Protect Your Shop From Mayhem

0:00Welcome to Repair Shop Reckoning: From Chaos to Control. Because too many shops today are running on chaos. Phones ringing, technicians frustrated, front counters overwhelmed, owners buried in problems with nobody to call. Kevin Brown has spent over 30 years in the trenches learning how to take that chaos and turn it into control. Shop owner, operator, consultant, leader. Through industry shifts, insurance games, bad hires, great hires, and lessons learned the hard way.

0:28This isn't theory. This isn't corporate training fluff. This is real shop experience, unfiltered. On this show, Kevin breaks down what actually works— running profitable shops, front counter control, training technicians, negotiating with insurance companies, building systems that make your shop run instead of burn, and the mistakes that quietly bankrupt shop owners every single day. No corporate scripts, no sugarcoating. And yeah, somebody might get offended.

0:57That's okay. Disney's two doors down. But if you want the truth about this industry, buckle up. This is Repair Shop Reckoning: From Chaos to Control. Let's get started. All right. Welcome back. Well, we got an early start this week. It's Tuesday at 11 o'clock, so I get some clips out early. Yeah, not rushing. I mean, lately we've been doing what, Thursday, right?

1:19Yeah. Wednesday. When we did it Wednesday last week. Wednesday last week. Yeah. So there's a couple topics, topics I want to talk about today. One thing that came up this week was, uh, should the technicians pay for scan tools? Or the clip was the shop would pay for it one year, the technician would pay for it for one year. I wanted to touch on that, and I also wanted to touch on what happens and why these guys think that they're being treated so badly, these technicians.

1:54Not all shops treat their technicians bad. I sound like a broken fucking record, just like everybody else online, right? Yep. Chris Craig just did a stitch and he was talking like, you know, some of these, they ask questions like, what do you think you should make? And these guys are like $250,000 a year as a technician. Okay. So I want to touch on all that and just kind of put it all in perspective and kind of go from there on my opinion, obviously.

2:19Right. And then here come the trolls from out from their bridges, beating their drums. So the first thing I want to talk about is shops and scan tools. Obviously scan tools are more prevalent nowadays versus when I started, right? Back 100 years ago, right after I get out of the freaking, you know, the cave, we could use like a MasterTech or a StarTech or not StarTech or what was that one?

2:49It looked like a hammerhead, that hammerhead shark that Ford had, NGS maybe. That's how long it's been, I don't remember, but he had different modules. So like, for instance, with the MasterTech, you could say you had a 2000 to 2003 cartridge. You could lie and say, oh, this 2004 to 2003 and get the data. Cause it was kind of the same. So it was a little bit easier back then to kind of get more bang for your buck.

3:17You would buy a cartridge, it'd be $600 back then. It was still a lot of money. But you could use it a long time. So then the scan tool companies got smarter and smarter and they started evolving. Now it's a yearly subscription. The problem with that is it gets really expensive. I think right now, yesterday, I think we have 9 scan tools.

3:37I mean, I think the, uh, the, uh, the Ford one, the— I think the Ford was like $1,500 a year right now. Wow. That's the only, you know, that one. And then there's, uh, we have, JPRO, we have Cummins Insight, we have Detroit Diesel, we have the Snap-on scanners. Like, we have all these different scanners and they— it gets quite expensive. How could me as a shop owner sit there and look at the freaking guys and go, yeah, you guys have to split this with me or you're gonna have to pay for that?

4:08And apparently there are shop owners out there that do that. Now, with our shop, We're medium heavy duty, light duty, so we have different, more scan tools than obviously probably an automatic motor shop that would do maybe trucks and cars, but they still have to do subscriptions and stuff like that for Chrysler, GM, for programming and stuff like that. So it does get expensive, but here, why should the technician have to freaking pay any of that?

4:37Okay, Jesus Christ, they spent a freaking million dollars in tools. I was a technician. I knew that I had, was like, you know how Dave Ramsey says you have Freddy, uh, Fannie Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in your back room, living in your back room with your student loans. Yeah. Okay. Snap-on, Macco, and Mac lived in my back room. Yep. I mean, they literally were one of my children.

4:54Every week I was paying them, right, to make money with my tools. Now let me be very clear on this. Some of the tools these technicians buy, they don't fucking need. They just buy them because they're cool and they got the Rat Fink fucking race car with them, or the Snap-on sweatshirt, whatever. Okay. The guys that are really serious technicians, they don't buy any of that bullshit.

5:15They have 1 or 2 ratchets, you know what I mean? They don't get all crazy into having 75 different ratchets and all that shit just because it's the latest and greatest on the Snap-on truck. You know, they're very calculated about what they do. There's the young kids, we all know what the Lube Rack kids or the Lube Techs, when they come in, they just buy everything under the fucking sun.

5:32You know, they make a little bit of money, then they fucking get the Crotch Rocket and they and, you know, remote control cars, and they're fucking broke and can't pay their bills. Yep. You know, um, so paying for scan tools to have your technicians do that is bullshit. Okay. Even if they're flat rate, hourly, whatever, my opinion, you should be strong enough shop owner where you buy the scan tools and you pay subscriptions.

5:58They can use it. In my opinion, it's no different than a trans jack or anything else. It's kind of an integral part of the everyday business. So why would you want a guy to go, hey man, you pay for the ScanTool subscription this year and I'll pay next year? You're a fucking shitty business owner. Okay? Do you not have enough money to pay for ScanTool subscriptions?

6:17Why don't you ask him to pay half the Edison bill too? Fuck, he's half there half the time. You're there the other half, right? Why don't we spend— you know what I'm saying? Like when you said the whole thing about splitting it, I'll pay it one year, you pay it the other year. I'm like, man, so then when he quits and leaves, like, how do you split that?

6:32Right? You have to give him a refund back. Or I think at one point they said that they would pay him back. Like, why would you get into any of that? Like my thought is like, if you're a successful enough business owner, you should put that in your numbers. Okay, I need to figure out how I'm gonna have to pay for all these scan tools.

6:49And you should have a line on your P&L sheet, how much it costs. Here's the problem with scan tools. Scan tools, the auto parts stores have used them to train the public that it should be free to plug in the magic box and it'll tell you what's wrong. That has been a problem in our industry because we have people come in all the time with all Riley's bullshit or AutoZone or whatever.

7:10Oh, they scanned it for free. He said it's an O2 sensor. Here's the O2 sensor. Will you put it in? No, I will not. Well, why? The O2 sensor's reading probably right. You have a vacuum leak, low fuel pressure, whatever, right? We put in an O2 sensor and it doesn't fix it. All of a sudden we're on the hook. There's a big huge fight over this shit.

7:28So they've trained the general public with these scan tools that they use at the auto parts store and put their free engine light check. I think they've got rid of the word diagnosis, right? Yeah, but it makes it look so easy. You have the kid with pimples on his face that works at AutoZone or O'Reilly's. His grandpa was a mechanic, so therefore he is.

7:51He walks out there, plugs it in. Oh yeah, fuck yeah, bro, you need an O2 sensor. Okay, and the customer's like, wow, that was easy. Then you go to the shop, you're like, hey, my check engine light's on. They're like, okay, it's going to be 1 hour to check that out. Well, wait a second here. AutoZone or O'Reilly's will do this for free.

8:06Yeah. Well, let's go back to my analogy of what is white paint. How many different types of white paint are at Home Depot? Is white paint white paint, right? You got white paint for $19.99 a gallon. You got white paint for $59 a gallon. That's the same analogy here. You go to AutoZone, they're the $19.99. They're there to pull that light. Some marketing ploy that they came up with.

8:29I don't know what auto parts store came up with. Think about it. I plug it in, I go, oh, right there it says it needs an O2 sensor. They sell you an O2 sensor. Guess what? There's no return on electrical parts. Well, you know, because you're not paying people for necessarily just plugging in the thing. Um, these people are the same people that ask you all the stupid questions like, do you have air conditioning in your car?

8:54When you're asking— when you're going to get an oil filter, you know, like they're asking the dumb questions. They are not qualified from that standpoint, you know. And so Yeah, they can go out there and plug it in, but doesn't mean— even though it says O2 sensor, doesn't mean that they're giving you the right diagnosis. And so if you fix that problem, it's even more money.

