EP21: To Rise To A Level 10 You Must Dig Deep. With Guest Industry Coach Dave Schedin

0:00Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Greg here, ShopSoup Podcast, another episode, and we appreciate all the support. You can find us at any, any of your social media sites, or I should say any of your podcasting listening areas such as Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Amazon, Spotify. I'm trying to get all over the place. So, you know, I'm new to all this still. So anyway, I want to say welcome to another episode here.

0:28I'm with a good friend and colleague, Dave Shendon. Shendon, right? Shedin. Shedin. There you go. Yeah, we squared that up before we got on there, right? It felt just like it's not pronounced. That's right. We gotta, gotta put all those, uh, you know, things up. How do you spell my name? You know, and then of course everything else that goes with it.

0:50Um, So Dave, Dave's been out for about 20 years, but now he's coaching. He's been coaching under Computrek, Computrek, right? Am I correct? Correct. Because I had it right the first time. I use a computer to track through the process and I'm a Star Trek fan and I wanted Trek in there somewhere. That's, that's the wisdom of my name. Yeah, right. Yeah, that's a heck of a way to name a company, but I get it, man.

1:21That's pretty cool. You know, so you've been doing this for, you know, how about 20 years you were saying, right? Yeah, yeah. April 10th will mark 20 years since I sold my shop in Gig Harbor, Washington. And, you know, when I got in this industry, 'cause I thought I wanted to be a psychologist, took a psychology class in 9th grade and loved it, loved how the brain works, emotions and all that kind of stuff.

1:49Didn't have a lot of money, so I went to Arizona Automotive Institute to learn a trade to put myself through doctorate school. Well, I graduated in '79, got married, had kids right away, responsibilities, and never pursued that career. So, I've been in the automotive the whole time. And really, what I found I wanted to do was in my journey, a coach came in and when I wasn't for about a 9-year period, I was in the dealership world.

2:17And a coach came in and showed me what it meant to truly be profitable from a different perspective than just driving money. It was profitable from heart of service. And while he only said that one time, it really resonated with me. And that same principle is what we coach on now. I was at 1.67 hours for Perattar, 4.5 days, jumped to 3.33 and never looked back.

2:43Well, it was interesting that you said about psychology because we either need a psychiatrist or we try to be one for everybody, right? You know, it's— Yeah, yeah. But you grew up, if I recall, you grew up in the service station business, right? In a roundabout way. So my grandfather was my male role model growing up. And I was actually on the island of Kodiak in 1964.

3:14Oh geez. When the earthquake went off and my grandfather had a '76 station there. Okay. And a few years later he owned a gas station outside of Palmer, Alaska and I spent the whole summer with him. Hmm. And I got to see him work on cars. It just intrigued me. He played guitar, worked on cars, so that's eventually kind of my idealistic, that's what I'm supposed to do in life kind of venue.

3:40But been around cars my whole life. I love working with my hands, mechanical in nature. I love problem solving and the rest of that. But the real problem solving that I'm finding as a coach has little to do with a tried and true proven mousetrap, so to speak, a better way, a better way of doing things. What I'm finding is it's the intangible course correction that will affect the tangible.

4:09Hence the fear on the counter when our service advisor's writing, the fear of there's not enough technicians, the fear of am I, you know, I'm overpaying, I'm underpaying. All the fears that run a business are really, is really what shifts and transforms a shop. And when you transform a shop, you really, in a sense, you've taken one step in the industry to transform the industry and shift the thinking rather than the doing.

4:40It's really easy to go to a shop, coach them, "Hey, do this, do that, do this, do that." And as soon as any elevated thinking that was in the building leaves, they go back to their old ways because they didn't shift their thinking or the belief system around preventative maintenance or diag and the rest of that. And basically, with a lot of coaches, they do behavior modification, but they don't do transformation.

5:06And I went through a phase in life that, um, I had started coaching in 2006 when I sold my shop, and within 4 years, my average client was gaining $204,000 of new gross profit in 12 months. Tried and true proven methods. And I patted myself on the back, a little bit of ego, a little bit of arrogance in that, had a very successful shop and profitability.

5:35And so I had all this success, arrogance. Then life blew up for me. 28 and a half year, you know, marriage and family blew up. Choices on both sides that weren't sustainable for a long-lasting, level 10 wild romantic. For me, Christ-centered relationship, just weren't there. And so, what I found is that things inside of me weren't working. The intangible part of me wasn't working.

6:01And so, I put myself through some personal development. In a couple of years, I put about $50 grand into Dave. And I say that third party for a reason because sometimes I need to detach from Dave because he's too emotionally involved in Dave to see what needs to be done. But, And what I noticed after about 18 months of personal development, I didn't have any new coaching topics, but all of a sudden my clients were getting $343,000 of new gross profit in 12 months.

6:33And I had to take a real humble approach to that to go, huh, I got out of the way of leading my own clients. And I look back and say, gosh, what I thought was a level 10 shop, I'm seeing now may have been a level 5 or 6 in a lot of areas, but I was so much better than other shops.

6:51My ego tainted me to say, well, I'm all that and a bag of chips. Well, you ever have a bag of chips that has like 30%, 40% of it's just air? That was my realization in my shop is like, how much were chips and how much was just hot air, you know? Yeah, I mean, it sounds like, I mean, you really, I mean, what you're telling me is that you had to have a personal realization of who Dave is and get through all of that before you could have proceeded in helping others at— to where you're at now.

7:28Yeah, yeah. I find that when you had asked the question of what do you see now, I've always made it a point to others that, like you just said, you need to know yourself first. You need to know what your goals are with the business that you're going to run, what you want to do, and how you want to approach those things.

7:53The market— market awareness, market knowledge, um, the processes that you need, the disciplines that you need, uh, that it can always be taught. But if you don't really have the the vision for yourself in mind and where you want to go with the business and what you want to do with the business, I think that you start fighting it right away. And, you know, for, you know, honestly, with myself, I know where I want to go.

8:20I know what I want to do, but I am not as— I'm not as disciplined as I should be, you know, because it's just that I believe that at certain points in my life, you know, and during the course of business in the day, I'm going to have fun. I'm going to be undisciplined to a degree. You know, I'm not going to be stupid, but I will be undisciplined.

8:48And I don't know, would you say that's like a natural occurrence for business people and just people in general? I mean, sometimes you go off the rails because you just need to, you know. One of the things is I've navigated my own journey And you brought up a point. I call it vitamin SA, self-aware. When I'm self-aware. But what I've found is that in personal development, in gaining the disciplines of a successful life, I've come to one of the personal development lessons was fact meaning.

