Ep 148: AVTECC Can Be the Change This Industry Needs with Dave Macholz

0:00Instead of having technicians come in and take a multiple choice test that, you know, that's assessing their knowledge, we're really assessing the skills that, you know, technicians go to signal that, you know, they can do the job. So we're trying to flip that script to say, let's help schools make more valuable technicians. You're listening to the Limitless Leadership Podcast, the podcast designed to help automotive repair shops learn how to lead, coach, train, and manage their team better by sharing proven techniques and thought-provoking interviews from industry leaders.

0:32Are you ready to transform your leadership skills by tapping into unrecognized potential to achieve limitless results? Let's get ready for liftoff. It's time to go from great to greater. Here's today's episode. Alright, welcome back to the Limitless Leadership Podcast. Today I got a friend of mine who is a friend of the podcast. He's been on the podcast before. Uh, he is the founder and CEO of Avtech.

1:04Uh, you're gonna share the acronym again for our audience, but our guest today is my friend Dave Macholtz. Dave, thanks for being here, man. Hey, thank you. It's my pleasure. Uh, well Dave, uh, if you would, as always, I always ask every guest, share with the audience who you are, what you do, how you do it. I know we've heard from you before, but for those who haven't, go ahead and share with the audience all those things.

1:24Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, my name is Dave Machold, uh, founder and CEO of AVTEC, which stands for the International Advanced Vehicle Technology Education and Credentialing Coalition. So yeah, it's a mouthful. Yeah, dropping the I though. Yes. Okay. Yeah, we just, we dropped the I just for the, the two-syllable piece of, you know, communicating. There you go. You know, as, as simply as possible, you know, what we do in a, in a name that's hopefully rec— starting to become recognizable to some folks.

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3:57Well, I, I'll say, uh, from the outside looking in, it's definitely becoming more and more recognizable, and I'm excited about what you're doing, uh, just like I was excited about what you were doing 6 to 8 months ago whenever you and I first, first met on the podcast. Share with the audience what AV-TECH is and what exactly you guys are doing that I'm referencing.

4:16Yeah, so AV-TECH's a new— call us a 501 certification body. So our primary mission is to certify technicians, but do it in a way that we have not in the past, which is performance-based testing. So in other words, instead of having technicians come in and take a multiple choice test that, you know, that's assessing their knowledge, we're really assessing the skills that, you know, technicians go to signal that, you know, they can do the job.

4:45And employers are, you know, ultimately using that as, you know, some sort of validation, right? So to speak, or a currency, right? A skills currency where, you know, technicians can demonstrate what it is that they're doing to their employer. In a meaningful way, right? Not just that they know it, but that they can do it. Uh, and how that kind of plays out is, um, you need folks to be able to run the testing, do the testing.

5:10So our first phase of this is really starting with schools. Uh, so we have 4 pilot schools that we just introduced across the United States. Excellent. Uh, yeah, hang on a second, audience, because I don't want to glaze over this. 4 pilot schools already that you guys are testing with essentially. So I want to just say congratulations. Like, that's, that's a, that's a huge accomplishment.

5:31Yeah. Thank you. You know, and a lot of those schools were hand raisers. They were people that said, hey, you know, we want to be the change in the industry. Yeah. And we really want to give this a shot. So they've become champions for this thing, which is really cool. And those schools are MassBay Community College up in the West Boston area.

5:51Umpqua Community College out in Roseburg, Oregon. Who else? Parkland College in the state of Illinois. And last but certainly not least is Collin College down in Allen, Texas, or really Dallas-Fort Worth-Plano area. Yeah, yeah. So really, really good schools, great programs already. They want to take their programs to the next level through certifying the skills of their students. So they're starting to pilot now We have 3 current certifications that they're working through and piloting.

6:23One of them is a maintenance certification, right, that really requires that the students or the technician to go through an entire maintenance procedure. Right. And part of that stems from work that I did at Suffolk Community College as a dean years ago, where we had students going out to the worksite where we had never done that validation. And we had an employer come back to us and say, You know, it's great that your students have all these certifications, but they can't put a car on a lift and they can't do a full service.

6:52So, you know, when you look at sort of the technician shortage and you look at the number of young people that are in the pipeline in accredited programs, right? So ASE accreditation has been around for years. They have pushing 2,500 schools, you know, on their numbers alone. There's probably 50,000 graduates a year, right? We only need like 68,000. So why is the school system not the answer?

