter and stuff like that and you're smart, get your finances in order and start looking for an independent shop that you can work your way up the ladder to be the man. And once you're the man, when the older man gets tired, you could possibly buy into that shop.

1:24:48Now, guys are going to say, where are them shops? I don't know. Okay, fucking in your hometown. Go around and look at these— some of these shops. I don't know, but it can be done. Yeah. You didn't know? I didn't know. I never thought this out and be like, I can get this. Yeah. What did you— like, what did they say? The— what would the 18-year-old Kevin say to the 55-year-old Kevin today?

1:25:09Oh my God. Yeah. What do you think? I was a dead horse. I was the fucking— like, there's no way I thought I'd be this far along. Like, if 55-year-old Kevin came to you and was like telling you what you're— you just moved into this house, like, you know, like, what would you say? I'd be like, I can't fucking believe it. I can't fucking believe that I made it this far.

1:25:28You know, I've outran all the haters. Yeah, you know what I mean? And like, I don't even care what these fags online say. Like, like, I give a shit, right? I probably shouldn't say fags. TikTok's gonna get me now. But like, like, I care. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, you look at me and my life and where I'm at and how everybody in my life, their life gets better when they're— when they hang out with me.

1:25:50It just does because I just, I help people out that work for me. I take good care of them. You know that. You see it. I see it. Yeah, look what we did. Yeah, no, I was gonna say, I'm like, Jason, there's fucking bullshit you got going on over there. Let's just open our own. Here we are. Yeah. Okay, I've told the story like 3 times in the past 24 hours.

1:26:04Yeah, it's just like, you know, I'm respectful to people who are respectful of me. I'm a dick to people who are dick to me. And you know, I do the mom shit because that's how fucking much I don't care when these guys say something like, that's not what your mom said. That's how much I don't care what they have to say. Yeah, yeah.

1:26:18It's like the mobile guy today going, yeah You're nickel and diming people to death. No, I'm trying to get people to understand that they got to get paid for going to work. You can't go to work as a flat rate technician going, I'm getting fucked on flat rates, it's a scam. Did you ever think you might be the problem? No, I'm not talking about the dealers because the dealers, you're getting fucked.

1:26:34Everybody, in my opinion, should quit the dealer and go to an independent shop, a good independent shop where they would take care of you. There's guys that retired from Hal's Auto Clinic that worked there for 25 years. Hal was a great guy to work for. My grandpa, Bill Brown Auto Clinic, he had guys that worked for 20 fucking years, 25, 30 years, they retired from him.

1:26:55There is good independent shop owners out there, you know what I mean? The dealerships, you're just another number. There's been guys on our post, Jay, that said, I seen a guy next to me died and 2 days later they had another guy in his bay. Yeah, we've said that so many times. That's crazy. That's crazy. You know, um, so that's kind of where we're at.

1:27:16Um, this is a good episode. I hope so. I hope it helps somebody that, you know, you could do whatever you want. And it's going to be hard because I didn't even get into Vicki dying because I already went into that story of how I had to rebuild the accounting system and stuff like that. This has been such a fucking journey. And Steve Jobs said it the best: the journey is the reward.

1:27:33Everybody has this great facade of here comes retirement. The journey is the reward. The things you're doing every day to get to where you're at is the fucking reward. I'm going to look back at my life and I'm not going to be I'm not beholden to anybody, but I am proud of what I've accomplished. And the people who know me closest know the struggles I had coming up, and look where I am now.

1:27:56You know, I passed a lot of these fucking haters up. Yeah, and it's a great feeling, you know what I mean? So you guys can do it. You just got to put your mind to it and stick to it. It's going to be hard, but you can do it. So change isn't easy. Have a good day.