Is Flat Rate Destroying the Auto Repair Industry? | Steve Blanchard

0:07Good management should always figure out a way to reward the people that want to produce, right? So no matter if you're flat rate or paid by the hour or whatever it is, you can still create those incentives for the guys that want to do more without penalizing the guys that, you know, they need to get home because they want to get back to their family.

0:26Everybody has different values, right? You'll still get the young guys that are gung-ho and they want to make more hours. Give them the opportunity. Right? They don't have to be on flat rate to do that. It's the way I see it. You know, it gives the technician a little bit more power to feel that they're in control of what they're doing. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

0:47Welcome back to another exciting episode of the JD Mechanic Podcast. Bonjour, mon ami, for my French friends that listen once in a while. Today's really special. I have a friend, a new friend, Mr. Steve Blanchard, who reached out to me. Um, and Steve is Québécois, um, Canadian. So that's the kind of the first one that we'll ever have on here. He's not 100% Québécois.

1:11He could explain that to me. He was an army brat, moved around, but he— we, we drove some of the same roads and worked in some of the same areas. He, uh, is from Ottawa. We're currently living in Ottawa, Ontario, which is my old stomping grounds. And, um, so we have reminisced quite a bit before we just hit record now and He wants to share with me kind of his background in how he kind of come up on the Quebec side of things, which I don't— I didn't know a whole lot about.

1:38And I find it fascinating because you've heard me talk about the differences that I saw in Quebec versus Ontario technicians and shops and all this door rates and pay and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So Steve reached out to me to kind of like share some of that. So welcome, Steve. How are you today, man? Thank you. I'm very good. Thanks for having me.

1:55I really appreciate it. Yeah. Part of my French is not great, so, you know, I'm just a squarehead Englishman, right? So I don't do well. Well, you know, my language is broken in both French and English now, so it's kind of a mess. I try to do my best. Yeah. So you're kind of, you've been doing this quite a while now. You're kind of an older gentleman like myself and got quite a few experience.

2:18How many years in are you? So it's thirty. It'd be like thirty, the thirty-second year. Yeah, long time. Quite quite a long time. Yeah. Yeah. And originally from you said to me kind of started out in Quebec, Quebec City, Quebec. Yeah, that's right. So so to my my background is I come from a military family, so I moved around a lot. Yeah.

2:42Basically every four years we jump from one place to another. So I was born in Quebec. Which was, uh, Laurierville at the time. Yeah. And, um, I moved to New Brunswick for 4 years, and then I moved to Germany in Europe for another 4 years. And in '89, we basically moved back to Quebec because my parents' family were, were all there. So that's when I ended up, uh, completing my, uh, my high school.

3:12And then looking for, you know, what avenue kind of interests me. And I applied in a lot of different places, but anything mechanical was a passion of mine. Like ever since I was a little kid, you know, I'd tear up my parents' like lawnmower just to see how the thing worked. And, you know, as one of those kids that just needed some kind of engine to mess around with.

3:33So I had this, this really big interest in that and automotive in my mind was a sure thing because I was like, everybody needs transportation and I'll never go out of, you know, I'll never be out of work. Yes. So it was kind of my, my reasoning at the time. So I, I joined, um, there was a college program in Quebec City at Wilbrod-Béart, it was called.

3:56Okay. And, uh, it was like a year and a half of general mechanics and then you could do 6 months back to back of specialty, like and electrical alignments, air conditioning, things like that. So I did the full program. Um, so from that point on, I was lucky enough to get hired. I was the first apprentice to ever get hired in a 35-year history of Laurier Pontiac Buick.

4:20It's like I could name them because they don't exist anymore. They, yeah, they got cut in 2008 with all the other giant, you know, GM dealerships. Yep. But it was a great place. Um, in terms of, you know, everybody there was friendly, they were all very competent. Um, I learned a lot from those guys. Uh, it kind of nurtured, you know, my sort of passion for, for working on vehicles.

4:45And, and from a very early stage, I, I had interest in electrical systems and the guys that were doing the specialty stuff, just because, I don't know, I I have a personality that seems to feed off of, uh, working with my mind over a challenge, doing repetitive stuff, you know. So I, I sort of gravitated towards that, and, and they gave me the opportunity to train at GM and, uh, specialize.

5:12Because back then everyone had specialties, right? Yeah, guys did engines, powertrains, or whatever, like transmissions. Yeah, so I was the electrical, you know, AC guy. Over there and, you know, did all my training to become a grandmaster tech, which, uh-huh, which, so this, this from an early stage, I think I was spoiled in the sense that I had no knowledge of the outside world besides where I was.

5:39Right. So to me it was, it was great. And the only downside was that because we were being paid by the hour there, Um, they were basically tracking metrics of hours produced per hoist. Yep. And the moment they saw the hours drag down below 40, they would basically put a little notice in everybody's paycheck every week to tell you, hey, maybe next week we might not need you.

6:07Because by law they needed 2 weeks notice. So every paycheck you had a note, which meant that at any time they could just say, hey, next week you're not coming in. You're laid off. Yeah. Yeah. So that was, that was difficult being at the bottom of the totem pole. And the moment, you know, the work went down, they're like, okay, well, next week you're not coming in.

6:26But I was like, okay, well, what do I do? You know, how did they justify that, Steve? Because like back in the day, like you said, everybody specialized, but like, you know, in the wintertime, a lot of people don't come in to get their air conditioning fixed. Right. And then in the summertime or, you know, in The summer, it seems like everybody— we're doing a little bit more front end, we're doing a little bit more air conditioning, you know, like we're seeing people driving more potholes.

6:52Springtime's busy, right? Fall's busy, that kind of stuff. How do they justify that though, that the hours are going to dip and all of a sudden they're going to say, oh, you stay home because the kind of work that you might be doing is not very common right now, and so you stay home? Like, I don't understand how they just— like, what Like you talked to me before we started talking about how you would— maybe they would lay you off and you would get another job somewhere else for a couple of weeks and then they would call you back.

7:18Like, did a lot of people come back or did they lose technicians a lot that way? No, because it was very rare that they needed to lay off. Like maybe it was 2 or 3 people at a time. Yeah. You know, in a low dip. And then as soon as it would pick back up, all of a sudden you get the phone call and you go back.

7:36So there was never like many, many people laid off at the same time. And it was always, you know, the new people coming in at the bottom. Yeah. And you said the pay was so much better at the dealer. It was just a slam dunk that you, if you were at Canadian Tire or something like that for a month and they called you back, you just immediately went back because the pay was so much better.

7:55Yeah, exactly. Fascinating to me. So it's a bit of a rough— I never got— I never, I never saw a guy get laid off from the dealer. I saw the guys get fired. Um, and I even saw some of them get hired back. You know, that was always the funny thing. You would see, uh, you probably saw that too. You would see management move around from dealer to dealer, and sometimes like a new manager would come in and then like 2 technicians would go and 2 technicians would show up that had followed that manager.

8:22And it was just, it was wacky. I, I never understood that. I mean, and sometimes it was a package deal that was a good package, and a lot of times it was not. It was, um, didn't always work out very well for us. So for myself, I was very young and really didn't understand the dynamics of, you know, managing a business. I, I would just put blinders and just do my job, right?

8:44Just fix the car. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Just fix the car. So it's, you know, I, I was raised, like I said, you know, by military family and everything was black and white to me, you know? Yes. Yes. So, you know, when you— when we're talking about gray areas and you let my— like, you know, you, you let a person as young as I was try and figure things out, you know, it's a gray area.

9:11Do I do it this way, that way? Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't, right? So I didn't have the judgment or the maturity to do those, you know, to have that, you know, that judgment. So I sort of stuck to what I knew and You know, they called me up, they told me to do a job, I'd fix it, you know, clock out and go home and, you know, let's see what tomorrow brings.

9:32You know, it's, it's, it was a day for day thing. What were they kind of expecting? How many hours? Like 50 in a week? Was that kind of the, the, the, the bare minimum marker that they wanted to see or 40 or? It must've been 40. Like I'd never, of course, you know, I would never have been shown those metrics, but I knew about the system just because You know, when you go in the lunchroom and you have the accountants and all there and they're talking about it, you'd hear them like, oh, I didn't know it worked that way.

10:01Yeah. Yeah. They're like, yeah, we see, you know, every hoist needs to produce a certain amount of hours and once it drops off and that's how it sounds like, oh, you know, your curiosity gets piqued and then you start asking questions and you're like, holy geez, like this is like some serious, uh, and then you kind of start understanding. So they would lay you off, but you never really knew how many hours you produced.

10:22Well, you, you knew it on paper. Like, they had— so, so the first GM dealership I worked at, yeah, it was called, um, I think ADP. You know, yes, I know ADP. Yeah, so ADP really tracks everything very well, right? Yeah, like we clock on a job, clock off, they knew all the hours, the time spent, what the job paid and everything.

10:42But of course, being paid by the hour, I never knew what a job particularly paid unless I grossly went over, and then someone would walk to my bay and say, hey, uh-huh, okay, now it shouldn't take you 3 hours to tune an alternator on this car. And I'm like, oh, it's like, sorry, I, you know, sorry. So, yeah, yeah, that's the kind of the way it works.

11:05So we never really knew how much we'd be— we'd produce. But it's fascinating to me. It was very, it was very, um How do I say, like you would literally, we would stand in line at 7:55 and we'd all clunk, clunk, like punch our cards, start working. You know, we'd locate ourselves on ADP, grab a job. So you guys would just clock in like I used to do and locate on ADP and then you just took your job and that's how your day started.

11:35Yeah. You went about your day. Yeah. And not so, not a lot of the politics then so much that you've heard me talk about with Some people getting easier work, harder work, better work, you know, less— Well, the thing is it didn't really matter because we're all paid by the hour. So it was, so this is the big difference, right? Yeah. Like, so I felt when I was working there that we were all a team.

11:59If I struggled, someone would come and help me. Right. You know, and, you know, as I got experience, I rendered the same service to Other people, if I could come in and help out, if someone was scratching their head on some electrical problem, I'd come in and say, all right, let me have a look. You know, everybody would help each other. And it, it, it was a— I mean, from my personal experience, it was very different from flat rate, which, by the way, at that time I didn't even know existed.

12:28Right. Because you were telling me before we started that this is all set down in Quebec. Under the policy or the you have to I I can't pronounce it. I'll pronounce it because again my French is terrible. But that was like a mandate that was essentially set down that that's how they had to pay you was that way of hourly no flat rate except for you said so what's the name of the the organization that set this down for you?

12:59So it's French. It's called le Comité Paritaire. Okay. So I, as of right now, I don't know if it's still in operation or, but basically this organization kind of was kind of like a union for technicians. Okay. So they're the ones who were in charge of, um, your competency. Yes. They did all the creating the exams and the classifications and the salaries related to those classifications.

13:26Right. But they also made flat rate illegal in the entire province of Quebec except for Hull and Gatineau. Yeah. Which you and I shared because was, is, so for people that aren't familiar with my little corner of the world, Hull and Gatineau is literally like on the other side of the river, uh, into Ontario. That's our provincial kind of, it's part of essentially a provincial border.

13:48So there's a large contingency of people in Ottawa that travel across to work in, in what is now called Gatineau, but when— back then we called it Hull. And then they would sometimes— they come over and work in Otero, vice versa. There's a lot of traffic and a lot of people going back and forth. That's kind of the beauty of that area is because it's very multicultural.

14:08That's why so many of us are, are bilingual. And, you know, we kind of have friendly ribbing back and forth and talk about the hockey game and all that kind of stuff because, you know, and that's— so that's been that way forever in, in Ottawa. That's just— it's very much that the person sitting next to you you could be French and you'd be on the Ontario side, and it was just that way.

14:29It's beautiful. Um, but there was a lot of people that moved back and forth every day, is what I'm trying to say, to work. So, um, and you were sharing with me how that particular geographical region of Quebec is the only way— place in the province that they suspend the mandate set down by the committee. And, and allow them to operate essentially as we do in Ontario, which is, you know, uh, we can pay you flat rate.