7:20We think it's because we've been kind of going about things the wrong way. Yeah, right. We haven't been looking enough at the skill set of the students in these programs, but also helping and empowering the teachers in the programs to be able to facilitate competency-based instruction that results in the skills that employers are hiring and promoting for. So, but you also wind up with this kind of a mismatch, so to speak.

7:45So in other words, an accredited program like my program at Suffolk before I left there, we had, you know, program accreditation, which basically said, you know, we were doing a certain amount of hours. It was a master certified program, right? And we struggled to cover the content that we needed to cover. So when you look at that, right, if you're communicating as a school to the employer that you have a master-certified program, right, and the student walks into a worksite saying, yeah, I've completed all these classes, if all of a sudden the employer's perception is that student can't do the job, there's all of a sudden this distrust of education.

8:29It certainly raises a lot of questions. It raises a ton of questions, and it's not the school's fault. Right? The school is working from a system, right? And it's content deep and skills shallow. So really what we're doing is looking at what does a student need to be successful in sort of those first 3 to 5 years, right? So they don't fall out of this system.

8:50You know, I forget what the podcast was. I was perusing the internet the other day and I saw a podcast where it was an employer and he was talking about being frustrated that a student had come in had a lot of certifications, right? And he was asked to do an alignment and he said, can you do an alignment? And this— the guy that he hired said, well, yeah, right?

9:15And he passed the class, right? He passed the alignment class in school and he had certification saying that he knew how to do an alignment. But when it came to actually putting the truck on the rack and checking things like tire pressure, he missed it. And he missed a poll and all the numbers were right and he was standing there trying to figure out.

9:35So the employer was frustrated because the student was saying, hey, I have these skills, but they were given the false sense that they had those skills because they passed a class that wasn't competency-based. So in other words, I go through a program, I take a multiple choice test at the end, and I get a C. Does it mean I could do the work?

9:55Mm. No. And that's really where we come in with this is we're not saying, you know, accreditation isn't valuable that's out there or certifications aren't valuable. It's just not enough. Right. And we need more evidence. And that's really what AVTECH is doing is creating that evidence that employers want to hire. Right. When you think about just the hiring process, I know you talk about this all the time.

10:18What's the cost of acquisition of a new employee or a lost employee? It costs 6 to 9 months of their salary to replace them. Right. So our thought process is at scale, and we've, we've heard this from some of the industry groups that we're working with and some industry partners. Hey, once this school is up and running, before I hire somebody, I know they don't go to the program at Collin College or Umpqua Community College, but could we pay the school to run a skills validation on someone before we hire them?

10:47Yeah. And, and that's where this is going. That's a pre-purchase inspection. Exactly right. And what would you pay for that, right? If it costs tens of thousands of dollars to hire a new person, why not spend whatever the cost would be to send them down to the local school who now becomes more engaged with that community? They're adding a value to, to what they're providing for the community because it goes beyond just the students in their population and they become the skills center right, for that region.

11:18So that's where all of this goes in sort of a futuristic mindset of what this looks like in a few years. But it's starting small, starting with 4 schools, building it, proof of concept, and really scaling that here in the near future. It's no secret in our industry that speed of service sells. As our world moves faster, instant gratification isn't a want, it's an expectation.

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12:50If you take your beard game seriously, this is the stuff that you need. And because you're part of the Limitless Leadership Podcast family, I've got a deal for you. Just visit thebeardedbrotherhood.co/lead15 to grab your favorite products and get 15% off in the process. Because a great leader deserves a great beard. Now, back to today's episode. Dave, I think it's— I really commend you for this task that you have chosen to, you know, this flag that you've chosen to pick up and carry.

13:26This is a heavy flag. Like, you know this. And I want our audience who's listening to know this as well. This is not an easy task that you're doing. Uh, ASC's been around for years and, and I like the way that you shared, like, you're not discrediting the accreditation from ASC, but it's, it's not enough. It's not enough because to your point, someone could take a multiple, uh, multiple choice test and they get a C.

13:53Even if they got an A, it doesn't mean that they can actually do the work. So a, a, a, uh, a knowledge-based test doesn't necessarily equate to skills. So being able to pair the two, have the knowledge and the skills, is, is huge. You know, our, our friend and, and believer and backer in Avtech, Dutch Silverstein, this guy is a former pilot.

