You Don’t Have a Sales Problem… You Have a Culture Problem

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, today we're going to talk about— I got a burp here— your shop has a culture problem, not a sales problem. One thing that gets irritating to me, there's a lot of guys on TikTok talking about how they do everything and how successful their shop is, and they're giving everybody advice and everything.

1:27But you notice they never really talk about their pay plans with their people. They don't talk about their cultures. They don't— they never even had, like, a lot of these guys don't have their technicians on. They don't talk. Like, the only people that I know that has done videos that I've seen is Dave from Dave's Auto. And he's got a big operation.

1:47I mean, that's a lot of moving pieces in that place. But he takes time to walk around and talk to his guys. Hey, you know, how long you worked here and stuff like that? Like, I have my guys on and stuff like that. So one of the things I sit there and I think to myself is like, these guys, they sit there and they give all kinds of advice and you should run your business this way, you should run your business that way.

2:05But what happens in their business? It's like a closed door almost. You know, a lot of these guys, I mean, there's obviously great shop owners out there. I'm not saying that. They're not, they just, you know, but if you're gonna be on TikTok and you're gonna talk about culture and how you should do things and how that, why not talk about your people or get your people on and, you know.

2:26Taking a peek under the hood, so to speak, you know, let's talk about that. Yeah, kind of like, you know, I'm an open book. I mean, we got guys at the collision shop, we got guys at the truck repair shop, you know, the trailer store here, just, I just kind of like treat everybody the same way. I treat 'em good, but also I treat 'em good, but we all know that I yell at 'em when they act up.

2:46Or I don't, I don't necessarily yell at them. I can say I correct them, right? And maybe my correcting is different than another shop owner. My correcting is like, what the fuck? You're being a fucking dumbass or whatever. That's just me. Okay. And I'm never going to change that. So all the people online, you know, nobody fricking judges you more than your haters, right?

3:03And it's just like, there's so many people on social media that run their fucking mouths in the comments. It just drives me nuts. It's like, you know, I did that. Flat rate video where I was offering $65 an hour for a flat rate tech where I did it when we were closed. Yep. I'm walking through. There's nobody there, right? Why would I do it in the middle of the day?

3:26Sit there and put my business out on the street, what I'm going to pay my guys when my customers are walking in and out and stuff like that, right? That wouldn't make sense to me. So I waited till everybody was gone. I did the video, right? The shop was empty. Okay. The guys were gone. Everybody's like, yeah, look at this guy offering $65 an hour because he has nobody to stay there.

3:43He has— look at the place is empty. Did you ever take into consideration that I did it after hours? Because I'm not going to be sitting there with customers going, hey, I'm offering $65 an hour flat rate. You know what I mean? It's just— and not to mention, that's an old video. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I'm going to say? That was an old video anyways.

4:01Yeah. Yeah. But people are just sitting there running their fucking mouth. And so, you know, you get these people on social media, they're hating on you or judging you. It's like, you know, uh, Royalty Auto Service, the other day I watched the video, I actually shared it and liked it. 'Cause I mean, Sherwood is probably one of the most level-headed, non-offensive guys on TikTok that talks about repairing cars.

4:24And his shop, you know, his shop is always clean, looks nice and stuff like that. But he basically put out, this is the most expensive brake job we've ever done in the shop. And he said, it's like $8,000. And everybody's on this guy. Like, and it ended up, he broke it all down. It's like $6,900. Like, why frickin' take the guy to the woodshed on that?

4:42He like was doing a video, whatever. Like, why is everybody so judgmental? Everybody's so literal unless it's them. Yeah, exactly. Unless it's them. And you know, I thought his video was really good and, you know, it talked about everything and broke down costs, which I thought that was another thing. You know, you see these guys, these DIYers. Oh yeah, I could do this.

5:02I'm a mechanic on this, on that. But then you really start to see Yes, you have to pay an uptick on parts, a markup on parts. You have to pay an uptick on, or a markup on labor. You know, running a shop, you have to add profit. You have to have profit to be able to warranty stuff and stuff like that. And when he broke it all down with his costs and everything, it shows how much money he really technically made on that.

5:25And I think that was a great video for people to actually see that number one, business owners aren't just raking it in. They, most people are so ignorant when it comes to business. They think that because you charge $199 an hour, you're getting to put $99 in your pocket and everything else, the other $100 covers your overhead, your tech, your health insurance, blah, blah.

5:45It's just, it's insanity right now. The costs that are going up for business owners. I mean, our health insurance every year goes up. I mean, just you name it, it's going up right now. And the problem is it's still, and it hasn't stopped, costs are still going up and it's outrunning what you could charge for your labor rate. That's what the problem is, because it's really starting to— we're starting to face in our business.

6:07And here comes a guy going, oh, you charge $200 an hour and you pay the mechanic $40 an hour. You're getting it. You're keeping $160. You're just killing it. Well, not really, because, you know, my liability insurance went up, my health insurance went up that we pay for the guys, some of the— some of it for the guys. And, you know, you got to remember how we do it.

6:25We pay a flat dollar amount for benefits because that way it curves every year when it comes around. There's 18 or 20% increase. If you're paying a percentage of it, you as a shop owner have to eat that. And sometimes it's just to the point where it's gotten so big, you gotta kind of figure something else out. Right, that makes sense, yeah.

6:44You know what I mean? So, 'cause you gotta, all your increases come, you know, all through the start of the year. Everybody's trying to get their pound of flesh. Right at the beginning of the year. Right at the beginning of the year when your taxes are due and you know what I mean? You're just coming off the end of the year. You know, Christmas is, you know, historically, you know, right after Thanksgiving, right around deer hunting season starts, it starts to slow down the shop business and usually through the end of the year, then, Here comes January, then, you know, you're starting to figure out, okay, you're getting your taxes done and here comes April.

7:11So by the time you get back on your feet as a shop owner, a lot of these guys, you know, here comes the tax bill if you're making money. So, you know, that was one of the things. And, you know, I want to get in today. I want to talk about flushes. I want to talk about, you know, the dealers, how, you know, obviously they're opposed to the freaking Right to Repair Act.

7:29Right. Because they're trying to corner the market. They're trying to freaking, you know, lock all the independent shops out of their software scan tools and stuff like that. So they could have it all in-house. But the problem is they're treating their people so badly. They're not going to have no technicians. Another thing I want to talk about is all these guys on TikTok, TikTok and Facebook and stuff, just trashing our industry.

7:52It's a mess. It's bad. Okay guys, it's not as bad as you think it is. You're just hearing the guys that are not happy with it. Oh man. Okay, so there could be some— no, I'm not saying that the flat rate is not a problem because obviously I switched it in my shop, right? We'll talk about that here today too. But, um, there's a lot of things going on, but everything's— if everything's negative on social media, I understand we're trying to educate people, but why not talk about some positive stuff?

8:19So if a guy's thinking about being a mechanic and he freaking looks up all these different TikToks and all these guys and looks at the comments, I mean, everybody— not everybody, I shouldn't say that, but a lot of people are Oh my God, this is horrible. It's, you know, the worst industry ever, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, how many of these people are going, I wouldn't work if I wouldn't want to be hourly or salary, I want to be flat rate, I make a shit ton of money.

8:38We get them guys on here, you know, maybe we need to hear from some of them guys. Yeah. You know, and then we get these, these, you know, other guys on TikTok and they're talking about how bad the industry is and how bad we treat the technicians and stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah. Let's flip the script. What about how badly the technicians, even though maybe they're getting paid by owners, The shit they do to the shop owners because they have this idea that he fucking needs me.

9:01So he's going to, you know, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that and he has to put up with that. Okay. There it goes both ways, guys. And you know, there's a big clusterfuck going on where, you know, you can see in that ad, like, you know, A-techs don't go to job interviews. They interview shops. Fuck off. If you're that arrogant, you're that sweet.

9:19Fuck off. I wouldn't hire you anyway. I wouldn't care how much money you make. And Gary Vee says it, you know, He doesn't care how much money a guy's making him in his business. If he's a piece of shit as a human being, then he's out. Okay, and I'm kind of in that, like you can make a good person a good mechanic, but you can't make a bad person a good mechanic.

9:39And we've all had these guys that come in their shop, they have financial problems, they fricking have baby mamas, they have drinking problems, you name it. Well, you know, it's the business they're in. Okay, great, okay. I get it, alcohol is a stress reliever. My doctor literally told me, a couple years ago. He said, man, your blood pressure's up and stuff. He's like, stress is the number one killer of freaking middle-aged males from heart attack.

10:02He's like, you drink, alcohol is a stress reliever. I'm not telling you to go become a fucking alcoholic, but it can release stress, no doubt about it. So as you know, nobody takes into consideration the shit the shop owners go through. So I want to talk about that. So these are kind of the list of things I want to talk about. Now I don't remember that list.

10:21You're going to have to help me. But this is kind of where I want to start with it. You know what I mean? I want to start out like at the front counter and then talk about the flushes and stuff like that. We'll just go from there. How about that? And you kind of keep me in line with what I'm supposed to be doing.

10:36Yeah, sounds good. So, you know, now that we had the fricking 10-minute preface of what's going to go on. So a lot of people I talk to, there's a couple of things going on. Number one, for some reason or another, everybody all of a sudden, BG's been going around doing a great job. BG has a decent product, no doubt about it. But they're going around, they're peddling their machines, they're peddling their flushes.

10:58And they put this idea in these shop owners' heads that if you start selling everybody flushes, you can make a ton of money. So I'm here to tell you, flushes have their place in our industry and they are not a crutch from you being a shitty business owner. What do I mean by that? You don't know how to price your parts. You don't know how to price your labor.

11:18You don't know how to price your job. So you're not making money. So you think here comes BG. So everybody's gonna get a fucking flush. And we call it in our business a wallet flush, okay? And I talked about that last time. So we have to be careful when we do flushes and why we do flushes. For instance, in my shop, everybody's gonna flame out about this.

11:39When I do a brake job and I put calipers on, I do a brake fluid exchange. If we're putting new calipers on and the brake fluid has high moisture in it, here we go. I'm not here to have a debate about brake fluid. I'm just telling you what I do in my shop. We do a brake fluid exchange. It makes the pedal feel better for the customer.

11:57You have new calipers with new seals and everything in them. Why not put new fluid in? Makes sense. Yeah. Okay. We do that and we get a lot of compliments. Man, my brake pedal feels great. Yes, we bled your brakes basically by putting new fluid in there. There might have been air, a little bit of air. So now your brake pedal feels better.

12:12Now, if the car is under 50,000 miles and they get routine maintenance, BG pays a warranty amount on them, and they really do have ABS modules. They have a whole list of stuff it covers. So that's a good product. Okay, you come in with a transmission problem, maybe a little bit of weird shift or something like that, a lot of times we could run cleaner— not all the time, a lot of times we could run a cleaner through it and do a trans fluid exchange, and it'll fix, it'll fix a shifting problem.

12:39Could it be a long-term fix or a short-term fix? That just depends on the vehicle. But we have fixed that type of stuff. What we don't do is we don't bring, have a car come in that needs headlights. See, it's got a headlight out and needs wiper blades and the tech pen whips it and puts a power steering flush on, a brake fluid flush.

12:57He takes pictures of his repair order, checking the moisture, checking the fluids, showing how dirty the fluids are. Most customers don't give a fuck. Okay? So all the customer hears is when he brings his car in for say wipers, wiper blades and a headlight out or something, and you come at him with $1,300 or $1,400 worth of flushes, you're a ripoff. And that's where these guys, I think, are missing the boat.