14:58That's right. That was so fascinating because I— in all my years of living in Ottawa, nobody had ever shared that with me, that like this particular pocket was, uh, you know, um, immune to the, to the regulations. I'd never known because I know like the dealers that were— I'll say some of the Chrysler dealers that I knew on the Quebec side, uh, Colbec, City, got to know of the Chrysler dealers because we would sometimes get with them on training when we would go.

15:24Well, I knew they were all flat rate and I just assumed, like in my simple brain, that everybody in Quebec operated the same way as us. Right. But it's not. It's very different. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's kind of a strange, like, geographical area in the sense that if I go there, you know, wanting to work in a dealership and I show them my Comité paritaire Class A card, right?

15:50They look at me, you know, sideways going, we don't know what that is, we don't care. And then if I pull out my Red Seal Ontario interprovincial license, yeah, they're also like, uh, we don't care about that. They know what it is. Yes. But they're not under any like umbrella or obligation to, to have a technician with those certifications to work in their shop.

16:10Yeah, you were saying in the Quebec and Hull— or not Hull, in Gatineau area— they can— you don't have to have any kind of training official. You can walk in with a bucket of tools, and if you can get the work done, they put you to work. And then you, you fight for your, you know, hourly, hourly pay based on whatever pay scale they want to do.

16:30Whereas in Ontario and other parts of Quebec, it's, you know, they recognize it as a certain level, as a certain level of pay, and you, you work up and train up and all that jazz, right? Certified. So Yeah. Yeah. So when did you leave? Because eventually you did get to the Ottawa side. How did that happen? Yeah. So in 2002, my girlfriend at the time had finished her college and there was— I mean, there was no work for her in the Quebec region.

16:59Right. And she tried like we— for almost a year, you know, from 2001, I think from into 2002, she was looking for a job, couldn't find any. And at the time, because I'm from a military family, my sister Yeah, was an officer, you know, in the Canadian Forces and posted here in Ottawa. Okay. So she already had a home here, a condo, which was quite large, had like 3 or 4 rooms.

17:24So one of the rooms was, was vacant. And my sister ended up inviting my girlfriend, say, hey, why don't you come down a weekend in Ottawa and see if there's work here for you? So she did that. She came down and immediately found work. Right. So my sister said, well, you know, I can offer you the room, you know, just give us a little bit for rent or whatever.

17:47And so I was in a predicament, right? Yeah. I'm in Quebec in a GM dealership still playing this yo-yo. Right, right. I love— I loved working at that GM dealership, but I was like, I can work in any GM dealership, right? I don't know what it's like in Ontario. Yeah. So I came down a weekend, and so this is how it went down.

18:08Really strange, right? So my sister lived in the Alta Vista Towers. I don't know if you know that, that sort of— it's, um, kind of near the Saint-Laurent shopping mall. Yes, yes. And, um, what I did is basically, you know, you pull out a map and you say, well, what are the closest GM dealerships? So I put pegs, I picked the 3.

18:29Yeah, that were the closest. And on a Saturday morning, I got up early And drove to all 3. And so this, this is where it starts getting really weird. All 3 were clawing to have me work for them. Sure. They're like, oh, we need you. Like, because I was the electrical and AC guy. Yeah. So in my ignorance, not knowing about flat rate, this was the caveat, right?

18:58It's they were having obviously trouble maintaining technicians that wanted to do that type of work, right? Yes. Because on flat rate, you know, like everybody, all technicians know that when you start getting into diag and electrical work, it's hard to get the pay or the hours to flag the hours on flat rate. But here's the thing is they never talked about flat rate in these interviews.

19:23They're like, oh, you're from Quebec, we'll pay you, you know, $20 an hour or whatever. Like they were— I got different offers. Right. So I'm like, well, it's a no-brainer. I'm done. You know, they're like, we got plenty of work. And I thought, boom, this is an opportunity to get out of this yo-yo of sometimes being sent home. And you know, you can't live like that.

19:45You don't know, you're living not knowing, you know, if you'll be able to pay your mortgage or whatever. I didn't buy a house at the time, but you can't even think of those things when you're on that that roller coaster of a ride. So, um, I accepted the closest dealership that was to my sister's place and, um, basically moved my box and everything over into my sister's room with my girlfriend at the time and started working in this dealership.

20:10And it was, it was really an eye-opener in, in the sense that, for one, you know, shop cleanliness and all that stuff was, yeah, different, a real shock to me. Like, I, I never even thought You know, there was literally like sludge on the floor that you could scrape. Yes. Because everybody being on flat rate, they don't clean their floors and they didn't, you know, don't take care.

20:34And, uh, yeah, I was just, wasn't used to that. So it was a bit of a shocker to me. And then, you know, as you're working, even though it was paid by the hour, you start learning about everybody else that's paid on this, this flat rate system. And yeah, you know, it's, uh, it was on a percentage. Of that, you know, the door rate.

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21:43They're a partner in success. I've been in the trenches and I know what works. TechMetric isn't just managing shops, it's transforming them. Measure up by every measure with TechMetric. Hit the link in the show notes below for more. And I never even thought that subject would come up in my case because I thought, you know, the electrical guys maybe are just paid by the hour.

22:04So I gathered up, you know, all the paperwork that I needed to pass that Red Seal Ontario Yeah. Um, license. And when I got it all done and went and wrote my exam and got my license, I got called in the office. They're like, congratulations. Uh, and then they tell me, okay, we're going to put you on flat rate now. And I was like, whoa, excuse me?

22:27What is that? What is this flat rate business you're talking about? So they were trying to, you know, smooth the idea on me, trying to tell me, you know, we're gonna guarantee you got— you get the hours and this and that. Yeah. And of course, again, in my ignorance, I— what am I going to do? You know, I'm young. I'm— so that's pretty tough for you because at that time, that's the only brand that you've ever really worked on, right, in a professional standpoint.

23:02And you come in and you write. So what everybody's saying, what I'm saying everyone is that he wrote the, what I call the 310S trade exam. We used to call it back then Class A license essentially, which is not an easy test to pass. It's not, it's a rather long, substantial, multi-point printed question. But what Steve shared with me, which again I did not know, is when you would take accreditation testing in Quebec, it was more in a classroom setting with an instructor on an actual component, right?

23:38Like you would have to, like you said, you would set up your ring and pinion backlash. The instructor would inspect it, tell you whether it was right or wrong. You had to open the service manual. Like that must've been a shock for you when all of a sudden it's just, here's a printout of paper and some pictures in it. Yeah, that's, that's right.

23:54That's, you know, a lot of people don't know about this, but The way they set up their, their, their exams in, in Quebec is you basically go and you're, and you're, you know, you're giving it your best. And what they do is they have maybe, I think it was 4 or 5 different stations. Could have been more, you know, it's been a long time.

24:15Yeah. But there's a Class A technician in every one of them. So there's, you know, powertrain engines, um, all sorts of different you know, categories like brakes, things like that, right? And, um, not only do you write an exam that's similar to what, uh, the interprovincial, like, Red Seal 310S, uh, license is, but these instructors basically are asking you questions, so you have to answer them in the best of your knowledge.

24:44You know, they could say, uh, you know, what do you do if, uh, you need to remove I don't know, the shoes on this drum brake system. And right, you know, uh, or like I said, like as an example, the backlash on a differential. So you have a bench, you could have gears all over the place. You basically need to open the book, you have to find the specs, and you tell the instructor, this is where I would start, right?

25:08You know, this is how I'd set up my thing, here are the tools I'd use. And you basically demonstrate, you assemble and demonstrate something. I mean, the Even the transmission part of it, um, like the standard transmission, you have an input/output shaft and they would tell you, okay, show me what, uh, you know, uh, the 3rd gear is on this, you know, and you basically just by knowledge, you need to know, looking at the different sizes of gear, well, that's your 3rd, you know?

25:33And then they'll say, okay, assemble it now on the shaft. So you gotta open the book. So, so it's quite challenging in the sense that you really need to know You, you, you need to be both good hands-on. Yes. And also knowledgeable. Yeah. Not very knowledgeable. Right. Um, what I experienced early on, um, you know, when I was working in Ontario was that there were some of my colleagues that were working were very book smart, you know, they had their license.

26:06Right. But in a strange way, they struggle doing the hands-on work, right? So they wouldn't know how to replace, you know, an alternator, let's say, something simple. Yeah. But to actually do the job on the vehicle would take them much longer than someone else. They'd struggle, they'd use the wrong tools. They, they're just not as, you know, manually handy. Yeah. Right. So, you know, in my mind I'm like, it seems that interprovincial license is somewhat lacking on that side of, of qualifications, if you know what I mean, compared to what I had to go through in Quebec.

26:43Right. So it's a weird, it's an interesting kind of dynamic, right? And you could have the opposite as well. You have the guys that, oh my gosh, they'll, you know, they'll replace a transmission in no time. And yeah, we've all seen it on YouTube videos. You watch this Ford tech just assemble a transmission, like, you're like, holy shit, there's no way I would do that.

27:01You know, yeah, you have those guys that are absolutely extremely skillful, you know, manual-wise, but you would ask them to diagnose something, you know, electrical on a vehicle and they're like, yeah, they're totally lost, right? So everybody has their strong points and weak points. So it's a— I'll say that interesting, a lot of the technicians, and please nobody take offense to this, but a lot of the technicians that I, I worked with in the Ottawa side that had come from the Ottawa-Hall Region, Gatineau Region.

27:32I would say they were weak on the electrical and diag side of things because I think a lot of them had started out in that particular— just like you said, in Hall and Gatineau, where you didn't have to have any certs to get into the door of the shop. They just were— they were what we would refer to like as CTECs, BTechs, the brake jobs, front end.

27:51They were all okay. You know, they could take a part out. Nuts and bolts stuff was easy for them. But the diag and the electrical, they were weak on it. Seemed like they had never gotten training in the ones that I had seen that had come from Holland Gatineau. It was a very funny thing. Not that they were dumb, it was just they were weak at it compared to us that had been on the Ontario side.

28:14And we had had to have at least our basic 310 Class A, you know, automotive training to get us to where that was. There was a lot of guys, I think, that had been on the Ottawa side that had just started out working maybe on a tractor and then gone to, you know, a minivan and a truck and so on and so forth.

28:34Like, they, they could work on everything, but the diag and electrical seemed to be a little weak for them. No offense to any of them that are listening. I don't mean that in any disregard. Yeah, everyone has their strong suits. And yeah, so when you tell me about your first couple, you know, months flat rate at that dealer? Because I think I know which dealer it was, but we won't say their name.

28:57But I think I kind of know if in that area— I can think of 2 for sure in that area. The one name eludes me on that one, but I remember they were a Cadillac dealer. And then I remember the other one was a, a big Pontiac, uh, Chevrolet dealer, and I remember them. Um, what was it like to all of a sudden see you kind of jump in with both feet on flat rate?

29:15Did you— was it tough, or did you So I would say that unfortunately, the sort of drive and passion I had for repairing vehicles started to decline. Wow. Started to decline for just because of the simple fact that every time I needed some diagnostic time, I had an uncertainty of getting paid or not. Right. And I had to go through hoops to find the shop foreman.

29:49Yes. To get the authorization to get the extra time. And the shop foreman was trained to clamp down and not just willy-nilly offer, you know, and it was sort of arbitrary. Like, he, like, how do you analyze a problem on a, on a vehicle and say, well, I don't think it should take you an hour to diag this. Yeah. So I'm going to give you half an hour.

30:10And it's like, really? It's like, you have no idea. I have no idea. Yeah, I need to, you know, do my due diligence. So believe it or not, my— unfortunately, like, I'll take full responsibility, but my attitude started taking a nosedive. And it got to the point where it was so frustrating. I recall building myself— you're gonna laugh, but I built myself a cube out of foam blocks that we had on PDIs.

30:43Okay. Yes. I wrote on them oxygen sensor, mass airflow, like all these different parts. And I literally went to the shop foreman, and when he was trying to pinch me on diag time, I'd look at him and say, tell you what, I'm rolling my diag dice. Yes. And I'm throwing a part at this car. Yep. You know, because like I've had enough of this.

31:05Like, you know, it gets to that point. It's unfortunate. It's why things, things got really sour, you know. And isn't that amazing? Because what you're— so what you're really sharing, you know, Steve, with us is something that like we talk about all the time, but you have a neat perspective because you started out in a, in a, at the beginning where that wasn't even allowed to be implemented in a way that you could be paid.