9:25There's a fact in my life, but what did I make it mean about me? And so, the fact in my life, I created disciplines. When I step away from those disciplines to do something in a different context, discipline is focus, courage, determination. There's a lot of great character traits that go into that. And it's not that I've set those aside, so to speak, or made them irrelevant.

9:51My old viewpoint was I need to stay this way. That's why part of me, you know, I went to recovery for workaholicism. Working 15, 20 hours a day, that doesn't create a relationship for family and kids or anybody in that. So, it's that work-life balance as we always hear. But what I notice is that now I'm in self-aware and I'm aware of all those things going on.

10:13I'm stepping into discipline at a higher level. It's a discipline of a beingness. And what I found is that just because I stop for a day, a week, or a season in life, from the heavy discipline and I step into something different called joy, fun, doesn't mean I'm no longer disciplined. It just means I'm adding joy to my life. Whereas before, I would never put joy in the work.

10:42And the more I was able to delineate, for me, what is joy while I'm working, what is joy while I'm vacationing, there's two different kinds of joys in that. Yeah, but what I'm saying, you know, kind of the reason we were connecting here is that, you know, coaching now for 20 years, you know, what are the pain points that shops are seeing?

11:04And obviously technician shortage, you know, bringing onboarding people, getting up to speed, especially service advisors, you know, and you have great hospitality people, but they're not in our industry. How do we bring them up to speed? And there's the ongoing ones. You pretty much talk to most shops, there's usually 3 to 5 very similar pain points in the industry. But I— what I'm looking for is, and we have tools for that, and most coaches have tools for all that stuff.

11:35But what are the, what are the, the, the 5, 6, 7, 8 level pain points that we never really talk about because they're not a level 10 pain point? What are pain points that are frustrations or fires we're always putting out? Well, yeah, go ahead. I mean, if you're asking me, I think, um, I don't really know if there is a tech shortage.

12:03I mean, if you were to look for technicians off the shelf, like, okay, yes, we, we could say that there is a shortage. But I do know that a lot of colleagues out there, myself included, we really do raise our own. And, you know, we've been doing that for, I don't know, quite some time now. You know, we're not afraid to take an intern, and we have one working with us right now.

12:26Um, he is a great young man, and he does come from the Sussex Tech High School program. He's like number 1 or 2 in his class. Great young man. Um, and we have another gentleman that came over from manufacturing, uh, signs and sign boards that had an interest in, you know, automotive, and we brought him in ground up, zero, like, you know.

12:47Um, and I, and I think that, you know, overall, um, just like, you know, in our individual processes, uh, that's where we're going to be heading is to, you know, training our own. We don't, um, there's a lot of support for that that I see, whether we are looking at going to conferences or what I see a trend is individual trainers coming into, you know, our area.

13:14And, you know, we're gathering up a few shops and having our own private sessions. Uh, that's something that, you know, I, I believe will continue. I know down here in the Millsboro area where our second shop is, it's very desolate in terms of talent. I mean, honestly, um, we have had, uh, I, I would say maybe 3 or 4 turnovers of crew members from when we— when I literally opened the door in, in '22 to where we are now.

13:45And just now we have a I would say our most stable crew with best talent and everybody seems to be satisfied and we're putting out good volume, good work. I think that the operators that really don't key in on that and again, I want to go back to it because, you know, I'm going to say this, maybe you experience, maybe you see it in your coaching clients and some of your clients, but what is their, what is their long or short-range goals?

14:22I mean, I'm looking at it like I got a, I've got a 60-year-old business that I'm operating and running. You know, I'm the second generation. My pride tells me that I want to see this thing go to 100 years. I'm not going to be around, but the legacy of that I want to put in play. And I have my son and son-in-law and I'm establishing the reasons why.

14:47So, don't you think that the root— I can't get over it. So, I apologize. But what do you think that is the main reason why people don't focus on some of these pain points, especially from a horizon standpoint? Like, where do I want— again, where does the business want to go? What do I want to do with it? And what's my mission with it?

15:11That is the $64 million question that I run across with every shop owner. Hey, what do you want your business to look like? Yeah, I just want it to run smooth. Okay, but what's that look like? Well, I just want people to get along. Okay, but what's that look like? The defining moment in most shops is when they finally determine what it is that they want it to look like.

15:31That moment comes when they discover their purpose. Why are they here? Why are they on the planet, on this planet, in this timeline in history? What is their— I call it calling. There's two different things, a calling and then a purpose. Purpose-driven empowers the calling. The calling is like one point of calling. I was a dad. I was a business owner. I was a technician.

15:56I was a brother. I was a, you know, a son. There's different callings in my life, but there's always a passionate why behind that. And for me, it's helping others connect with their authentic self so they can do the authentic thing that they were created for. And so, when I coach, one of the first things we go after is, what is it that you want?

16:19And that is probably the number one hurdle as a coach to get people over because I've got all the tried and true proven mousetraps that make a shop successful. And they're not the only ones out there, but they work. So it's not just the mousetrap. You know, Brian Klemmer wrote a book. It would all be— if how-tos were enough, we'd all be skinny, rich, and happy.

16:42We just go copy what somebody else does, right? And we just mimic it. We could— you can right now with AI and Google, you can, you can ask any how-to on this planet and you will get a rock-solid answer. Brian had said is the problem with how-tos is people don't do what they're told or what they know they should do. And part of the reason they don't is there's a disconnect now from her why.

17:06And so, the context of most shop owners are they did what I did. They settled, which means I'm better than all the guys around me. I'm doing good. I settled for an ego stroke versus a calling and purpose on my life. When I'm in the context, and even now as a coach, I find there's times where I settle. When I'm settling for something less, I'm not settling for— I didn't settle on a level 10.

17:35I settled on a level 7. I used to be at level 5 and now I'm a level 7. So there's great reward in that. But then I settle there. I don't continue to expand or grow in that. When I'm in the context of a settle and settling in my life, and I see this in my clients that I coach, when they're settling, It's difficult for them to see their passion.

17:58And why? Because they've relaxed their intentionality of going after why I'm on this planet. I've allowed myself to be fulfilled at a level 7 and be satisfied with it. And there's nothing wrong with that. But in true fulfillment, that last 3 degrees to get to a level 7, the fulfillment from that is exponentially more than the 7 that they're already experiencing. So getting somebody to go, well, what is it you want from your shop?

18:29You know, what's your— what is your legacy? And you got a 100-year legacy that you want to see happen. You know, my mentor that I never met through his books and stuff, but Brian Klemmer had a, you know, a fight. He was challenged to have a 500-year plan. Well, okay, what's going to happen once I Once I pass away and die, right, you know, um, actually, that— I've heard it said this way: there's two deaths on this planet that every man or woman faces.

