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Are You Listening to Tom Brady? [E198] - Diagnosing the Aftermarket A to Z

Are You Listening to Tom Brady? [E198] - Diagnosing the Aftermarket A to Z

Remarkable Results Radio Podcast Aug 20, 2025 25 min
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About this episode

Exploring the wisdom of Tom Brady, this episode emphasizes the importance of hard work, preparation, and teamwork in both sports and the automotive industry. The host draws parallels between Brady's success and the roles of technicians and shop managers, advocating for a collaborative approach to problem-solving. Listeners are encouraged to engage with all aspects of their work environment, fostering accountability and communication. The discussion also touches on the significance of continuous learning and adapting to challenges, making it a thought-provoking listen for those in the automotive field.

Topics: teamwork hard work preparation accountability communication continuous learning shop management diagnostics
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This is the Aftermarket Radio Network.
Welcome everyone to yet another episode of Diagnosing the Aftermarket A to Z. I'm Matt Fonsland.
A lot of times I find the people who are blessed with the most talent don't ever develop that
attitude.
And the ones who aren't blessed in that way are the most competitive and have the
biggest heart.
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Alright, so that isn't a movie quote or a song quote.
I'm kind of deviating from normal.
That is a Tom Brady quote and that is the subject or he is my subject for today's
episode because he recently did an interview that's sparked a little bit of controversy
and I'm not sure why.
But the reality is, is we should be listening to him and I don't mean just shop owners or
managers.
Of course, we they should.
But as technicians, we really should be as well.
I think the reasons are obvious.
He wins a lot or won a lot, succeeds a lot.
And if you watched him, he wasn't, I don't know, athletically, he was the most
gifted quarterback intellectually.
I mean, he wasn't by any means dim, but he wasn't like the smartest that even going up
against Peyton Manning, he might have been second to Peyton.
When it came to that, he learned a lot from Peyton and he would very much admit that.
But I don't know that anyone worked harder than he did.
And of course, he had a system.
So I guess I'm not trying to turn this into the Tom Brady versus Peyton Manning
show because both of them are just absolutely terrific.
And neither of them were athletic specimens.
Neither was very fast.
Neither of them was very coordinated.
Neither of them had just an absolute rocket arm.
Both of them won.
Both of them scared the Jesus out of defenses.
And for good reason, preparation, just dogged preparation, physically, of course, working
out in the gym, but film and taking notes.
And I guess why this is important to me is specifically in this interview, Tom's asked
to talk about the quarterbacks playing now, you know, six of them who are kind of knocking
on the door of winning their first Super Bowl.
Who's most likely to do that?
He won't really answer it because it's really up to them to a degree, right?
It's a team sport and things have to go certain ways.
They have to avoid certain injuries or enough injuries, stuff like that.
And I don't mean just the quarterback themselves, but the entire team.
But ultimately, they do have a lot to do with that.
And I think what Tom led on, which I find fascinating is it wasn't limited to
just him or it wasn't limited to just what he did at the quarterback position.
Sure, that, you know, dominated it.
He worked on himself.
He worked on his abilities and his knowledge and abilities, meaning that just physical,
but also reading defenses, you know, taking great pride in being able to read
a defense and kind of know what they were doing before they did it.
But then also taking great interest in action or involvement
in the other facets of the game, the other like the defense and the special teams
and being involved in that way.
Because as a quarterback, what would he have a fair bit of control over?
Scoring, time of possession, stuff like that.
But you can put up a lot of points if your defense can't stop the other team.
You may not be able to put up enough points.
Therefore, the team has to work together to succeed.
This isn't unlike a shot.
Now, granted, in this interview, Tom talks about the quarterback position
as being kind of like the CEO of the team, especially on Sunday or during a game.
That might be rough from a tech position, technical specialist or mechanical specialist.
Like that's a rough thing to take on.
Some of us are, some of you are absolutely in that position.
That's not so much CEO, but kind of that quarterback position
where you're a shop foreman or a very much a leader in the back are not even that.
I mean, even if you're a service advisor, if you're kind of the leader,
then you can sympathize with this greatly and start taking great interest
in the other aspects of business and how the shop is working.
I'll stick mostly to the back of the house, the technical or mechanical
specialist position that you can start taking interest in the front of house.
And I don't mean just management in itself, which you should, everyone should.
We should have a little bit of an idea of what management is, their role,
why they have to hold us accountable.
But then for us to also be able to hold them accountable.
And I think we could do all that very respectfully.
I think they can hold us accountable respectfully.
I think we could hold them accountable respectfully.
But learning more and more about that, I guess you guys can reach out to me
if I'm forgetting something.
But to me, when it really gets down to brass tax, there's two ways
for a shop to profit more.
That's more tickets or more repair orders, more cars or higher tickets.
I guess I say that with a little bit of a you understood aspect to it
or a little bit of a hopefully where we agree that the dollar dollar
amount isn't as important as like the margins, right?
So there's we have to factor that in.
But fundamentally, more money per ticket, more tickets.
That's really what it boils down to.