31:30So you just had— so you came to work and everybody worked together and took pride and, and had teamwork, and you, you know, you loved what you did. And then you get into a situation of this pay scale that in the industry has so many of its detractors and then so many people that love it. And you admit that it started to change your attitude and started to kill your passion for the industry.

31:52And I relate to that so much because it was like, I have never not loved working on cars. I have loved it from the first time on my first car when I learned to do something and it, you know, I took a broken thing and I made it whole again. That was an addiction. But it was the fight and scratch and argue to get paid under flat rate that killed my— and it has the effect on my attitude to this day that I still— I'm not working flat rate, but I'm not— I know that because I did work flat rate, it affected my attitude in a long-term effect.

32:30That will never be undone, if you know what I mean. It's crazy, isn't it? It's just, it's so wacky when we talk about it in this industry, how we have so many people like yourself with a similar story, and yet we still hold on to it like it is the way that it has to be done. I can't wrap my head around the reasoning anymore.

32:48I cannot. It's just, I know why it's done. It's done because it's simple, you know, and it takes the— it takes a lot of the liability off of the employer. And puts it onto the employee, but it's killing the industry. Yeah. And, and, you know, you know, the guys that are working beside you as well, you know, I bring in a vehicle with this, you know, I could be searching a couple of hours to find, you know, some green on a terminal inside, you know, some module somewhere.

33:19Meanwhile, the guy next to me is banging brake jobs and flushes. Yes. And at the end of the day is walking with double my hours. Yeah. And I had to go to school, I had to train, I have to do continuous training to keep up my grandmaster. Like, it was completely devastating to me, you know, how I was treated. And I, and, you know, I ended up thinking, you know, dealerships don't care about me at all.

33:44I felt like GM, the company itself, cared about technicians. Right. Because they had training, they had— oh my gosh, like I could show you, I have beautiful plaques with, you know, these antique cars and, you know, congratulations for your grand— you know, I love that. I felt like I felt valued by the company, by GM, but not by the dealership and where I worked.

34:09It's, it's, it's almost backwards, isn't it? It's backwards. Like you would think that your employer would value you and your manufacturer that you work for indirectly would just be, okay, you're just a number within the system. And it's, it's crazy that you feel more like the OE manufacturer is concerned about your growth and your ability than the people that sign your paycheck.

34:38That's nuts to me. It's absolutely asinine. It's ridiculous. I know where you're coming from though, 100%. 100%, you know. So what, um, did you— how did the conversations go when you would talk to the management and say, here I am doing, you know, I'm finding these— I call them the ghosts of the machine or the intermittent problems, or like you said, the corrosion on the terminal— and I'm actually repairing the car, diagnosing, troubleshooting, you know, fixing the car, and my pay is sucking because the guy next to me is just doing Uh, let's, let's just say it, you know, intake gaskets on a, on a, on a V6, you know, on the old anything that

35:18GM ever built, right? Those guys, you saw how fast they do them. Cavalier head gaskets, you know, the old 2.2, like how fast they would do those, right? Yeah. And you would see these guys do these jobs all day long, and it's like you're over there trying to solve the early network problems and the early diagnostics and fuel injection and OBD1, and they're just banging out money left and right.

35:39How did you handle that conversation with the management? So it's funny that you talk about that because another sort of aspect that I was noticing, you know, in my workplace is that the guys that were producing a lot of hours, no matter if they were good techs or not, yeah, they were valued for producing those hours. Even though they would get comebacks every day, yeah, they turned a blind eye to it.

36:05Because they were producing so many hours. Sure. Yeah. Which I was like, how are you encouraging— like, it was so backwards. Yeah. Like, Steve, it's not even real numbers because if they remove The Comeback from their production sheet, they didn't really produce 8 hours or 10 hours or 12 hours or whatever the number would be because we have to remove the numbers that they created when we have to do the work over again, right?

36:34So say they, they put an intake on and pinch a harness and it comes back and there's a— all of a sudden the car misfires or the injector doesn't turn on. And you being the electrical guy, you get it and you go in and find it. And they go, oh well, you know, he did that inject— intake job in 7 hours and Steve had to spend 2 hours to go fix the wire.

36:54He still got his 7 hours. And we internal the 2 that we pay to Steve to fix what Bob caused. And then they go, Steve, your production is not as good as Bob's. I know. We just keep playing the game, right? Like that producer, we can't be without that production. Yeah, exactly. It's not true production, right? So here's like, I got to talk about this because this is really— So that, that's, you know, on the technician side.

37:27So when you have a conscience as a technician to do a good job, you know, just to serve the customer, to do a good job on their vehicle, this is how it goes down. I remember very well, uh, Astros, you know, the, the— I think they were called the M-Van bodies, uh, the ones with, you know, the— there's a cap over the engine and they're quite hard to work on.

37:50Well, these V6s were also plagued with intake leaks, right? Yeah. So it would take, like, for me, I remember it was a 6-hour job to do it properly, one of these intakes. The flat rate from GM paid half that time, 3 hours. Right. Right. So this is the situation that happens. You bring in a vehicle, one of those vehicles for an oil change.

38:15You see coolant, a puddle of coolant in the V of the intake. Yeah. What do you think the flat rate technician does? He mocks you. Does he say, hey, you know, we need to fix this intake. I'm going to lose 3 hours. Yeah. No. Or does he turn a blind eye, put some brake cleaner, wipe it, do the oil change and see you later?

38:33Top up the coolant. Yeah. Ship it back. So, so to me, I was like, this is absolutely horrid. That, you know, this customer bought this vehicle, it's still under warranty, and guys are turning a blind eye to fixing it just because it— they know they're going to lose their shirt doing that repair, right? It's com— like, that is the worst of the worst in my opinion.

39:02It's just because we're, we're screwing 2 people at that point. We're screwing the customer, and if the tech does the job, he's still getting screwed on the job time, right? And that, you know, I— that was one of the main reasons I always said we just need to drop flat rate, because then you just go in and you get handed the ticket, you inspect the car, you see that what needs to be done, you get approval and you do it.

39:24And when you go home at the end of the day, you know what you're going to get paid. And everybody advocates for the customer. Everybody wants to do a good job. Everybody takes pride. Everybody handles their own comebacks. There isn't a competition with the bay mate next to you. On he's flagging 12 and you're at 6 and no, I don't want to, you know, fuck that guy.

39:43I'm not going to help him. I'm going to sit there and watch him struggle when he gets something that he can't do. Like, that's the attitude, the culture that that pay system, I believe, is so responsible for. Right? I don't want to— if the guy next to me is at 12 and I'm at 6 and he's struggling, I can't find the time a lot of the time to go bail him out.

40:05If I can do it, because I'm, I'm half where he needs to be, right? He can give up 6 and learn his mistake and fix his mistake or, or go through the lesson, and I will just keep plugging along. And hopefully that at the end of the week we won't look so far apart. Exactly. Yeah, you know. Yeah. And that, that's the whole, you know, team sort of environment that I experienced in Quebec versus— yes, now And like, like I personally tried not to think about it this way, but the guy working next to you has now become your competition.

40:38Oh, 100%. Like, how in the world is that? Like, that makes, you know, it doesn't make sense to me. We should be helping each other out. We should. Steve, if you start to help him, you're training your replacement. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he's younger, faster, you know, he doesn't ever— maybe he just never takes lunch. Maybe he comes in an hour early and stays 2 hours late, and you're teaching them all the little secrets and tips.

41:02Yeah, you trained your replacement, you know. Or, or let's say you're willing to sacrifice some of your time. So I was like that. I, if I had a repeated operation of doing some kind of repair, I was analyzing what I was doing, and in my mind I was like, is there quicker, a faster way of me doing this so I can make gain time?

41:22And if that meant me buying a special tool Or sacrificing an hour or so to try it a different way. And maybe I'd hit a wall and go, ah, that didn't work. I just lost my shirt. I have to go back and try. So as you experience this and finally figure out a system where you're saving time, and then the guy next to you goes, hey, uh, how are you, how are you doing that intake in an hour instead of 3?

41:47And now you're thinking, well, geez, like, you know, I sacrificed a lot. To get this knowledge. And now if I just tell them, now this guy's going to be banging them out and taking— it's like, and it's kind of silly and you don't want to think that way, but it like, well, it crosses your mind and you're like, it shouldn't be that way.

42:07I shouldn't— that conversation has come up. We call that gatekeeping, you know. Launch Tech USA has established itself as a trusted leader in automotive diagnostics and aftermarket solutions by delivering cutting-edge technology and reliable support to the North American market. Driven by a deep understanding of today's repair environment, Launch Tech USA develops solutions designed specifically for the growing demands of modern vehicles and professional technicians alike.

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43:03Together, they set us apart. Launch Tech USA is driving the future of automotive diagnostics. To find out more about Launch Tech USA, visit our website at www.launchtechusa.com. Tell them the J.D. Mechanic sent you. And everybody is, oh, there's never a justification to do that. That's a terrible thing. That's the reason that young techs are washing out of the industry is because we're gatekeeping knowledge.

43:28And I have always put my hand up and go, wait a minute, I used to do that. And there was a reason why I did it. And this was the reason. Am I proud of it? No. But the system made me do it. I was self-preservation, you know? And eventually you can't hide it forever. You know, people learn it. People, people talk, people show each other.

43:48It's like you've heard it, you know, guys go off to training and they sit around in training before the class starts and they start telling their tricks to the other guy from the other dealer. How do you get that dash out so fast? Oh, you don't have to take all this out. You reach up here with this little thing and you do that, and then boom, you know, it's done and it comes out.

44:07And everybody's like, oh well, so nothing we can keep guarded. We can't keep it guarded forever. But man, I don't like— there was a handful of guys that I knew that if I found a trick or if I found something, I could share with them because they would share with me. But people that I hadn't vetted or felt that they were— they would be able to reciprocate, I didn't bother to show them.

44:31I would just wait till they handed me their work order and then I would go fix the car. It's brutal, eh? It is. Especially when, like, in, in that particular GM dealership, if we were out of work, we had to go to the dispatch tower and tell 'em, hey, I'm outta work. They'd write your number down and you're, you'd be in line for a job, right?

44:52But here's the kicker. Yeah. Because let's say I'm specialized in electrical, I may be waiting 2 hours, you know, to get a job. Right. And, you know, my number is slowly creeping forward. But let's say we're 10 out of work and I'm halfway after 2 hours. I'm number 5. Some customer comes in with a pickup truck, tells the advisor, you know, when I put my truck in reverse, my mirrors move.

45:18Right. So the— so this is a normal feature of a GM, but the advisor writes up the ticket anyway. The tower gets it and says, oh, this has got to be electrical. We're going to fast-track that to Steve. I pick up the work order and go, what the hell? This is a normal feature of the vehicle. Yeah, right. But I still have to check it in case there's something wrong.

45:39So I bring the vehicle in, I do all the systems check. I'm like, it's a normal feature. I write up my story, I go back to the tower and I go, that car, like, there was no repair needed. And he's like, okay, I'll put your number back at the end of the line. Yes. So I'm like, are you like— yeah, so those— so really this is like a grind, right?

46:02So all these little things just take a chunk out of you every day, you know? Yeah. And it got to the point where I started threatening them, like, I'm gonna leave. I told them, I said, I'm looking— I'm gonna actively start looking for a job somewhere else, right? And, uh, you know, they get all, you know, Puffy. And then they're trying to figure out a different system to pay me.

46:22And like, I won't go into detail with that, but they tried something and it was absolutely— it was actually worse than what it was before. And then, yep, um, I heard of another dealership opening up under the same group, but it was a different brand, right? Yeah. And they didn't have specialties. They didn't have, you know, engine guys or whatever. So I volunteered to hop to that dealership because they needed techs to open up.

46:51Right. That's how I got out of that whole situation. It was the only— I thought it was my only way out. It was like, yes, you know, what was it? Leaving GM, which was after 10 years, you know, and to start on a brand new brand. Yeah. Asian brand. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I did Hyundai and Kia. Yeah. Yeah. That's different, eh? Oh yeah.