14:12He's a shop owner, former pilot, and he's like, look, I can't— I couldn't have just taken a test, just a, a knowledge-based, uh, test to be a pilot and then go fly a commercial airline with, you know, 300 passengers on board. It, it's, you can't do that. And the, the reality is, think about like what other industry, uh, experiences this type of situation where there are lives at stake.

14:42The safety of someone's vehicle being worked on by someone who has simply taken a, taken a test and gotten a good score on it without actually testing their skills. That's, uh, that doesn't, as a customer or a guest in a shop, That doesn't make me sleep well at night. No. I mean, especially now, right? You look at ADAS systems, right? What percentage off can you be on an ADAS calibration?

15:06Right. And how do you test for an ADAS calibration or someone's, you know, capacity to carry that, carry that calibration out? How do you test that on a multiple choice test? You just really can't. Yeah. Now, this is coming from somebody that has worked with Motor Age and written study guides around the L4 exam. Right? I've been involved in that world too.

15:28And so I realize what the limitations of that are, right? And to go back, you know, I'm not discrediting the value of investing in yourself, right? In fact, yeah, we would encourage anyone that's in our program to continue traditional certification. Yeah. But to add to that, right? Because the more qualifications that you have and the more credentials you have, in my opinion, it it's going to help you communicate your skill, you know, your passion for the industry and whatnot.

15:56So it's not to discredit what the work that's been done, but at the same time realize, you know, in an ADAS world, you need to have at least some evidence of what someone can do. Yeah. You know, and insurance companies are interested in that. Body shops are interested in that, right? Especially now where you see litigation. Yeah, against technicians, body shops. Right.

16:21And there are law practices that are looking at ADAS as a field. Right. That's kind of terrifying. Sure. Yeah. Right. Especially if you're a shop and you're saying, well, how do I have evidence that the people that I'm hiring can do the work? So that's, that's really why we started in the advanced vehicle space. So I mentioned the maintenance certification that we do.

16:40We have an ADAS calibration technician certification. We have an EV safety certification, and both of those exams are hands-on, right? So it's a little bit different than showing up to a test center. You have to show up to a shop essentially, or one of the schools, right? The schools are piloting these and you're given a vehicle, you're given the service information that you were trained on, and it's, hey, go do this.

17:06And really what the test looks like where you, where you think of, okay, well, how is it scored? These are pass/fail tests, right? There's not like, hey, I did one thing unsafely. Well, guess what? If you do that at work, right, and it's, it's your life or the life of somebody else, it's not okay. So it really actually changes the way that we look at testing, you know.

17:29And if you think of testing as a tool, right, most technicians understand tools. You use the right tool for the right job, right? And Really, it's not ours is better, right? It's what's the right tool to measure skills competency. And the way to do that is to test people hands-on. If you're listening to this episode, I'm gonna encourage you to watch this episode.

17:52It's happening live at the, well, not live. I mean, this is gonna be, you know, we, by the time this airs, Dave, this is gonna be months away. But, but we are recording this episode live at the 2025 Apex Show in Las Vegas here at the Venetian. And, um, uh, if you are listening, watch it on YouTube at The Bearded Leader. Um, Dave, since the last time you and I have spoke— spoken, um, so you guys are now in 4 different schools.

18:19Uh, what is— actually, before I ask what's next for AVTECH, what's, what's on the horizon for you guys? Um, typically I'd share— I'd ask this question towards the end of the episode, but I'll ask now. How can our listening audience get in touch with you and AVTEC and find out about how to attend, where to attend, you know, where to go to attend these schools as well?

18:38Sure. Easiest way is to go to our website, which is www.3dots.org, right? AVTEC.org. And on our website, there's some ways to get ahold of us via email, some contact forms, sign up for our mailing list. We also have an opportunity for folks that look at this and say, hey, we'd like to get behind this movement. We're very much at an early phase.

19:10We're about a year and change into AVTECH, and a lot of what we're doing right now is, you know, through the support of industry, but also individuals who have said, hey, I'd like to you know, support the mission and they've made a monetary donation to our 501, which is awesome. And that's, that's allowing us to, to, to get out in the public, you know, have a lot of these conversations and really start to, you know, create that movement.