19:04The first one is a physical. The second one is the last time your name is ever mentioned on the planet. And it's not that I need my name to be mentioned, but my impact, my influence— where is that? Am I sowing into long-term things like foundations? And, and, you know, one of the things I challenge shop owners and, you know, our last 30 clients, average increase is $373,000 of new gross profit a year.

19:33That's over— that's like almost $30,000 a month of new dollars. My, my suggestion is you've never had that money before, so you've What if you just gave, I don't know, $5,000 a month to an automotive scholarship for every month? And if we had 1,000 shops giving that, how much could we attract and fix in this industry? And that new GP dollars that you just created, stop trying to pay your employees the least amount so they won't quit because then they're going to do just enough to not get fired.

20:06Right. What can you pay them? What can you come from abundance mindset? And I personally believe service advisors and technicians, the A-level ones, that they're top of their game, they need to be making $150,000, $200,000 a year. And they just— they're worth it. They're absolutely worth it. The scarcity thinking, the settled thinking of a level 7 keeps people's pay at a level 7 and not the 10 that they want from life as well.

20:33I just went down a zillion rabbit trails with that. Well, yeah, I know, but it's— but it all kind of makes sense. I mean, again, it depends if you want to maintain a level, a level 7, then that permeates through the whole shop, wouldn't, wouldn't you say? And then instead of trying to reach an 11 or a 12 or whatever, you know, then, you know, there's no energy that's coming through the doors in terms of, you know, team, team building, team success, uh, and you're evidently not teaching that to the team that you want to be successful.

21:13You want them to be successful and you want goals to reach. So, you know, why stick at number 7? Why do you want to stick at number 7? It's kind of like a flat line. And again, that comes right back to purpose-driven. Why are you here? At the end of the day, every purpose on this planet, every person I've talked to, I haven't found them yet that it hasn't been connected But everybody's purpose takes this little thing.

21:39What do they call that stuff? Oh yeah, money to make happen. So at one level, that's the evil thing, isn't it? Yeah, well, it's the love of money is evil. The money itself is not evil. Money is not evil, right? Yeah. And so it's like, I love my purpose enough to create positive cash flow to go fund that and fulfill that. What happens in every shop owner is leading in context, whether they focused on it or not.

22:08And the subconscious, unspoken, unaware of context are what's actually running a business. And when I've— in my shop, when I leveled out at what I thought was a level 10, but actually was a 7, I was deceptive, self-deceived. But I allowed a level 7 settling in my shop. I didn't realize that's what it was. But then all of a sudden, I noticed that my excellence in my shop, there was always an ongoing nagging set of warranties and comebacks.

22:41The excellence wasn't level 10. And when I started doing— when I stepped away from that, like I enhanced my canned jobs to the point where I— we're moving so fast as advisor and technicians. The number one part that interrupts the workflow Whoops, I forgot to order that part. Yeah. And so my canned jobs— and we have them as a product now that we sell— but there's triggers.

23:05Like if I'm doing a wet valley intake, old school, how many wet valley intakes do we see anymore that leak? You know, General Motors was part of my, my retirement plan. But, you know, the, the intake gasket, the, the valve cover gaskets, the thermostat, the heater hose quick disconnect, they're all triggers built in. So whenever I do that job, I'm triggered to go add that, add the oil change, add the cooling system, add the partial tune-up because part of that stuff's off.

23:33What's the level 10? And when I started putting triggers in, and I stepped away from settling and I wanted something more, better, different, when I started putting the triggers in my canned jobs, now when that job was done, my comebacks went way down because I, I wanted, I wanted that higher than level 7 that I had before. So I put in built-in triggers, and now I'm doing a full level 10 repair versus just the, the part that's broken and all the peripheral things that it affected that I never really touched before.

24:09Now I'm touching those and doing those. Well, you raise a good point in terms of the service advisor, and what the biggest error could be is not ordering the part to get the job done. Now, do you think, and do you see where we are really burdening our service advisors with multiple tasks that require attention, such as, you know, the next— get it the next appointment, make sure that you add this and do this and do that.

24:44And before you know it, we've compounded their position to the point where the risk of them failing is high, or I should say not failing as much as being not capable of selling properly or getting confused or just strung out on a lot of things. I know that there's a tendency to give them everything, but should we? How do we reduce them reduce their obligate or tasks to the point where they can focus on the relationship of the client.

25:19There is, there is a lot of task-oriented that's put on a service advisor. And when I coach shops, we have tried and true methodologies that there are a lot of steps for an advisor to do and remember. But how is my system reminding them Yeah, because, you know, I've got— so here's my metrics on an A-level advisor. It's going to typically be at 3.5 to 4 hours repair order.

25:47They're going to close 60 repair orders a day, and they're going to have, um, 12 to 15 repair orders always in process, of which 3 to 4 or 5 of those are going to be at $1,500 to $2,000 or more average ROs. So that hamster wheel that keeps going, there's a lot of doingness in there. It takes a higher level of somebody's— their state of being to be in that.

26:11And as I say that, there is a lot. And I'm gonna— and this is a made-up number. 67.89% of all statistics are made up on the spot. And so, um, yeah, yeah, every time I say it, it's different. So there's, uh— I'm going to make this number up— somewhere between 3 to 5% of people that are in the advisor position can actually handle it at a level 10.

26:38If you were to take the advisor position and you went to a Fortune 500 company and you put that person in that company, they would have probably 2 to 3, if not 4 people doing that position, task duties and responsibilities. It's just too much for one person to do. A lot of shops now are creating advisor assistants where they're handling the, okay, I sold the job, get all these parts ordered.

27:07Or they've— a shop is now has a dedicated parts person, which, you know, I started out independent, went to dealerships for about 9 years, and then back and have my own shop and then coaching. But what I saw in the dealership world is I never had to really deal with parts. There was a parts department.. They looked up the parts, the tech went and put a parts requisition to the parts department.

27:31They handled all the parts lookup. I just did labor as a service advisor manager. And so it was different for that aspect. When I have my own shop and you're doing everything, you're doing your complete parts department, you're a complete sales department, you're the complete dispatcher department. You know, in a dealership they have multiple positions handling what we put on the independent world, on service advisors.

27:57And the thing about it is, is that advisor assistant that maybe is, you know, $60,000 to $70,000 and some people are going, wait, that's what I pay my advisor. Well, you're underpaying your advisor at that level. That's, that's a scarcity fear mindset. But you, you bring an apprentice advisor in, an assistant, and now it's same thing we're doing with the techs. We're growing that advisor over a period of time.