47:11Because I'm easier, like, in my opinion, it was like way easier. When I walked into Hyundai the first time and I started there, I was like, there's no trucks, you know. They have a minivan but hardly sell any minivans. Like, we would never see them come in. It was all little tiny 4-cylinder, you know. Yeah, occasionally, you know, or a V6. Yeah, they don't have 10 different engines like GM or Yeah.

47:38And I was like, and the, the, the, the scan tool was pretty easy to navigate. The software was pretty easy. You know, the service information, they were really, really prone to the same pattern failure after another. Every front cover leaked, you know, like it was just, that's what we would do. I was there before the 2 liters got really common for, for failure.

47:57So, uh, I did one of the first ones that was done in the province. And at the time it had, uh, like 35,000 kilometers on it. And he was from out of town and he couldn't produce any service records. So we thought it was failed because of neglect. Well, no. And then we started to see more and more of them. And then we would see failures on the V6s too, fill up with engine, like metal particles, you know, all through the engine, plugging up the VVT solenoids and the oil passes.

48:2540,000 kilometers. Like they were just the engines. And then by then I was done. I was like, enough of this. Uh, the electrical side I found with Hyundai was very much a lot of bad grounds, uh, right from the factory. Like, the ground— they would paint and then put the ground on, and it was never a good ground. Um, and, and corrosion and connectors as well, really bad.

48:48Um, other than that, I didn't find it hard to fix at all. It was a very easy brand to work on. Yeah, but you know, the politics again in that shop that I went to were not great, and that's why I didn't stay. So, you know, you probably don't see this anymore, but we were actually— like, I was installing entire air conditioning systems on certain vehicles.

49:10They came in from factory without AC, and you could buy a kit and install it on the car if the customer wanted it. Yeah, I remember, I remember hearing about that. I didn't have to do it, but I like a little accent or, uh, you know Some of those cars, they would, they would option them, buy them all up. Yeah. No aircon.

49:28Yeah. And then, yes. And then it'd be like, oh, the customer wants AC. Oh, that's okay. That's just another $1,500. Yeah. You know, or whatever the number would be. And you would order the kit from the parts department and you would put it on and do a little programming to the engine or whatever software. And it worked. Yeah. And, and, but I heard of other people trying to do that on other brands.

49:49They tried to do that on Chrysler a couple times. And it did not go well. A lot of like, because when you think about it, right, what's the airbox look like in a— and I'll say like an old Wrangler, like if you had to put AC in it, it wasn't terrible. But if you ever bought like something else and thought, oh, I want to upgrade now, it was— you better trade that vehicle in.

50:11You know, it was bad. And again, I saw them. We had a guy, a Nissan dealer here. He got into the idea if you bought a Titan truck, he would give you a Nissan Versa for free. And everybody thought that was a great deal. And you would buy a Nissan Titan, which was not a great truck. Let's just be real. But the Versa that you got, no air conditioning, no cruise control.

50:35And then he would be like, oh, that's okay. Like, I'll go to the parts department and see what it would, you know, cost to put it together to add AC to this car. And the parts guy would just laugh at him and go, you, you don't know, do you? This, this, this can't be done. And then all of a sudden that deal fell through because, wait a minute, in 2014 I'm buying a car without air conditioning in Canada?

50:55Why would I ever do that? Yeah, exactly. Well, it was a free car. Nah, thanks. I'll buy my Titan somewhere else. So you kind of— what was the starting in at the new shop? You know, the brand new place, brand new guy. Was the culture a better fit for you, Steve? You're talking about when I moved out of GM? Yeah. Yes. So, um, for one, you know, the vehicles were a lot easier to work on, so I enjoyed that.

51:24Yeah. I enjoyed being able to work on all the systems of the car, right? Yeah. Even though, like, you know, eventually the electrical side of things is what I was being given, right? Yeah. Which again ties back into this So, so some managers treat flat rate as their tool to reward or punish technicians. Yeah, I don't know if you've seen that in your— oh, so right, some guy gets a, yeah, gets a comeback and all of a sudden he ain't getting PDIs for the next week.

51:57That's right. And once again, I'm like, morally, how could a human being Like, everybody makes mistakes. We're human. Sure. Yeah. Why are you using flat rate to punish a technician? So literally, I would have to watch a guy sitting on his toolbox dangling his legs while everyone else in the shop is doing PDIs just because a service manager thought, I'm going to teach him a lesson and not give him hours.

52:27And I'm like, what right do you have? That guy has maybe a family to feed. He's got the same bills as everyone else. Yes. Okay, he made a mistake, you know. How about having some kind of review system and having a discussion about it and maybe ensuring that it's not repeated? Yeah. Versus what you're doing right now, which is to me starving, total misuse of your— of power, of— yeah, you know.

52:54Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's I got into this, this— I really had a hard time finding any positives in the flat rate system, right? Everywhere I went, there was always something, you know, to, to basically break me down and rethink what the hell am I doing here? Yeah. Like, how did I get into this? You know, it really made me regret ever making the move from Quebec to Ontario.

53:25You know, it got to that point. Yeah, so then you think, you know, what's the point of hopping to another shop? Because it's just going to be the same somewhere else. Yeah, I mean, I might as well just hack it and deal with it. And yeah, it's a new address, a new t-shirt, and you know, more stuff arises. And you know, it gets to a point where they burn you so many times that enough's enough.

53:45I mean, I could tell you a story to this day that has affected me so much that Like, uh, when I was working at Hyundai, um, that it was one of the reasons I left just because we had, so believe it or not, this dealership was, had inherited a whole bunch of tooling from another dealership that closed down and they had everything to refurbish like a machine shop, right?

54:11Like say a head cylinder. So they had the grinding tools. You could, you could put angles on the valve seats. They had all the tools there and I knew how to use them because of what I learned in school. And I wasn't afraid to— like, it's not that complicated to me anyway. Yeah. And but what they were doing is always sending heads out to machine shops, right?

54:32And then they'd be getting bills, you know, $800, $1,000 to refurbish and check this head and all that. And, um, I, in my opinion, I was like, we're losing money. Like, I, I could be making hours off of this job. So you go to them and say, we have all of this machine shop equipment. Yeah. Why don't we start using it? And what do they say to you?

54:54So my manager at the time says, well, it sounds like a good idea. I mean, if we can get some hours, like give you some more hours. And I was like, perfect. Right. So, you know, I, that particular engine that I was repairing, Um, I seated 24 like new valves in there, right? You know, made sure they're all— you know how you have to lap the whole process, you know, everything beautifully sealed.

55:21I reassemble this engine, it runs like beautifully, you know, whole thing fixed. Customer leaves with the car. But this is a warranty claim, right? Yeah. So I don't see it flagged on my sheet, you know, it takes This is another ridiculous thing. Sometimes it would take a month, you know, if they're battling it out with the manufacturer. I don't know what the hell's going on.

55:45But finally, and this was probably a few weeks later, I get the ticket with the, with the time for that job, and it's like half the time that I spent on it. Yeah, what the hell is this? And I see that no time was given for to refurbish this head. So I immediately walk into the manager's office and I'm like, what is this?

56:06He's like, oh yeah, warranty, uh, warranty couldn't pay you the, uh, you know, the, the refurbishing of the head. And I'm like, but I walked in here, we discussed this, you gave me the go-ahead, I did the work. Yeah, did a great job, and now you're not paying me? So it got heated in the office, right? I started raising my voice and I was trying to— yeah, you know, the steam was coming out of my ears, right?

56:28So I left his office and I went straight to the parts department And I asked the parts department, what machine shop are you dealing with? And he told me, and he's like, give me the phone, dial them up. So, you know, I end up calling the machine shop, and I said, this particular engine, what do you charge our dealership to refurbish, to replace 24-valve?

56:51So it's like, oh, that's easy, it's $800. So I'm like, $800, eh? Okay, right? So I walked back in the manager's office, I said I said, if you would've sent this head out, right, we would've— for one, the car would've been jammed here for who knows how long. We would've lost hours and all this stuff. I got the job done. You would've had an $800 bill, you know, to pay.

57:13But I guess the warranty process, which maybe he wasn't aware of, but they had to submit that claim, right, to get, to get it paid. But since they declined it because I did it, they didn't want to pay me. So the dealership doesn't want to pay me like this. So I'm walking out of there having, you know, maybe worked all day on an engine.

57:36Yeah. And having half the hours for it or trying to help out the— Yeah. You know, it's like you can't burn me more than that. Like, I completely lost trust. Like, I don't even to this day, like, I can't trust any, any And they wonder why we get so toxic, Steve. You know what I mean? I wonder why we don't ever want to, because then you can understand why I don't want to clean the bay.

58:03I don't want to take out the trash. I don't want to do anything that they will not pay me to do because they've taken— that's just one. They take $800 of value from me. That's just one job. You pile that up by, you know, it's like somebody, the conversation popped up, do you put wiper blades on for free or not? And all this kind of just Well, just say, you know, it takes me 6 minutes to put 2 wiper blades on.

58:27It's 0.1, and I do 10. That's an hour. Okay, that's an hour. Let's say I do an hour every day. At the end of the week, I gave you 5 hours. At the end of the year, how many hours did I give you that I just— we didn't bill? Now, that's, that's fine. You don't want to charge the customer. I totally get it.

58:48But I gave you then 5 hours that week. Yeah. At whatever my dollar amount is that you're paying me, I gave you that. But then you turn around and you say to me, I'm not going to pay you for this thing under warranty or that thing under retail, or I expect you to do this and there's no pay for that. They wonder why we tell them to go, you know, get fucked.

59:10Like, because that's why you treat us like that. And then you turn around and say, hey, Show some initiative, show some care for the customer, advocate for your customer, and do that for free. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But how is that burden our responsibility? It's not. It's like we gave you a value. Now you have a satisfied customer. You may have customer retention because of this free work that I just gave you.

59:37I, you know, it's terrible. And You know, you and I have seen it where the dealerships that have the reputation for being able to actually fix the car, not just make a bunch of money and service a bunch of cars, not just do a bunch of oil changes or flushes or whatever, but actually are known in the city of Ottawa, this dealer has strong techs and ability to, you know, get the transmission fixed or solve the AC problem or solve the drivability problem.

1:00:04Those dealerships are always having people come in. Always. They come, they bought it at— we— I worked on so many cars when I worked at Capital Dodge downtown Ottawa on Carling Avenue. We had so many cars that came in from Colbeck and City, right, the 2, the 2 Chrysler dealers over there, because they had been there and they had bought the car there, but for whatever reason, they— it was just they weren't finding what was wrong.

1:00:27And, and they would come to us and say— and we would find it. Did we always get that customer back? A lot of the customers then That Capital Dodge was now their dealership. They would drive across the river in the morning, drop their car off. We would shuttle them to work in Quebec, take them to work, right? Pick their vehicle up. We did crazy things at Capital for customer service, and they stayed loyal.

1:00:50Not everyone, because it's just an inconvenience of, uh, like, I live in Hull. It's a lot, you know. I'm driving past 3 other dealerships to come to Capital. But some people did stay loyal. For fixing the car, finding what nobody else had been able to find. You found it, you kept that customer. Well, when you don't then have a technician that you reward them and you appreciate them for finding the ghost in the machine, it's no wonder that they show no loyalty to their employer and no loyalty to the customer, no loyalty to the brand, no loyalty, period.

1:01:24It's not— for me, it's so easy to understand why the attitude in the industry is the way it is. You just have to look at the way they treat us. That should make sense then as to why the attitude is there. Why am I called Jaded? That's why, right? Yeah. So it's, it's, you know, it's, it's a bit of a, you know, you know, when we first chatted about like doing this interview, I had thoughts.

1:01:49I'm like, you know, I don't want to— I'm not here like this Like, I don't want to like smear the entire industry, you know, and, um, but my ignorance when I was young getting into it, you know, I may, I may have, you know, my decisions might have been different if I had the knowledge that I know now. And I think putting it out there is not a bad thing.

1:02:15No, because at least, at least you're educated. And if you get in it, you know, be prepared to, you know, have thick skin and, yes, you know, basically, yeah, you know, it's not any— it's not an easy trade. You learn that there's a game and you learn how to play the game, right? And for me, ultimately, with all the conversations that I've had and I've had my detractors say, you shouldn't be talking so negative and you shouldn't be— people are not going to want to do this because of what you say.