9:10You know, it's funny you say that because I just— a meme popped into my head that was on Facebook the other day. Old guy walks in Overalls to the auto parts store, says, I need 6-foot 3/8 fuel line. They say, what year, make, and model is it? They don't fucking know. They do not know. And that's the problem. You get these guys that plug it in, they They've discounted what we do.

9:31Okay. They discounted the shops. Well, I go to AutoZone and get it. They can plug in and tell me what's wrong with it for free. No, a code is just basically points you in the right directions. Okay. The O2 sensor is lean. Why is it lean? Well, obviously the O2 sensor is bad. No, it's actually doing its job, but it set a code.

9:49Okay. Then you go and start checking further into it because you have an hour. Usually you charge an hour for a diagnosis, right? You start doing it, you start looking at it, and you're like, look at the car's idle and funny. And then all of a sudden you find a cracked vacuum tee is sucking air. Okay, then all of a sudden you plug it in, you fix it, clear the code, everything's fixed, your fuel trim and everything goes back into, in, into place.

10:09The O2 sensor was never bad. It was just like, hey, I'm over here, I'm lean, I'm doing my job. But the scan tool pointed to that direction, and that's where AutoZone, all these guys will be like, yep, you need an O2 sensor. And then you'd put an O2 sensor and it just didn't do nothing. You know what I mean? It was a waste of money.

10:24But what did they achieve? They sold an O2 sensor and it's non-refundable. So there, you got to understand the auto parts stores are there to do what? Auto parts. They sell auto parts. They do not fix cars. It's not all O'Reilly or AutoZone auto parts and repair. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. For fuck's sake, we don't have enough technicians to start stocking them places.

10:49Right? Exactly. So back to the freaking whole problem at hand. It goes back to, in my opinion, and I guess, you know what, now this is facts. Numbers don't lie, right? If you're not running your business profitable and these scan tool subscriptions come up, what are you gonna do? You're gonna ask your guys to pay for it. You're gonna ask your guys to pay for it like some fucking chump.

11:12I mean, I couldn't honestly not even in a million years think to myself to ask my guys to start paying for scan tools. None of the shops I ever worked at, from Hale's Auto Clinic— I've only worked at 3 shops— from Hale's Auto Clinic, Sterling Performance did not have scan tools, to Garrett Auto and Truck did not make any of us pay.

11:31And Garrett Auto and Truck was fucking broke, let me tell you now, that place was fucking bankrupt, and we still had scan tools. Now, we had— when I started out, we used an Allen Scope, okay? It hung from the ceiling and had floppy disks. We had to boot the thing up with floppy disks. So once you got that bitch booted up in the morning, you didn't shut it off unless you were Steve's fucking dad.

11:51I go on a road test, come back, he'd have it shut off. And I'd be like, dude, what the fuck? Like, why would you shut this off? You know, because I would literally— back then when fuel injection was just starting to come out and stuff like that, I would plug it into the Allen scope, look at the ignition, right? But once again, I never had to pay for any of that stuff.

12:11They didn't ask me to buy a fucking scope. Now, in my opinion, the ignition scopes and stuff like that, we're doing secondary ignition scans I thought it was a great thing that before a tune-up, my old boss would always make me take, take a look at it, plug it in the scope before you tune it up. The frickin' ignition wires would be off the screen, right?

12:30When I would put the new ignition wires, they would be back right where they should be, if I was, you know, on the scope. But we didn't have cameras back then. I couldn't pull out my camera phone in the '90s to take pictures, right? So a lot of this stuff we used but we never had to pay for it. Okay. So I get scan tools are more and more and more.

12:50I get it. Now, if you're in a shop and you're a flat rate tech and you're making tons of money and you decide to buy your own scan tool, that's okay. Right? You, you're paying for it to do your job, right? Maybe there's one scan tool in the shop and there's a bottleneck. Yep. Um, I have 3 scan tools, 3 Snap-on scan tools that, so nobody ever gets bottlenecked.

13:10Like, I just kind of look at them as like toilet paper. Like, I know that sounds really arrogant, like you got to have it. Yeah. Okay. You got to have the scan tools now. So I always just pay for the subscriptions and I just never even pay attention to it. Here you go. We have to have it. Um, you know, as a matter of fact, I'm getting ready to look at scan tools for the front desk now.

13:30I'm having the service advisors now, uh, do pre-scans when everything comes in the door. We're going to scan it and print the report. And put it in the ticket so we can see the technicians are pulling this, pulling the codes to speed it up for them a little bit. Constantly improving the process. Right. And then when we're all done with these jobs, we'll have this— when this— we do the final checkout, the scan tool, my tech service advisor, when they do the bill, I want to pull the codes on it afterwards to make sure there's no codes in it.

13:57So when we fix the codes and then we drove it, you know, through our drive cycles and all that stuff, we'll have it. So when they take— when they leave, we'll have the information like, hey, these codes were there, we went through the drive cycles and stuff like that, the OBD readiness test, everything's good. And we're going to put that in the file too.

14:15So we don't really necessarily anymore have problems with, um, stuff coming back with the same codes. We usually drive enough afterwards, the 2-trip, 3-trip, whatever we just depend on, whatever we have to do, we make sure it's fixed. Um, so that's not a problem, but I am a guy that likes to have information and cover my ass. And I think that's going to be the second part of this podcast when we start talking about our paperwork, our descriptions, our disclaimers, covering your ass on certain types of things.

14:49A lot of guys don't do it. They don't think it's important and it's very important. Well, and I know just how it's helped you even with customers in the last couple weeks. Yeah, as a matter of fact, we use AI. And I, by the way, just a little side, I like how everybody's touting AI. AI, you got to use AI. How long have I been talking about this?

15:106 months? A year? Yeah. I've been messing with at least probably 8 months, right? 9 months. But everybody else— it was like last, it was last summer when we were going to TJ. It was like July, remember? Yeah. So it was over a year I've been talking about AI. Now everybody else is like, oh, AI is the way to go. But do you remember everybody giving me a hard time about AI?

15:26Yep. At first. Now— oh man. Yeah. Remember Wolf Winski? Yeah. Everybody else is freaking, you know, telling me, yeah, on their social media doing classes and everything else. Okay, yeah, it's here to stay. Okay, so let's talk about writing up and covering your ass with all the proper information for these customers and disclaimers. I think this goes with the scan tools we're talking about.

15:51We're kind of— that's another layer with the front desk, right? We're already done and talked about— I don't agree Will the technicians ever have to pay for fucking scan tools or subscriptions or anything? I believe that's a shop, shop tool. Let's go ahead and close that section out of the podcast. Technicians should not have to buy scan tools unless they choose to buy a scan tool.

16:09That's a different story, right? That's all done. Any professional, you can go buy a tool and enhance your— yeah, right. And you know, people, before we get into the COVID your ass, people in our industry, these technicians sit there and cry that it's so bad. So bad, so bad. This is a horrible industry. And I'm going to go back to the analogy.

16:30You go to Walmart, a bottle of water is $1. You go to a Kid Rock concert, it's $19. Know your value, know your place. If your shop is not treating you well, fucking move on. You guys yourself go around and say there's a technician shortage, right? That means if there's a technician shortage, what happens if there's a shortage on something? Supply and Demand.

16:52What goes up? The cost. You technicians should go to another shop and say, this is what I can do. The other shop, this is what I want. And if you're good, they'll hire you. Yep. Right? Supply and demand. So if there's a technician shortage and it's so bad in our business, move on. Opportunities. Opportunity. I seen a clip of the Ford CEO.

17:16I don't know if you've seen this one. No. Where he's talking about the Right to Repair Act. The guy's a fucking moron. He's sitting there talking about— and I'm not going to sit there and, and, and talk exactly what he said because I don't really— I'm not going to paraphrase it, but I'm just going to say this to sum it up. He basically said these jobs are— these cars are very complicated to work on, they're very dangerous, we just don't want anybody working on— we want to have the right tools and all that stuff, so we don't want anybody just working on these cars, right?

17:47Okay. On the other side of his mouth, he's like, oh, hey Bobby, cut that warranty time. That fucking Ford tech over there is on TikTok saying he could do it in 3 hours when it pays 9 on warranty. Fuck that. Cut him. Cut him. He's part of the problem, right? He's sitting there saying one thing, but doing another. They all went to Washington and got— and Donald Trump even said it.