28:21And $60,000 sounds like a lot to pay somebody. But if you take $60,000, divide it by 170, 150 car count a month is like $2,100 for the year. And if you're at 4 hours for Perrotter, by the time you divide that all down, you need to add probably $8 to your labor rate and you just paid for your assistant. Sure. In that.

28:48So when you— that's one of the principles we train on too, is reduce it to the ridiculous. Mm-hmm. $20,000 of technician training where you fly a Gary Smith from Diagnation, you fly him in for 3 or 4 days and you let him be your coach ongoing. And you, you know, it's irrelevant what the price is because Mr. and Mrs. Jones are the ones that pay for it.

29:10Right. I never— I have an ongoing statement, you know what, I never paid my rent, I never paid my taxes, I never paid my employees, I never paid anybody. My customers paid off. Customers paid for everything. Now, were there days that I tapped into my cash reserves? Yeah. And went into lines of credit? Yeah. When I first opened. Yeah, there was times that, yeah, I'm working on my business was based on opium, OPM, other people's money.

29:36I was drug-free. I was going to say, I want to hear that one. Yeah. So it's like, by the way, if you can't have dad jokes, I mean, you gotta have jokes, right? We gotta keep it light. That's what— nothing has to be too serious. It's that, and that's part of the fun and joy too, is that on my journey to a level 10, level 10's not the goal.

30:10It's the joy in the journey. Sure. Simon Sinek has a book, phenomenal book, it's called The Infinite Game. The Infinite Game, the goal of the game is to perpetuate the game. It's not to win. Right, exactly. And when we get to the point where my, well, my game is GP dollars, is that a goal, a target? Yeah, but that's not the game.

30:32That's a finite game. Correct. Inside the infinite game are many finite games. And when you play those in an infinite context, it's different. Like, I don't want to— in one sense, I went for, I need to be profitable, I need to be profitable, I need to be profitable. Well, profitable is a pinpoint on a map and a destination. The road to get there, the Google Maps.

30:55But what I found is that profit really wasn't what I was after. What I was after is continuous cash flow. Now, when I need to, when I need cash flow to pay vendors, to pay payroll, the rest, I'm just dipping into my cash flow, right? I'm just— I'm not having to, you know, stress to build up to then pay my vendors, to then have a depleted bank account again and keep going back.

31:19Now, did my business start out that way? Yeah, absolutely. It took a while to discover, create cash flow versus profits and Life is fun at that point. Life is joyful at that point. It certainly is. You know, you said that, you know, keeping at a 10, but the infinite game is one where, you know, like I said, if you have that mindset that, you know, I want to be here forever or I want to see the business be around forever, you know, and everything that you need to get that.

31:58It's like, um, it to me, like growing a plant, growing a flower, growing a tree, you know, what, what are you going to put in the soil? How are you going to tender? You know, all that stuff comes into play, um, and it takes work. And that's where, uh, maybe somebody doesn't want to do that much work. I mean, there's been, there's a couple chatter, a couple of conversations recently, uh, brought up online regarding that topic right there.

32:24You know, guys who aren't training, who are limited, they're limiting themselves. And why are they doing that? You know, is it because they want to— they give themselves 10 years and they're out? That's as long as they can handle it, and from there on out, hey, poof, they're gone. Some guys want to build an empire and then sell it real quick. Some guys like the volume, some guys like, you know, let's make profit, let's, let's make more per car, that kind of a thing.

32:57Um, your average client sounds like they, they have a decent amount of volume. They, you know, they seem to be well structured. Um, they have good— I said they have good car count. It sounds like it because your numbers and your ARO averages that you're telling me dictate that. You know, these— your clients are really doing well. Is that true? I mean, so what you're finding— they are.

33:24And some of them, it's a journey. Some get it like, you know, my journey of 4 and a half days. I doubled the size of my repair order, 1.67 to 3.33. Yeah. In 4 and a half days. I got lots of clients that do that, but I also have clients that take 18, 24, 36 months because that's their journey. They're discovering the resistance inside of them.

33:43The fear they won't let go of. And some of that fear sounds logical. Have you ever heard this term? Well, I just need to be fair market value. Yeah. So now you're letting the market drive your profitability and cash flow. You're not in the driver's seat. And so as I look at— but like our average shop has typically got 3 to 4 techs.

34:05They have anywhere from 125 to 175 car count. We have, you know, we've got some shops we deal— they got 350, 400 car count, 500 car count. And you do a 0.3 increase in those and you're close to $500,000 in new GP dollars. You know, small is the new big. And I'll bring it back to when I say level 7, that's a judgment on my part, my definition, my meaning.

34:32For some people at one point, my— what I look back now and I see what I thought was a 10 was a 7. Because I'm out in the marketplace and I'm seeing shops that built more better different than I was. Humble enough to go, I didn't have it all in that. And at one point, there's a point where you reach, I don't want to say capacity because that's limiting, but you reach a fulfillment, a true fulfillment.

34:59And one man's level 10 is another man's level 7. And there's nothing wrong with you achieving what you look at somebody else. Wow, they're a 10. I'm a 7. But that 7 to you could be a 10. And that's okay. What's your purpose? What's your why? What's your calling? Because it could be, you know what, I'm giving this business 9 hours a day and then I'm actively involved in a faith-based community, a missions work, a contribution, Big Brother, Big Sister, whatever.

35:27I'm now giving my time is so important to me, non-business hours that I'm giving back. But I need the funds in my business to fund so that I can go do the things that I'm called to do. And so, it's like for any coach to go, well, you know, you should be at a level 10 versus my version of level 10. No, I help them discover what is it that they want.

35:54And that, Greg has been some of the hardest journey because people are hiding, you know, father wounds or, you know, childhood wounds that they never processed. Or in Canada, they processed. They went pro in Canada. I guess we're amateurs. That's in Denmark. They're about to process. Yeah. But it's like, it's okay. You know, if you're listening and your shop is like, gosh, I worked so hard to get it to where I'm at.

36:25I'm finally at a place where there's peace. There is joy. There's nothing wrong with that. Don't disrupt that, but maintain that. I think that we— I believe, I really believe, and I see it because I can get affected by it too. We look at others as if that's their— that's our goal, you know, and social media. And, you know, we do, we look at people who may have 20+ locations they seem to be buying.

36:58And, you know, all that stuff comes into play and you go, wow, geez, man, I'm this big, they're that big. But, you know, happiness is here as well as here. And it all depends on what you— again, what, what you feel comfortable doing. I have a big— I don't know what— I guess a realization that people need to look at or understand is— and I've gone through it.