13:19And their service advisors aren't trained and their technicians are just— we're told you sell everybody a fucking flush, throw it on there. We're going to throw it at them, see if they buy it. Great. If not, we're not going to do it, you know. But what it does is it pisses people off and it gives you a bad reputation. So with that being said, like, for instance, you know, we'll have cars come in with a misfire and say the spark plugs are worn out or truck with spark plugs are worn out and it's got a lot of miles on it.

13:47We'll put an induction cleaning on it, clean the injectors, change the spark plugs, wires, whatever. I think that's a proper thing to do when the intake is all, you know, and it's a direct injection engine. You could kind of package that with it. We're going to go ahead and clean your induction system, we're going to clean your injectors, we're going to run a chemical through this, going to clean your rail, clean your injectors and stuff like that.

14:08We're going to put some stuff in the gas tank, clean everything out, you know. The car will probably run better. They'll probably notice an increase in fuel mileage a lot of the times. And you kind of package that all together. That's a little bit easier if I brought you to the shop and you're not a mechanic and your car's running bad. And I'm like, oh, hey Jason, okay, we're gonna put spark plugs in it and we're gonna do an induction cleaning.

14:28Have you had this car since? I've had it since it's brand new. Man, I can't believe I got 110,000 miles out of the spark plugs, whatever. And I'm like, all right Jason, we're gonna do that and we're gonna go ahead and do a fuel system cleaning on you. You're gonna probably get some fuel economy back, blah, blah, blah. You're gonna feel just fine about saying, "Okay."

14:44But if I said, "Jason, we're gonna go ahead and do spark plugs, then we're gonna do induction cleaning. And while we were in there, we noticed your brake fluid is dirty. And goddamn, I can't believe you could drive this thing with that dirty-ass power steering fluid. And by the way, we should probably flush your trans while we're in there." Okay, once I started talking about brake fluid, which was outside the scope of your repair, how did you feel about that?

15:03I feel like you're finding ways to nickel and dime me. Exactly. And that's where we're running into where these guys think they're gonna make a lot of money doing flushes. Flushes have their places, maintenance has their place, absolutely. But don't try to jam it down people's throats every time, guys. You just, it causes problems in your shop, okay? Not to mention, if your service advisor's already on the fence with this customer anyway, 'cause they don't really like the way he looks and talks and stuff like that, then he tries to do a full send with all these flushes on him, it pisses people off, you know?

15:34Yep. You know, so we're very careful about flushes in our shop. We do some, but not as many. I would say probably our number one fluid exchange is brake fluid. Brake fluid. Just because I just think that's one of the more important fluids. And you know, guys are going to flame out on me. I really don't give a fuck. But then you tie it into your process.

15:53And it's not like, oh, and you need this. Like, this is just getting done because you're doing this. Right, exactly. We don't go off— outside the scope because it just, it just irritates people. I mean, right now everybody says it, everything's so expensive, everybody's this. So why are you trying to, you know, you know, take a pound of flesh off these customers?

16:12They might just have enough money to get the thing running so they can get to work. Okay. So you gotta be a little bit careful on it. I'm not saying that, you know, you shouldn't sell the flushes that are needed, but just don't do a full send on them all the time. It just pisses people off. And this goes back to, the private equity groups I talked about last week where these guys are like, we don't fucking care.

16:33Your job is to sell X amount of flushes per month. I don't fucking care how you do it. Well, that kind of makes your people dishonest. Absolutely. Because these guys have to make a living. Oh, yeah. Okay. And most people don't realize it. The average person has under $1,000 in their savings account. And I don't even know the statistics. I looked it up.

16:53I forgot. But most people don't even have a savings account. They live paycheck to paycheck. So a $300 car repair can really cause a frickin' home budget crisis. Yeah. Okay. We keep saying how expensive stuff is, so you got to be careful. The private equity groups don't give a shit. These guys got money to burn. They sit up there, they buy these buildings and they put the investments in.

17:14Don't get me wrong, but they don't treat people fairly, you know? And everybody for some reason thinks that when you go to the dealer, that's the best place to go. Yep. Okay, here comes the freaking haters. Oh, fucking dealership's the best. Great. Okay, then why are you the same guy on my post going, I'm getting fucked on flat rate, I'm doing DVIs for free?

17:33Okay, last week's shirt was, uh, you know, pay your techs for DVIs. And some guys were even misunderstanding that post. They're like, what's your problem, bro? You can't pay for DVIs, or you don't leak DVIs? I think DVIs are a very, very important part of inspecting any vehicle when it comes to your shop. Now, once again, we're not gonna raise Mrs. McGillicuddy's car up and look around, it's pretty much mint everywhere underneath, it just came in for an oil change, doesn't need brakes or anything, and you're gonna go say, well, let's get her a brake fluid flush, let's get her a tranny flush, let's get her all this flush, right?

18:08No, but a DVI could uncover she's got a CV shaft, axle shaft, transaxle seal leaking and dumping transmission fluid, and if she keeps driving the way it is, Oh shit, man, we pulled your dipstick and you're— it's not even reading on the dipstick as your trans— I notice when I go around a corner it feels really weird. Well, we know why, it's leaking right there.

18:27We don't know why, we need to do a diag on it or whatever, do a dye test on it and tell you why it's leaking. But I don't suggest you drive it right now till we figure out why your transmission fluid's empty. That's pretty much a logical reason for DVI, right? When you do an oil change as a technician, mechanic I call myself, you and you look around everything, and yes, you're looking for work, but you're not looking to skin the people.

18:49If they need brakes, hey, your front brakes are at, you know, 30%, they can go a little bit longer. Your front brakes are at 10%, you go up front. I would do both of them right now. I don't have enough money. Let's do the front brakes. We'll schedule you back in a month and a half, 2 months for the rear brakes. Okay, that way you're not just, you're gonna die.

19:07You drive it out of here, you're gonna die. And by the way, we need to do a trans flush on it too. And that's literally what happens. There's a big— there's a chain around us that pretty much tells people— they drive their cars in and stuff like that, they pretty much tell them, can't let you drive it out, this thing is going to kill somebody.

19:25I mean, I've sat there at one place to pick up some tires, uh, we were getting tires put on something before we had all our tire equipment. They flat-ass lied to this lady. And by the way, you know, I think we can get that transmission flushed too so you don't destroy your transmission on the way home. And you're just like, are you fucking kidding me?

19:41I feel like I get this image of like you sitting there and they're speaking Spanish and you're the translator. Like, you understand what's going on right now. Right, right. And I remember that. I went back and told the guys, man, that was a real bad look. Like, them guys had no soul. And this was an older lady. These are younger guys. But in that particular chain, these guys get a piece of the action, of the whole entire invoice.

20:04Yeah. Okay. I think that pay plan is a bad pay plan because your guys go out on the weekend and spend way more money than they're supposed to. Your customers are gonna take a bath come the start of the week if they're getting a total, uh, percentage of the total ticket. And this particular chain has, over the years, we've done, they, they do tires and stuff.

20:24So we would do like a bunch of front end work and a front alignment and they'd be like, oh, they'll do the tires way cheaper. And then, You know, they go there in a week or two and they call me up. The customer called me up and it was, the guy's name was Steve Naswald. He owned a roofing company. He's like, these motherfuckers are telling me I need ball joints.

20:40I go, we just did ball joints on that thing last, like a few weeks ago, and tie rods. He's like, I fucking know. He's like, I told him to put my fucking tires on and stop trying to rip me off. So if that happened to him, and there is shops out there that do it. We had a truck come back to us that they didn't like the price of our, belt tensioner a few weeks ago, 'cause we were gonna buy an OE International belt tensioner, which, okay guys, I know, I know, you could buy that belt tensioner, the same one that's not OE, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I get it, we got it from

21:09the dealer because they seem to last. They didn't like the fleet company, didn't like the price, they ordered one, took it to another shop, and guess what, it came back making a belt noise, they wanted us to check it out. We look, the tensioner that they put on it that was cheaper is cocked, and the belt is now riding at half, like 4 ribs of the belt are off,, and it's, it's sitting there slapping.

21:30So we fricking get on the fleet, needs a belt tensioner and a belt. Now we just did that. Well, here's the pictures. Your Kmart belt tensioner that you saved your client all kinds of money. His truck now that makes a living for him is back in my bay. But look how much money you saved him on getting him a Kmart belt tensioner.

21:47And for most of you people don't know who Kmart is, Kmart was a company, kind of like a Walmart in Michigan. And then I think they might've went maybe into Ohio, and it was bought by Sears. That CEO, when he went, they bankrupted it pretty much. Bankrupted it. Yeah. But Kmart was a big thing when we were kids. We did it on Blue Light Special.

22:05We got socks on Blue Light Special over at night. My grandma would be like, we're going to Kmart, kids. We don't know what— she would call it Kmart, kids. We don't know what's going to go on. And for the older guys, you know, we would drink a Vernors, drink a Vernors and have some Better Made chips and drive on over to Kmart.

22:20Right. That is hilarious. Yes. So this goes into my next thing. What is your brand? All these companies, they like to wear the badass shirts, all the logos, all that. What is your vision? What do you tell your people? What is your output? Okay, obviously. Okay. I like— okay, I got a badass logo, right? But if that logo, you're a lying piece of shit that tries to sell everybody under everything under the moon they don't need.

22:50That's your brand. That's your brand. So, you know, my personal opinion, I believe that you need to be, um, I've said this before, like, we're the most expensive people around. Yeah. But I expect nothing but sterling service for our customers. And I, my guys fricking know it. I convey that to them. We don't do shit like that. Like, when I find something happens, I'm like, I don't like that.

23:11That's bullshit. We're not doing that. Um, call them back up, whatever. Like, I don't do shady shit. We're successful enough, we charge enough money so we could warranty stuff, we take care of our customer. We screw something up— we just blew a guy's back window out here. Did I call the guy up and go, guess what, truck was sitting out in the lot and for some reason the back window's broken?

23:31Not my problem. Yeah, no, I put a back window in the truck, vacuumed it out, and get on with our life. Okay, it was a $500 back window plus labor to install it. Fucking life goes on. I'm not going to hang the guy who broke it out to dry. It was an accident. He didn't get up in the morning and go, how can I fuck up Kevin's day?

23:48How can I cost this guy $750? I'm gonna break a window today, then I'm gonna laugh and I'm gonna go up and tell him I broke a fucking window while I'm laughing. No, he didn't wake up doing it. It's an accident. Yeah. Oh, can anybody pay for it? It's just, you're being a fucking asshole if you do. Okay, but that goes hand in hand of making money.

24:03If we didn't make money and we were already in the red and we were losing money every month, somebody paid for it. That just piles onto it. Okay. All of a sudden, instead of losing $1,500, I lost $2,000 or $2,250 for them. Like, or you have the people that don't have integrity and then they start shifting their morals and they tell the guy, not my problem.

24:20I didn't, you know, they start making excuses or they didn't, they don't repair it. Right. You know, so, you know, you have to tell your people, I told this before, you have to tell your people what's expected of them, what your mission is. What you expect, how they're supposed to treat your customers fairly. You gotta give them direction, right? So if everybody inside your organization knows what's going on, everybody seems to have it under control when the customer shows up.

24:52Okay. What if you had 4 guys up front? You go, everybody up front, you're all service advisors. I don't know who the top service advisor is. I don't know who the bottom service advisor is, but when that customer walks in, I want you all to talk to them. Nobody would know what to do. No. And I'm gonna show you a message that I got from my 18-year-old son.

25:07This is why I don't understand why all you shop owners have such a hard time to understand how processes and procedures, how important they are. I came back from the Dominican Republic and I brought something back. It went through our house. We got sick as a— my wife was first and then my dog. My wife was first and then I got sick.