19:33So that's a way for folks to get involved. If, you know, there are educators out there that listen to your podcast, what we're doing with them that's really, really exciting is we've created something called Automotive Instructors Institute. So we're going to be down in Texas in January, January, the week of January 12th to the 16th, 2026. Okay. And we're running an Automotive Instructors Institute there.

19:59And that's an opportunity for folks that might want to get involved with this at their school to come to a training event, get trained on 3 different certifications, at least during that time period. And then, you know, essentially have the tools and whatnot that they need to go back to their home institutions to start to implement this. So that's a really exciting thing.

20:21And, you know, this has gotten the attention of industry. You know, I'm here this week, which is awesome. Yeah, we just announced a new corporate sponsor, Pico Technology. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. That's awesome. And, you know, really, we're building an alliance of folks from industry who, you know, see this as a way forward. Yeah. You know, we really want to make sure that technicians have the skills that they need to be successful.

20:47And, you know, in working with organizations like PECO and TopDon, we're starting to talk about, well, how do we improve our training and credentialing pipeline, you know, throughout the industry? So they're not just partners monetarily. They're partners that really, truly want to work with us to bring this to scale, which is awesome. It's, it's incredible to see how many people recognize what this can do for the industry.

21:11And we know that it can do a lot. We know that in order to do so, it requires change and change is hard. People don't love change. In fact, people really resist change. I'll ask you, you talked about how it's gaining attention within the industry. I'd imagine good, bad, and indifferent. Oh, sure. Can you speak to the, um, let, let me ask you this, cause I'm, and I'm, I'm careful with how I, how I phrase this.

21:34Phrase this question, but what, what is the, what is the real reason for the kickback and the pushback on, on, you know, we're not talking about replacing something, we're talking about adding something so that a, an industry can, can, can truly change for the better to, to protect our guests and to, um, to, to create more credibility for our, our, our industry.

22:00What is the reason for the pushback? Well, you know, I think this is a loaded question. See, I'm careful with asking. You're careful with answering. Well, put it this way. You know, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, Ralph Nader had written a book called Unsafe at Any Speed. And at that point in time, there were all sorts of congressional hearings around vehicle safety.

22:28But technician competence came up, you know, and at that point in time, the dealers got together. It's mostly the dealers and some people from, from industry. And they went to Congress and they said, well, look, we don't, we don't want to have technician licensing. And they, they essentially leaned on a guy from Princeton University who had started a company called Educational Testing Services.

22:55Who's actually the parent of the GRE and, you know, graduate school entrance exams, things like that. And he said to the automotive industry, I can help you build an exam and that exam will show competency. Hmm. So at that point in time, the government accepted that as the standard, right? You move forward with a voluntary certification system. So I think, you know, when we're coming out and saying, look, less than 20% of people hold a voluntary certification in our industry.

23:28And when you have hundreds of thousands of people, that means that you have hundreds of thousands of people that we have no idea whether they can do this job or not, right? So I— That's scary. Yeah, and I think when we start to talk about that as the reason for AVTECH existing, you know, there are probably people that look at that and say, well, you know, they're attacking the current system.

23:49If the current system was working right, we wouldn't be sitting here having the conversation. Very well said. You know, it's a piece of the puzzle, but it's not the whole puzzle, you know? And I think especially now with safety, it's something that, you know, I've done quite a lot of technical training. I've been involved with great companies over the years. Yeah. Both secondary, post-secondary, also, you know, training for WorldPac and, you know, different organizations for for quite some time.

24:18And I guess my point in saying that is when you do training, one of the things that you do when you go out and you train folks, especially for large entities, like I do a lot of training for the City of New York around the vehicle electrification and things like that. And they would say, well, what does somebody get at the end of one of these classes that is evidence that they can do the job?

24:39And how do you answer that? Well, well, they get a certificate of completion. Yeah. Right? Or if they go out and they take a safety exam that's online, but if they get a 70 and pass it, right? What does that mean? Does that mean they can actually do the job? Means I'm taking my car somewhere else. That's right. I mean, so when we talk about certification, right, there are no perfect exams, but it goes back to alignment.

25:05So I think a lot of the pushback that we have as an organization is from challenging the fact that we don't have a way of measuring technician proficiency, right? We'll never really truly call it competence, even with a skills-based assessment, because you're assessing a person, you know, one period of time, not over a long time. Great point. Right. But in terms of the alignment, right, we feel that, you know, the way that we're going about things is the way to go.