37:25In fact, I'm going to be speaking in September at the Auto Service Leaders Conference regarding it. It's about where do you matter and your influence. And then, the biggest thing that comes into that is age. I don't think people give enough respect to the fact that as we get older, right? I don't care if you're 30, 25, you know, whatever. But you can't stop age.

37:51And at every point on that clock, you change. You change whether it's a position in either your politics, your life, your economic output, income levels, all of that. And that seriously affects how you operate. And you have to have a strong will to get through all of that so that you're what mission you started with, if you had that vision for yourself, you have to maintain that.

38:20But at every year you change, it's inevitable, you know. And so when you get to the point where, okay, like we are, right, we're not spring chickens and we're pretty much— I don't want to say at the end of the line, but we're not at the starting point either, right? And I think guys become a little bit ignorant of that and how it affects them.

38:45And then you start reflecting on what coulda, shoulda, woulda, you know, and you look at other people who are, you know, ramping up. Like I said, they look bigger, feel better or feel bigger. They do more dollar signs all over the place. And that can be intimidating, you know, and it can be deflating and it shouldn't be. Yeah. What one of my, not a role model, but one of my inspirations was Colonel Sanders.

39:21You know how old he was when he started? Oh yeah, he was an old codger. Depending on what report, 65 or 67. Yeah. Inside. That's when he started his journey. Yep. And that. And so, and Ray Kroc and McDonald's. He was in his 50s. And so it's like, what I've discovered is that the, the infinite game context when I play it myself is that while I have a finite life maybe on this planet, I believe that there's an eternal aspect to us.

39:52And in that infinite game, what's the legacy that I'm going to leave behind? In the aging process, I have noticed too that most of us are going back and still processing childhood things. Like, I have an inner child. Well, my inner child, he'd be in junior high. And so it's like, dad jokes are funny, you know, poop jokes, you know. And so there's a certain processing that we do.

40:25And while I wasn't responsible for the events that happened in my childhood, right, that created self-protective programs that run on autopilot. What I am responsible now though for every moment in my life and how I respond in that. Do I respond? Do I react? And there's a whole wealth of personal development that I'm still on a discipline journey because there's days where like I just want to pull the covers over and stay in bed.

40:51And there's other days, oh my gosh, it's 3 o'clock. I could be doing this. I could do that. I go do this, you know, 3 o'clock in the morning. It's like, there's some days I'm super excited and there's some days I'm not. And the days I'm not is when I find my biggest transformation because now I get to see what's actually running my life on autopilot.

41:09Yeah, you know, it's funny because when you say that, that really hits home to me. I mean, when I had a procedure done in April of last year, you know, for stents, February,, right? And I'll be honest, I could not leave the house, although I was perfect fine. I mean, it's, you know, I'm thinking that stents are like, okay, it's the heart.

41:31It's this, it's that, and it's serious enough. Don't get me wrong. But the recovery, it's like you can walk out of the hospital and you can do everything but, you know, 5-mile run. But to me, that was something that I go, oh my God. You know, the first tear in the Superman cape, you know. I can't do anything. I've ran into a pile of kryptonite and I literally could not leave the house, could not leave the house.

41:59And I, you know, it was— I would open the door, grab the mail and get back in and just stay calm and quiet because I didn't know what was going to happen. It's a scary thing. And since then, it's been a case of Like you just said, some days I don't even want to go near the shop. You know, I just don't, you know, and I had to get— well, I had to get through all of that.

42:24Right. And so that's a very scary— but you're, you're spot on with the days that you feel, and that's honesty. And that's where, you know, again, we have to, as business owners, we have to confront that and and get over it and get through it. And that's tough, man. That's really tough. It is. And one of the leadership personal development modules that I went through was first day, last day.

42:55If I live today like it's my last day, how would I show up? If I live today like it's my first day, how would I show up?. And I get goosebumps when I say that. It's when you apply that context to your life, your conversations are different with employees, with family, with friends, with vendors. Everything is— everything in life shifts when we become self-aware of how we're showing up in this moment.

43:27And in that realm, so many of these leadership personal development modules now, and I got Life Coach certified. So, I walk shops through this process as well. One of the realms of self-aware is I found that my mindset was, if I just do this, I'll have that so I can be happy, joyous, fulfilled. And so, then I got to think, well, gosh, to do that, I really need to have that.

44:00And to have it, I got to do something first. So I pinged in my life, do, have, do, have, have, do, do, have. And being was over off to this left. Well, when life blows up for me and I get to work on Dave, one of the first things that came to, what's your state of being? Who are you choosing to be?

44:17What's your character trait you're choosing? Courage, focus, humble, humility, honesty, surrender, and not surrender, throw up the white flag surrender, but to surrender to the what is. So I can see the possibility of what could be. But when I shifted life and it went into be, do, have, my beingness shifted and changed. So my doingness was at a whole nother level. Things I thought were a level 10 became apparent they were a level 7 because my state that I chose was one of settling.

44:53And so I had put a ceiling on what I could conceive as a level 10. When I broke that off and stepped into humility and go, I'm not all that in a bag of chips, I'm more hot air in a lot of areas of my life, and I got to get real. When I did that, then I was open to more things, and then my doingness went to a whole new level.

45:15Well, my doingness went to a whole new level, my havingness went to a whole new level. Sure. By the way, I make up words. You may not be in the web sphere, but it's going to be in the It'll be in the Davester. That's okay. But I really, I really encourage shops to take the personal development journey. Yeah. And, and while we offer that, and there's some other avenues that I think that when people walk through personal development at a high level, they'll have a chance to have a greater infinite game and leave the legacy Right.

45:50You know, when you talk to, as soon as you said, yeah, I want the shop to go for, you know, 100 years or more, it's like, ah, the infinite game. There it is, you know? And you find like-minded souls in our industry that want that infinite game. It's not a one and done. Do you offer, it sounds like you, that what you're offering is just not business coaching, but personal coaching in a way.

46:19I know that I belong to a group here locally, but it's, it's run by two great individuals. One of them is quite popular with Carm Capriato. Dave Wyman. He's a good friend of mine. Now, he's a psychologist. He's basically like an executive psychologist, and he helps you to get through all of this. I'm going to have him on the show here once in a while.

46:45Him and I will talk all the time. He'll question me with car repair and I'll question him with mental stuff. So we share some things. But it's a retreat every year in October. The group gets together and goes out to Arizona in Cave Creek, really, by Frank— are you familiar with Frank Lutz? I am. That's okay. Well, I don't know him personally, but I follow him on articles and podcasts.