25:28She got sick. We got back Saturday night. She was sick as a dog. Sunday, I was fine. Monday, here it came for me. Then she went over to my grandkids' house. She gave it to all them. Then my son Lincoln got it. So I'm laying in bed last night at 9:20. I said, he's in his bedroom. I'm like, if you're sick tomorrow, stay home.

25:46I don't need anybody else sick right now. He said, I already talked to Jason about it. Jason is my partner down there who runs the shop. I said, sorry, exclamation. He's like, proper channels. Jason is my boss. You're Jason's boss. What happens when we go out of process is, Dad, I said, so what did you guys, uh, decide? He said, he said exactly what you said.

26:10I said, okay. He said, have a good night. Remember, if you go outside the process, it causes problems. That is awesome. So my 18-year-old son knows how important the processes are, right? All my other people know how important the processes are. My one service advisor, he's that guy that's like a 1978 motorhome that you're driving along and all of a sudden just goes into the other lane for no fucking reason whatsoever.

26:39That's my one service advisor, Phil. He drives me absolutely nuts, but we're working on it. He's a great guy besides that. Philifying. Yeah, he philified it. So he does a good job. He just sometimes he colors outside the lines, if you will. You know what I'm saying? But, you know, our processes are very deliberate. We've worked on them a long time to keep them all in place.

27:01We change them sometimes, but when we change them, we do it in writing. Okay? So why am I saying all this? Because everybody needs to know what's going on in the shop. Okay? We were having a problem here at the body shop, for instance, with some of the guys not knowing what's going on with the jobs. So now Monday mornings, all 4 of us sit down and we go through the whole job board.

27:22We talk about every job and where they're going. So now all 3 of the guys and I myself know what's going on with the jobs. So when I leave and go to the other shop, these guys already know what's going on, all 4 of 'em or 3 of 'em. So now they could talk to the customers. Any 3 of 'em could talk to the customers.

27:36They could take customers in, they could do everything versus one guy trying to do it and one guy trying to have all the notes and stuff like that. Everybody knows, and that has kind of stopped the chaos. Sometimes you have to think outside the box. I have a manager here. He's supposed to be managing everything, but sometimes it just gets too chaotic.

27:53We have all these jobs. I think right now we have like 27 jobs going on. So there's just too much stuff going on for one person to do. So we just got everybody in on it and that has solved all the chaos problems. We have chaos to control. I'm not wearing that shirt, but that's from Chaos to Control. And that's where a lot of you shop owners think to yourself, I need to handle all this.

28:13I need to handle every little thing in the shop. And what ends up happening, you handle all those little things, but a lot of the big things get missed. Parts, stuff like that, parts coming in wrong, they're not getting checked in. They're, you know, you never told the guy 'cause you're trying to do everything. And you know, that's a big problem in shops.

28:32Now the other problem in shops is wasted time and money. What I've realized now, I've talked to a lot of shop owners. One of the big problems we got going on right now is we don't have trained service advisors. When they talk, a lot of guys talk about their service advisors not being train. So the intake is a problem. What do I mean by that?

28:54Well, some, a lot of these guys I talk to, they're getting information is getting dropped. And I talked about this in my podcast. I'm reiterating this because I'm kind of keep this one just simple and kind of give people ideas. Yep. Um, a lot of times the customer comes in, the phone starts ringing, the service advisor's up there by himself going crazy.

29:10He's like, ah, hang on. And the person might get interrupted 4 or 5 times. So this whole story doesn't get told. So you kind of have to have it. You have to figure out if you need 2 service advisors or 1, or customers need to learn to wait their time. You need to have somebody answering your phone, putting people on hold, taking messages.

29:28We don't usually like to take messages because we don't— people don't call them back. Yep. We talked about that. More margin of error. Right. But you can't have— there's nothing more irritating to a customer when they're right in the middle of a thought and the phone rings and the guy's like, hang on. And then all of a sudden the guy on the phone is the most important guy.

29:44Okay, hang on. Okay, good. Hang up the phone, start talking again, the phone rings again. Right? So you gotta kind of manage that so you don't cause chaos in your shop and stuff doesn't get dropped. So a lot of times what we do with our sheets, we have them right now. I'm repeating a lot of the stuff we have, 'cause I'm trying to just kind of go down the garden path.

30:04Yeah, people gotta hear it several different ways. Right, so. And using different examples. Right, so another place I've, realize people are losing— shop guys are losing money, shop owners are losing money— is the way their process works. What do you mean by that? Well, I write up the repair order, I don't get a lot of diag, I don't get it signed, whatever.

30:23And then you go, okay, you give this to a technician, he goes and checks it out, he writes it up, and he notices— we'll just say it's a Ford— and the fan clutch has been hammered on with an air hammer instead of the right proper tools to take the fan clutch off, right? And it needs a couple other things, um, One I always liked, I used to always run into on the 7.3s on the right valve cover, they would fricking send the nut home with an impact when they did valve covers and it bends the dipstick.

30:45So you got it stuck and that's extra time. And these technicians don't write all that up. So think about this, they're a flat rate technician. They write up, yep, I checked the glow plugs, it needs the glow plugs. They send it up front. The service advisor knows nothing about the bolts or that bolt that was sent or the fan clutch. Well, if you really stop and think about it, what happens if that fan clutch doesn't come off?

31:11Cause it's so egg-shaped. You start hammering out with the air hammer. It's destroyed this time. So there was nothing written about that. And then you look at the dipstick tube and you're starting to look and it's all rusty. It looks like it's ready to break and it's twisted. It's all, so you're like, okay, I gotta get extra time to heat that nut off to get it up.

31:27But the technician never takes the time to write that whole story down because as we know, What are these guys saying? Ain't my fucking job. Ain't my fucking job. Well, guess what, buddy? It is your job because the service advisor can go out there and he can look up R&R glow plugs and it'll give him a book time. But he doesn't know the extra time that you're gonna have to do to deal with that fan clutch.

31:50Not to mention what happens if you finally get it off and it's so fucked up this time you have to get a new one. We never even told the customer this is a problem right there. And we start looking at the extra time we have to get the torches out, to heat the nut up to get the little nut off there so we can get the dipstick tube outta there.

32:05That's so— That's a major miss because again, you haven't even prepped, you could prep the customer that, hey, this could be a problem. Exactly. Now you're surprising 'em outta the blue that all of a sudden you have a problem they didn't even know about. Right, and so a lot of the times what'll end up happening, either the technician will deal with it or the technician will come up front and go, yeah, well it needs a fan clutch now because I took it off and look at it.

32:29Okay, well, was it like that? Yeah, it was fucking like that. Look at it. Okay, but you never said anything to me about it. Yeah, it took me an extra hour to get it off. You never said anything to me about it. I don't tell you. I got the dipstick and you know, now they ran the nut down on the dipstick and the little bracket broke off the tube for the dipstick tube.

32:47Now it needs a dipstick tube. We all know on a 7.3 you're fucked at that point because it goes in the side of the oil pan. So possibly now it's just got to the point where It's a whole oil pan situation going on. So now this whole thing's blown up and here comes a shop owner going, what's going on? Yeah. Then he's like, well, fuck, I don't really wanna do that.

33:06I don't wanna do, ah, ah, let's just, I guess I'll call the customer. Then the customer's all pissed off. Well, you could have avoided all that by just basically noting it on your repair order for the service advisor to say, hey, we're gonna get you an extra, we're gonna get the technician an extra half an hour. We're gonna try to save your fan, But look at the repair order.

33:21There's a real bad picture of it, how bad it's destroyed. And by the way, your dipstick, they did a full send on the nut holding it on. We can get it up, but look how bent it is. We're going to do our best, okay? That's going to be another half hour, hour. So now that technician just got paid for his time, not to mention we informed the customer, okay?

33:40We gave them an expectation, we're going to do something, but we also brought them on board and said, hey, this could be a potential problem. So If it's a problem, if one of them's a problem, half the problem went away. We took care of the other half, right? But if we got both of them, everything lives. They know that the clutch fan was messed up, was messed up.

33:59So we got it back on there for you. But just so you know, it's, it's bad. Okay. And we're going to note it that we did not do this. Okay. You see how many problems we just solved by just basically bringing the customer up to speed, not only the customer, but we had to, Educate what? The service advisor. Well, and so not only solving those problems, but the customer's also going, you asked me earlier how I feel and I feel nickel and dimed.

34:27If I'm putting myself into the customer's shoes now, I feel like you guys did everything you could to help me out. You guys stated, here's a problem, it's really messed up, we're going to do everything we can. And I feel like you're doing what you can to hook me up. Right. And think about this. You know, a lot of times these shop owners, They're so exasperated.

34:43They just got done dealing with this, dealing with that and everything. And then the guy comes in, he didn't do this. He fucking, hey, just try to deal with it. You know, then it just ends up being a whole mess. And not to mention the number one problem you run into, it costs the shop owner money because people aren't doing their job.

34:58Now, now we can take it a step further. Whose problem is it? It would be the shop owner's problem because he's not training his people correctly. Why? Because he doesn't have processes and procedures in place. And that is happening a lot. The more we have these inexperienced service advisors up there selling jobs, we have to give them the information to sell the job.

35:18How do we do that? The technician, you always say these guys are not technicians. They couldn't do our job. That you literally say they can't do our job, but I could do their job. Okay, put your money where your mouth is. Write it up, help 'em out. Not to mention if you're a flat rate tech, which you all, You all hate flat rate, but if you're a flat rate tech, what is the downside of you writing a good report?

35:41I've said this 100 times. So the guy is armed to say, hey, this went on with your vehicle. Here is why. This is why it's going to cost you more money. That means more money goes backwards to more hours for the technician. So it costs the customer more money, but the technician is going to make more money. He's not going to waste time.

36:01What does that translate to? Efficiency, his productivity, his paycheck. You see what happens when you don't train your people correctly? And I'm gonna repeat this, and I talked about it really super fast last time, so I'm gonna go really slow. Last week's training at my shop was, I had one guy that just didn't seem that he thought it was really important to really put down the information for the service advisors.

36:27So I wrote the repair. I had wrote a shitty repair order with a bunch of flushes on it. Remember I told you this? And then I wrote a normal repair order with the normal flush that it needed to repair it. I said, now sell this one with lacking information with a bunch of flushes. So now you got the guy pissed off without— with lacking information.

36:44You couldn't even answer the questions that he asked you about his repair. Then you told him, but you don't understand, the technician just basically said it, because that's pretty much all you had. Or you'd be lying. And then, and by the way, you need a turbo and you need all these flushes. The guy went fricking nuts. The guys are like, that was really uncomfortable.

37:04And I'm telling you guys, you shop owners, and I don't care about the dealer. Okay. I do not care about the dealer. I'm here to help independent shop owners. I do diesel shops and you know what I mean? I'm here to tell you, take your guys after work, take one of the write-ups in the back. That these guys get. If you're a shop owner, you're not paying attention, that they give to your service advisor to write an estimate on, and your, and your service advisor's got to call the customer with lacking information.

37:31Go into your office and have them, but don't give them to each other. So if you have 4 guys, mix up their repair orders so they can't— the technician can't sell their own. Yeah. So he doesn't even know what's going on with this job. Or go write 4 different jobs that are lacking. Yeah. And then say, okay, here, go out there, go in my office.

37:49I'm gonna go in the other office. You're gonna, we're gonna put you on speakerphone. You have to sell this to us. Then you ask him the questions. You ask him the questions that the customer would ask. You're not gonna ask him what the oil pressure is. You're on your mechanical gauge. Don't, don't get all technical. Be a customer. Yeah. It's got an oil leak.