25:33So that's where I see a lot of the pause. And, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of things going on right now. Think about right to repair. Yeah. Right. The independent repair market is saying to the OEMs, we should have the same rights and availabilities of and access to everything that you have for your dealer technicians. Right. And I look at that and I go, yeah, I completely agree.

26:03But there's one caveat for me. What is the independent repair market saying is the qualification of their technicians as, as compared to the technicians that are in an OEM that have factory training? We don't have a factory training program. What is our qualification program? You know, so that's where I think what we're saying is a little disruptive, right? Because that's a, that's a massive movement, right?

26:30To repair. Right? Uh, and I— but I think you have to look at all of this together and say, as an industry, if we want to get better, the first thing that you have to do when you want to change something is kind of admit there's a problem. Yeah, that's right. Right. Very well said. And, and, and also to that point, you have to also have enough pain, right, to motivate you to get to that change.

26:52So I, I think, you know, the reason that we're experiencing some pushback, let's say, is because you're challenging something that has existed in the quiet of our industry and has not been brought to the forefront. And we're, we're challenging that to say, hey, we're admitting we think there's a problem, right? If you have 120,000 students in schools every single year and you don't have enough people to fill the industry, and we're spending tens of millions of dollars trying to recruit and retain people, yeah, there's an issue.

27:29And how do we get to the underpinnings of that? And that's where I think, you know, maybe I'm unpopular for bringing those things. Well, hey, look, I, I really appreciate, um, I really appreciate the fact that you're introducing this, um, this pain, uh, that's very evident. So it's, you know, we'll call it the PAS method. You're gonna introduce the pain, agitate, and then here's a solution.

27:49So PAS, pain, agitate, and solution. And AvTech is certainly a solution. No one's going to want to go to a doctor to have surgery who has only taken a test without actually practicing some, some type of applicable steps to show their, their competency, competency there. No one's going to want to fly a plane with a pilot who has never flown a plane before.

28:14Like, so to me, like the, it's, it's obvious Um, I'll, I'll say, man, like Limitless Leadership podcast and, and Limitless Leadership as a company is gonna agitate this pain with you. So we are certainly in your corner. You know that, you know, I'm a big believer in you and what you do and how you do it. But, um, man, keep on carrying the flag, Dave.

28:34I know it's not easy. Um, I, I wanna ask you, you know, from a leadership standpoint, um, something I believe in when we hire team members, you know, we wanna hire CIA team members, people who are coachable, intelligent, and whoever the right attitude. But when you hire, I believe that you prioritize values over skillset or values over talent or values over, uh, practical application, whatever you wanna call it.

28:58Now, that doesn't mean that you ignore the latter, but you prioritize values over skillset. My comment, and I really, I don't think there's a question, it's more of a comment, is this, like, look, what we're identifying is an opportunity for us to hire and bring on the right people who, who understand how important it is to have values like being coachable, having the emotional intelligence to work with your team and guests, and also bringing the right attitude because we know that, you know, one bad apple can ruin a bunch.

29:28So you hire your CIA team member and you also ensure their level of competency from a performance standpoint through a company like Avtech. Right. I mean, to me, like, this is a match made in heaven. So I know I'm naive in saying this because I'm really thinking like, well, why wouldn't someone want this? Sure. But, uh, but to me, this is, this is where I say like, keep on carrying the flag, like keep on carrying this torch.

29:51Like, this is not easy. I know it's a big lift, but man, you have a lot of people who believe in you and believe in Avtech. And I'm just gonna say, man, keep going and keep growing because this is, it's incredible what you're doing. Well, thank you. You know, and it's so meaningful. To hear from someone like yourself. And yeah, I've definitely felt the support of the industry and we can use more, you know?

30:12So reach out, you know, reach out to me via email. I answer the website email, right? So literally you're not gonna get a boxed, you know— A canned response. Yeah. And it might take me a moment or two to get back to you, but you know, I talk to each and every person that engages with us, you know, at some point. And I could probably do better, you know, but it's something that, you know, we definitely want to be engaged with the people that want to be engaged with us.