1:02:45Here's the thing. What I want in this industry is people that love, love to solve problems and fix cars. That's what I want. I don't want people that just want to pick this as a job, right? So because I think that the most of us, what makes us— we're a little sick in the head, as you'd say, is because of that love of that, that, that I have to know what's wrong.

1:03:07I have to know. And you will donate your time and you will, like you said, you'll give up an hour to learn. That's the people that we need in this industry. That's ultimately— that's going forward is going to solve the problems and keep the cars fixed and keep us viable. Here's the thing: if the people that make the decisions don't start to recognize that that is the key player, the person that can solve the problem, not the person that produces the hours— if they don't grasp this concept It's only a matter of time.

1:03:43Jim Farley, if Jim Farley doesn't figure out, the CEO of Ford, that he has all these empty bays that he keeps talking about, if he doesn't understand that the culture at the dealership level that he doesn't work in the dealerships, if he doesn't understand why the bays are empty, they're doomed. And he can go to Mr. Trump and he can say, I need you to write in this legislation that prevents people from working on their own car.

1:04:06That's not going to happen either. So we need a very big people to start looking at what's actually going on at the dealership floor every day. Not about the money, not about the pay, but how they're actually treating us. And when they do that, then some of this stuff will start to turn the corner. I feel in my heart that's where I feel this is going, but I could be a bit of an optimist.

1:04:30So yeah, what do you— probably we're probably the only trade that So, so think about this. Let's say my furnace breaks down. Like, to me it's dead simple, like, compared to what I, you know, work on cars. Yeah. I want to fix, let's say, changing like the, the heat blower on it. I go to some plumbing place and I say, I want this particular blower.

1:04:53He goes, well, show me your HVAC license. Yeah. I'm like, well, I don't have one. Well, we're not selling you the part. I'm like, hold on here, this is like, this is ridiculous. But anybody can go to Canadian Tire over the counter and say, I want a starter, I want brakes, I want— I want my flex lines and my brake pads and my calipers.

1:05:14And I want to put the caliper on upside down and never get the brake fluid to bleed out and the pedal will suck. And I want to put the pads in backwards and slide through the next inner shift. That's all my right as a citizen to be able to do that. Because we have natural gas in your furnace and you need a valve, the government says, no, you have to pass certification before you can buy that valve.

1:05:38Okay. So because I might blow up my own house, but I could slide through an intersection and kill 10 people. Yeah. Make it— I recently, I recently helped out my neighbor that tried to do his rear brakes on his Toyota in his driveway. Yeah. And it's got, you know, the electric e-brake. Sure. Yeah. And I guess it actuated while he was doing the repairs.

1:06:00He didn't know it. The pistons popped out, the oil leaked in his driveway. And, you know, I walked over there like shaking my head and I'm like, dude, yeah, congratulations. You just made this substantially more expensive. I was so— I was standing next door in line up at the parts store yesterday. No, yesterday was Saturday, Jeff, so that wasn't yesterday. Thursday morning, I'm standing at the parts store right next door to my dealership to get a wiper blade that we didn't have in stock, a rear wiper blade.

1:06:28And the guy in front of me is buying pads and rotors front and rear for a '21 Chevrolet Trail Boss. And, uh, so he's buying pads and rotors. I'm like, oh, very cool. You got electronic parking brake? Yeah. I said, oh, okay, um, you might want to just go and Google actually some of the warning steps that you have to do with that truck in order— because I said, you know, if you leave the cap on the master cylinder and push the brake caliper back, you could corrupt the ABS module.

1:06:56And he looks at me and he goes, I don't believe that for one second. And I— me, because I hadn't had a lot of coffee yet that day and I was like really sore, my arm was sore. I said, yeah, what the fuck would I know? Never mind. Yeah. But I mean, and there's the parts store. They're just laughing at me, right?

1:07:17They're just laughing because they all listen to the podcast and, you know, they cut up. We cut up all the time. But like, I'm not there to, to, to tell you, hey, you shouldn't be allowed to buy that. I'm giving you a tidbit here that's going to prevent you from really breaking your truck and saving you some money. And you don't want to like You just think I'm being an asshole.

1:07:39I just— yeah. And that's so again, at 50, maybe by 60, I'll just shut up and not say anything. But obviously I like to talk and I like to engage with people. That's why I do this, you know? And when this comes out, somebody is going to tell me in the comments section that they did their brake job on their Chevy truck and they had no problem.

1:08:00I— yeah. Seb also, congratulations, you meathead. I don't care. It doesn't matter, right? Yeah. So what, what do you do to, or what did you do, or how did you come to find peace with doing this? Or have you found peace with the way the industry is for you, Steve? So the only side of things that I hadn't explored was working for an electrical vehicle manufacturer, which to me, I was thinking this could be different because now we're not dealing with flushes and we're not necessarily dealing all the time with brakes.

1:08:43And yes, the dynamic or culture might be different around it. And, um, it piqued my interest, especially like some, like some big companies like Rivian, Tesla, and all that are kind of like coming up in the woodworks. Yeah, I was like, you know, I could give it a shot at working on those and see how it is. So I, you know, eventually I, I ended up making the hop there as well.

1:09:08And the tech to you, I would have to think, would be very interesting. Like, you would be very keen to want to work on an EV. You're that type of guy, right? You embrace the new technology and all that kind of stuff. And you and I kind of shared before we started talking how I, I've worked on some Teslas and, uh, you know, some Priuses and some different EV things, and I— it's not my jam.

1:09:30I don't like it. Um, not because it's hard to fix. I don't find it hard at all. It's very, you know, straightforward. You follow service information, you fix the car. It's the customer for me that is very different, you know, very different. Which I shared that story of the, the guy with the, the Model X that was self-driving, tailgating the truck, and drove over the dead deer in the road because he wasn't even looking out the window.

1:09:53He's looking at his phone. Yeah, um, that scares me that there's a bunch of people out there driving around now like that. And I get it, the technology is going to— it's, it's here. That's going to, for the most part, is going to operate reasonably safe, right? Until it's not safe and until somebody Um, has a whole lot of bad habits from driving.

1:10:17Say they— the car used to self-drive and they used to always be going everywhere, they were on their phone, this car's self-driving. And now the car suffers some kind of, you know, breakdown, failure, and it no longer will self-drive. How good a driver are they going to be now still driving that same car around, but they have to rely on their— and their instincts and their training, you know?

1:10:41That's what scares me. They're not going to be good drivers. And that's what scares me about it. I think that we've crossed that line of what is actually smart. Yeah. I was fortunate to actually see the progression of full self-driving and it's gone, like it's gotten better in like the learning curve that these companies are using to to update the firmware and all that and make it better is quite astonishing.

1:11:13Yeah. Like, I remember my car couldn't negotiate a roundabout in the beginning, right? Like, you would, in the morning, like, pick up the steering, you know, like, and now it just like goes through it like it's nothing, right? So that's, that's an example. But what's, what's really intriguing is the creative methods they're using to implement safety, right? So So like, I don't know all the different brands.

1:11:36I know some of them. And like the one that, that I've seen, they're even using an inside camera to basically track your retinas. Yes. Right. So to see if you're actually looking through the windshield and if you're looking down at, let's say, the user interface, the screen, or, or you reach down to grab your phone, the warnings will go off like take control or whatever.

1:12:02Right. I drove a Mazda the other day that did that to me. I looked over away from the— I looked away from the pop-up display to look over at my phone for a second. And it immediately, the steering wheel shakes and tells me, hey, you've taken your eyes off the road. And what these vehicles do as well is they log these alerts.

1:12:21Yes. So you get into a fender bender, you know, you can pull the logs. And if they see on that one drive, you got like 5 warnings because you keep grabbing your phone. And now you hit a person. Well, sorry there, buddy, but you're responsible for this accident. You know, see, Steve, they're, they're taking all that information and they're compiling it and that's going to determine your insurance rate.

1:12:45Yeah. You know what I mean? They're selling that information to the insurance companies. Allegedly they're not. To determine how much you pay as an insurance rate. Yeah. Like that— did we cross the line there, Steve? Maybe on, you know, like, uh, George Orwell, 1984, you know, Big Brother is watching, right? That's a very— not to get political here, we don't want to do that on this podcast.

1:13:11But you wouldn't believe the level of tracking that these vehicles— they're computers on wheels, right? So if, like, the vehicle, if you look at the logs, will actually know which side of the vehicle you approached. Yes. Right. How you open the door when you sat down, the exact time when you buckled in. If you touch the button on the UI, everything is tracked to the T.

1:13:36Right. So what that does in a way is when you're looking at an electrical vehicle with someone that has a problem, you have a lot of information to look at. Right. And what's interesting about it is, you know, you get a lot of customers that like to say, oh no, you know, I You know, let's say your, your full self-driving isn't engaging, right?

1:13:58Right. Right. But you look at the warnings and it says, oh, you know, your seatbelt wasn't buckled. So then you ask the customer, do you buckle your seatbelt? Of course I do. I buckle my seatbelt every time. Well, it's like, well, I'm looking at your logs right now and you're not buckling your seatbelt. Therefore you can't engage your full self-driving. Right. Like, you know, you can't lie anymore.

1:14:19You know that? Yeah. So it, it's very intrusive in this, in a sense, right? How, how much data is out there. It's, it's absolutely crazy. Yeah. I mean, you can, you can literally analyze an accident to the percentage of application either on your brake pedal or, or the throttle. Right. Um, how you reacted, if, if you hit the brake or not before you hit, you know, like that deer, you could have pulled like data like you wouldn't believe.

1:14:46Mm-hmm. Just to see what happened, you know, in that, in that particular instance. So it's, it's quite sophisticated in terms of Yeah, I never even thought about it. Like, it was like he said, oh, I drove over a deer on the road. And I didn't think, because the old me thinks like, well, yeah, that can happen. And then I remember that, wait a minute, he was— he could have been self-driving.

1:15:07So how does that happen? And it's like, oh yeah. And then he's like, he showed the video to my service advisor. My service advisor's like, oh yeah, he's got the video. He's tailgating the truck. The truck swerves. Uh, he— the car reacts. The car doesn't react in time. It tries to avoid hitting the truck and goes right over the deer. Yeah. And I'm thinking, it's got air suspension.

1:15:29I'm thinking, does it lift high enough? Like, I'm thinking how fast that car must have adjusted everything, Steve, to be able to, to not absolutely destroy itself but somehow make it over the deer. Like, I don't know what part of the deer it hit. I didn't look at the video. Yeah, but it's just amazing to me that the technology is there to do it.

1:15:50I don't like the fact that they track where we eat, where we shop, and we sell all that information. I don't like that. That's, uh, I believe that those companies like should have to figure out that the way we do, which is like they track it the other way. I don't like that it's now being information gathered by the OE that's being sold to everyone else, the Amazon playlist and and, you know, Spotify playlists.

1:16:13And I, I'm not good with that. It's my business. Mine. Exactly. But it's like Sherwood from Royalty, they released their video this week and talked about— because of the, the meeting with Trump, and, you know, he says like, uh, well, do you actually own the whole car, or is the software in the car belong to the OE? And that's— he got talking about how, you know, features within the car, we can turn it on and off remotely.

1:16:40And, you know, you want heated seats this month, next month you don't want heated seats, or you didn't pay for heated seats, we shut heated seats off. I don't like that either. Way I bought the car optioned, the way I bought it, it should stay that for the life of the car. Because otherwise, now what becomes the process when I start selling cars to people and I say it has this option and that option, and then I find out that's like, well, it has that option if they turn it on But then when they turn it on and it has a hardware failure that keeps it from working, they're still mad at me.

1:17:13What am I supposed to do? Add up the whole option list and tell everybody and make it all work before I sell it to them? I can't do that. It's completely unreasonable. But here we go again, right? When everybody's just like, I paid my subscription, my seat should work. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of business models are are really leaning towards that kind of— yeah, you know, if you can get a monthly payment from a particular person, you know, whether it's $10 a month or whatever, then they got you hooked for a very long time.