38:05It needs, it needs a rear main seal. Where's that at? Well, I don't know. Maybe some service advisors would know where a rear main seal is. I would have to say it has something to do with the rear and it has to be the main seal in the rear. Throwing it out there. So think about it. The guy's like, um, uh, I, I don't know.

38:27Well, you don't know? Well, yeah, we know it's leaking oil. Well, how do you know? It's like, oh, the technician said. Do you want me to go get the technician? No, I want you to have the information when you're trying to sell it to me. Yep. All right, so it's basically, yeah, it's leaking right where I thought it was. The customer says it's right in the middle of, right under my feet.

38:44You know, I see smoke or whatever. When I stop at a light, it's right under my feet. When I look at my driveway, there's an oil puddle right about under my feet to the middle of the car. Okay, that seems like it's the middle of the car. Yeah, it's the rear. It's the rear. You know, that seal in the rear. The service advisor's like being smart, right?

39:00Yeah. And the guy's like, okay. And he's like, and by the way, while we were under there, we looked at your brake fluid. While we were under your hood, we looked at your power steering fluid. We pulled your dipstick on your trans. Ah. And you know your air cleaner's dirty too. Well, okay, so how much is the rear main seal? I don't know, we have to pull, uh, I think we had to pull the trans out.

39:20It says remove trans, put seal in. Okay, uh, what about the brake fluid? I, I don't know, let me see. Oh, that's $200, and the power steering is $159, and the transmission is $400, and your rear main seal is this. Like, it's a miscongot bobulated piece of You're the customer at the other end going, say what? What you talk about, Willis? Different strokes.

39:43You know what I mean? Like, I'm just trying to like kind of give a broad thing, like how it looks to the customer. And you know, a lot of these business owners walk by, these shop owners walk by and they're probably, oh my God. Like you can't pull the phone out of the guy's hand. If you do, you discredit everything that customer from that service advisor the rest of his life.

40:02Hang on. You're a shop owner. You walk by. Hey, hang on. Tell them to hang on. Hang on. Hey, this is Bob. You know Bob? This is Bob's Automotive. This is Bob. Yeah, my service advisor fucked that all up. He messed that all up. What did you just do as a service advisor? You discredited him from whatever dealing with that customer ever again.

40:20Yeah, that guy's like, yeah, that guy fucked up last time I talked. Now nobody could do anything in the business but the owner. Yeah. And what did the owner just do? He just slipped the handcuff on and went right to the front desk because there might have been 5 other customers standing there. Dropping off cars and they're watching this whole thing unfold.

40:35Ah, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's the worst. And honestly, once customers feel like they have a note of relationship connection to the owner, it's the absolute worst. I worked at a company where everybody would come in and be like, I know Debbie. Like, great, I do too. I have her phone number in my phone. What do you want? Even like, they want discounts, they'd want like the hookup or whatever, right?

40:53Yeah. I've actually had customers tell me that they know the owner when I'd be up there at the desk years ago. I know the owner really well. I went to high school with him. You know, he gives me discount. All right, I'll talk to him. Like, you know, that is hilarious. You know, a lot of times if I'm being lazy, you heard that guy freaking bitching at me the other day, you know, I want to talk to the owner.

41:10I said, yeah, I can't do anything about that. He's on vacation. So I don't know, tell your— you're like, what? It's just like sometimes the fight's not even worth having. Yep. You know, but this all goes back to a training situation and processes and procedures in place so you don't look like an idiot. So my point to this whole thing, when you start out, remember, I said, remember, I start out with a logo.

41:28I started out about your logo's badass, right? Yeah. So everything behind the logo has to be a very defined experience for the customer. If it's chaos, why spend all the money on lettering your trucks, having the badass logo, having all this stuff, the beautiful waiting room, if it's fucking chaos and you're the only person as the owner that can make it all work?

41:49Yep. Okay. I haven't been in the front office in 2 weeks at Garrett Auto and Truck. The other day I happened to go by and I yelled at that customer because he's just being completely ridiculous and basically fired him. But the guys are like, yeah, you just need to stay in your office. He was like, he was a 1-star review no matter what we did.

42:09So fuck him. He needs to leave. I just told him, leave. Don't ever come back here. You're just— you're driving these guys nuts. That would probably be the last time I got involved with something because I know I don't get involved in my own shit because I cause problems. Yep. And, you know, and I've said this 100 times and I'll say it 101.

42:24These shop owners that say, I just want my life back, but they can't get out of their own way is a real problem. Well, and I was telling you today about a podcast we had with a client that came in. The guy that he had as a guest was like, he was asked, what do you want out of your business in the next 5 years?

42:40And he said, I want a personal life. I want to, you know, empower my other— my guys. But the whole time he's taking phone calls. The whole time people have to call him and ask him questions about what's going on in his business. Right. He's not empowering those people. He's always gonna have a job. Right, and you know what, guys? I'm gonna tell you something.

42:57If you're an independent shop owner and you go out in the shop and you work on cars, you're gonna get fixed cars. Probably 100% of the time, most of the time, you're gonna get fixed cars, right? If you are a shop owner and you go up front and you sit there and you sell the jobs and you write the estimate, you're gonna get badass estimates.

43:13You're gonna probably get, you're gonna probably sell most of the estimates. Okay? But if you never let anybody else or train anybody else to do, fix the cars or write the service, you're stuck. So is your service advisor gonna do everything you did? Abso-fucking-lutely not because he's not you. If he was you, he would have his own shop. Okay? Yep. So you train him.

43:39You teach them the way you want things done. You put processes in, in place, procedures and rules. Okay. And then you go with it. Now, when something pops up and goes off track, you might have to modify that a little bit to get it, to get it back on track. Yep. Because, you know, different things happen in our business. Nothing's ever the same.

43:59That needs to be done. And what ends up happening when you start dialing all this stuff in, really good and you start watching it, you start watching your metrics, and I talk about the numbers all the time, what ends up happening is you start to realize who the turd in the punch bowl is. You get a guy that walks around really fast all the time with a clipboard, never gets anything fucking done.

44:19But you look at him, that fucking guy goes by, goddamn, look at him go. Not doing a single thing. Not doing a single thing. That motherfucker looks busy. He's got a clipboard, he's got this, he's got going on, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you start looking at what their technicians are producing. Then you start looking at what the service advisors are selling.

44:38Then you sit back as a business owner and say, okay, where is the bottleneck here? Where is the problem? Then you find out one service advisor is trying to kill it, kicking ass, doing everything he can. Your other service advisor is lazy, not ordering the parts he should be doing. So then these guys are picking up the slack and they're, you know, they don't really necessarily bitch about each other because maybe they're all on a pay plan that everybody gets a piece of all the sales.

44:58So that's a lot of stuff that needs to be dealt with as you're going through these processes. You kind of have to sit back and watch and the problems will present themselves. And I don't get super excited if they happen one time, if it's a one-off, but if it happens over and over again, I'm like, that's a problem. We need to change that.

45:15Yep. Right. If we have one guy that's always fricking running shit into a pole or doing stuff like that, obviously that guy has a problem. Right. Yeah. And that's the thing that, you know, sometimes these guys just go nuclear right off the rip and they start changing shit so fast. There's so much people get lost. Let's face it, I don't know very many employees, team members, whatever you fucking want to call them, that get up in the morning like I just said and say, I want to fuck with my boss.

45:42I want to make my problems his problems. I want to do this. Now hear me now. Some of these guys have problems that they bring with them. Okay, but everybody's human. Okay, so sometimes if you look at a guy and his production is down, I've said this 18 podcasts ago, you might want to say, hey, what's going on? I noticed this week and last week you're gone.

46:00Well, my grandma's been in hospice. Well, he's fucking human. Okay, he's going to have a problem. You can live with it. Okay. He's working for you. He's freaking spending his life working for you. Yes, you pay him. Give the guy a break. Okay. But if you look at a guy and go, what the fuck is the problem here? You're on the Snap-on truck for 45 minutes.

46:18You're here, you're here, you're here, you know. I don't know. And he's got a shitty attitude. Then all the other guys are like, yeah, he doesn't care. He doesn't do this. He doesn't do that. Then that might be a problem. He might be driving down the tone level in your shop. And I was at a shop the other day and they basically said they got one guy that nobody likes and he doesn't get anything done.

46:36He's got excuses and this and that. I said, fucking fire him. After what you told me about the guy, get rid of him. He's a shitty person. After everything you guys did for him. And he's still acting like that, fucking get rid of him. He's a terrible person. You think? Oh, I think, you know, so that's sometimes you need to go when to cut your losses.

46:55Well, how do you know you're not the problem? Because you're a dickhead boss. Well, that's where culture comes in. Okay. If you got 10 employees and 9 of them are happy as can be and have no problem and one's pissed off all the time, okay, chances are he's the fucking problem. Yep. Okay. I don't really have a culture problem. I really don't.

47:11You're around. Yeah. Okay. No, not at all. Everybody's happy. Yeah. Because I pay these guys above scale. Okay. And I, and I tell, you know, I feel like I repeat myself. I feel like I'm a broken fucking record. You know, most shop owners don't wake up in the morning and go, I want to fucking rip my employees off and I want to have a big mansion.

47:28They just don't know how to achieve the goals that they, that they have set, or they might even not have no goals because they're in what we call survival mode. He works his ass off all the time and his bank account's always empty. Well, let's take a look at this. Why you're not pricing right? Because you don't know. You're that technician that started a business and you just don't know.

47:49And we get them guys on there all the time on our post going, fuck it, start your own mobile business, start your own business. You don't need this shit. Well, that might not be in the cards for everybody. Yeah. Okay. Some people live paycheck to paycheck because some of them because of their, their own fricking demise, right? They do it to theirself.

48:06But other people just have life situations. They never got out. They never got that chance. Right. Um, so they're not going to go out and afford to go buy a van or a truck or go start doing mobile work or whatever. They just don't have the money or the time to invest or whatever, or they're scared. Let's face it. Some people are just flat-ass scared.

48:27There's just some people in my life that, you know, that would never do it. And, you know, I like what Grant Cardone said the other day, scared money don't make money. Okay. Um, my guy that I used to be in business with that started the shop, his dad started the shop. He was a guy that liked to stay very conservative. We don't need to spend it on a website.

48:43We don't need to buy Google AdWords. We don't need to do this. We don't need to do that. Well, when he retired, when I bought him out, I needed to do all that shit and it exploded once I did. So sometimes you have to take a little bit of a chance. And some people just don't want to take that chance. They get a little bit scared.

48:58You used to do sales training, you know, right, right up to the pitch. And then they're like, I don't really want to piss the guy off. You know, he's going to buy or not. If you're a good salesman, you already laid the groundwork for him to say yes or no. Well, and it's a lot of times avoiding the things that you think are going to make that person emotional.

49:13You can see if you ask a couple more questions, you're going to push it over the edge. And I see over and over again, people avoid those conversations. They don't want to be uncomfortable. And that's where the sale is at a lot of times. You have to do something. And I see you just say it. Yeah. Like Dale Carnegie books. I've read all his books.

49:30When he was talking about doing sales, he would talk about, He would walk into a guy's office, look around, be like, yeah, soccer. Who plays soccer? Oh, my daughter plays soccer. My nephew plays soccer. He's on travel soccer. All of a sudden we just made the personal connection. It's not business. Yep. Or, oh yeah, my daughter plays soccer, but she hurt her fucking— she broke her leg.

49:523 months later. Hey, Jason. Yeah. Stop by to visit. Number 1, first and foremost, how's your daughter? Yeah. Oh, her fucking leg's great. Now You showed empathy. Yep. Okay. Now you're fricking sell the guy something. And I'm not saying go be a crook, but that's, let's face it guys, that's sales tools. You have to be a good enough salesman to get on a personal level.