18:09Oh my God, there was guys in school that were not good at arithmetic, but they could take an engine apart and make it purr like a kitten when they put it back together. This seems like a really weird thing. Well, if anybody is not blind, the dealers want to lock it all out so they can collect all the work. Yep. They want to get rid of guys like us.

18:28It's insane. I'm shocked that this would even make it anywhere. Like, that's horrible. I'm pretty sure it's going to get shot down. God, I hope. You know, I'm sure they're going to come at it again some way or another. You know, in the Trump administration, whatever, because he doesn't seem like— he didn't really come out and say it. He just said it's weird.

18:49Yeah. So hopefully he doesn't. But that is so weird. I haven't seen anything about that. I gotta check that out. Yeah, yeah. Farley is— he's— he looked like really scattered in that interview. He's falling apart, isn't he? Had the whole like, not a shortage, and yeah, shortage in the bay thing last year. And yeah, then, you know, they got freaking Explorers blowing engines up now, 7,000, 8,000 miles on them.

19:10They're freaking blown up. I mean, they had the most recalls out of anybody last year. You know, and it's just like, it's not like other manufacturers don't have recalls. My PCS went out my Cybertruck and everybody else's, they told me it'd be 4 to 6 weeks. They had it back to me in 3 weeks. But in the meantime, they're like, here, drive this Model S, have fun.

19:26So they're pretty cool about shit like that. Yeah, they care, you know. Um, so, you know, and going back to, you know, covering your ass. So we talked about all this technician stuff, right? And I just threw that whole thing in there because I just I always wanna think to these guys are always online crying. They're just not getting paid enough. They're not doing that.

19:44But once again, if there's a shortage, that means everybody wants technicians. Go find your shop that they're gonna pay you. There's guys out there like me, all my clients that I talk to that I have, they all treat their technicians great. Like, yep, you can't paint everybody with the same brush, every shop owner with the same brush. And they're like, well, yeah, you know, You know, I was talking to another guy.

20:08He's like, yeah, typical shop owner going up to your other place up north. Well, wait a second here. I want to, I want to fucking go ahead and say this out loud. People have had the same opportunities in their life that I've had. I'm sure of it. I just put myself, I took advantage of the opportunities. If you want to have a podcast, whatever, good for you, but you cannot sit there and talk about how shop owners can act and you act like you know all about what shop owners feel, go through and everything.

20:35Like you have empathy. You have never been in the emotional roller coaster of being a business owner. You've been a technician your whole life, and you get on a podcast and talk or whatever, but you're not a shop owner. The guys that are shop owners kind of resonate with you when they have a podcast and you talk, you listen to them talk.

20:51We all talk about the same thing. It's stressful. It's the whole man in the arena quote. You know that one where it's like, uh, people attack the man that goes and does something and achieves, tries to achieve something great. The man that's in the arena that has spotlight on him, has all this pressure and everything else. It's so easy to, like, talk shit about that guy, essentially, is what the quote is.

21:10And it's so true. You can say all the stuff about a business owner. You can talk shit, but if you've never been in the arena, you got to shut your mouth. I'm reading a book right now and it talks about Rockefeller. When you think about Rockefeller, what do you think? One of the richest men ever, right? Yep. Of his time. Obviously, Elon Musk is the fucking man now.

21:32Rockefeller must become a trillionaire, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Rockefeller, did you know that he just about worried himself to death? He got alopecia back then. They were saying, you know, stress alopecia starts from stress. Uh, he had ulcers so bad he had to change his diet and all this stuff. He was so worried about freaking money. People absolutely hated him. His brother took all the plots out of the family cemetery because they hate— he hated his brother.

22:00He's like, we don't want anybody buried by this fucking asshole. This This guy was so worried about money nonstop, it consumed his life. Yeah. When you worry about something 100% of the time, all the time, usually you're going to do pretty good at it. Think about if you eat and breathe whatever, right? You are going to be good at it, right? So he ended up with all this money.

22:18As he got older, he realized at 55, they're like, if you don't change your ways, you're going to fucking die. You have all these ulcers. You are going to die. He changed his ways, stopped doing some of the things. Got strong because they're saying, you know, between 50 and 55, you're in your prime. You're like, you should be financially stable and all that stuff.

22:36That guy started giving money away. Do you know he was— he, um, University of Chicago, he was one of the guys that was freaking, um, a lot of the medical stuff, a lot of the, um, pharmaceutical companies, he funded all that stuff. They don't talk about all this stuff. He literally went from being the— everybody hated this guy, worrying about being a businessman, worrying about money, worrying about money, to start giving it all away.

22:57Has still ended up wealthy and still changed the world. That's crazy. Yeah. I was like, wow, sitting there listening. Because you think Rockefeller, he's a rich guy. He fucking knew exactly what he's— never had a problem. Yeah. He was worried, worried himself to death, to ulcers. That's so because he was— he, they said, he said every night, success is borrowed. He said this money could only be temporary, so I can never let off the pedal.

23:20Okay. And the reason I'm saying this, that's how business owners are. Yep. I've said this 100 times. When things are going good and you're busy and the shop's flowing good and you got money coming in, you're over here. I got this shit right as a business owner. Yep. When things are bad, what have I done? Have I been overpricing? Have I been doing this?

23:38Oh my God, I've not been at work enough. I'm not. It is a psychological mindfuck. You do sales training, you do entrepreneurs. It's all mindset. It's a mindset. Mindset, right? Yeah. And in this, I'm kind of jumping around here, but it's kind of all goes to where I'm going with this. As a business owner, success is borrowed, right? If I don't start going to work, if I start taking— how many guys have you seen, their second generation, that come into a good business and all of a sudden they just start spending all the money and they break the place, right?

24:07Yeah. So success is borrowed. You have to be smart. You have to treat your people well and all that stuff like that. But you can never take your eye off the prize, which is the numbers. Your numbers aren't going to lie to you. They're going to keep going. And that's where buying the scan tools and not trying to cheese dick your employees, right?

24:23Hey Jason, can you buy the scan tool? I'm a little bit short. I don't have $800. Do you know that I have a customer out there right now that owns a pretty sizable garbage company? Okay, his truck got hit by another guy in a garbage company. This truck's been here since October and we pulled the windshield frame, got it straightened back out.

24:43We're like, yep, we can get glass in and everything. It's gonna be like $6,800. $6,800 and then the glass. So all together it's going to be like $8,000. And he ended up suing the other guy. So I tell him, I go, dude, this thing's been sitting here since October. I go, you got like a fuck ton of— you got 250 days into this thing or some shit.

25:01Yeah. Why don't you just fix it? Because he kept telling me I'm losing so much money. I go, well, you wouldn't lose money. I mean, if you said you lost $60, you would've spent $8,000 to fix the truck and then went after the guy. You'd be up, right? Yeah. You'd be $52,000 ahead. I don't have $8,000 laying around just to spend on fixing a truck.

25:21I'm a small business. I said, you don't have $8,000 and you're the size you are? What the fuck do you mean by that? This is exactly what I said. But that guy's got the— probably got a big house, the fricking car. He pulls every dime out of his business. And that's what a lot of these guys do when they're second generation. They say that usually the third generation kills a business.

25:40You've heard that before, right? Because they just— they never earned it. They never had to sit there and maneuver it. They just kind of showed up and it was successful. It was handed to them. It was handed to them. So they don't really respect like we do. And that's the mindset where you have to— even if you're third generation, you just stop and look and say, this is a fragile situation I'm in.

25:58I can't just go. Because you have to understand, when that business started, times have changed. Like when Garrett Auto and Trucks started, it was 1982 when we moved into Garrett Auto and Trucks building, right? Yeah. What were cars at that point? Shoot, man. $6,000? Yeah. Cars are $100,000 now. Yep. Wow, that's crazy. You didn't have to have scan tools. So there's a lot of different stuff going on with a lot of things in this business world that it goes back to the scan tools, paying your people, taking care of the people, because without these people, what do you have?

26:30Yeah. What do you have without your technicians? Unless you're going— planning to go out there and fix all the cars, you don't have a business, right? So why would you mistreat these guys? Why would you even fuck around for a dollar or two or three an hour? If your guy wants $3 an hour because he doesn't think he's making enough money— now, if you pay a guy the going rate, a good wage, say hourly wage of $35 an hour, and he comes in and goes, I'm just not making enough money, $40, whatever, right?