1:17:45And it's— yeah, it seems to be the way that, like, if they can find ways of, you know, even, you know, Tesla, you gotta, you gotta be connected to the network, right? So you buy the vehicle and all of a sudden they tell you, oh no, if you want if you want like your full mapping system and all that, you have to pay $15 a month to— it's like, oh man, yeah, it just got looped into another like $15 here, uh, like, you know, it's never ending.

1:18:10So this is what they're doing now with options on vehicles. The cars come with the hardware, yeah, but you need to pay to activate it, right? So I, as far as I know, like, this is the way they want to, they want to head with Full Self-Driving, is that they're not gonna allow customers to fully purchase this, you know, off the bat.

1:18:30They want to sell this kind of, sell it monthly. So if you plan on going on a trip or whatever, you go on your little, you know, account and you basically, okay, I want Full Self-Driving for this month. And then you, let's say you pay $200. Yeah. You got it for a month. You know, if you want to keep paying, you keep paying it.

1:18:47So they, they'll probably get more because initially to like, When I initially, you know, when I looked at full self-driving, it was like $20,000. Yeah, like, are you kidding me? That's a lot of money to put into software that's already on my vehicle, you know. So not a lot of people were willing to take that leap, and that's why, you know, these companies, their prices are fluctuating.

1:19:09And it's frustrating on the customer side because you're like, well, I paid $18,000, you know, when I got my car, and now it's $10,000. Yeah. You know, like, why are people paying less now for the same thing that I— you know, it gets frustrating. So what— but they're probably going to hook in more people to try it out with a subscription-based thing than rather than having to dish out like, you know, 10 grand at a time.

1:19:33Whatever. What do you think of that little truck that's being sold by Slate? Um, I call it a truck, but they can essentially put a different body on essentially the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard about that. And then And it's being marketed as it's gonna be like a $30,000 truck. You know, very basic amenities, all that kind of jazz. I like that idea because I think that there's, like, if EV is gonna go forward and completely take over, which I'm still not convinced that that's going to happen, there has to be a market for people that can't afford a $100,000 EV and need, reliable, simple, you know, can be fixed multiple places transportation.

1:20:17Um, you know, whereas, you know, some of the other brands, a lot of people, it's like, oh, we'll send somebody to fix that for you, right? We don't— or you can bring it if you live in a major metropolitan area, you can come by and drop it off and we'll give you another one, a loaner. I like the idea that like some of the Rivian and Slate and whatever BYD is going to be Um, that they can be more— I want to think that they'll be aftermarket shop friendly, where they'll be like, yes, we want you to be able to get this service just about anywhere you go, and we're going to release it.

1:20:50Um, because I'll tell you, last year when I was in Vegas, I think I rode in more electronic cars than I've ever ridden in my life. Um, they had the Tesla Loop that's underneath. That's fascinating. That's incredible what that, that technology and that stuff does. But everything, like every Uber driver and every, uh, taxi was all either a hybrid or an EV, straight EV, didn't matter.

1:21:12I didn't know Volvo had an EV like I drove in or rode in. Like, it was, it was really interesting to me. So I think it's just a situation of like certain markets will become saturated and then other markets I don't think are gonna— will fight it hand and foot. Um, yeah. You know, I don't think it's because I don't think it's about the grid thing.

1:21:34I think that it's like the grid, they'll build the grid to make it work, but it has to be— they're sitting there going, who's going to build it? Who's going to build it? Like, I don't want to outlay the money. Like, you know, Elon already pumped a bunch of money into the economy to, to start the grid, but I don't think he wants to be responsible for building it all so that everybody, his competition, can use it, you know.

1:21:57Um, to me it's just a very impractical car. Like, if my old boss had a Y and if he left Kingston, he couldn't even drive to Pearson Airport in Toronto without having to pull over and charge. Uh, and, and that to me was like, so how long did he— well, he'd pull over and charge for 15-20 minutes, and then, you know, he could go to the airport.

1:22:22He had to stop on the airport in Port Hope on the way back, charge another 15-20 minutes. And then you could go home. Well, I can fill up my car maybe in 5 minutes, and maybe I walk in and get a coffee or I don't, so it's a 50-minute thing. But like, when we see these people and they're stuck waiting for 45 minutes to charge— say the car now— and this is— I follow Rich Rebuilds on YouTube, and Rich talks about, you know, how some of these cars are great until you're locked out of fast charging, and then the car becomes very inconvenient to, to sit there and charge for multiple hours.

1:22:58And, you know, this level charger won't work. And I, like, I just sit there and look and go, why would you ever want one of these things? Why? Well, so to touch on that point, so insurance and liability is a huge thing. It governs everything, right? So, so if you're a manufacturer of an electric vehicle, and of course it's got a lithium-ion battery which has its dangers, right?

1:23:18It's It's not friendly when it comes in contact with water. It's prone to fires and all this stuff. When, you know, your vehicle gets into an accident and it's deemed that, uh, you know, it's basically a write-off because it costs too much to repair it or something. So manufacturers have implemented ways of locking them out. So let's say the car did have supercharging and now it was like Rich Rebuildy, that's what he does, right?

1:23:44He loves to grab like a wrecked car and I'm gonna fix it. Which is great, you know? Yeah. But the problem is, is that car, if it's, if, if it has been locked out by the manufacturer, they did that for liability reasons because they don't want to be responsible. They, they don't want the image of their vehicle being on the road and all of a sudden catching fire.

1:24:02And the public's going to look at it and see the problem, right? Not every, the backstory behind it, right? So that some guy bought, you know, a wrecked car and tried to fix it. Right. So, so now people are trying to circumvent these lockouts to try. And I, and I totally agree that a competent person can fix up a car and make it safe, but from the liability side of the manufacturer, I understand why they want that ability to be able to lock you out.

1:24:31Yeah, like this VIN number is no longer, you know, being supported by us, like by— for our charging network or whatever, right? So that's That's kind of where that comes from, right? We also, you could make the argument, we've been for years have been allowing people to buy fuel line, a rubber hose to patch it. Failed again. And it didn't matter if it sprayed all over the exhaust system as they drove down the road.

1:24:54If the car started and drove again, they drove down the road. And then if it caught fire, it was like, what happened here? Oh, he fixed his own fuel line and caught himself on fire. Oh, well, you know, it's not like the next day somebody says, okay, we don't sell fuel line or fuel pumps or or, or, you know, copper line or rubber hoses, or we just keep right on going.

1:25:14So why did that liability all of a sudden trump— there, I don't— shouldn't have used that word, but, uh, why did it trump that ability that, you know, we can say, oh no, you're not allowed to do this because you might hurt yourself? Freedom says I should be able to assume the risk and the responsibility. You know, it's, it's a funny world we live in because I mean, they don't want the sight of the car catching on fire all over the news.

1:25:41But let's be real, if they have a flood, they're all parked in a field somewhere so many meters apart from one another, and then they'll spontaneously combust anyway. Yeah. Because of their compromise from being in a flood. I, you know, I— it's not just the automotive industry. So like, like I have— like I'm an instructor for scuba diving and all that, and I actually repair underwater propulsion vehicles.

1:26:06Okay, cool. They also have very large lithium-ion batteries, right? Packs that are $5,000, right? They're very expensive and they're, they're built in Europe, like in Italy, right? So for this particular brand, so it's extremely basic to me compared to a vehicle because all it is is cells and you put a BMS in there and they program it and then you put it in your scooter and, but you know, maybe, maybe it has 50 lithium-ion cells in So what happens when one or two cells don't balance or they short out?

1:26:40So I have the— the customer comes in, I have the battery, which costs $5,000, and I could easily open the cap, open the pack, test the cells, replace the ones that are broken, put it back together, put it back in. So, you know, I reach out to our Italian friends and I tell them, you know, I could easily fix this. They're like, no.

1:27:00He goes, we don't want you opening up this battery pack. Do not touch it because of liability again. Right. Yeah. But now you're telling me that I have to tell my customer that he has to buy a $5,000 battery that I can open in 10 minutes and pull some cells out and fix it. I mean, it's, it's horrible to me. Like that's, yeah.

1:27:20Like you should, you should have some kind of, you know, whether, whether the manufacturer wants to give training or whatever. Have some kind of certification to do it? Well, that's, that's the world we live in now. Like lithium-ion is a big, like, you know, you've seen the arguments then, Steve, where it's like when we start to talk about mandatory certification in the industry, there's a big pushback, right?

1:27:43Oh, I don't want, I don't want to subject myself to that. That's not fair. Don't involve the government. You know, I've been doing this 50 years. I know how to do it. I, I can take— how many people have taken apart a Prius battery pack on YouTube and, uh, you know, changed some cells out and rebalanced it, charged it up, and got, you know, a working Prius again.

1:28:04We've seen Ivan Pine Hollow attempt it. I've seen Check Engine Chuck do it. They didn't have Toyota-level OE-specific training. They went in there and, and how does this work? And they fix it. We should do that. But all of a sudden now, like If the EV thing is going to come along, they're going to make us be certified before I can touch the battery pack?

1:28:27Like, I'm not a half-in, sometimes kind of guy. Either put certification across the whole industry and say, like us in Canada, you have to have some basic level, or else remove it all and let it be what it is. Let natural selection, Darwin, right? Um, and, and, and be what it is. You know, I, I, I think it's coming. I think mandatory certification is going to arrive whether the industry likes it or not, because I think as we keep going, the, the insurance and the parts people, the vendors, are not going to allow us.

1:29:03Maybe the government, and after Trump leaves, will say, no, I don't want people to be able to work on their own EV without, you know, and, and maybe that's what happens. I don't know. I don't like that. It's one more reason why I don't like the idea that— my big thing with the, with the EV thing is I don't like the idea that maybe tomorrow something, someone somewhere decides I'm not allowed to charge my EV, and now it becomes a dead paperweight in my driveway because maybe something, uh, I re— I— my credit rating drops below a certain amount.

1:29:41My social credit score— I'm not supposed to say that— and, and all of a sudden they won't allow me to charge my car. This is a very real thing that is happening and can happen in other countries where EV is already a thing, like BYD. Do you think they're not going to shut your car off on you? Of course they can. They already know how to do it.

1:30:01They already could do it in some cars. The technology is already there. It scares me then when it's least If I know— and again, it sounds ridiculous because the fuel thing, if they want to shut it down electrically, it won't matter what engine is propulsing it. I won't be able to get to the fuel. But, you know, it was like when Sherwood's people were going to respond to his video and they're like, well, I'm just going to go disconnect that.

1:30:23And he just laughs and he goes, it's not going to be so simple like that. It's going to be a network and a password and a gateway. So my, my basic redneck brain says that I don't like that because I don't like the idea that they can shut down the car remotely. It's true. But I mean, we used to joke like, you know, full self-driving.

1:30:44But you were saying how, you know, the self-driving thing and, and the— we were talking about the, the shutting them down remotely, you know. That's what's gonna be— they're gonna make the cars like drive back to the— you know, you're gonna watch it out your window and you're gonna see your car drive away. You didn't make your payments. You didn't make your payment.

1:31:08I— does that scare you too? Yeah, it's, it's— I mean, the technology is there, right? It's just like, you know, like this whole Privacy Act thing, we're, we're kept so much in the dark. Like you said, we know that the data is there. Yeah. How do we really know what they're doing with it? Yeah. And I understand some companies need that data to improve their systems.

1:31:35Mm-hmm. So they, they, they need it to, to, to like in, in that aspect. But, you know, we, we know that there are data leaks everywhere. Like, yeah. Who's to say that your insurance company can't request, you know, hey, is this driver actually following the speed limit? Like we'd like to see. And all of a sudden they get the logs of your car.

1:31:59Yeah. And they're like, this guy's driving 150 kilometers an hour like every morning, you know? And all of a sudden you get the phone call and you're, you know, your insurance rate's like going through the roof. It's like, whoa, what the hell just happened? You know? So who knows? Yeah. You never got a speeding ticket. You never were in an accident, but the car snitches on you and tells you that like, hey, Jeff habitually drives down the 401 highway at, you know, 30 kilometers over the speed limit.