47:13Great guy. Well, his shop is close to this event. You go out to a house, really it's their house and, well, one of the Daves' house. Anyway, it's a time to be spent on reflection, next levels, you know, where do you want to go? The things that we're talking about right now. And it does help because you get to recenter, you know, center yourself.

47:42I think it's a heck of a program that if you know, to tell you this, this might sound crazy, but the events out there, you not only just learn like business support, I can't— it's multi-businesses that go, that come into here and it's very, very small. There might be like 30 people. But you learn business tactics, strategies, you know, but then you're also learning, you're doing yoga, you're doing mountain climbing, you're doing all the things that, you know, from the physical to the mental, which is really kind of exciting.

48:20It's really a great break. And I don't know anybody in the automotive space that actually takes that to that level. I mean— That's close. The journey I went on, personal development through Klemmer and Associates, they— Brian Klemmer, who founded the company, they do what's called experiential learning. How do you get something from here to here in a short amount of time? Because this is where the, you know, a lot of change happens when you take something to second nature, when it runs on autopilot, where you have— you're emotionally involved, you have an emotional experience around something.

48:56It sets deeper inside of you, whether it's positive or negative. So, childhood, we may have had some trauma things happen, and it set— it was experiential learning, not in a good way. Now, we learned some negative, you know, things inside. Like, for me, and I still battle, I'm unlovable, I'm insignificant, my voice doesn't matter. Well, it's funny that my— I was beat up on as a kid, attacks in a sense, my voice doesn't matter.

49:22But what do I do now? I'm in an industry where I use my voice to transform. Right. So the very challenge of our calling and purpose at life is usually the challenges that we come against. I believe that there's a dark force that's trying to take us out. And so in that realm, that force attacks purpose. And when we really come from a place of, if I can step into my beingness at a higher level, I'm going to connect with my authentic self and I'm going to connect with my purpose.

49:52Most of the time, somebody can tell me all that and it goes in here and it means nothing. But you get me out in a physical and I'm out in an environment and I'm on a ropes course or I'm on an outdoor event that's pushing my comfort zone past the edge of it. And now I succeeded at that. And what happened to my comfort zone?

50:14It got bigger. It got bigger. It got bigger. The more I put myself in experiential learning, the more my comfort zone expands. And when my comfort zone expands, lo and behold, my GP dollars went up. My, you know, and what I can coach in shops, their GP dollars went up. Well, here's something else. Let me ask you. All right. We're talking as owners of businesses and stuff like that.

50:40We understand the personal development side and we're talking very good, habits and practices that we can to elevate ourselves. How do we get that to our employees? So, I've gone to great lengths with this. I had some pretty good job descriptions in my shop. When I went through personal development, I started coaching. We use a very unique onboarding process assessment. It's not a personality assessment.

51:10That doesn't tell us how they're going to behave. It's an indicator. We use a job fit behavior in 9 different behaviors for decision-making, for energy, for pace, for decision-making, for all the 9 major characteristics of how they're going to show and perform. Well, I embedded those inside of what I call enhanced job description. So now, and I get shop owners to do this, what is it you want in character traits of that service advisor, of that technician?

51:38Are you hiring to character traits? Are you hiring to they know how the car works? I want both of those. And so part of that inside of an enhanced job description is creating a culture of training. You know, Brian Bates, myself, and Brian Holti, we did a podcast with Karam around creating a culture, a training culture. Well, that starts in your onboarding process to let the people know contextually We are a shop about training, including not just career service advisor technician, but in personal development.

52:12And if management leadership deems that there's training, that you're going to make every effort and committed to going to the training that management deems necessary for the job, including personal development. I recommend, you know, when I coach with the shop, there's a balance because you can go real heavy emotional feelings and never get anything done, or you can go so into mechanics of making it profitable.

52:39And as soon as I step away, we did behavior modification, they go back. So, we keep a balance of that. One of the things we do is we start with one of the very first leadership and personal developments we do is a book that I read once a year. It's a once a year read. I've been doing it now, that book for since 2010.

52:58So, 16 years, one or more times a year I read it. It's Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute. And then, they have a follow-up book called The Anatomy of Peace. That is a real-world environment storyline of presenting leadership in a practical, tangible way for the intangible results that we actually want to produce. Something that's pretty understandable by the team members, right?

53:27It is. And whether you get the— whether you read the book or you get the book on tape— book on tape, now I'm dating myself— get the 8-track. That's true. Is it— there's some language I'm never going to get rid of. You can play it on your Walkman, you know. Yeah, exactly. Um, um, actually, as old as I am, it's more of a— I'm going to play it on my slow Walkman.

53:49You said it right. Walkman's a little too fast. How true. But it sounds like it— I am quite impressed with your approach to coaching and the alternate types of methods that you're presenting. And you can see why the success of your clients is what it is. We started off with questioning on how we can or what are the pain points. And I think we went into a psychology session.

54:19So send me the bill. Let me know what I owe you. You know what? Or actually, maybe I should pay you. So here's what I've discovered. If I'm struggling, if I have a challenge in my own life, all of a sudden, the phone rings, an email or a text comes in from a client. Their challenge, their struggle, their pain point in the moment, their solution is the very solution I need.

54:49So coming from faith-based, I believe that— I believe God's pretty sneaky and that, okay, Dave, you want to overcome this? Great. So here's somebody that's going to call you. You figure it out for them and you have your own solution to that. And it's kind of like it's that iron sharpens iron. It really does. And there's times where I don't know what that client needs.

55:11They know what they need. And it's a matter of tapping into them, having them take an honest, super honest look at themselves. And once you see self-aware, it is amazing on how much they already have the solution to walk out of what it is. It's the journey of self-aware. Yeah. And you get that aha moment. Yeah, yeah. I have two moments. I have an aha moment and I have an oh, caca moment.

55:43Oh, that's what's running my life? Oh, caca. It's the doo-doo moment, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, everybody has to reach it before they can start to climb out, no matter what the situation might be, whether it's a personal habit that you have to stop or a business habit that you have to stop. It's a low that's there, something triggers it, and then from there on out, you should be able to improve.

56:11And you seem to draw it out very well because you've experienced it yourself in your own life. Like most of us have, we've had that caca moment, you know, and it's either, all right, I continue to caca or I have to improve if I want my vision and everything else that I'm responsible for to be, you know, okay, you know, to experience that joy that you're saying.

56:38So it's really— you have a lot of Okaka moments. It can really wipe you out. Okay. That might be my inner child with the poop jokes. But it's really partnering with Coaching is more around partnering with two people trying to do something different in the industry that provides their livelihood. And there are times when I go to a client, their solution may not be something I have in my wheelhouse.