27:04You got to look at this guy and go, wait a second here. This guy's fucking always buying shit. He's always doing this. He's always out living outside of his means, right? Yeah. The reason I'm saying this, you cannot subsidize poor financial skills for your employees, right? But you can employ your— you can pay your employees well. And what they do outside of the shop does not have any hindrance what goes on inside the shop.

27:28You can't set your pay scale By what these guys are doing outside your shop. Well, and, and it makes me think of how you've actually invested in your guys and taken them through the Ramsey courses so they can understand their financials too. Yeah. Every one of my guys sit there and invest in their matched retirement, my companies and stuff like that. And they're all financially stable.

27:48I imagine pretty much all of 'em except for one could probably write a check for $2,000 and not even blink an eye. Yep. Okay, my guys are not broke. My guys get paid very well, you know, but I'm very cognitive about paying my guys well because I can't have the things I have on their backs. And I've said that before. So I'm not going to step over a pile of broken bodies when I retire someday or sell the shop, however it ends, die, whatever.

28:19I don't want people to look at it and go, yeah, he had all this and we fucking did this. For it. So how do we protect all that? Here's where the paperwork comes in. So I talked about all that stuff. I talked about the technicians. I talked about this. Now, how as a business owner do you protect yourself? The paperwork is key.

28:37You guys don't think you ever have enough time to do the paperwork till you go to fucking court and your paperwork's a fucking disaster. And then the judge looks like, you don't have a signature of this, you're not in this compliance, you're not in this, you fucking lose. Pull out your fucking checkbook. Oh, oh, well, thank God you got that fucking money for the scan tool that your fucking major employee paid for.

28:57Yep. Right? Yeah. So how do we do that? Well, let's start here with AI. When a customer comes in, we tape the conversation with the AI. Then we fricking run it through the AI and have them put it into, we put it into repair. We copy and paste in the repair order. Why do we do that? Well, last week we had a customer come in, an employee came in and told us all the wrong shit.

29:23We checked it all out, stuff that the owner did not want checked out, called up, said we did this. The guy flipped his fucking shit. You fucking idiots don't know this. You don't do that. You don't do that. Hang on, sir. Let me send you the transcript of what your fucking employee told us to do. Now that you're calling us names. Yeah.

29:41Send it to him. He read it. I call him back. I know who's the fucking idiot now. He's like, I have to apologize. What happens if I wouldn't have had that? It would have been hearsay. Yep. I didn't say— he's— what do you think that employee's gonna say if his boss is that big of a dickhead? What do you think the employees— you think he's gonna lie at our expense?

30:00Absolutely. Wouldn't you agree? Absolutely. Well, we got past that, and that's happened several times. So we have the transcript. Now, the reason we have the transcript, not only to cover our ass, but also information is not dropped between the front and the back. Service advisors are generally busy, lazy, however you want to cut the cake. Yeah, they might not put the key information.

30:21Now we have it all in there, right? We have all the write-ups. If it's got a misfire and we have the AI say, hey, we have a misfire, and they're like, we don't want to do it. You do realize that this frickin injector is dumping gas. You could ruin your engine by driving it. Broken. We put all the disclaimers in there. That's the only thing you can do nowadays.

30:41You can't put handcuffs on them and tell them they can't take the car and arrest them for driving their car. It's their car. Yep. But your paperwork all has to be in order. Trust me when I tell you this, guys, your paperwork has to be in order, because when you go to court, sooner or later it's going to happen. Or the credit card, you have to get your proper, proper authorizations.

30:59We had a lawyer who does contracts go through the repair manual in Michigan, and he wrote my terms of service for my repair that you have to agree to. So we are 100% in compliance. When we send you the repair order, you have to agree to the recommendations. You have to initial it next to them. It gives you the price, it gives you— puts their IP address on it and everything.

31:23There's pictures and everything. Why do we do that? Because once again, It's a different world out there. Do you realize when I started, I would ask them what their birth date was or what was the last 4 of their Social Security number and they'd give me approval over the phone. Think about it, when you're selling this shit, I'm pulling out, and the best way to do it, my friend Shane told me, he's like, when I started selling websites, how could I go out and just sell something that didn't exist?

31:46Yep. Yeah. This is just a fad. Websites are a fad. They're never going to go anywhere. The World Wide Web is a joke, right? Well, now we have all these tools. So what ends up happening with all these people that are criminals, they exploit it more and more and more. There's actually people that go around right now that realize that they can go get services done and then they can go dispute it on their credit card.

32:10They're— it's happening a lot in our industry. They'll go get their car fixed, do everything, all that stuff. And guess what? Well, I didn't do this. I didn't do that. We had one that said that they did not even approve the services, that we did the work and charged them the money. Guess what we had? We had all the approvals with their IP address and their initials, right?

32:30And then we had a fucking video of them coming in and signing the repair order. They picked it up. So when they charged us back, it was like $7,000. So they charged us back. The credit card company's like, this is the reason. They said, you know, you didn't perform the services. I forget the code. We sent them everything and they're like, and we won.

32:53Yeah, but what happens if you're a shop that doesn't have any money and you don't have the time or the shop management program because you're so busy and they're going to take $9,000 back from you? That could put you freaking in the poorhouse, man. Right? $9,000. Well, you think about just a second ago you said that guy that didn't have $8,000 to fix his truck, you know, so he's $1,000 in the hole.

33:15Right. So you guys that don't have time to get proper approvals and stuff like that, it's like playing Russian roulette, right? It's not if you're going to get screwed, it's when. And I'm going to tell you something. People are not honorable nowadays. Am I painting everybody with the same brush? Kind of. Because I'm going to tell you what, I would have to say probably 80% of the people are fucking scumbags in the world now.

33:39I mean, how many fights and arguments even on the road driving home? People cutting each other off in a high-stress situation because of Michigan fucking construction is everywhere in the summer. I only laugh because you drive a Cybertruck. And so I know, I know you get misguided hate just for driving a vehicle. Yeah, I think it's, yeah, it's hilarious. But yeah, people flipping us off for no reason.

34:01That old lady at the restaurant, like, she was hanging out her windows screaming Nazi lover and all that kind of shit. Like, what the— yeah, what is wrong with you? Yeah. And you know, we get these people now that are professionals to go around screwing businesses and businesses don't have all their ducks in a row and they win. You know, one of the other content creators was saying he got a chargeback and he caught them because they were in a parking lot when they fricking called it, did the chargeback somehow or another.

34:27I don't know how that all went. Like we've had several of them where, you know, and another very important thing, guys, you should have your warranty You should hand your warranty out with your repairs. Like it's the last page of our invoices, our warranty. For instance, we, if your truck or vehicle's modified in any way, we don't warranty it. There's a lot of things here at Motor City, I can't warranty caulk for more than 30 days.

34:56Think about it. You get caulk and something happens, something pokes at a tree or whatever, it gets, it rains, it gets cold out, ice, it spreads. All of a sudden you got a water leak. We can't be responsible for that. Some things we just can't cover. Control. Yeah. Now I had a customer the other day, actually about a month ago. I don't know if I told this story.

35:14We— he had a water leak and we took his slide out of his side of his camper and we rebuilt the slide and fixed the roof and everything and put it back in. He went during the winter and he called us up. He's like, hey, that slide's leaking. We're like, there's no fucking way, everything's new. Like, no, we water tested and everything.

35:32So he brings it here. I'm looking at it and we're looking at him like, we're fucking spraying it with water. I'm like, this thing's perfect. So I walk up front to the lady, she's sitting up there, they're an older couple and the husband's sitting there. I'm like, there's no water leak. She's like, well, he's like, well, after the tornado came through. And I'm like, what?

35:52He's like, yeah, after the tornado came through, she's like, there was 85-mile-an-hour winds blowing across the side of that towards that camper when it was raining. Dude. And I'm like, are you kidding me? She's like, no, I told the old Pollock that's probably why it's leaking. I go, why wouldn't you come here and tell us that? What's wrong with people? Was it a fucking tornado on a wind?

36:12So I don't think it was directly a tornado, but 85-mile-an-hour winds sideways on a camper not designed to do that. And it wasn't leaking up top, it blew up underneath, and the water blew up underneath the lip, probably get pressurized and pushed water in on the floor. I mean, how the fuck is that our problem? So that is hilarious, you know. We had the wife calling him out though.