I'm not really sure what else we could do to increase profits.
I guess we can lower costs, taking active interest in such things.
What can we do to save money?
And I don't mean cheap out using cheaper, less quality parts.
Probably not a good answer.
Maybe more expensive, better parts ends up being a better answer.
But taking interest in that and getting involved, bringing it up in meetings,
having honest discussions, civil discourse over it, reaching outside
of just our specific area of effect, also found it very interesting
that he was talking about in the team sport.
Sometimes we get the out of when things aren't going well.
It's somebody else's fault.
We're doing whatever we can do.
And I think that affects mechanical technical specialists
specifically that you can look at your production and go like, well,
I'm pulling my weight. What else is going on?
And there might be some truth to that, but then it's getting involved
and trying to help do something about it.
If you're the one cranking out the hours and your colleagues aren't
or maybe one specific colleague, rather than necessarily jumping
to criticism and jumping all over them or going behind their back
and talking crap and just dragging them down further and further,
helping management figure out why you might have a very unique
position or perspective as to why they're struggling.
Maybe it's not them. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not.
Or maybe it's them, but not a competency issue.
Maybe there's something else you can find out about
that's affecting their production levels, stuff at home.
We know, right? There's so many things, not infinite,
but there's a lot of things that can affect how somebody performs.
Can we dig deeper? Can we help management dig deeper?
The whole management accountable for not digging deeper if they're not, right?
There's way too many managers or owners who are kind of armchair
quarterbacking their own businesses where they just kind of look at these
numbers and make assumptions and they don't ask questions.
There's no curiosity to find out anything deeper.
They should be held accountable.
We can do that respectfully, I think that can be held in a private
conversation with the manager or owner and it can be held,
I think again, respectfully during a short meeting.
It's just more than, I would say, our area of effect
that we can start reaching out because the reality is, is our businesses,
the shops we work in or four managers of the business or owners of the business.
I know the sport stuff kind of gets beat to death.
I'm as guilty or more guilty than most, I guess, content generators, if you will.
I know I've done quite a few episodes that involve something to do with sports,
but, you know, we are a team.
I guess we're not a team sport, but we're a team.
It's more than just one individual or even a couple of individuals that help us win.
Where I fear the comparison starts falling apart is,
especially when you think about professional athletes, you know,
the lowest on the totem poles are usually doing pretty darn well for themselves,
both financially and then just like social economics is really high.
Their social value, our social value isn't so good.
So economics would be nice.
So to know not so much like to get paid off before the success,
but that we can trust one another, management and mechanical and technical specialists.
And anyone in the position of the company is, if the company does better,
we're all going to do better.
And not just our pocket books, like, yeah, that should be involved,
but also the work environment that should be always constantly improving.
And I know it's a topic I've touched on many, many times, probably to a nauseating degree,
I don't know, but I can't get over the fact of him talking about that as
getting involved in the other aspects, asking them if they need help or learning more about it
to be able to have some sort of input or at least better understand their hurdles
and what they're up against and what they have to deal with.
And then can you be involved in the solution?
Can you be part of the solution or at least not make things worse?
It's terrifically important.
If that's all we ever took from him in this interview,
that would, I think, be life changing for all of us.
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When he's talking about his personal success,
my BS meter kind of twitches a lot
when successful people talk about their success.
I know I've done an episode or two on just luck.
Luck plays a big factor in success.
Successful people hate that.
That's one way to really tick somebody off
or ruffle their feathers is to assign luck
a significant, whatever that number means,
contribution to their success,
being at the right place at the right time,
meeting the right person at the right time,
having the right skills or being in the best position
to capitalize on an opportunity
or just stuff that's wildly out of your control
about being born when you were born
and where you were born and stuff like that.
I'm sorry. It's a big factor.
I don't think there's anything wrong with admitting it.
I guess it just shows awareness.
A lot of people work really, really, really hard
and don't succeed.
At least, I guess we have to be very careful
about what we define success as,
and this is not going to be the episode
that tries to tackle that monster.
I think we can, at least for a conversation's sake,
agree on a certain level of success,
that there is a lot of people out there
that work very, very hard, maybe in this profession,
maybe not.
They aren't what we would consider successful
and not necessarily due to a lack of work or effort,
but those who are really, really lucky
and don't work aren't successful either.
They can't be.
I think that's a reference to what I talked about
or at least that quote at the beginning
is how many people, maybe not in this profession,
but how many people did you go to school with?
High school, college, they had all the gifts.
Or have you ever read about somebody
that they just, high school was easy
and they got a scholarship and they went to,
I don't want to say this is a common story,
but somebody I know, high school,
they had to put forth zero effort,
very, very minimal effort to get straight A's, A pluses.
It was so easy for them.
And they were in all the advanced classes.
And then they took classes beyond high school
and they were set up and one of them in particular goes to MIT.
And they are immediately this,
the quote unquote dumbest person in the room.
And the problem was like IQ,
they are probably not the lowest,
but because school was so easy,
they never had to learn how to work.
They never had to learn how to study.
And they ended up flunking out of MIT
because they didn't have that skill set.