1:32:24Let's pump up Jeff's insurance rate. That's not fair to Jeff. Jeff hasn't been in an accident yet. Did he break the law? Yes, he did. So Steve, with— does the, the future of the industry then kind of make you apprehensive? Uh, like, in my opinion, I think things need to change. Like, something's going to have to happen because, I mean, it can't just keep going on because I, I haven't seen any improvement in terms of you know, any benefits or whatever, um, operating with a flat rate system.

1:33:01I mean, and don't get me wrong, I understand some techs absolutely love it, they make tons of money on it, but for many of other different reasons that we discussed, you know, whether it's, it's, it's benefiting the customer or the way management uses it to operate their business or You know, there's, there's, there's, to me, in my opinion, there are far more, um, um, how would I say, disadvantages to sustaining something like that.

1:33:36And, and totally understand how difficult it would be for dealerships to adapt, but I've always said I've experienced both. Yes. Yeah. And The systems that track our— the way we work, the time we spent on jobs, the, the, the, the labor rates, you know, tied to those jobs are all monitored and tracked, right? So whether you're paid by the hour or flat rate, if you fall behind— because that's the reason all the dealerships tell you like, oh no, we're not going to put you by the hour, you're just going to sit there and do nothing— it's like, well, no, you're still going to see my metrics.

1:34:12Yes. So if you're falling way behind on your peers, then you walk in, you get this little warning telling you, hey, pick up your feet or, you know, it's not going to work for you here. And it's as simple as that. Right. But that's, that's what it comes down to, that, that thing that the buzz topic all the time now in the industry and in the circles is leadership.

1:34:31And I've said that forever, that the reason that they can't implement salary and make it work everywhere is because we don't have leadership. Like, when I think of some of the service managers that I've worked for, there's a reason that it wouldn't have worked any way but flat rate, because they had no clue how to motivate, how to manage their people. They weren't managers.

1:34:54They were other technicians that maybe used to produce a bunch of hours, that had some familiarity with the brand, and they thought that was the person that was going to lead everybody. And it doesn't always work that way because you know and I know how we can be. I don't have the best people skills after a while, right? It's the same as looking at a lot of 45 and 50-year-old technicians look at a 20-year-old technician and go, they don't want to work.

1:35:16Well, that person with that attitude is no kind of leader, right? I genuinely believe lots of techs go to work every day and want to fix cars. They genuinely enjoy it. They want to do it. It's their job. They, they get off on it. But if you're finding somebody that's slacking and you say, oh, they're just gonna ride the pay or whatever, well, that becomes a management problem of what are you going to do to lead that person to better.

1:35:39And are they always fit? No, they're not. But it comes down to where we have to start thinking, what actually is a good employee? What does it actually look like? And you and I said, oh, the guy that could turn 16 hours in an 8-hour day, but 8 of it, 4 of it, 5 of it had to be redone. That was always their, their, their model.

1:36:00Well, that's not what is working for culture. It's not working for longevity. It's not working for customer retention, customer satisfaction. It's not working for any of that. But yet we seem to get them to understand this true model that you want to build is the steady Eddie, the consistent, low-comeback, high-skill, problem-solving ability technician. That's what you build as a whole crew of that.

1:36:24And when exactly it starts to deviate from that, they take shortcuts. They try and— what? Ask them, why are you trying to rush through this job? Well, if I take the money away from it, what's the incentive to rush through the job? We would just all— we would work like we were working on airplanes. You don't rush anything. Everything is following a process.

1:36:43Every bolt has a torque. Every process has a service sequence that has to be followed. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. It's done that way every flipping time. That's how this stuff— and again, with the technology going forward, people that design these electric cars, I think for the most part, think that that's how it should be implemented. I publish the service manual because I want a service performed this way.

1:37:07Well, all of a sudden we put in a pay incentive that says, hey, cut all the corners that you can to become as fast as you can. And as long as it still drives out the bay, win. Well, that's not what we should have always been doing. Right? True craftsmen, to hold ourselves to a standard that everybody thought they were getting when they went and paid for the highest door rate that they could at the dealership.

1:37:31That's what they assumed they were getting— the highest level of skill, the highest level of care. Did we ever give that to them? Not consistently, not across the whole board. Yeah, that's kind of a rant right there. Wow. Um, but I think that that's going forward with the technology, Steve. What scares me is The technology should actually force out flat rate. It should be like— there should be— we're dealing with, you know, lithium-ion battery cells and a very real potential that we could burn this sucker down or kill these people with the kind of voltage you're going through the car.

1:38:02There should be no shortcuts. Yet I don't think— it doesn't matter what we put in technology into the car, the industry will still drag its feet and kick and scream to hold on to that pay system. Yeah, it's going to be the same way. Yeah, this— that's, that's the big, you know, debate. I, I like— good management should, um, always figure out a way to reward the people that want to produce, right?

1:38:34So no matter if you're flat rate or paid by the hour or whatever it is, you can still create those incentives for the guys that want to do more. Right, without penalizing the guys that, you know, they need to get home because they want to get back to their family. Everybody has different values, right? Um, you'll still get the young guys that are gung-ho and they want to make more hours.

1:38:53Give them the opportunity, right? They don't have to be on flat rate to do that. It's the way I see it, you know. Um, and at the same time, it gives you— it gives the technician a little bit more power to feel that they're in control of what they're doing. Right? Where on flat rate, you know, this favoritism, you know, one morning a technician brings a coffee to a service advisor and next thing you know he's doing gravy for like, you know, the rest of the day.

1:39:21Is this like— it shouldn't be that way. And, and, and, and you would eliminate this independency, like, you know, the viewing your neighbor as a competitor. Yes. And you would start creating a team where everybody starts sharing their knowledge. Yes. And then you would watch your shop grow the skill level, you know, to a, to a point where, you know, bring on anything through the door, we're gonna get through it.

1:39:49Yeah. You know, if, if I can't figure it out, I know my buddy's there to back me up and come and help me out, and we'll get it done, you know. And that's the sort of attitude I think it would bring, you know. But, but It's such a hard, hard thing to change. I, I've had this conversation, you know, I don't know how many times throughout my career with different people.

1:40:09And, you know, I always get the same answer from management, you know, oh no, we can't do that. You're just going to drag your feet and not do any work. And I'm like, how? I don't understand how you— that's, that's the first thing that comes to your mind when we talk about being paid by the hour. It just makes no sense to me.

1:40:27But look at how many times they can have a top-notch service advisor sells a bunch of work, great with the customers, and they leave. And somebody else comes in and they take the job and they're not as good. And do they ever do a damn thing about that? No, no, no. They just— ah, well, you know. And, and, you know, we've seen it.

1:40:49The service advisor that plays on their phone or Candy Crush on their— on their— and I, I tell the story, I didn't work with him personally, but I did have a friend who worked at the thing And he had the laziest service advisor that he'd ever seen, and he wasn't on any kind of incentivized thing at all. If he didn't feel like phoning the customer that day, you could carry out the estimate to the car, for the car, to the advisor, and the advisor wouldn't even look at it.

1:41:13He'd go, no, the customer said he was only going to do an oil change today. Never even picked up the phone and called the customer. It came back because the customer would— next month is in for a recall or whatever, right? Part that came in. And another advisor gets the car and, and tables the estimate, and he goes, I never knew I needed all of this stuff.

1:41:36Well, in this industry, we just sit there and go, it's always a technician issue, it's always a technician issue, production is always a technician. No, really, what the technician is responsible for is how fast or how slow they are at getting a particular task performed. How many tasks that gets sold to the customer is strictly on the quality of inspection that we do.

1:42:01But you can do a great inspection in the world, if you have an unmotivated person who can't sell the work, it doesn't convert to shit. Exactly. Shinola, pardon my French. So it— again, I, I'm starting to see where the spotlight is being shone now on the service writer to actually be able to be motivated perform, advocate for the customer at a level that's never been there before.

1:42:24We keep talking about the technician shortage. I think the technician shortage fixes itself, but I think we really now need to look at what is the failure of service writers. And I'm not just talking in dealerships, I'm talking in shops now too, because we see small independent shops that operate never doing inspections, only fixing when it's broke down. I don't ever want to be a salesman to my customer.

1:42:49Yeah. And, and then a customer all of a sudden has a 6-year-old car and it needs $6,000 worth of work, and nobody ever gave them any notice because, you know, all they ever did was oil changes and they did one brake job and maybe plugged a tire. And all of a sudden they need $6,000 worth of work because the AC doesn't work, the shocks are shot, the tires are bald, the brakes are bad.

1:43:11There's corrosion. And all of a sudden everybody goes, nobody told me about this kind of stuff. Transmissions slipping, blah blah blah, right? We could go on hours. So this advocacy of the customer and their car is what's important. But if we do not have people that convert that into sales, I don't give a crap about the technician's production. The whole team is not producing what it should be Because somebody that can just come in and sit there and smile and play nice and give only the good news.

1:43:49Yeah. And it screws the whole backside of the building. And I have a real big problem with that because I know I could, I could have several customers that— and you've seen it in the dealer— you could take an estimate out to one advisor and he sold it just like that. And another one looked at it and got really emotionally involved and said, oh gee, I don't know if Mrs.

1:44:09Smith's going to be able to afford that. She was just telling me her mom's going into hospice. None of it matters. The reality is this. And if somebody that doesn't want to sell this, they're a liability now, way more than the technician that takes too long to do a job. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It goes back to leading. Can I lead my advisors?

1:44:32No. We've got people that run shops that can't even lead the advisors, let alone lead the technicians. Well, then what's— what are we expecting? We're just going through the motions at this point. Yeah, yeah. Just reacting. We're not proactive. The car needs an alternator. We put an alternator on it, write up a bill, get paid. Yeah. We don't truly think about what we're trying to do here.

1:44:56And then you say all the other opinions of like, well, this isn't about sales, this is about service. Listen, when they walk into the restaurant, you still have to sell them the food. Yeah. What, uh, do you have an exit strategy out, Steve? Not just of the interview, but of the industry? Ah, well, I mean, I'd love to retire, but, you know, I, I've— I'll always, you know, tinker.

1:45:22My dream is to actually be able to move into a place that's more rural and have my own shop. Yes, right. So I could just tinker things on my own, you know, time as a, as a personal enjoyment, or that— I mean, you know, not necessarily making a business out of it. So, so I mean, that's sort of my vision, but for the moment I'm, uh, I'm awfully tempted to, uh, throw myself into technology and maybe changing, even changing my career at even at this point in my life just to Just because, you know, I've— my bucket's pretty full.

1:46:01Could you, could you build yourself a business making the scuba diving scooters? Yeah, yeah. I've, uh, so that's a long story that I could unbox, but I basically opened up a, a dive shop for a while. Um, yeah, but I had, you know, a workplace injury that restricted a lot of things that I could do. So I've been in rehabilitation going to physio and, you know, seeing specialists and all that.

1:46:28So I'm working through that and it's also one of the reasons why I'm probably gonna back out of working, you know, for someone else like working on cars because I just don't have the physical capacity anymore to keep lifting heavy loads every day and in and out. So So yeah, that's kind of where my future is heading. But, you know, you were talking about, uh, service writers, and I, I mean, I, you know, at some point we need to unbox because I had experiences in the EV world which, you know, the preparation to a customer coming for a visit.

1:47:06Yeah. When you think, like, I've never thought about it throughout my career, but how far you can take it Yes, prepping someone. Yes, you know, before they come in, making sure the parts are there, or, you know, looking at their concerns, even digging into it a little bit before they even show up at the counter, and being prepared to make things go smooth so that the result of that is less wasted time on the tech side.

1:47:33You know, you're waiting for parts, you're waiting for your estimate, you're waiting for this and that, you know, which is not our fault. Like, why are we paying for it, right? Yeah, if, if they— you and I have probably walked the same kind of bays where it's like the customer made the appointment to come in and they said they had a brake complaint.

1:47:50Now, how many different brake jobs can you put together at a Hyundai Kia store price-wise? Not a bunch, right? And you can probably table that to the customer when they make the damn phone call. Okay, so Mrs. Smith, minimum, like, uh, you think you're hearing some brake noise from the front, uh, I have done Oh, 10 Accent brake jobs in the last week, and they all cost $526 to $596.