36:36That's so funny. Yeah, she's like, yo, pull up, you know. But you know, we have everything documented with the insurance companies. I'm telling you guys, and the reason I've morphed into all this, as a business owner, you have to be smarter than the average bear. You have to protect yourself. And a lot of you guys just don't think it's very important to write on your repair orders descriptions.

36:57Call the customer and go, hey, we're gonna do this. It might not fix it, but this is what we're going to do. Are you okay with that? Yes. Okay, I'm gonna send you this. I want you to go ahead and approve it, put your initials. Do you think that's a little ridiculous? I don't, because when he, they all get in there amnesia.

37:12When the final bill comes, they have amnesia. They're like, what? Well, I don't remember any of this. Well, I believe that's something that you should have a signature. So you can say, you said this, or you did this, or recorded phone calls. We, we now have moved to taking the phone calls and put them in the file every time now. Not just like sometimes it was like we would do it sometimes if we thought it was— now we put it in.

37:36Because it's easier not to lose it, just to have it in the file. You pull up with the pictures. You ever go to court, you have the phone calls, you have the— you have everything, the emails, all that. We put it all in there. And you know, it reminds me of the caution coffee is hot, uh, symbol on McDonald's coffee because they got sued.

37:53Because they got sued. And anytime you ever see like, uh, you know, your caution you're driving the wrong way signs, like, it seems like such a stupid sign. We always say out loud like Oh, somebody did something stupid. Like in, I think a lot of times business owners or we as people, we want to trust people or we think, oh, no one's, they're not going to screw us over.

38:12They're nice people or whatever. But you can't beat experience. And I know, you know, 30+ years for you. I know me through business, I've been screwed over plenty. And I talked about like, I will, I hate taking and I will refuse to put a, do AR accounts as a salesperson because I've been screwed over by so many people that are like, Oh, well, I can't pay it this month, or I can't pay it.

38:34And now I'm like in the hole with money. Yeah. And we don't even play that fucking game. I will tell you what, the sure way to get in a fight is over property lines and AR. Yeah, man. Yeah. You ever see how weird people get about property lines? I get that weird over my fucking AR because I'm not going to— okay. Yeah.

38:52I live my life by a certain code, meaning when me and Marilyn took over this business, we're like, in my mind, I'm like, okay, I have— I pay everybody net 30, so within 30 days everybody has to be paid. Well, that puts undue stress on you, right? So what happens? You have an AR account or bills you haven't done, and you're trying to get these people to pay you within 30 days.

39:15So it's a, it's a, it's, it's a stacked deck of cards. Would you say it's a house of cards, right? Oh yeah. Because if they don't pay you on time, you can't pay your people on time, and then they can't pay their people on time. Then like on, so on. I'm not talking about corporations because corporations have no fucking soul. They don't give a fuck.

39:32Absolutely. I've had, I've had, I had a generator company, um, come to me and they're like, we want you to start painting all our generators. I had to— it was this big fucking jerk-off fest. They wanted me to come down, they showed me everything, and I'm just like, not impressed. I don't give a shit. Like, you're showing me this plant and this, and we can paint this, we could do— we could give you so much work.

39:51We could, you know, we could What? Okay, great. We go all into the thing. We start talking about terms and, you know, it was the big sales pitch and I could always tell, like, they're a little hesitant to always tell me what the terms were. Yeah. So they're like, what are your terms? And I'm like, I don't have terms. Either you pay me as you go, you give me a check or whatever, pay me at the end of the week when you pick them up, whatever.

40:14We can't do that. Okay, well, you want to pay the credit card? Nope, we can't do that. Our terms, we'll pay you Every 120 days. I said, you've lost your fucking mind. I said that to the guy. They're like, excuse me? I go, yeah, no way. Like, you're not gonna run my ship for half a year, you know what I'm saying? I'm like, are you kidding me?

40:36I thought I was waiting for the punchline. Yeah, they were dead fucking serious. Serious? That's crazy. I'm like, yeah, we can't do business together. Well, that would be a lot of money. A lot of money I'm not gonna see. But they had the balls to actually, like, it was like a big fucking deal. They're a huge generator company around here. I'm like, there's no fucking way.

40:556 months? 6 months. That's so crazy. And it makes me think you've said this before, like, the money's— we have money. It's just not— it's in somebody else's account, you know? Like, and that's the worst is when people owe you money, you're like, I did the sales, I did the work. The only thing we're missing is the actual money, which is the most important part for our business.

41:12Right. Can you imagine? Okay, we'll just put it just do a little freaking test. Okay, I do 4 generators in a month and they're $50 grand apiece. We'll just say $40 grand, $30 grand. I'm gonna put all that money out. I'm gonna put maybe $100,000 a month out or more for 6 months. $600,000 I'm going to front the corporation that's worth millions and millions and millions.

41:40It's crazy. Do you think they let their people pay them in 6 months? Fuck no. I know other companies that are like, yeah, we're net 60, we'll pay you in 60 days, but they're on their customers 30, 30, 30, 30. It's a money game. If you can get away with it, great guys, but I'm here to tell you, if you're an independent small shop like us— I mean, we have 2 locations, don't, don't, doesn't matter, it's still money's money— you cannot sit there and run your business buying other people's parts, putting them on their trucks, paying labor to fix their trucks so they can go out there and run their business.

42:15Yep. You know, and that goes to the guys that don't have time to write a bill. Them sure are the guys that definitely can't write a fricking contract up or disclaimer. Not a contract. They're not lawyers. A disclaimer to cover their ass. Right. Terms of service, not on the repair. It always seems that they just don't have the time to write it up.

42:37Well, and they don't have the time because they're constantly running in chaos. And when you have chaos constantly going on, it seems like you don't have time, but it's taking some of that control back and putting these standard operating procedures and processes in place, and you'll be amazed at how much time you actually have. Yeah, it's amazing that you sit there and you stop and think about this stuff.

42:57Like, I'm a suspicious guy. Why is that? Because I've been burned. Yeah. Like I've seen it all. It's kind of like people in business, they like, especially in the fleet repair business, you always get that fleet manager going, "Hey, I have 10 trucks. Can I get a discount?" I'll give you a discount on number 10. You know, we had a pretty big franchise around here.

43:21You know, they had 20 trucks to do and they did the old try to do the carrot on me. Well, can you do better on this one? No, I'll do better on number 20. Like, I'm not going to start this fucking bullshit or, hey, my friend, you bring it here. I send all my cousins over to you. They have hundreds of trucks.

43:36We have— we make you rich. No, you're going to make me crazy. There's no discounts. We don't even talk discounts. Like, I don't understand the whole discount thing. And you can get around that by writing an estimate and say, here it is. And they say, well, what if I pay you cash? Then I'll have cash. Cash charge doesn't matter to me. If you pay with a credit card, you're paying the 3%.

44:02Yeah. If you pay cash, you save 3%. It doesn't matter to me one way or the other. You put all your money right in the bank, have all your stuff, because all you guys that think it's a great idea just to take cash over the counter and then give the guy a receipt and crumple it up on your end, what if you go to court?

44:20Did a $10,000 job, something happened, you went to court. You go to court, they pull it out. He pulls out his repair order. They're like, okay, do you have your paperwork, sir? Do you have the original where he signed? Uh, you crumpled it up, threw in the garbage because you stole the cash, remember? Then all of a sudden he's got a slick lawyer going, wait a second, how did you pay?

44:42I paid cash. He doesn't have the paperwork. Let's go ahead and look into this. Can you show us where this went in the bank? I think— not that they would probably— the IRS would get involved because I guess it's a big process to turn somebody in. But think what a bargaining chip that is for the other legal defense. Look at you and go, Jason, you threw away the original, you stole the cash, you're fucked.

45:05You're fucked. Is it really worth it? So that goes back in the— that goes back into having your paperwork dialed in. You could go and pull any frickin paperwork out of any of my frickin shops and be like, here you go. Yep, he paid cash. He got put in the bank this day. We staple. The deposit for the cash or any deposits to the repair orders.

45:28We go to the bank with checks. We don't take checks, so cash or it's a company check. We do some of our companies, we staple it. You know, a lot of times we deposit it for our phone, print, staple it all together. We ever go to court, here it all is. We take all the guesswork out of it. There's a run to the bank, there's a— yep, there's a signed invoice, there's the terms of service.