50:13It can't all be sterile. We all, there's a guy that was my financial advisor. He took Travis, took his, bought his business. His name was Mike Thompson. Yeah. This guy had a personality like a fucking snail. This motherfucker did not laugh, did not smile. He was just a sarcastic, hostile prick for 20 fucking years. He did a great job, but he never joked.

50:32He just— you just never knew where the guy was. Nobody fucking liked him. Yep. None of my guys liked him. I said, I don't like him either, but he makes us fucking good money. We don't have to fucking like him to have our investments do good. Yeah. Our new guy, Travis, he's a great guy. Yeah. Sometimes he talks too fucking much, but he's on a personal level with— I know his kids.

50:51I know about what kind of guns he likes. I know what kind of car he drives. I know, like, about his place. I know a lot about him. We're on a personal level. I could pick up the phone and call him, yo, what's up? Like, I think that's a lot better. So with all that being said, as a service advisor, get to know your customers.

51:08Get to know them. Now, a lot of customers will tell you their life fucking story. Yeah, absolutely. I've had customers come in and go, my wife got caught cheating on me last night. She was doing this when I walked in. She was about, bad door. I'm like, oh my God. Oh my God. Did you get on video? No doubt. Yeah, right. The guy's name was Chris.

51:24He owned a landscaping company. Came in sideways and he's just like, holy fuck, you're telling me this? Why? Shit. You know? Um, yeah, but you kind of get to know how they are and what customers will do what, what customers get pissed off about what, and you kind of got to kind of have a relationship with them. And in order to do that, you have to have a service advisor that lasts more than 2 weeks.

51:43So how do you do that? You keep training them. You keep training these guys. When they do something you don't like, you say, okay, we're going to put a policy and this is why you don't do it. Once a week, do training. Topic of the week. You know, this week's topic, I don't even know what it is yet. Jason and Lincoln will tell me, or Jason will tell me what we need to talk about.

51:59I think it's gonna be DOT inspection in a truck, way we want it. I know that was one of the things they talked about. We take an hour and a half, we fricking eat, we pay the guys overtime, we sit there and we do the training. And a lot of times it's almost getting to be fun now. Yeah. 'Cause like last week we were listening to the phone calls and I was the guy there calling.

52:17So I was like, you know, the one guy's like, Jody. Hey, this is Jody. I'm like, what kind of fucking name is Jody? Is this a man or a woman? And he's like, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. And we were just kind of, you know what I mean, on that. Then we got serious, but everybody's laughing. We had fun, you know what I mean?

52:31That type of stuff. So, um, that's some fun sales stuff. I love that kind of just even the role-playing. And I love how you're breaking it down and talking about how you do it, because I don't think people a lot of times get how can I effectively train people to do this stuff. I told them— I used to think as a leader, I'd have a great conversation and my boss would be like, how'd that go?

52:48And I'd be like, oh, it went great. I had, it was a great conversation. I think he gets it. But I could tell somebody something, it doesn't mean they can go out and repeat it. I would agree with that. And I would agree that sometimes, um, my friend that used to own, Steve Garrett used to own Garrett Auto and Truck with his dad.

53:02And then me and him became partners. He was probably one of the most intelligent people I know, but he was a horrible salesman because he sold them than unsold them. Yep. He just wouldn't fucking stop. Kept talking. He wouldn't stop. The problem was when we would have a talk with the guys or do training with the guys, he would talk so long they would forget what the fuck he started at, what they were even beginning with.

53:25Yep. A lot of mechanics and a lot of people in our industry, not all, but a lot of us had learning disabilities. So everybody learns different. There's videos on it. I always say this, if you try to get a goldfish to climb a flagpole, he's gonna fail every time. Yep. Different people learn different ways. I'm a guy that's always been hands-on. I've gotten better as I've gotten older.

53:47So I've done a lot more reading, obviously in business, but I was just not that guy in the 4th grade that could read a book and tell you what I just read. I just would be thinking about other things. Okay. So sometimes the role-playing is a way of going on, not to mention they get the feelings, they get the little bit of anxiety when they can't sell the job.

54:05Then they start to understand like, man, When they're out there at their toolbox writing this piece of shit repair order for the service advisor, they start to think, man, that was really uncomfortable to do. And sometimes these guys have a little bit of a hard time maybe articulating on paper. So that's where AI comes in. I want this, this, and this written out and put these bullet points on with emphasis on this, which I've taught my guys to do.

54:26Yep. So service advisors can understand what they're trying to say. Maybe not all the time. These guys don't wanna write a repair order. Did everybody ever think that a lot of 'em can't write the repair order? I don't want to write a fucking story. Fuck you. Yeah. Why is that? I seen the way you write your name. You do realize there's supposed to be an I in your name.

54:46Like, yeah, think about it. Yeah. Some of these guys were a product of the public school. Not all of them, but some of them are the best fucking mechanics. Yep. But couldn't spell their way out of a wet paper bag. So we have to start looking deeper into all this stuff. And, you know, I'm not this guy that's going to sit up here, guys, and use big words and stuff like that.

55:03And I say fuck a lot and I use little words. And I have a very limited vocabulary, if you guys didn't know, and fuck is at the top of the list. But I want people understand what I'm trying to say. I'm not talking over their head. I'm not using big words to try to make myself look so smart that these guys don't even know what I'm trying to say.

55:21Could I? Absolutely. Will I? No, because I don't see any value in walking around acting like I'm the fucking grand wizard and using all these big words when guys don't even understand what I'm fucking saying. My audience. That's why a lot of these guys fricking resonate with me. And I'll tell you what, another thing, if you guys want to give me hate shit, good fuck, I'll just say a blank and fuck you.

55:43Don't even bother. Cause I really don't care. I don't argue with people online. A lot of times I'll give mom jokes back and shit like that to them. I really don't care what they have to say. Cause it's not going to change my life one way or the other. Number one. And number two, it's not like we're getting rich on TikTok. Okay.

55:57The problem is on TikTok is so fucking liberal. I can't say what I really want to say. Cause these people will be like, holy shit, trust me. But I'm not going to get into all that. There's guys out there that talk the big words and want to talk to the masses that want to act like they're so much smarter than everybody else.

56:14Go ahead. But at the end of the day, go look at everybody's bank accounts and look at everybody's lifestyle. Okay. Like, uh, my one guy, my one client said a pretty good thing. He's like, wealth whispers, money yells. Wealthy guys don't go around freaking screaming and yelling and talking about their money all the time. There's guys that have a little bit of money that talk about having a lot of money.

56:37If you really stop, if you think about it, like some of the wealthiest people you freaking know, don't even know it. I mean, when you met me, you're probably like, who the fuck does this guy? Who is this guy? I don't walk around. No. Yeah, absolutely. You never know. Right. And, you know, some of our best clients with the most money, they end up being the best customers and best friends over the years were guys that came in and they're fricking got cement dust on them.

57:02Okay. Like Henry Ford said, you know, opportunity never knocks. It might knock, but he might be wearing overalls. I had this client at the cell phone store and he'd come in in overalls. He was dirty, smelled. Yeah. I've heard that people that had been to his house that he was like, lived like a hoarder. His house was millions, you know, worth a couple million dollars.

57:20And he was like, he would drive up in a Lambo. He used to own Mr. Roof. He sold Mr. Roof to a big company. He had a ton of money. You just never— if you saw him walking in, you'd think that he was just some dirty guy, right? And that's why you need to treat everybody with respect. And you teach your service advisor, teach everybody, treat everybody with respect.

57:37We treat everybody with respect until they don't need to be treated with respect. And I'm not afraid to fire a customer. And I think a lot of the times now, one of the next things I want to talk about is these guys are doing so shitty in business, they think they have to take every job in under the sun. Because if they don't, if they say no, that means they're not going to be able to do this job.

57:57But at the end of the day, they don't even know how much they're making on that job. And a lot of these guys are actually losing a little bit of money on these jobs because when they realize that they're not putting a markup on their parts because they're trying to— they're putting a little markup on their parts or no markup on their parts.

58:12And then their labor rate is not high enough. And their guys that they're paying out of that labor rate are sucking most of the fricking labor rate. And then the overhead is taking the rest of the labor rate and that $100 and some dollars just cannot stretch that far. They're not making any money. Yep. And then they say, I'm going to put my, uh, service advisor, I need to sell more.

58:35So I'm going to put my service advisor on a percentage of the net profit. Let's talk about that. Your net profit comes out of the back office after it goes through the grinder, which is QuickBooks. After I take— you take your cost of goods sold, you figure out your— on your top of your P&L sheet. Yep, that's right. And that's right. And then it goes through all my costs, and at the end, this is what's stuck in my bank account.

58:58And that's 1% or a negative number. Okay. So I lost $2,000. I'm going to give the service advisor a percentage of the net, which I think that's what my shop management program says up front. Yeah. I made. Yeah. But there's no cost taken out of there. It's just taken into consideration what your late, your loaded labor rate was with your tech and what your parts markup is.

59:25It cannot take into consideration how much the Edison bill is, the insurance, this and that. That gets all sucked off that. Yep. So these guys don't really know what they're doing and they pull up their— they look at their shop management program. Shit, I made $18,000 profit this month. Oh, look at you. They give you way different than that, right? And a lot of guys just don't know that.

59:45It's not that they don't want to do it. It's not that they're trying to do the— not trying to do the right thing. They just come up with this whole harebrained thing because they see some guy on TikTok talking big words or you should do this, you should do that. And they don't understand how the whole— pie is cut up. Well, remember we, we had the client and he was talking about he was bonusing his, his, his manager and, but didn't know his net number.

1:00:05And you're like, how are you bonusing? Like, what are you? And he's just running it off the, what he was in the system. Yeah. And a lot of these shop management programs I'm starting to realize are horrible at doing a profit margin calculator when these guys are building repair orders. That's one of the reasons I like Shopware is it gives you on each box and it gives you one of the cumulative on the top..

1:00:25So my guys have it, I have it set up so it's green if they're good and red if they're bad on the labor and on parts. Now you can't get full markup on every job, right? So you get your little jobs, you make higher dollars on your bigger jobs, you make less dollars on it. All washes out at the end. Hopefully if you're doing it right, you're at this thing.

1:00:43This is all a training issue and this is where shop owners, I am telling you, these shop owners are going absolutely nuts trying to run their shop, deal with the people, deal with the customers, fix the cars because they can't find the help. The service advisor doing stuff wrong. They don't even have an accounting in the back. They don't even know what's going on.

1:01:04So they don't even— they're just always running around putting out fire out. And that has caused a huge problem in our industry. So let's talk about the shop owners. Okay? How many people Have you heard on TikTok talk about how hard it is to be a shop owner? We're the guys that fuck everybody. So I guess if we were in a dirty movie, we'd be the guy on the top, right?

1:01:29That's what everybody says. Yeah. That's not necessarily the case. I know plenty of shop owners that say, I didn't take a paycheck for the last 6 weeks because we didn't make any money. I paid my guys. Yeah. What if I told you guys that most CU technicians make more take-home than the shop owner? What if I told you that the shop owner is on flat rate or commission just like you do?

1:01:51What do you mean by that? Well, if he could hold it together long enough to pay his bills and pay you, he could stay in business. What happens if you guys have no work? You guys quit and go down the street to another shop. You get another job, you start making money. What happens if he can't pay his bills? The bank comes and takes all his shit.