30:39And, you know, go back to your point on, you know, measuring other types of skills. You know, in the skills world right now, we call those durable skills, right? So all of your soft skills, your communication skills, do you show up on time? Yeah. And, you know, interestingly, while we're measuring technical skill set, It's just imagine a world in the future where the independent repair shop has a relationship with the community college down the street.

31:05Someone comes in for a job and it's job interview number one, right? And they think they like this person. If they can send them to the local community college for an appointment, right, or local trade school or maybe even a local vendor, you know, it could be a parts training center like a NAPA or whoever. Um, if they send them to that appointment and they show up on time and they're presenting well— like, one of the things that we see too is you could start to measure some of those durable skills.

31:34Did they show up on time? Did they show up for the appointment? So even if it's not an actual checklist item, yeah, you still have some feedback from that site as to did that person have good communication skills, did they keep the appointment, etc. So Yeah, it's, it's sort of holistic when you start to, to look at this from the lens of skillset.

31:54Dave, if I'm a shop owner listening and I have existing team members right now who I want to enhance their performance-based skills, what can I do? How can I involve AV-TECH in my, in, in the training of these, of these technicians? That's a great question. And I think that's a later phase of what we're doing. Yeah. Because we have to get the schools up and running.

32:17But it's something that we're definitely cognizant of, like how do we get shops to have a professional development program that's aligned with what we're doing? And we see the companies that we're working with as logical starting points and looking at things like diagnostics, for example, and having diagnostic certifications around tools and different skill sets. Think about scan tool and scope usage, right?

32:44So there's, there's some exciting things coming right now. We're, you know, we're crawling. We need to get to the point where we're walking. And in order to do that, we need the support of the industry. Yeah. And, and, you know, I think that's something that's coming in the future that if you think about it, right, if you said, well, what does a diagnostic certification look like?

33:08Hands-on. Well, Let's just take the SCOPE, for example, right? If you had to utilize a SCOPE for signal acquisition, could your technicians do it? Could they then take those patterns and interpret them? Well, if they had to take that test, all of a sudden now you start to inform the training world where right now— and this is a whole nother topic for another day— but the training world right now is very much like, well, here's an ADAS class.

33:35Okay, what's the outcome? Well, we're going to tell you about ADAS. Well, can they do the ADAS calibration at the end? Right. So it starts to change the way that I— this is my hope, that our movement starts to change the way our entire industry thinks about training. Yes, I like, I like where you're going with this. And really it becomes about performance improvement, right?

33:58Not so much about the testing, but the process in which to get to the demonstration of the skills requires rethinking and reshaping the way that we're training technicians. I like where you're going with this, Dave. To me, you know, especially with all these events, like we're at APEX. I mean, I'm sure you guys can hear a lot of the background noise. We're right smack dab in the middle of a trade show.

34:18In fact, I think— is that someone just whistling? I think so, yeah. Yeah, so anyway, right smack dab in the middle of a trade show, and it's not even busy yet, which is crazy. But, um, I view events like Apex and then the ASTA Expo and Vision and Tools and all these great, uh, events throughout, throughout the industry. Um, uh, the Sunrise Training and Expo, uh, in July in Arizona.

34:42Uh, and I'm, I, I feel, uh, guilty for leaving people out. I'm trying to think of like, who, who am I leaving out right now? I apologize if I'm leaving you out. There's one every weekend, so you gotta list about another 48, right? Yeah, exactly. But the point is this, you go to training at these events and then what happens beyond that training?

35:00Like what we know is that knowledge without action or application is just information. And the sad thing is a lot of us treat these trainings like the practice that is needed to eventually be in the game. But what about the actual practice? Because that's what you're talking about. Performance improvement comes after the training. So you come to training, get a lot of knowledge.

35:21Now it's time to act. You get back to your shop on Monday and you start working on performance improvement, which is really practice. Right. So a football player is not gonna go to spring training or summer training camp or whatever. And then, and then, uh, without practicing for the games, there's hours of practice for this 5 to 7 minutes of actual game time an average football player plays in a game.

35:45There's so many hours of practice. So my encouragement, and I'm getting amped about this right now, Dave, you can see it, man. Like, go to training, get the knowledge, but put in the practice, practice, practice for the game. And that's the opportunity that a lot of us are missing in the industry right now. Yeah. And you know, we think that what we're building is kind of an ecosystem, right?