57:13It may be something that, like, I've had some clients that have had, I mean, I have a certain level of ADD, HD, and I don't know what that HD is. Is that high definition ADD? I'm not sure what that is. It's the advanced version. Yeah. Or, Or dyslexia, I mean dyslexia. I took that test, kind of a backwards test, but I have clients who have, who are super ADD, like they are shiny ball squirrel.

57:38And ADD, all ADD is, is you have a supercomputer part of your brain that the other part of your brain that's normal is trying to catch up to. And because there's a disconnect there, it makes it look like they're idiots or they're stupid or that, they're not, they're just super brilliant. In one or two areas and it's so fast and it's getting it caught up.

57:58Well, there's a discipline of brain training for that. And there's times where somebody's at a level of ADD that life coaching is just not going to serve them. And I'm going to say, you know what, I'm going to suggest you get some ADD counseling. You get some deeper tools or tools that will work and take you deeper. So, there's times where I'm coaching somebody and that's like 2% of the time that I run across that.

58:25Mm-hmm. I felt the reason to say that is because no one coach is gonna have all the answers. No. You know, there's some very powerful coaches. I'm part of the CAMP Coalition of Aftermarket Management Professionals that Carm does once a month. Right. And I love meeting, you know, Cecil's phenomenal. Air Pocket, gosh, Vic, Murray. Yeah, yeah. You know, all these coaches that are so phenomenal, you know, and I watched some of the feedback from Vision and I watched, you know, Cecil Sunkent and some of the screens up on his personal development.

59:06It's thinking, it's the intangible. And I love that we have coaches in our industry that are going after leading people in the intangible will far outweigh those who are just coaching in the tangible mousetraps. That's good. That's true. And I think it's necessary. I mean, really, the way that our industry is going and the speed of which it's changing and the elements that we have to bring in, it creates a huge problem in terms of keeping on point, attention, you know, what we have to do, the multiple business models that we can be attracted to or follow or trial.

59:53And all of that really creates such a whirlwind inside of our own thinking, or I want to say our own brains, because, you know, I don't think there's not a shop owner that doesn't, that does not think of shop 24/7. We sleep, but as soon as we wake up, it's a matter of, okay, what's the shop going to do? That kind of a thing.

1:00:13And we're always on, you know. I mean, it's very rare where we can find peace, literally peace. And unfortunately for a lot of shop owners, they can't experience even a 10-day vacation or a 1-week vacation or 2 days. You may not even be able to enjoy a nice dinner out for 1 evening. And that's not right. That's not why you start a business.

1:00:36You start a business with a purpose in mind, with a vision in your hand, and you respect yourself first. Yes. Without you, you can't do anything for anybody else, including your family or your friend or your clients or anything like that. So, if you don't know how, if you don't learn how to take care of yourself physically and mentally and grow the, you know, you're not going to go far.

1:01:02Let's put it that way. You're going to burn out. You're going to have a hell of a time. You're going to whine and moan about everything. It just won't be a happy life. That joy that you're talking about just won't be experienced. So, you know, it's good to see the industry start to recognize, like you have and like you've described and like you practice, that personal development must be part of the training experience.

1:01:25It's not all numbers. It's not all revenue. It's not all GP. It's not all NOP. You know, it's not how many locations you have. It's, it's joy. It's let me find the joy that I'm doing. I'm doing this for a reason. I left, I left the dealership or I left, you know, being a technician or I wanted to invest in something different because I see a purpose here.

1:01:49Well, you know, you need to follow up in here, right? As well as doing the business. So it's a great conversation, man. Yeah, you know, I love this kind of a journey industry. You know, one of the things I'm looking for my perpetual thing is I'm in a season now where I want to start train the trainer. I want to grow some coaches, some life coaches, automotive life coaches.

1:02:14I want to, you know, have come along somebody and say, because their passion and calling is transformation, right? And I believe our industry When we have a core group that is after transformation, we're going to solve our technician shortage that we as an industry created. It wasn't the government and trade schools and the rest of all that. We had scarcity mindset, LOF pricing wars our grandfathers started in our industry, and we've kept that scarcity thinking all the way through hiring and what we pay and the rest of that.

1:02:53When we go to transformation, we go from scarcity thinking to abundant thinking. That's huge where it's going to take our, our, our business. And some people may, you know what, I just want to own one shop. And some may want to go through the, the Todd Hayes program where I own 15, 20 shops and I'm open 7 days a week and I'm, and I'm really, my business is always on.

1:03:14One of the cool things in our industry, one of the One of the best tools is a point of sale that went cloud-based, you know, and part of their marketing was, yeah, you can be on the beach in Hawaii and check your numbers. Yeah. Now it's a hindrance. If you're on the beach in Hawaii, put your fucking computer away. Be here, be now, be present.

1:03:35That's the truth. You know, it's like, it's, you know, anything. Here's just— maybe we'll end with this too. As I see the human condition in myself and in others, I don't actually see weaknesses in people. I see strengths overextended, underutilized, misappropriated. They're so loving, they overextend love and now it becomes codependency. They hire codependency. They motivate. They lead codependency. And now, their people are running their shop and they're getting frustrated and burned out and they're always rescuing in the name of love, of support.

1:04:16In reality, they're not letting that person struggle to their solution. They're taking the pain away and they never grow the muscles of solving problems with that. And so, I truly believe that in our industry, when we wake up and we go, we created our own hamstring, plain and simple, we just did. We never made the industry look sexy enough, profitable enough. You know, I spoke at a high school a couple years ago at a high school trade show or automotive program.

1:04:45And every kid walked in the door with their phone in, 7 o'clock in the morning. I spoke 3 different classes. They walked with their head in the phone, came in, sat down, and the teacher's giving announcements and talking about the day, and they're hardly looking up. They're hardly even listening to them. They're completely zoned out. And he's introducing me and maybe 20% of them are looking up at me because who's this new guy in the room?

1:05:11Many of the rest of them, they're buried in their phone. And why they allow their phones, I don't know. That's another whole topic. So I knew I had to get their attention like right away. And so I take, I forget what I have, but anyway, I slammed it on the thing and I mean, I made a loud noise. And it woke the room up.

1:05:28And I said, how many of you here, what would your life be like if you made $150,000, $200,000 a year? 'Cause you can do that in the automotive world. In fact, if you want, you can make over $1 million in this industry. You could have multiple locations in that. What would you do with the $1 million? And some guys, you know, and I pointed to a kid, I said, what would you do?

1:05:51Well, I'd put, side pipes on my car. And I go, that's some pretty expensive side pipes for $1 million. What would you do? What would you do? And it was getting the kids to dream. What would you want to give back? You know, what do you like about school? I mean, we went into a dream moment there and all of a sudden these kids woke up.