1:02:12Yeah. Okay. And all of a sudden he has nothing. So he's taking all the risks. All the liability for you guys and stuff like that. And he has to deal with his own problems on a daily basis. And you're out there fucking bitching and crying about, uh, you're not making enough on flat rate when you're not in turn writing up the repair order so the service advisor could actually write, sell it.

1:02:31Not only mentioning you're not even smart enough to realize that you need to write the extra shit up, the bolts, the fan clutch that's messed up and all that stuff, that type of stuff. You're not even writing that up, but you're complaining that you're not making any money. But you're in turn writing that up for a training issue. So service advisor can't sell.

1:02:48At the end of the day, it's the owner's problem. He should be training you guys. Maybe he doesn't know how to train you or he doesn't even have time to look into a guy like me to help him because he's worried about the insurance company. Now all of a sudden workman's comp frickin sends him a piece of paper in the mail that you're going to get an audit, which they do every year to us.

1:03:06Uh, and guess what? The insurance bill just came and it went up 17% this year. And guess what? Here comes a liability insurance company that's going up. And guess what? In Michigan, they just put a distribution charge on your Edison bill. Okay. Guess what? The company car insurance went up for all the cars. Fuel prices just went up. So this guy's over there going, I didn't have no money in my bank account.

1:03:28Now my Edison bill is $200 more. Uh, Mitchell just raised my shop management program another $100. QuickBooks are the biggest horrors around. They raise it every other fricking week. And he's sitting there going like this. Does he walk out to your toolbox and go, holy shit, look at this list of stuff. I'm going to need some of this back. I'm going to need some of this back and I need some fucking help.

1:03:48He doesn't go and complain. He sits there silently and freaking goes, oh my God, this is freaking horrible. What do I do? I don't know what to do. So then he says, we need to get some flush machines in here. His only idea is everybody needs a fucking flush. Yeah. Then you go back to what I just said earlier. Okay. I like, I literally live this shit every day talking to people.

1:04:10It's insanity. It's a vicious cycle. It is. It is. It's just, it starts at the top. Okay. Whatever you do, shop owners, independent shop owners. Okay. Stop when the close, when you close your shop at the end of the day, sit in your lobby, your office, and look at everything and think about how everything flows. Okay. Then think about it. Do I need somebody to help me fix this type of shit.

1:04:35Okay. I'm not a guy who just, my mom and daddy left me a trust fund. You realize that some guy on my post said my mommy bought me two businesses. I didn't see that one. On the podcast when I was on vacation, we played the number one podcast. Yeah. It says, uh, tell me your mommy bought you businesses without telling you your mommy bought you businesses.

1:04:52People are so stupid. Okay. And let me tell you something. They obviously didn't listen to the episode. I am self-made. Okay. I started at a shop. I own the shop. We started another shop. I own that shop. I didn't get the family business. I didn't build my shops on the family property. I didn't— wasn't a hand-me-down. My dad didn't walk out the door one day and say, here you go.

1:05:13Okay? None of that shit happened in my life. Okay? A lot of shop owners are second or third generation just because they're the next in line. I remember there was a point in that conversation in that episode where you talk about like your dad said he could get you a job where he worked if you did these couple— if you did these things and then you just started working.

1:05:30Yeah. Yep. He was going to get me a job as a journeyman. Journeymen, union journeymen. I'm like, yeah, I'm good. I'm not going to work in the union. I'm just going to make my own way. That's what I mean. You made your own way. It wasn't even taking a job. Yeah. And I had an opportunity. I ended up with a guy that was not very good at business, smart guy, but just was not overdriven and was really not super great at business.

1:05:50So I was able to work my way in and make myself very, very valuable. That's the next thing I want to talk about. You technicians, We talked about it just a little bit last week. If you are so wonderful, and not only you could fix every car or truck that comes in with your one hand tied behind your back in a blindfold, and when you're doing that, you're going to peek out underneath the blindfold, you're going to do the service advisor's job too.

1:06:17My thought to you is, why not tell the freaking go-around if you're not making enough money in your shop and go find a shop where they value you? Look at the owner and go You don't really know what you're doing. You're looking for an A-TEC. Mm-hmm. I can help you. I have X amount of years experience. I could do X, Y, and Z.

1:06:34And don't lie, like I said last week, and take some of the problems off his neck. What if you found a shop owner that was doing just fine, making plenty of money, and he was tired of working out in the shop. He wanted to start working on the business. And you came in and said, hey, I'm more than capable to go out in the shop and I could fix the cars and stuff like that.

1:06:52You can start working on the business. But what I want you to do is maybe get me a helper I can train. I want you to pay me this. And if the helper is making money, I want a piece of his action too. And I'll babysit him and I'll teach him everything I know. We'll build this place together. How old are you?

1:07:08Oh, I'm 60. Well, you probably got 5 years, right? You want to retire? What's your retirement plan? I don't have a retirement plan. I fix fucking cars. I have no money in the bank. What if we put this place all together and me and this other guy that I'm training or these other guys I'm training, I'm running the shop. You're building the business, we get to the point where you can say, hey, we're profitable.

1:07:25I want 10% equity in your business. I want 10% of the profits, and I want to do a buy-sell agreement. I'm going to keep building this with you, but I want to set it at today's price. So what's today's price of the business? Well, today's price of the business is fucking broke. Okay, I'll give you $400,000. I want the first right of refusal to buy your business for $400,000.

1:07:46In today's money, can we put that on paper with a lawyer once we get it making money? Yeah. The shop owner's like, it's no fucking problem because this place is never going to make money. He's thinking in his mind, right? Yep. Yep. What if something— this guy starts working, they start making money, everything starts going good, and he says, okay, let's go to the lawyer.

1:08:03All of a sudden, this guy that sold himself now helped this guy maybe have a retirement. Yep. Right. And it could be owner financed. You have to get the bank involved. Think about this. The guy's already been running the business. So the guy's 60 years old. We'll just redo the whole story. The guy's 60 years old. He wants to retire when he's 65, right?

1:08:22Because that's when you get Social Security. And this guy is 40. So he says, for 5 years, we're going to put this place back together, but we could do however we structure it, 1% per year, 2% to get to 10% within the first 5, whatever. So he's got 10%, right? That way it keeps him there. It's not golden handcuffs. That's what guys are saying, oh, fuck yeah, because you put golden handcuffs on.

1:08:45He could walk away any time. But the stock, however it's structured, is not portable. What does that mean? He can't say, I own 10% of your company. I'm fucking quitting. You owe me 10%. You could do a small buyback. Hey, if you quit, I'll give you $500 for the stock I gave you. There has to be trust on both sides. But I'm trying to paint the picture of there's deals like that you could do to get yourself a shop.

1:09:08There's guys that are old that just don't want to change, that you could actually— there's so much money laying on the table, they just never change. So all of a sudden, you maybe start arguing with them a little bit, you get this thing going, but you start making money. Trust me when I tell you this, guys, I've seen this happen over and over again.

1:09:22The old guy's not making any money, okay? He's fucking broke. But all of a sudden, this guy starts doing stuff a little bit different, and he starts doing a little bit more different. Then all of a sudden the bank account's a little bit different. A little bit different. He does a little bit more stuff different. All of a sudden this guy goes on vacation.

1:09:42Nothing changes. The bank account's still going up. How's he starting to feel about that other guy? Oh, you're happy that you're in partners. You're part of that. Guy was— that was fucking me. That was the deal I've made with fucking Steve. I was that guy. That's awesome. By the time he— he— I went— he went to leave, I owned 25% of it.

1:10:01By that deal. Okay, I've never talked about— that's how the deal was laid out. I started that place, I was the first guy that actually could fix shit. Okay, I remember my first job was a specialized pharmacy van, and we could bring Kevin Bullion, who used to run— I'm still friends with them— he was one of our biggest fleets. My second job was La-Z-Boy.

1:10:20I did cylinder heads on a freaking, uh, uh, uh, the old, uh, 663. Oh, it was a 7.3. It was their newer Lazy Boy truck. But my first job was an engine, was a 350 in a G-van. It was like a '95 G-van. And I took it out, I put the engine back in, and I had it done in like a day.

1:10:41And I went over to Steve Garrett and I said, where's the oil and filters at? I'm ready to start this thing. He's like, there ain't no fucking way you're ready to start this thing. I said, yeah, I'm ready to start it. He walked over to look. He pulled his little mag light out. Looked around, wow. Put oil in it, I fired it right up, took it out and test drove it.

1:10:57He's like, my other guy, John Hartman, that used to do these engines would take him a week. Well, I was young, I was hungry, right? So the next job I did was cylinder heads on the next Lazy Boy truck. I did that job and I did that, right? So I started solving a problem for this guy. Then I started doing the drivability and he would do the truck side and I would do the car side and the pickup side.

1:11:19And then I kind of worked my way into still being a mechanic after several years. But then all of a sudden he's like, well, I want you to take over the truck side because the car side is making way more money. Then it came to the point where I'm like, yeah, I'm out of experience. I don't know what to do. That's where Management Success came in.

1:11:35Once we got that going on, that's how I started coming up with the deal with the lead-in. But my point to that whole story was I started there for $11 an hour. Okay, guys, you can do it. Believe in yourself. Just because everybody in your life told you that you're going to be a fucking failure— I was 16, I was horse number 16.

1:11:57There were 16 horses in the race. Everybody I grew up with, my family and everybody, the only person that believed in me nonstop, unconditionally, is my mother. Okay, and I'm not going to cry or anything like that, but you start to think about that, okay? You're not good enough. He's a problem in school. He doesn't get it. He doesn't learn what everybody else does.

1:12:16He has a bad attitude. He has this. He has this. He's not going to go anywhere. He's different. He needs to be on medication. Okay, that's the fucking world we live in now. It's even worse. So think about these guys. You go back to the very start of the conversation. They go on TikTok. They're like, I'm really good at fixing things. I didn't do very good in school.

1:12:35I did really good in auto shop before they discontinued it and turned it into, you know, frickin lesbian frickin basket weaving or whatever. Um, and then he flicks on his TikTok. He decides that he really likes his job working at the tire store and he wants to be the guy over in the corner that's ASE certified. Then he flips open Tip Top.

1:12:54Don't get into this business. You're gonna get fucked. It's horrible. Nothing good about this business. It's the worst business to be in. You get screwed, you get screwed, you get screwed. So let's go ahead and put this in perspective. Every HVAC job, HVAC job is great. 100%. Every plumbing company's fucking great. 100%. Every other trade is great. 100%. No matter what. Being an auto tech or a diesel tech, you're a fucking idiot, you're gonna get fucked, it's a horrible business.

1:13:18100%. When you get online and you listen to these guys, it's 100% bad. Yeah. How many guys are in there going, there's good in it? I'm proof. Yep. Okay, well, you're fucking greedy, you fuck people. Bullshit. I make enough money because of who I am, and I pay my guys all very fucking well, above scale. Okay, my fucking C-techs make an hour what the freaking A-techs at the dealer make.

1:13:42Okay, and it's not even flat rate anymore. So fuck you guys. Well, and I think it comes back to what I've seen this whole entire time of knowing you is you never forgot where you came from. You did work your way up. Yeah. And then I feel like you give other people opportunities. Absolutely. Abso-fucking-lutely. Guys screw up shit all the time and I just don't.

1:14:03Everyone that works for me one way or another has a problem. There's not one normal person in my between these fucking organizations. I'll be completely honest with you, there's not. But we get along just fine. But these guys know what's expected of them. They know what I'm going to say. I am not fucking bipolar. I don't walk in one day and freak out about one thing and walk— do I fucking yell and scream sometimes?