36:09It's not just about a test. It's about professionalizing what technicians do. You know, technicians don't get the respect, admiration, right? Compensation. Yeah, right, right. That they deserve. And really, if I had to say anything as we kind of wrap things up, is I am focused on what's going to help technicians. Yeah. Not what's going to help— and I, you know, I know you have a lot of shop owners.

36:34I'm not— I— if we help technicians, we're going to help shop owners. That's right. It's a byproduct. So You know, the other thing is, and this is probably why there's also a little pushback to what we're doing. Okay. When you don't have a licensing structure, right, or like a professionalized structure for technicians, what does that allow employers to do? It allows employers to pay entry-level people less money.

37:00So think about this. The young person— go back to the school scenario— young person goes to school, gets a 2-year degree in automotive technology, has a ton of certifications, and they come out and they go to work. And do you know what our average rate of pay was for our second-year students at Suffolk in their cooperative program? What you got? $16.50 an hour, right?

37:24That was in their last year. That was average, okay? We had some outliers that were at $23, $24 an hour, but $16.50 was the average, right? I can go to Starbucks, right? And go to— what's the place in Texas? Buc-ee's that everybody talks about. Buc-ee's pays real well. Costco. Yeah, Costco. And I can make a living, right? $16.50 an hour, if you do the math on it, is not a living wage, right?

37:50It's not. And what's also happening here is when we've set up the employer in terms of expectations of thinking that that person coming out of the 2-year school is a master certified person, Right. They're not— they don't have the experience yet. Right. But also the training that we imparted to them was content deep, skills shallow. Right. And the employer has every right at that point in time to say, well, I can't pay more than that because they don't have the skills that I need to be able to compensate for them for that.

38:21Yeah. So we're trying to flip that script to say, let's help schools make more valuable technicians. Let's give shop owners value from the educational programs that they're working with. Not that the schools aren't trying, right? They are, but they're playing to a playbook that is aligned around 8 areas of testing, right? Mm-hmm. And master certification in a test that is going to be the predominant way that they're trained to take a multiple-choice test.

38:51We're flipping that script. Yeah. Dumping the pieces out on the table and putting this back together with the skills perspective. And really, I— the, the person that I hope we help the most is the technician. Dave, I can't wait to interview you again, uh, you know, 6 months, a year from now, and find out more about the 4 schools that you guys are currently in.

39:09Plus, by then you're going to be in more schools, I, I, I would imagine. Um, you know, there, there are 2 questions I ask every guest on every episode. The first is, what does leadership mean to you? I'm going to put a, uh, a cliffhanger might not be the right word, but I'm gonna encourage everyone to go back and listen to our first episode that we did together to get your answer to that question.

39:29The second question is always, what is the best advice you've ever received from a coach or a mentor? I'm gonna flip the script on this episode and ask you, what's the best advice you can give to our audience? Boy, well, invest in yourself, right? Um, I think everybody that's here at Apex, right, is probably going to training. So I think, you know, as a person that has higher education and working on my doctorate, right, I believe in the power of education.

39:59I believe in the power of investing yourself in whatever's available. Right? Right. So for those that might also think that we're, you know, not for certification, we are. Go out and invest in yourself. Take certification exams. Find any type of way, especially for our technicians that are listening, listening to provide evidence to the folks that you work for and you work with that you're at the top of your game.

40:27I love that. And I think that's really the best advice that I could get is your investment in education is a lifelong investment that will keep returning benefits long after you pay for that education. Absolutely. Absolutely. Love that, Dave. I look forward to the next time when I get to introduce you as Dr. Dave Mukholz. I hope from your mouth to God's ears.

40:48I hope that's, you know, still a bit of work to go, but, uh, and, and trying to get this off the ground, but all good things. And I hope that's the case. Yeah. Hey man, you're on your way, brother. I appreciate you. I, I really, uh, admire and respect this, this massive, uh, haul that you are undertaking. But man, you're doing a fantastic job.

41:06Keep it up. Thank you. Appreciate that, my friend. Likewise. And, uh, hey, thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for watching the Limitless Leadership Podcast. As you know, uh, every episode we look to transform our leadership skills by tapping into unrecognized potential to achieve limitless results. So thanks again for tuning in. Have a great day, everyone.

41:24Don't forget to smile today. Tell your loved ones how much they mean to you. I'm Josh Parnell reminding you to keep leading well.