45:50Everything's already locked down. And these guys not covering their ass is a real problem. I'm telling you guys, if you do not have proper signatures and authorizations, you're going to lose. And a lot of you guys can't afford to lose. Nobody wants to lose $9,000, for example. But like, then there's a difference of where does that money come from, right? And the other thing is, we talked about a little bit, let's talk about your warranty.

46:17If your terms of service are agreed to, and then your warranty— they agreed to your warranty and your terms of service. It states it in there somewhere. Your warranty is laid out, blah, blah, blah. At that point, you don't have to warranty something that's not really your fault. For instance, we had a 3-liter Baby Max that the guy had deleted. He was from Chicago.

46:41He blew his turbo up. It was boosting too high. I don't remember the whole circumstances. His program was jacked up. I'm like, dude, the reason this turbo failed is because of your programming. We can put a turbo on it, but we can't warranty it. Oh, okay. Well, I guess I have no choice. Well, you have a choice. We can put the thing back to stock, put a regular stock PCM and put it all back together the way it should be, and it'll be fine.

47:06Or you can sign the disclaimer that here's our warranty. It says this isn't done. We also put it in our verbiage. You know, this truck is deleted. We warn the customer. The customer agreed this turbo could fail. We laid it all out. And guess what ended up happening? He made it 400 miles down the road. What ended up happening is we ended up turning his— he had a programmer, like a 3-position programmer, and we said, leave it on 1 and it'll probably be okay, but we're still the disclaimer.

47:31What'd he do? He said, I turned it off and about— it was fine for about 100 miles and the turbo went out again. And I don't remember what happened. We never got it back. So he takes it to a dealer. The dealer's like, yeah, they didn't put this gasket, this gasket, and this gasket on it. Well, it's fucking deleted. Them gaskets are already gone.

47:52There's block-off plates. So we start talking back and forth to the guy. So I call the dealership and they're saying, yeah, they didn't do this right. And the guy won't talk to me. I'm like, whatever. Then the customer calls him like, if you have it towed back here, we'll fucking help you out somewhere in there because this is GM turbo. We could probably get them to warranty it.

48:08I'm not doing that. I'm going to charge you back. I said, okay, charge it back. So it went back and forth and all that stuff. And it, uh, we won because we had all the paperwork. We won, not a big deal. But the dealer, it blew up on the dealer. The dealer called us and said, hey, did you have a problem with this guy?

48:27We're like, yeah, we had a problem with you too because you said we wouldn't do it. Well, we didn't give him a warranty and he's charging us back. Oh, and, uh, you know, we didn't put it on a repair order that are, you know, disclaimer and stuff like that. She's like, so we lost and we want to go over this guy's small claims.

48:40I I laughed at him. I go, you fucking prick. I go, you wouldn't help me. You basically said, I don't know what to tell you. You tried to do the same thing to me, but you didn't have the proper paperwork. I won. You lost. They didn't learn the lesson. Obviously it's a red flag that this customer is doing, going through this process with you.

49:00And again, it's not learning the lesson because if they're gonna do it to you, if, if, if a woman's cheating on this per— on this guy with you, chances are she's going to cheat on you with somebody else, right? Like it's going to— it's a pattern of behavior. Well, you know that show Justified? Yeah. When the chief is like, Raylan. Yeah. You know what they call a dog that bites everybody?

49:20He's a biter. You shoot everybody. You know what you're going to be known as? A shooter. But you know what I thought was, I told the dealer, I said, you're a dealership. I would imagine this is kind of against your franchise and, you know, for GM. And yeah, no, as long as we didn't delete it, we could work on it. Like, okay, now there's guys that are flaming and stuff.

49:38There's a true story, but you know, they lost. I thought it was fucking great. That is like, fuck you, you guys are gonna throw me under the bus, you know what I mean? And I, I've had several of these guys, uh, I actually had a guy, and this is where paperwork's important, I had a guy, overrepresented minority, drop his landscape trailer off And the spindle was melted on it.

50:04His bearings failed, it twisted the spindle. It came in on a tow truck. I went out there with the forklift. It was a single axle trailer. Picked it off the trailer, had the tow truck pull out. I set it down. Said, you know, I need to take the axle out of it. I'll cut the spindle off it, put a spindle on it, put it back in.

50:22We'll just say it was $600. I don't even remember what it was. Man, that's a lot of money. That's how much it's going to cost. I don't know what to tell you. Approves it, gives me a deposit, the $300-some deposit I think it was. The next day he calls me up, he said, I don't want to do the job with you. I could— a friend of mine will do it cheaper.

50:41He's got an axe, whatever. I said, okay, I'll refund you the money. I refund him the money, but the credit card fee doesn't get refunded. It was like, I think it was like It was between $20 and $30. How's that? Yeah, he fucking tried to charge me back for that. That's crazy. The credit card company's like, say what? The lady calls me, she said, I'm like, I'm confused here, can you help me out?

51:10I said, you have all the paperwork? She's like, yep. I see you charged a deposit. Yep. I see you refunded it. Yep. She's like, okay, so what's the Why is he charging you back? I said, because the fees he got charged, he's wanting me to pay for the fees too, even though I spent the time unloading the trailer. The lady's like, this is ridiculous.

51:29She's like, you didn't even get the fees. Let's say it's not like you got the fees. Yeah. So she's like, yeah, okay, we'll go ahead and let you, you know, 4 to 6 weeks, we'll let you know. I won that. But once again, without all the paperwork, that could have cost me some. And at what point does it become principal? Absolutely. Like, that, that guy pissed me the fuck off.

51:50$30. I went over and freaking unloaded this trailer. Like, my time was just fucking worth nothing because you're a fucking loser, basically. So reason I'm blabbling and babbling and babbling about covering your ass, guys, because I'm telling you, sooner or later it could make you or break you. If you have all your shit dialed in with all your pictures, all your signatures and stuff, this goes to show you're professional.

52:11Yeah, think about it. Yep.. If you walk into the fricking court with a fucking stack of folders and the judge says, present your case. Here's a repair order. You can see we approved this. We needed more work. We sent it. We approved this. Here's the pictures of what happened. Here's his signatures. Here's this. Here's that. He paid with cash. Here's the bank receipt.

52:32Here's this. What does that say about you? You're organized. You're professional. You're ready to go, right? But here's the guy. Most of these guys are shop owners. Present your case. Uh, it looks like on June 20th— can't read my own writing, Judge— he did this and he paid cash. Oh, he paid cash? Do you have the receipt where you put in the bank?

52:52Where's his signature on the repair? Uh, I don't, I don't have it. How is that going to go for you? Yeah, you're probably going to lose just, just, just the way you represent, because you look like a fucking jackwagon, right? Like That's what I try to tell these guys is like, you have to be ready to go at any time to court.

53:12I hate to say it, but it almost seems like that's the world we live in. I mean, I know guys that wouldn't write a fraudulent estimate that got in an argument with a guy and somebody allegedly got pushed and that he ended up getting sued. And the end, that guy ended up getting money. You can sue anybody for anything nowadays, guys. Just because it's not criminal, you can get sued civilly.

53:36All they have to do is get a file on you at court. Small claims has gone up. Like, okay, we're in a business that nobody likes us. We're like the dentist, right? How many times you fucking smile when you're going to the dentist? You're not happy to be there. You're not happy to be there. Just like you're going to get your car fixed.

53:52Okay, so any little excuse they could find to give you a bad review, charge you back and stuff, they're going to do it. So you better get your shit dialed in. Okay. And you guys who don't think you need to write a bill or because, you know, you've known Bob forever and Bob will always take care of you. People's circumstances change. Absolutely.

54:09I know a guy, I don't even know if he's still alive, that owned a company around the shop, around the corner from Garrett Auto and Truck, uh, Nash Pneumatics. This guy was wealthy for a long time. Business changed. He didn't. They spent. They didn't do this. They didn't do that. That he's broke, but he had a reputation around town of being a guy that would pay his bills.

54:32So, you know, that guy's circumstances changed. Would you give him $10,000 in credit like you did before? Oh, you know what I mean? You can't do shit on a handshake. So as we've progressed, we have to get signatures, we have to do so. Some of my oldest customers still do 50% deposit. They're used to it, it's just the way it is. Yeah.

54:56It's not that I don't trust them. It's not that I don't think they would screw me, but what about situations change? And some people have situational ethics. 5,000%. If it comes down to paying you to fix their truck for the 4 grand that they owe you or paying their house payment because something happened, their house payment's getting paid. Absolutely. Absolutely. You've seen that before.