1:48:17If your car needs that, would you be interested in doing that? And then Miss Smith says no. Well then, what's Miss Smith need to come by for? Just an oil change maybe, or whatever, right? Um, you know, and I can see both sides of the argument for that, but to think that we every time we have to go through the same thing of Inspect the car, right?

1:48:37And, and I'm not advocating we don't inspect the car, but the advisor have to go through the whole headache of like, what do the parts cost again? What's the labor cost again? You should have that customer not primed, not on the hook. That sounds bad, but they shouldn't be completely shocked when you call them and say, yes, the brakes are shot. Yes, it's going to be $700.

1:48:57They should have known when they were dropping off what to maybe expect. Exactly. Shock is less, right? But we have all these cars that it's like, how many times do you do it? You table it and they go, oh, the customer wasn't expecting that much. Put the wheels on and put it outside. Why does that happen, right? What were they expecting us to do?

1:49:17And I'm not saying that we do— we put on cheap parts. I'm not saying we start pad slapping everything to make the job go, but the, the nonsense that we sit there and wait for the customer to get called over a brake job or over a transmission flush or of an oil change or a coolant flush or a tune-up or a battery.

1:49:35I never understood that having to wait thing. Not that everything should be a menu board, but your advisor should be pretty familiar with the flipping maintenance schedule on the car. So customers come, Mrs. Smith is making appointments, she's got 80,000 kilometers on the car. What's their caravan do at 80,000 kilometers? Let's do some— let's do it for transmission service. When they're making the appointment, if they're incentivized and want to make some flipping money and do their damn job, they should be getting Mrs.

1:50:01Smith saying, hey, are you aware of the fact that at 80 these 2 services should be done? Exactly. Say then, I'm not interested in doing it, I'm getting rid of this next month. No problem. We just do the oil change, we do the basic inspection. I don't have to sit there and tell the advice. The technician doesn't have to write the estimate.

1:50:21None of that has to happen. But the fact that they just answer the phone and then wait for the technician to tell them what the car should get done, and I never understood that. It has to work together. We should already be like, yes, I had her expecting, yes, go ahead. You've got those tickets where you go to the doctor and he said, oh yeah, they said if it needed brakes, just go ahead and do it.

1:50:43Well, write that on the flipping ticket. And I myself one walk up to the desk. I just go to the parts counter now and get it, assuming it needs it. I'm not trying to say we just like run, run amok and we start bolting parts on the cars not need. I'm not trying to say that. But if it's already been communicated that they're good with it, just write down that they're good with it and we can carry on.

1:51:04We could flip a couple more cars. Everybody wants to turn and burn in the base. That's how you start to do that, people. Make your advisors take that next step, that next 10% of effort, and this will start to speed up production. Hey, crazy thought. Will— how about taking a minute to look at history? Oh, you know, yeah, you know how, how many people come in, they, they book an appointment to replace their tires, but you know, 6 months ago when you swapped them, you wrote that they're at, you know, their, their summer tires were at 3 mil.

1:51:35You open that, like, you bring the car in, you're like, you open the trunk and you're like, these tires are worn out. Yeah, the hell? But it's— it was written on the previous RO. Or you charge them $100 to store them for the last 6 months. When you put them away, they had 2/32 on them, so they should have been in the scrap pile, and no one tabled it to the customer then.

1:51:56So now pull them out, we put them on the car, and we wait. Oh shit, these aren't even worth putting on the car. What do I do now? I scramble and I call the customer and say, hey, you need $1,600 worth of tires. Yeah, and we— and we don't have them in stock. We don't have them in stock. That's what we've done.

1:52:12We've paid the technician to put them on the car and you're going to drive away and a week later you're going to come back and get your tires done. And what do I do? I guess I charge you an hour labor again, or what do I do? I eat the hour of labor. What do I do? It's just like, oh, I'm having my PTSD scum flaring up.

1:52:31Thanks for that. Exactly. Yes. That's, you know, like 6 months ago we told you your brakes were at 4 mil. You know, you probably need brakes now. Like, I don't even— if I was advisor at open, I'd look at the work order. I'm like, yeah. So as soon as, you know, you pick up the phone, call the customer, you know, we wrote you're probably going to need brakes.

1:52:49We can order them for you, have them in stock when you come in. Boom, the job is sold before the car— before the customer even shows up. And exactly, the customer says— so the next question, because I love this part of it, is the customer said, okay, so Mrs. Smith, we told you last time that your brakes were getting low. Um, are you interested in getting your brakes done?

1:53:06And Mrs. Smith says, no. Well, I had them done over at, say, the Midas— not picking on Midas— and, and, and they're noisy. Okay, Mrs. Smith, um, Midas normally has a warranty. Have you been back to Midas to have this checked out? Oh no, I don't want to go there. Okay, so what— when you come into my shop on Monday morning at 8 o'clock, how do you want us to proceed with this?

1:53:27Because I can fix your problem, but it's going to cost a brake job that's going to be more money than what you spent at Midas. Are you okay with that? Yes. Yes. That's what I— super duper. But if they bother to flip and ask, like, it's like, I mean, I don't have a whole lot of faith for them because they can't even ask where the wheel lock key is half the time.

1:53:44Right. So how are they going to ask kind of shit? But if the overlords, thank God, bring down the AI, you know, stuff, maybe we won't have to happen as much, Steve. The appointment is just gonna be like, okay, Mrs. Smith, thank you. So your appointment's for 8 o'clock, uh, you know, at Orleans Dodge, and, um, please have your key ready. And, um, you know, we'll— can't wait to see you.

1:54:08You know, coffee. That's how this shit could work. Exactly. You could eliminate half the problems by creating standard operating procedures for service writers, right? When you're booking an appointment, make sure you go down this list. Have you checked this? Check this. Check this. Check And right there you'd eliminate so many problems in the shop, like so many. Because we have— yeah, we have SOPs for technicians running out our yin yang, right?

1:54:35How do you go to— how do you test a battery? How do you approach a no-start? There's all kinds of SOPs for that. But for the advisors, hardly any. They just kind of throw them up there and go let them do their thing, let them work their magic. Well, I'm gonna tell you, a lot of them didn't work magic. Oh yeah, they skated by on their, on their, you know Yeah, natural joie de vivre.

1:54:57And then what's that get us? Somebody that really likes them. We never made any flipping money. Yeah. Wow. See, I didn't expect— Steve, I didn't expect you're going to get me so worked up, but that's good. Lots of flashbacks, lots of PTSD from the dealership days. It's all good. Will you stay in Ottawa, you think? I, I mean, I like it here.

1:55:25It's— I, I mean, I, I, I can do all my activities. I can do scuba diving, can play hockey, I can golf, you know. It's— I, I— the climate is starting to bug me as I age, you know, but, uh, yeah, you know, I, I'm I don't think I like— I'm not a person that loves to live in very urban areas. Like, I wouldn't be downtown Ottawa or Toronto.

1:55:53That even frightens me just thinking about it. Like, I, you know, so, but moving out someplace more rural where I'd have more land and be able to have a big shop, oh, that'd be, it'd be a little dream. Maybe get a, you know, a muscle car to You know, to have a little project to work on, you know, in my retirement days.

1:56:16It's— yeah, we could go to the cruise night at Place d'Orléans on Thursday night. I don't know if they still do that, you know. I remember going there all the time, and there was a lot of people that came from the Quebec side that were for that cruise night. So that was always fun. Yeah, those things still happen. Yeah, they have, uh, they have a lot of good dive sites right around Kingston if you're ever in the, in the, in the area.

1:56:34Into some of them, there's some pretty amazing stuff. Even if you go out Bay of Quinte towards Picton you can kind of see where the arrow, the plane, some of them got dropped into the— and there's a couple of those pieces still on them. So I mean, it's pretty— not that I don't, I don't dive. When I was a kid, I thought I would really like to do that, but I never got into it.

1:56:53But I know there's a lot, there's a lot of wrecks in Lake Ontario, I'll tell you that. Yeah. So water's cold, I'll tell you that. It's flipping cold. And I know right off of Michigan, there's a lot of really good wrecks too. And some of them are in a lot more shallower water, like 20 feet down. You find old, old boats. So I want to thank you for coming on.

1:57:14I really enjoyed this. There was— you really taught me a lot about what in Quebec, because I had a lot of preconceived notions that I didn't— I didn't know there was a license kind of certification in Quebec, period, because of my little exposure to my corner of the world. I thought, yeah, yeah, that way. So thank you for sharing that with me.

1:57:34I definitely want to have you come back on. We need to talk about you know, the more of where it's going and where you see yourself going and the, the dealership, you know, struggles. Because a lot of my listeners are dealership techs. A lot of them are. And that's a lot of when we see the comments of people that are really frustrated in the industry, it's a lot of the dealership guys and girls.

1:57:56And, you know, people just like, the answer immediately is like, oh, we'll just leave the dealer. It's not so simple. Yeah. If everybody just left the dealer tomorrow, there's not enough employment opportunities outside the dealer network for every technician out there. It just doesn't happen. And I have said it before and I'll say it again, a lot of places that if you were to leave the dealer and go to just the wild, wild west of some of the independents, you're jumping out of the really hot pan into a fire in some of them in terms of tooling and training and pay and whatever conditions, whatever you wanna talk about.

1:58:27That's not all of them. But it's a lot of them. So, uh, closing thoughts, Steve? Well, I, I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to, to come on your, uh, podcast. And, uh, keep doing what you do because a lot of us out there that are in the trade really enjoy watching your podcast and we learn a lot from it. So keep pushing because it's, it's much appreciated.

1:58:53All right, a lot of fun. It really is, honestly. And I mean, it— I love the fact that like you and I have probably driven down some of the same streets and, and, you know, probably not worked on the same cars, but you never know, right? And I mean, and I think that's just cool, cool as hell because, you know, as big this— as this world is, I have a real soft spot for that area, right?

1:59:14The Ottawa-Ottawa kind of area I just absolutely love. And I think it's absolutely cool that, you know, you reached out to me. And anyone else that's listening, listen, I don't really care where you live, you know, if you listen and wanna have a conversation, please get a hold of me and, you know, and, and share with me your thoughts and perspectives and experiences and all that jazz, because I just love it.

1:59:35I love hearing it. I think it— we all have something to offer, and I think that we only improve this if we start sharing, you know, the struggles. That's it. It's not to run the industry down. It's just to share, like, Steve's obstacles and perspectives and what he's felt, what the industry has done to his passion. And how he still managed to conserve that passion, that says a lot.

1:59:58And I think that we, if we're going to fix anything, we need to really look at that as being just the tip of that iceberg that we talk about with mental health with so many of us, you know, because it's a grind. And we knew it's a grind when we got into it, and we know it's a grind after we've been in a while and we stay with it.

2:00:14But that doesn't mean that because it's a grind we can't make it better. And I think at some point now we have to really look at what's going on and make it better. So as always, thank you to my friends at Launch Deck USA for the sponsorship. My family at TechMetric, thank you. Um, you guys, I can't do it without you. You make everything possible here.

2:00:36Um, the merch store is up. We had another— Riley Spence had his little young daughter with our onesie on. So I need to rep in the merch store and tell you guys, remind everybody that the merch store is just trying to raise funds to send people to training. That's what it is. Uh, Jeff's not buying a new bass boat with the merch funds.

2:00:52You know, it's just we're trying to give back with that. So, you know, if you feel like you want to look at my mug on a, on a coffee mug, or you want to see my ugly face on a hat, then run over to the merch store and, you know, mind the tariffs and, uh, swag. So Steve, thank you for coming on, man.

2:01:12Um, thank you. I'm gonna look you up next time I'm in Ottawa, okay? All right, yeah, please do. We'll grab a beer and some chicken wings or something and, uh, and shoot the bull when we don't have to record it. So everybody, I love you. Thank you all. Hey, if you could do me a favor real quick and like, comment on, and share this episode, I'd really appreciate it.

2:01:34And please, most importantly, set the podcast to automatically download every Tuesday morning. As always, I'd like to thank our amazing guests for their perspectives and expertise, and I hope that you'll please join us again next week on this journey of change. Thank you to my partners in the ASAR Group and to the Changing the Industry podcast. Remember what I always say, in this industry, you get what you pay for.

2:01:56Here's hoping everyone finds their missing 10mm, and we'll see you all again next time.