1:14:24Absolutely. I'm human. I get pissed. I get passionate. I don't fucking care what the people on TikTok say about me. That's not professional. Oh, fucking well, okay? I don't fucking care. And that's what people need to hear, the truth. Motherfuckers do not tell the truth every day. They candy coat everything with big fucking words and their education. The problem we have, we have more fucking degrees than thermometer on most of these motherfuckers and they can't do nothing.

1:14:46Yep. Okay, they come in and they tell me, do you have a degree? No. Guess what? I hire fucking people with degrees to do shit for me. I got a badass fucking law firm and I call them up and they fucking drop whatever they do and fucking handle it for me. Why? They say, because you don't fuck around. You know what you want and you fucking pay your bill.

1:15:02Right away. My accounting firm, I called them today and said, I need this piece of paper from the IRS. Can you handle it? Absolutely. Within 45 minutes, it was in my fucking email. They know I don't mess around. I don't fuck people around. Okay. And I can make a decision. My people know if they come to me and say, this is the problem, what do we do?

1:15:20I give them an answer. I don't go, well, you know, what do you think? I'm not a bitch. Okay. And that's what I talked about. And most people didn't realize what I was saying about that bitch culture. Yeah. Okay. I've seen this happen over and over again, especially in the last 5 years. Everybody wants to be Disney. When you really figure out who Disney is, they're a bunch of fucking pricks that empty people's wallets out.

1:15:40They are absolute masters at freaking emptying your wallet out, make you feel good while their fucking mouse is in your pocket. There's no doubt about it. Okay. I've seen these customers or these companies that were built by guys like me with a fucking attitude, but look at you and say, we're not fucking doing that. I don't give a shit. If you don't like it, there's the door.

1:15:56Here comes the fucking guys going, you're not going to have anybody work for me. Yes, I fucking do. My guys all fucking like me. They actually told me they missed me. I was on vacation and they weren't blowing me because they were all texting me and shit. Yeah. Okay. We get along. You see that? We all get along. Okay. We're in a group text.

1:16:11We fuck around. Like, I'm— I keep it like this. We all know who's in charge, but I sometimes eat lunch with them when I'm there, talk to them, whatever. We're all friends, whatever. But a lot of the guys that started businesses like me, their problems with employees were not a problem because the employees knew what was expected of them and they knew that if a customer got out of line and something happened, that I had their back or that owner had their back.

1:16:37They made money. They were profitable. They had Christmas parties. They had this, they had that. Then here comes a new regime. Everybody needs to be soft. Everything needs to be softened up. We need to be nice. We need to use big words. We need to get the guy with the degree in the corner to tell us how to fix this and fix that.

1:16:53We need massages. We need quiet time. We need— what is this fucking mental health day? Bullshit now, okay? Do you think your grandfather, when they were storming the beaches of Normandy, had to have a mental fucking health day? We had guys lying about their age to go fight for their country. And I said this last week, we don't even know what fucking sex or what bathroom to use nowadays.

1:17:13We got these parents fucking leading into this shit, okay? Back to these guys who started these business, they had a vision, and no matter what happened, they fucking went with that vision. They didn't care how your feelings were. They didn't give a shit. And I know one guy that was very successful. He did not give a fuck about your feelings, but he was an awesome guy.

1:17:33He fucking literally told my wife and he's, he passed away now. He used to own a company we, we, she used to work at. She said, I could lean over my, in my chair and look at the window and look and see if he was in his office. So she, he would call her up. She said, I called him up one day and he said, uh, She's like, hey, I need you to sign this piece of paper.

1:17:53He's like, walk over here, you need to lose some weight, chunky. She's like, I laughed, it didn't even insult me because I loved him. And then she's like, that was rude. He's like, what are you on, your period? By today's standard, that guy would get fucking sued. 5,000%, absolutely. My wife fucking loved the guy. Yeah, he fucking called me up and he's wealthy.

1:18:16When he sold his business and shit, he called me up. He's like, hey. I'm like, yeah. He's like, I need a motorcycle for my grandson. I'm like, okay. He's like, I seen Lincoln's on Facebook, your son's. He's got one of them race ones, right? He's like, yeah. He's like, it's got all them stickers and shit on it, right? With his name. Like, yeah.

1:18:31He's like, get my grandson one of them and bring it to me. I'm like, well, it's just not that easy. He's like, it'll be fucking easy. Figure it out. He's like, I don't expect you to do it for free. I'm going to give you $100 to buy yourself dinner. True story. I called Marilyn, I go, Forrest just called me and said he wants me to get the grandkid a motorcycle.

1:18:51He wants me to get stickers on it. She's like, go fucking get it. I'm like, okay. We took it to him. Here's $100 for dinner. I appreciate it. I didn't make any money on it. Just, he was just a guy, a guy. Didn't overpay people. In fact, he stuck with my wife. And when he retired, when he sold his business, He gave everybody $1,000 for every year they're there over 10 years.

1:19:15Wow. My wife was there 16 years at that time. She got a check for $16,000. Wow. Back then we were fucking broke as a joke. Do you realize what $16,000 did to our life back then? Holy shit. And that was a guy that had a vision. And no matter what, and no matter what got in his way, he did it. And that's what you're going to find with a lot of the guys that had their own businesses.

1:19:38They started, they stayed with a vision, and they didn't give a fuck who they offended. And that's literally how I've been. I don't care who I offend. Okay. You're going to, no matter what, you're going to offend people. Okay. Look what they did to Jesus Christ on earth. 5,000%. Okay. He offended a whole bunch of fucking people. Yeah. Right. Okay. They, they, they did him.

1:19:58Yeah. Uh, if you're going the right way in a video game, what happens? You run into bad guys. Okay? Your biggest haters are your biggest, or your biggest fans are your biggest haters. And people, I'm telling you, if you're successful, there's as much people that you're close to you that want you to fucking fail just so they can look at you and go, yeah, we kind of knew that was coming.

1:20:21Okay? How do I fucking stave off that whole thing? I work my dick off all the time, nonstop. I text you sometimes at 9 or 10. I better not text him. It's 11 o'clock at night, I wake up. But my point is, I don't ever shut my brain down. Yeah. There's a lot of guys that want to do really good, they just don't know how to do it yet.

1:20:38Or they've been told their whole life, you're horse number 16. And they believe it. And they believe it. You're the guy that's going to go nowhere. Yep. I remember one time, he's passed away now, my Uncle Freddie and them were all over my, um, Aunt Judy's house and they were talking and I came around the corner and they were talking about getting me a job at Chrysler at the plastic molding plant.

1:21:01They're like, if we get him a job where he makes $40,000 or $50,000 a year, that would be just fine for him. And I was like 17. I thought to myself, fuck you. Yeah, I'm just going to be just fine. And I've just always stayed the course and I've always stayed at what I've done. I've always fixed shit and I stayed in the business of fixing stuff.

1:21:20Now I'm fixing shops for people with people, you know what I mean? And, and I'm changing people's lives now. And you know, all these guys that I meet all have a similar story to me. They started in a truck. They weren't a very good student. They were this, they were that. They started somewhere and they ended up working their way up. Now they just don't know what to do.

1:21:37Okay. That's what people need to understand, that you can do it. And I'm here to tell you, this business is not as bad as everybody says, just because they have a podcast and they say it's horrible, horrible, horrible. And they get everybody that on there that agrees on this horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible. And they got people saying, big words and stuff like that.

1:21:55This business is not that bad. You just have to find the right spot. And I talked about it last week. How can they sell a bottle of water at a concert for $20 fucking and Walmart can sell it for a dollar? Yep. Okay. Know your place and know your value. And that's what you guys, everybody's been telling you your whole life. Yeah.

1:22:14You know what? You're just not that smart. You're just not that, okay. Think about it, guys. Stop and think about it. You can do it if you really want to. It's the first step you have to take it. You have to take the first step. I just told you I did it. Come up with a deal. There's plenty of guys. Your dad is getting ready to retire from his business.

1:22:32You've been working with them. Okay. What are you going to do when he leaves? I don't know. Well, guess what? Screw your fucking balls on and figure it out. You know, when I tell people, they're like, man, you're really expensive. Goddamn right I am. But you only have to sell 4 or 5 hours more a week of labor to pay for me.

1:22:47Yep. But you're sitting there scared to take the next step, or you're too embarrassed to take the next step. Did you think that I just walked in the shop when I decided that I was going to buy into it and get them to buy into it, that I'd think to myself, fucking, we're going to make a ton of money. I was scared.

1:23:02Okay. And I'll tell you another thing. As good as I am at running that shop, because I've been running it for 30-some years now, when Steve Garrett walked out that door of closing, when I bought him out and all the money was mine, all the responsibilities were 100% mine. That was a very lonely feeling. And I told Jason this the other day.

1:23:21I said, the day I walk out of the shop, you're going to be completely 100% ready to run it. But it's going to be a very lonely feeling because you don't have nobody to turn around and go, hey, what do you think about this? At that point, everything's on your back. So you have to get all the information figured out and learn how to do all this stuff.

1:23:37Like I'm training these guys, I'm training Lincoln, I'm training Jason. These guys are all going to be able to do it. But training is the most important thing. And sometimes if you're at the top, you have to go somebody a little bit higher. So if you're the business owner that has all the answers to the questions, but your shop's not doing what it should and you're blaming your service advisors and you're blaming your technicians and you're blaming that, why don't you go fucking look in your mirror?

1:24:01Okay, the buck stops. Look in the mirror. So now that I completely had a heartfelt Hallmark fucking show. This is one of my favorites. This is good. Yeah. I mean, it's just, you know, I talked about the— you build your internal brand. I already talked about that. My guys know what how I'm going to handle shit and how I'm going to feel.

1:24:19They know the mission and they know the expectations. Absolutely. But I want to reverb on that. Okay, here's, here's the fucking good one. I— okay, let's do the gut check. If you were an employee but you're the owner right now, sit down in the fucking chair after you close at night. Would you want to work for you? Start running out Your processes, how you treat your people, how you pay your people, how you as an owner have snowmobiles and all this shit, and you're telling your guys you can't afford shit when you're buying all this stuff.

1:24:55Okay, I'm buying a new house. All my guys know about it. They know how much it is. I built it on a flat rate tax. I finally got caught to the point where I had to switch them to hourly, right? Fuck off, right? Yeah. But, uh, Would you trust the leadership? Would you feel respected? Would you, would you feel clear on the expectations of what's expected of you on a daily basis?

1:25:19Okay. Would you feel like you could win if you were at, if you're at the shop? Now you're the owner looking at asking yourself all these questions. Let me repeat them. Would you trust the leadership? Would you feel respected? Would you feel clear on your expectations? Know what goals you need to hit? Would you feel like you could win? If not, your team already fucking knows you're a piece of shit.

1:25:45That's awesome. It really— I guess that piece of shit's a little bit harsh, but fuck it. That's what it is. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You're stealing people's lives. Think about this. These people, Let's talk big words and all that shit. Fuck that. If you got a guy, say you got a 20-year-old guy and you treat him good and you expect him to retire from your shop, he's giving you his fucking life.

1:26:10At that point, you have a responsibility to that employee to make sure he can make a good living. You can't say, well, fuck, he only needs to make $40 grand a year. I can make $90. No. Okay. I make less fucking money. I, if I had to make less money and pay my guys a little bit more, I would. No doubt a fucking about it.

1:26:29I just would. My guys know it. Okay. I just want to make sure that everybody's taken care of and I don't want to walk over a pile of dead bodies being wealthy and walk out the door and go, "Ha, thanks for your fucking life." And that's what a lot of these people think. They think they fucking own you. And that's where you get into private equity and all these people, they don't give a fuck about you.