55:16Absolutely. People's circumstances change. Yep. Okay. You know, they said the average people, uh, average person in the United States does not even have $1,000 in their savings account. That means you're one catastrophe away from screwing somebody. So doing your paperwork, covering your ass, getting signatures is a great thing. And how I put another layer on top of that to basically vet some of these people, I collect half down on them.

55:45Motor City, there's no Everybody, when you approve it, you get a, you get a link to pay half down, period. Yep. Why do I do that? Because it shows that they're committed. Over the years at the other place, I got one right now. I said, I talked about it, Kyle something, his truck's still sitting there and he paid half. He never paid nothing.

56:08That's how he got started. Oh yeah. It was a $2,500 bill. I'm out. It's still sitting there. And guess what? I don't even have a title or nothing. We can't find a guy to even serve them to get a mechanic's lien or anything. I could not even go through the stakes. It took too— it's just a fucking mess. I got another truck out there that they never even approved anything.

56:28They dropped the truck off and they went bankrupt. Wow. And it's an EV truck out there. And it's got a charger in the back of it and everything's a big F-650 and all that. They went bankrupt and we went to put a mechanic's lien on it right away. It came back that it wasn't even in their name. So they bought it and never transferred the title.

56:55Wow. They were still running on the other guy's plate. So I couldn't even get a mechanic's lien on that because obviously it wasn't even theirs. Wow. So I couldn't take ownership of a truck that wasn't theirs. So now that truck's sitting out back. I don't know what to do with it. We've had lawyers and whatever. Wow. Yeah. So I have 2 right now.

57:16I have a third one. What year is this truck? What's that? What year is that truck? I think it's a 2015 maybe. That's just crazy. People just leave their stuff. They went bankrupt. So I started doing the whole money down thing on that one. There's nothing I could, I could have got money down. At least I could have had something. Yeah. But, you know, like the, obviously the Holmans, the Enterprise, the Auto-Integrate customers, I don't get half down, but everybody else pays me half down.

57:40And what I've realized is some of these guys will say, oh, absolutely, go ahead and do it. Say your bill's $5,000. Hey, I need $25,000. Oh yeah, no problem. The $25,000 or $2,500 never shows up. Yeah. That means you never bought the parts or anything like that. So you're not out the money. Do you know what I'm saying? Yep. Um, after 7 days to push people along, we start charging storage fees.

58:02God, you're a prick. No, this is shit that I've learned over the years that you got to start doing. You have to start doing this shit, guys. You have to write repair orders, get authorizations, get deposits. Like, that's the world we live in now, and it's only going to get worse. Sorry if I hurt your fucking feelings. Sorry. You know, it goes hand in hand with being a good business owner to protect yourself so you can afford to go back to the very thing we're talking about, taking care of your mechanics and not making them pay for a fucking scan tool because the guy that upfront that you didn't have all your ducks in a

58:33row fucked you out of $10 grand. So now you don't have no money. So it kind of goes— I painted a whole big picture, right? It goes from me not doing what I'm supposed to as a business owner to going back to making my scan tool— my techs pay for their scan tools. And there's obviously lots of things with being a business owner.

58:50We talk about it relentlessly on this podcast. Money, money, money, money. Know your numbers. Know your numbers, right? Yeah. But knowing your numbers is one thing, right? But if you can't keep the money because you didn't get the signatures, you didn't do the bills, you didn't— Okay, that's a whole other thing, right? How are your numbers going to look if you're not collecting the money?

59:07You're not writing the bills. The numbers don't fucking matter, right? Absolutely. All my clients that I consult with, I'm like, guys, the very first thing I do is fix the front end. Authorizations are the very first thing we do. You have to get authorizations. The very first thing, signatures. Okay. You should have a camera in your front office because cameras will save your ass sooner or later.

59:29The camera will save your ass if something happens on your business. Property, a slip and fall, an altercation, whatever, where your side of the story needs to be heard. And I'll tell you what, people's tunes change when there's a fucking camera. And I know a shop around here that there's an altercation and there was no cameras, and the fucking story just grew.

59:52Was like fucking Pinocchio. The story just grew to the point where it's like it didn't even resemble what happened. Yeah, there would have been a camera, would have stopped it all right at the beginning. So cameras, if you can have audio on your cameras, great, put it, put it right there. Check your state law. If you have to have it posted, you're being video recorded and audio recorded, put right on the wall.

1:00:15Oh, for sure. If somebody's not acting like an asshole, they're not going to care about the sign. No, if somebody's not there to fuck you, they're not worried about this sign. And it may stop, it may prevent them from doing it just because they can see that they're being, being recorded. Absolutely. We have everything laid out. Uh, let me go grab them, actually.

1:00:31Yeah, because we have them in Jim's office and we hand them to people and have them read them. Oh, we have questions. All the time. Motor City payment terms: payment is due upon completion of work. All jobs require 50% down payment for work to begin. Full payment up front may be required at management's discretion. Accepted forms of payment: certified checks, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, cash.

1:01:17In red: 3% Convenience fee for credit cards. Thank you for your business and your cooperation. They asked us about our payment terms. There they are. Yep. Okay, here's the next one. Diagnostic charges. This is where people get theirself in trouble. At Motor City Collision, we believe transparency and fairness. Diagnostic charge policy: we charge 1 hour for per concern. If we can resolve that within 1 hour, we will do so at no additional charge.

1:01:48If the issue cannot be resolved within that hour, you'll receive an email or a text with pictures and a written estimate detailing the necessary repairs and amount due. If we spend 1 hour diagnosing your concern or provide an estimate and you choose not to repair and decline it, you will still owe 1 hour for diagnostic labor for the time and expertise provided.

1:02:10No surprises, just honest professional service. Okay, how can somebody argue with that? Body estimate policy. This is one that people always want to get a body shop estimate and go shop it around. So our body shop estimates for truck damage are $185.32. If the repair is complete— completed by us, this estimate fee will be waived. If the repair job is not completed by us, it's a non-refundable charge.

1:02:41This fee reflects time, expertise, skills involved in sourcing parts, writing a detailed estimate, calculating total repair costs accurately and professionally. Thank you for your understanding and respecting the value of our work. Now, what does that mean? Here's what ends up happening. A guy comes in, says, will you give me an estimate? You go out there, you take pictures, you go put it in the computer, you do this.

1:03:01Now you have 20 minutes into it, you start calling Volvo, Peterbilt, Kenworth, whoever. By the time you're all done, you have an hour in this estimate. You send it to the guy, he sends it to his insurance company, nothing ever happens. It's gone. So what we do, if they don't leave the truck here, they pay us that $185.32 before we mail the estimate out.

1:03:20Yep. Wow. You do that? Yes, we do. If you don't like it, don't even comment on my post. I don't give a fuck. That's exactly how we do it. But here's the thing, guys. We lay it all out. There's no surprise. No surprises. Here it all is. Yeah. What are your terms of payment? Right there. These are all on the corner of his desk.

1:03:36They're laminated so we can give them to him. At Garrett Auto and Truck, we have them on the counter. Hey, what about this? Here it is. So listen, why do we do that? The word track is already there. We're already being video recorded and audio recorded. It's already set it on the wall. You go to court. I didn't know I had to pay that.

1:03:53Let me go ahead and show you what we read you, sir, or what you read. Judge, what was that, Mr. Brown? Oh, hang on, Judge, here it all is. Yep. Well, wait a second. There's a signed invoice, there's pictures and everything. I don't know how much more clear you could have been, Mr. Brown. That's kind of why I'm— what I think, Judge, I just don't know why I'm here.

1:04:14Well, they said they don't understand. Judge, what do you think I could have done more to make this client understand what was going to happen? What was— I laid everything out. I was transparent. What do you think the judge is going to say? How can you argue that? Yeah, how can you argue that, right? Versus, I told him he was in my office on, uh, I think it was June 12th.

1:04:37I can't even read my own damn writing. Well, do you have a repair order? Well, no. Do you have the estimate? Well, no. Uh, no, I don't know how to work that damn computer thing. God, yeah. Look, when you start to like lay it out that way, it's kind of like Right. But this stuff is happening. Oh, absolutely. So it happens all the time.