1:06:13And one kid, as I was talking, he was collaborating He was talking amongst his peers and he was getting, pulling people away from listening to what I was saying. And later on, I called him on it. I said, you know what, you're an influencer and that's a powerful thing. But right now, could it be that maybe I'm saying something that's a solution to them?

1:06:36But because you're being funny, gaining the center of attention, that person didn't hear the very thing in life they needed to hear. How many times do you How many times, to be funny, do you interrupt somebody else having a breakthrough? After the class, he comes up to me and he goes, nobody's ever said that to me. Nobody's ever spoke that way to me.

1:06:55Wow, really? He goes, I needed that. And here's this 17-year-old kid, senior. He got it. Kids are open. They learn faster than we do. And that, anyway, yeah, I just, I love our industry and I love the direction that there are pockets of direction that are really gonna transform our industry. And we— I think you're onto it, honestly, and the others who follow suit.

1:07:25I think that if shop owners, and I'm sure that there are plenty of them out there that actually take alternative courses in terms of personal development. They may not be industry related or something, maybe because the industry has never presented it to them. Like I said before, I head out to another group. Would I go out to an automotive group, a core group of 30, 40 people and work on myself?

1:07:52Yeah, absolutely. And not under the guides of ownership. What's ownership? And no, no, this is, you know, personal development. Like, hey, where's your head at right now? You know, what are you doing to help yourself? Those kind of things are really important.. And if the industry takes that tact and you and the coaches at camp can fuel that, we will be better off.

1:08:19There's no question about it. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I get it. So, well, I want to thank you for, like, one, reaching out. That was excellent. It was like that. I said, yeah, I can't— there's too much to talk about. When you threw those questions at me, I said, I, let's, let's get talking on this because I couldn't, uh, I could have been a novel, right?

1:08:39And I know your feedback has been amazing. You know, like I said, you can send me the bill if you want. I don't care. You know, um, it's good that, and I hope, uh, that the audience and the listeners, and whether you're shop owner, whether you're a technician, we're at whatever you are, you know, take heed to what Dave is describing and what we just mentioned about Except personal development is important.

1:09:02Having a vision for your business, setting a goal and sticking with it no matter— like I said, you will have your ups and downs and there'll be moments when you caca and there'll be moments when you haha, right? So it's all that joy that goes with it. But I want to thank everybody for listening in today. This has been another episode of Shop Soup.

1:09:25You can get us here at Apple podcast, Spotify, Amazon, and Google. Plus, you can listen to it on ShopSoup or soupradio.fm is where it will be playing in rotation shortly. That's one of the avenues. And there's also some pretty cool music on there. So what kind of music do you like, Dave? You know, I pretty much almost everything, maybe not so much rap or whatever, but Yeah, I like, you know, I love acoustic rock out of the '70s.

1:09:57Okay, the Eagles, some of the early even acoustic Christian rock. Yeah, I love ballads. I love some newer country, not, not so much the, the twangy stuff. Is really my dad's era. There's a couple of twangs I like. I'll go, I, I like a Well, in terms of country, Dwight Yoakam, some of that era, you know, but the bro country music I'm not too keen on, you know, that's the— Yeah, one of the things on my bucket list is I wanted to go see James Taylor and I wanted to go see Jackson Browne.

1:10:34Well, they toured together right after COVID. Yeah. That was kind of a unique event that we got to go to Meridian, Idaho and gosh, So cool to watch those guys live and see the artistry. Yeah. And musicians, I mean, just anyway, I love that. And a lot of their, a lot of their songs are transformational songs if you let them, you know.

1:10:59They really are. Running on Empty, Jackson Browne, Pretender. If you listen to the words of that, it's like, oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all good. Uh, you know, uh, what I'll do is I'll I'll back this up with a playlist from you. I'll call it Dave's Playlist. We'll make sure it runs on Pacific time. Yeah, exactly. So look, it's been great, man.

1:11:24I really appreciate it. And thanks for— we'll have to do this again. We'll have to keep up and, you know, we'll go back and circle back and see how many— well, I could tell you how many squirrels I chased and maybe you can tell me how to stop chasing them. So, you know. All right, buddy. Thanks a lot, man. You're only chasing one?

1:11:41What? Well, I wanted to keep it respectful. People think I'm psychotic as it is, so, you know, but it's— so I say one, but it's many. And I get hollered at, trust me. I, you know, I have a coach and I also have my son and son-in-law, and believe me, they strafe my rear end, you know, quite well when they see me going off in different directions and I have to catch myself.

1:12:08So I'm getting better as I cross the 65 and the 66 and 67 and getting older, whatever. But good talking to you, man. I appreciate it. I really do. Wait a minute. Give where people can reach out. Give all your contact info out there. Yeah. So it's Dave@ComputrekSystems, and that's C-O-M-P-U-T-R-E-K Systems with an S on the end of it. And you can find my website that's there, and our contact information's there.

1:12:37There's even time to do a free discovery call, you know, look, jump on my calendar, find an open date. Let's just find out if, you know, if we're a good fit, if where you want to go in life is where we have some solutions for. Here's kind of funny, I go to, I go to workshops and I'll say, hey, come talk to me afterwards, it's a free conversation.

1:12:59And I'll have less than 2% of the people ever come up and have a free conversation because somewhere they meet, oh, he's going to try and sell me. No, I want— I want you to transform, whether it's me or somebody else. I don't care who does it. I want you to transform. And that's a free conversation. Good, good. All right. Well, we'll make sure we put some of the contact information down in the notes and the books that you have recommended from Simon.

1:13:23And another one you mentioned too. Or that was a, that was a paper, wasn't it? Which one? The, um, God, I can't remember. Leadership and Self-Deception? Yes, that's actually a book. It's a— oh, this is a book. Okay. Yeah. And you can get the— again, you can get the recording of it. Um, I, I learn left brain, right brain when I listen to it.

1:13:44I'm audio input motivated. Yeah. But I'm also left brain, right brain. And so if you want to maximize a book get it on audio, read the book as they're saying it, because you know you're touching left and right brain. Yeah. And you'll retain more of it. The E-Myth Revisited— I love that Michael Gerber narrates his own book. Yeah, phenomenal book. Yeah, interesting.

1:14:05I got to try to practice. I don't know if I can do both. It's challenging. It is challenging. Yeah, it sounds— yeah, it's challenging to listen and read the book while you're driving at 65 miles an hour. Don't tell me that. Come on, man. All right, buddy. All right, man, I'll see you later. Thank you so much for reaching out and great show.

1:14:25Thanks again. We'll talk soon. Thanks, man. Bye.