1:26:50The dealers and stuff, they don't care. Guess what? You die. And there's guys on our post said, yeah, we die. A guy die at the dealer. They'll push another guy's toolbox right in that bag. Okay. At the end of the day, it's all about the money. Okay. But if you get into an independent shop, you might know, get to know the owner and then, you know, the family and stuff like that.

1:27:09You might become extended family. You might get treated well and they might know you're valuable, you know, treat you very valuable. Now, unfortunately, if you talk to some of these guys online, there's not very many good shop owners out there anymore. Everybody's horrible. Everybody. Everybody's horrible. Every shop owner's independent's horrible. They've already told me, you got two houses, typical shop owner. Remember one thing, guys, I started in the fucking trenches right next to the other soldiers.

1:27:39Just so happens I'm one of the only soldiers left at that shop. We have new crews over the years. Now I have, you know, all my guys now have longevity. They've been there a long time at both shops. What does that tell you? I don't have a huge turnover. When people are like, oh, you fire people. Fuck yes, I hire people, they're a piece of shit, I get rid of them.

1:27:55They lied to me in the interview, I get rid of them. Yes, I have a lot of turnover when I decide to hire people. I might go through 3 or 4 guys in 4 months. They all sucked. Yeah. So I got rid of them. I'm not going to hold on to them and fuck somebody's car up and kill somebody and get me sued.

1:28:09Okay. So yes, I do have turnover when it comes to the guys that we hire. They don't last. I get fucking rid of them. Well, and you said at the beginning, the turd flushes to the top. You know, like when you have a culture, you can see who doesn't fit in that culture very clearly, pretty quickly. Yeah, my guys already telling me, last guy that I had in there, like, this guy's a jerkoff.

1:28:27They're like, I can't believe he's here this long. I said, well, maybe he was nervous his first week. They said, it's his second week, he still sucks. So I called him in the office and fired him. He said, I knew this was coming. I said, how can you be a master mechanic He said, "I'm good at taking tests." I said, "I could see that."

1:28:43I said, "Your skill level is nowhere near being a master mechanic, state certified, Michigan." Talk to some people, them tests are easy. Some people, they're hard, whatever. Some people are good at taking tests and some aren't. It's basically about it. So at the end of the day, in closing, as a solution to your problem, okay? And what I mean by that, I'm not saying don't sell jobs.

1:29:09What I'm saying is price the shit right and treat the people right and the sales will keep coming. You know what I'm saying? And Steve Jobs said it the most, the best. He said, you build a good product, money's— or you build a good product, money is the byproduct. Like if you build this product, the money will come. And think about if it's true.

1:29:27Yeah. Okay. I want people to feel like walk in my shop, this place is really clean. It's very nice. It's organized. Okay. It's very professional. You know what I mean? A lot of the shops are just not like that because the people don't have the money. It's dirty. There's a guy out there trying to do that. He's trying to do 7 jobs.

1:29:43He doesn't know what he's doing. You know, we've, we've talked about that, you know, so, you know, better culture gets you better work because of the processes, right? Everybody's happy. You know, uh, I've listened to a book right now, which is an older book. Uh, Unleash— Unleashing Your Hero by Kevin D. Brown. No way. Kevin Brown. Yeah. He talks about people in your life that were your hero that helped you get to where you are.

1:30:15And he was talking about a lady at Disney who was an executive chef, who his wife started to explain to him that his kid had autism, how they have their digestive system is very sensitive on certain things and stuff like that. And how this person basically went the extra mile. He talks about it quite a bit. He talked about her so much, he sent a letter to Disney and stuff like that and ended up getting her way up the thing because of how great she was with people.

1:30:39She made them feel welcome and, and stuff like that. And I think that's, that's a big part of your service advisors. They can't be under so much stress worrying about that sale because of your culture is sale, sale, sale, sale. Like, think about it. If you ever walk into the dealership— yeah, you know it, right? Yeah. Like the Harley-Davidson dealer and all that shit.

1:30:59You know, they want you to have this whole big experience and they take you in the finance office and just fricking corncob your ass, you know, and it's just horrible. Well, you talked about at the beginning and when, when places want you to sell these things, the flushes, for example, as a salesperson, you will find a way to sell those things and they may not be the most ethical ways.

1:31:21And a lot of companies, they won't care. But then what that does is it ruins your brand. It ruins why people hate sales and why they hate going into certain businesses and being sold is because it's the brand that they portrayed. You know, one thing I have never talked about this before, but I'll just go off script a little bit. You ever go to Best Buy or any of these places and they're like, would you like to extend a warranty?

1:31:41Yeah. So I play this game with them. So I go to buy a washer and dryer. I found this by about a year ago. This story just popped into my head and I was at Lowe's. And I said, I want the best washer and dryer because I get sick of buying them every couple years. And the guy's like, well, you know, I do a lot of sales and, you know, everybody likes these Electrolux.

1:32:03And I'm like, okay. I said, well, they're about $900 more for the pair. I'm like, if they're going to last, I'm cool with that. Oh yeah, they're great. Low warranty, never break down, have nothing but rave reviews. I looked online, I'm like, wow, people like them. Get up to pay for them. You want the extended warranty? You just told me not to.

1:32:21I go, wait a second. I go, you just said they never break. Well, you know, it's always good to have an extra warranty, but wait a second, you just literally said they never break, they don't have warranty problems. And he started laughing. He's like, man, you're kind of really fucking good at this. He's arguing with me a little bit back and forth.

1:32:38We're bantering now. He thinks it's funny. He's like, these fucking are management. We get $5 for every warranty we sell, or I forget the number, and management's on it to send a warranty. They're But you're sitting there like you're like State Farm. You're lying and saying one thing to the shop and another thing to the customer. It's like this because that money.

1:32:58Yep. And what do you think that did to me? I didn't get mad because I knew the guy was just doing his job. But what— you could put on your Lowe's card too and save $200. So that warranty is essentially free because they're hoping that you're just going to start making the minimum payment at 39%. Yep. Yep. And that's how they get most people.

1:33:15Oh, you know, we pretty much can sure get you financed. You just get the extended warranty too. Might as well throw it on there. You know, I've talked about that before too, how they get these people to open the credit cards and these shops with credit cards. They're doing it to people now. You get these credit cards, you know, because the people don't have the money.

1:33:29So you get paid, you give the private equity people that are loaning the financing and everything, you give them X amount of dollars, the interest rate, and you give them so much of a kickback. And the rich are getting richer. And I don't want to sound like a frickin' liberal, but it's kind of true. You know, so, you know, better culture equals better, better work, right?

1:33:46Because the processes and stuff like that. Better work is better customer experience. What does that mean? They go outside, their car, their truck's clean. There's not grease all over. They don't drive out the parking lot. The frickin' check engine light doesn't pop back on. They just paid $900 for your guy to miss it because you have a quality control guy. Got the job afterwards, been driven thoroughly.

1:34:05It was scanned after the repairs were done. Stuff like that. So it's a better experience for the customer, you know, and better experience equals better sales. So there's just no other way around it, people. No other way. It's controlling. It's controlling that situation. And one thing I wanna, uh, just like say, because what you've done is you've laid out, again, I love how you talk about the role-playing, cuz of how to, how to train your people.

1:34:32But if you're going and you've never role-played with your, if you're, if you're listening to this and you've never role-played with your people before, You're not going to get people that are excited. You're going to get pushback. You know, there aren't going to be people that are going to line up and fall in like your guys, because you created a culture that this is just now expected and you're doing it.

1:34:48Whenever I've, you know, people will give pushback because it's uncomfortable. And this is what we do in bootcamp is it's like role-playing these situations. I have an artist in my bootcamp this week and he, he quoted this guy for a mural, $1,300. And the scope of work has changed. And he's like, I gotta, you know, I gotta represent my price. And I'm nervous about like, I've got to really up this price because I really shot myself in the foot on the price.

1:35:11And I, I'm like, what do you want the price to be? And he was like, $5,000. It's like, I'd really be happy with $6,000. I think $6,000 would cover my costs. I'm like, so $6,000, right? Cover your costs. Cover your, like, cover your costs. Like, so $6,000. Okay. $6,000. So I have him role play it. He's, well, I think I gotta, you know, we gotta, and he's using that weak language and he's hemming and hawing.

1:35:32And I think I can get it done by September, but I'm gonna have to, Maybe I'm going to have to jump the price to— and he looks like he's going to throw up in his mouth. And we did it over and over and over again to where he, by the end, he increased the price. That's going to be $8,000 for the mural.

1:35:46And then he had something else. So if the guy asked him like, hey, can you get it done by June? Yes, I can certainly get it done by June, but that's going to be $12,000. And he's roleplaying it. It took him— it took like 5 times of roleplay that before he got it out where he wasn't nervous and sounding weak. And if you go to that conversation weak, you're going to lose that every time.

1:36:06Totally agree with that. 110— I can't even say how many percent I totally agree with that. I look at people and go, here's what it is, blah, blah, blah, blah. You see me sell shit. It's like the one day when he's like, we were sitting there talking about podcasts. Yeah. And he's like, what did he say his budget was? $300 a month?

1:36:23I said, yeah, you already spent that talking. We can't help you at all. He was just like, say what? But it's like, you're not being a dick. That's just me. I'm fucking blatantly blunt. Like, What do you want? Yep. Like, you can't go around saying you're the best mural painter in the fucking world, then going, well, I, uh, I want $5,000 to cover my cost.

1:36:42That scares me right there. You don't even know what— cover your cost? Cover your cost. So wait a second, you go to work every day just to trade dollars. Do you realize you can leave that money in the bank and you'd be, you'd be better off? You go do something else. Yep. That's what we talked about when you start talking about these numbers with these guys.

1:36:56Some of these jobs you're doing, you you'd be better off doing nothing. Yep. You could pay your guy to do nothing and you'll be better off than doing the job and losing money. There's a fucking concept. Like, oh my God. So I hope everybody enjoys today's conversation. And on top of it, we're making progress. We got Front Control, the service advisor system that turns phone calls into profit.

1:37:20That's going to be course one. We're working on, we're working on these. This is almost done. We are working on this. So we got 0, we got 11 lessons done right now. This is very tedious process. It's a process. Once we get them going, you know, and the other thing is too, we're going to start selling t-shirts. I want you guys to start wearing them at your shops and stuff like that.

1:37:39This one says, pay your techs a fair wage. Last week's were pay your techs for DVIs. We pay our techs for DVIs. Do you realize that if you're a technician, you're not getting paid for a DVI in an independent shop? Add 2 tenths here and there and you'll get paid for your DVIs. You don't even have to tell your boss. At the end of the day, add 2 tenths.

1:38:02I was adding 2 tenths to my jobs back in the day when I worked at Hal's Auto Clinic and nobody even ever caught me. And I was supposed to do strict book time and I was over there adding 2 tenths, 3 tenths all over the place and nobody ever said a word. Okay, get what's yours, guys. If you're just listen to this conversation, it's going to be on every Friday morning.

1:38:20Our episode comes out 7 o'clock. Yep. 7 o'clock and we're starting. We got 921 YouTube subscribers, guys. Hit the button. Hit the button. If you guys like our content, hit the button. I'm trying to buy a third house. If you hit the button, I could buy more cool shit, right? Because we all know social media has changed my life. Not— I could shut this door tomorrow and never come back in here and be just fine.

1:38:43But I like running my fucking mouth and I like pissing everybody off, apparently, right?, but let's keep it real, right? I, let's go. All right. Have a great day. Bye. All right. That's gonna do it for this episode of Repair Shop Reckoning. If this helped you, please make sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. We drop real conversations, real systems, and real solutions every week.

1:39:05We'll see you back here next time on Repair Shop Reckoning.