1:04:57People are like, well, I didn't understand that. Okay. We had a lady today call me on the way to work. Her axle is broken in her trailer and she called the tow company. It's a tandem axle horse trailer. She doesn't know if it's the axle, the shackle, whatever. We said, call the tow company, have her bring it here. The tow company couldn't get it on the thing.

1:05:15They're like, we're going to chain it up and take the wheel off it. We're like, okay. She's like, I want the trailer checked out 100%. We're like, okay, that'd be 2 hours. An hour to take all the wheels and drums off to check the brakes, and another hour to check the floor, the joists, electrical, right? Yeah. Well, I don't really want to pay you for that.

1:05:34I just think you should check it out. What? What? Well, I want you to check it all out, but I don't really think I should have to pay you. I don't understand what you're saying, ma'am. You want me to just do this for free is what you're saying? Well, yeah, if you want the work, you would just do it for free if I decide to do it.

1:05:51So let me, let me get this straight. You're gonna, you're gonna go ahead and decide if my time has any value whatsoever, and at that point you might do it? Like, are we dating here? Am I taking you to dinner? Now you're gonna see what I have to say? Do you know what I mean? Like, yeah, where the fuck are you thinking?

1:06:11Like that's the problem that once again, we go back to the AutoZone and the O'Reillys and stuff where it's a free scan tool. These guys using that word free have kind of ruined it for us. So we had to come down with all this different types of stuff. And yeah, guys, I'm probably over the top on a lot of this stuff, but I will tell you what, there's no better feeling.

1:06:33So there's one last thing I'm going to talk about, then I'm done. It's an hour and 9 minutes. Intake pictures are a beautiful thing. Why do you take intake pictures? Let me tell you why. That dent wasn't there when you got the vehicle. Actually, the dent was there. Look at the timestamp when I took the picture. That fender was dented when it pulled in.

1:06:56They just didn't know if their kid ran into it last night. They might not be lying. Somebody didn't tell them. Yep. But you're not getting pinned for it. My check engine light wasn't on. Actually, your check engine light was on, your ABS light was on, your airbag light was on. Every fucking light was on. No, it wasn't. Well, we have a picture with a timestamp and the date when you dropped it off.

1:07:16The repair order was started at 9:02. At 9:08, we went outside. Your car is still in the parking spot you left it in, and all these lights were on. At Motor City, we had a guy with a bass boat come in, and it had a surge brake set up on it, and it has a cable with a hook. Well, he comes in.

1:07:37He didn't want to end up having it done. It was a Nitro, I think. Yeah, because the brake line was broken at the caliper. I looked around, I found the brake lines. They're a whole kit. They're quite expensive. He didn't want to do it. He came to pick it up. He's like, you ripped the fucking cable out of front of my trailer.

1:07:54We're like, no, we didn't. He's like, yeah, you fucking— it was fine when I dropped it off. I looked at it. We're like, no, it wasn't. It was fucking ripped off. So we walk out front and I know, because I wrote the thing up, I took it in, it was still where he left it that Sunday. And I had fucking pictures of it.

1:08:10The fucking cable was gone. So I said, when did you drop this off? He dropped it off Sunday. I pulled up the timestamp at like 7:06 or 7:08 or whatever it was the next morning. It was not very far from when we opened. Yeah. And I had the pictures when I, when I put the thing in the computer. I'm like, here, here's the picture.

1:08:31Come to find out, he called his fucking friend. His friend ripped it off. Wow. So he did call me back and say, hey dude, you know, we got— it got heated. Yeah. Because I told him in my office, I go, you fucking think I'm gonna sit there and worry about a fucking $20 part and lie? I go, obviously you don't. Fuck, I don't give a fuck about your cable.

1:08:48He's a dick. Because he was being a dick to me, and I have him on the shelf out there. I would have put one out if I broke it. Yeah, yeah. But it was the point of me having the picture. And there was no better satisfaction when a guy comes loaded for bear guys and you pull out bear spray, which is your pitchers, and go, hey, wait a second here, buddy.

1:09:05I can remember one, Compass Construction. The guy was a fucking prick. He had a cab and a half 6.5 truck. He freaking came in screaming and yelling. He declined. It had a problem back then. Back in the day, the 6.5s, when you would touch the gas pedal, thing would go 100 miles an hour. He, um, his door was smashed in. His passenger door smashed in.

1:09:28He declined the work. Just a fucking prick. The guy was just a dick. I'm sure he's dead by now. And, uh, he came in fucking screaming and yelling, you fucking smashed my door, you did this, you did— I'm like, your door is fucking smashed. And, uh, he's like, it wasn't fucking smashed. And we're like, it was fucking smashed. And, uh, I pulled up the camera.

1:09:47I did not have— that was before I even took pictures, intake pictures. He dropped it off on a Sunday. It went frickin' by the camera, which was mounted right above the door. He went by nice and slow because he's an old man. Dent right there. Dent. Before we even— it was a Sunday. He pulled in and the dent was there. We pulled up the film.

1:10:09There it is. What did he say? Oh, doesn't say I'm sorry. Oh, I don't know what happened. Me neither, but it wasn't us. So if you guys don't think cameras are cheap, guys, cameras are not. You can go get a Google camera nowadays, like, or a Ring, and they're not cheap. I mean, they're $20 a month. Even if it's $100 a month, $25 a week to have that footage, what is that worth to you?

1:10:31Oh, for sure. You know, I am a firm believer in cameras, audio and video recording, signatures, pictures. It's the world we live in, guys. Yep. So it's easy to explain to something that somebody's going on if you have pictures. And they're timestamped. It's easy to solve an argument when you have pictures and they're timestamped, right? And I'm going to tell you something else.

1:10:52It's not like we don't dent people's shit. I fucking messed up a guy's fairing on his truck where the airbag fucking— we were going up the hoist, the airbag was a little bit low, fucking ripped the whole side up. Guy called, when's my truck gonna be done? I go, as soon as it gets back from the body shop. I ripped the fairing off it.

1:11:05You what? I ripped the fairing off it. Oh, what do you say? I'm gonna have my body shop fix Thank God I own the body shop. I've done that too. We fuck shit up. Yeah. I'm not saying we don't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we live up to it. Yeah. But it's a little bit easier when you have the money because you do all this stuff and you don't get screwed and you know your numbers and stuff like that.

1:11:24If you mess somebody's truck up, you just take and get it fixed versus parking it. Okay, I'm gonna tell you this story. There's a company, this, I swear to God, this is the last. It was a Dodge Intrepid. Guy's name was George Harding that worked for us at Garrett Auto and Truck. He backed that motherfucker into a pole in the— at the shop and fucking smashed the back tail light and fucked it all up.

1:11:52Back then I wasn't the owner, but somebody that was in charge said, you need to go back that car into a parking spot at the end of the parking lot so when they pick it up they don't notice it. 'Cause we don't have the money to fix it. Oh, shit. Yeah. Oh, shit. And they picked it up and about an hour and a half later, they called.

1:12:13They called up. And that said, somebody said, I don't know. It was fine when it was here. Oh. I remember thinking to myself, that was just fucking dirty. Oh, that's dirty. Dirty. But you know what? They didn't have the money to fix it. Oh, man. And everybody was like, we don't know. Oh, yeah. I don't know what I would have said. I would have probably been like, I don't know either.

1:12:35But I did. But I remember that. And I remember sitting there thinking to myself, man, if you're in business and you fuck something up and you can't even take care of it, what does that say about you? Oh, man. You're hoping that nobody notices. And then you're asking your employees to act like they don't know too. And what does that show you?

1:12:54Show your employees about you. Oh, you fuck a customer that puts food on your table, would you fuck them? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I'm not saying that it didn't— that people got fucked at that shop, but before I owned it, shit went on. That— am I perfect? No. Do I rip people off? Absolutely not. Uh, it's, it's way harder to remember a lie than it is to remember the truth.

1:13:185,000%. Yeah, so A lot of people don't like me 'cause I'm brutally honest. They say, "Do you like that?" And I say, "No, it's fucking ugly." A lot of people don't really want, they don't want the truth. Think about it. Jack Nicholson's right. You can't handle the fucking truth. Yeah, yeah. I don't think we're good at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all I can say, guys, cameras, audio, paperwork, 100%.

1:13:37Get your authorizations, get your signatures, get your pictures. Protect yourself. The wolf is out there nowadays and it's gonna cost you money if you don't. Have a good day.