There is something to that.
I guess if you ever watched the movie Rudy, right?
I'm not sure how accurate it is to real life,
but Rudy Rudiger did not have the physical tools.
He wasn't big.
He wasn't strong.
He wasn't fast.
He had a huge heart.
He was on the practice squad for Notre Dame football.
There is reference to another player who had all the skills
and the lineage came from the right family,
had all the physical tools,
but just never had to put forth effort
because middle school, high school football was easy.
He was so much better than everyone else.
He didn't have to know or learn how to work.
He didn't have to learn how to be good.
But then all of a sudden you're thrust into this world
where everybody's that good, or most.
And all of a sudden the gap in skill and talent isn't so big
and now you suffer.
Tom Brady, I guess sort of being really tall,
which helped at the quarterback position
to be able to throw over even larger people on the front line,
didn't have the big arm, didn't have the fast feet,
wasn't ultra strong.
So he had to learn how to out think.
He had to be able to be a step or two ahead of everybody else
on the field.
I suppose that's a really easy spot to slide in
a basketball reference with like a Larry Bird.
Yeah, he was 6'10".
I know they advertised him at 6'90".
He couldn't jump.
He couldn't run.
But people that would talk about him
and I think the same with Tom Brady, same with Peyton Manning,
they were playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.
The importance of bringing that up is we can't rely on luck,
good, bad or otherwise.
We can control what we can control.
We have to put ourselves in the best position possible for
when luck goes our way that it really goes our way.
And that's where the hard work, the determination comes in.
And that's what Tom Brady talks about and many other successful people.
If you ask them why they're so successful,
they'll say they were willing to do things others were not.
And I don't think they're lying maybe to a degree,
just not maybe recognizing how hard other people are working.
But generally, in many cases,
they were willing to work 16-hour days, 14-hour days,
20-hour days for a while.
They were willing to risk everything.
It could have blown up.
There's a lot of people that risk everything and lose everything.
They didn't.
I mean, what else do they have to reference?
But still, you have to be willing to work.
You have to be willing to put in the effort.
You have to be willing to put yourself in the best position possible
to succeed because, I mean, if you don't,
what are you going to do?
Just sit and wait and hope that luck works out.
You can't do that.
But when you do put in the work and the effort and you're determined
and you stick with it and you follow a plan
or you modify your plan to put yourself in a better position
to succeed and a better position to succeed,
that when you do finally succeed, again, whatever that means,
you can say that you succeeded because you worked so hard
and were willing to work harder than everybody else
and forget about all the luck that may have contributed to it.
But I'm not on a mission about luck,
but really, seriously, you can then tribute that to your hard work
and the effort put in and the amount of effort,
not just in the studying of whatever or devising means to be faster.
If you're a mechanical specialist to be more productive
or technical specialist to arrive at an accurate conclusion sooner,
very important, but also being willing to look at your plan
and look at your process and be able to alter it to evolve it over time.
That's extremely important as well.
So yeah, I guess it really comes down to it.
You might want to check out the interview with Tom Brady.
You might want to go through a lot of his interviews
and listen to what he has to say.
You can probably pick up a few things during the broadcasts
when he's talking, same with like Troy Aikman,
I think there's stuff to pick up.
These guys won Super Bowls.
The ultimate in team success for football.
What is the ultimate for team success in auto repair, right?
Profitability, the ability to take care of everyone,
to pay them, offer benefits, improve their work conditions, and grow.
That would be ultimately the success, right?
From a management standpoint also to work towards
giving people the ability to take joy in their work, often forgotten about.
But one of the stalwarts of American thinkers,
W. Edward Stemming, was big about that.
We get to cherry picking what people like that say
and forget about everything they said.
I don't mean forget everything they said,
but we pick what we want to remember and what we want to use
and what we want to reference.
And forget about some of the other golden nuggets that they tossed out there,
stuff that was still very important to the overall success
of the business as well as our own.
So with that, I would like to note that Tom Brady,
when talking about quarterbacks, did not feel Josh Allen was one of those.
So sorry, Trace, too bad you aren't here to defend him.
I don't know what you're going to do to defend him.
He's got all the talent in the world.
I don't know if he takes interest in defense and special teams and all that,
but I don't know.
He did not get the blessing from the great Tom Brady,
so that can't be good.
I'm joking.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not joking, but I'm teasing and just kind of jabbing
to people that actually allow this podcast to exist.
Maybe a strategic error on my part.
Oh, well, I got to be me, right?
A little bit of ribbing.
They're from Buffalo, New York.
Guess who they root for?
Anyways, thank you very, very much for listening.
I hope you got a kick out of this.
If you have anything to add or feel I missed anything
or any topics you'd like me to cover or any input,
please don't hesitate to reach out to me.
You can email me at matfonsilpodcast.gmail.com.
You can also track me down on social media.
Again, I just really would like to thank our sponsors,
Napa Autotech Training and Pico Technology.
And also, I'm going to toss out a thank you
to the Aftermarket Radio Network
because I have to brawn those after ribbing their quarterback.
Sorry about that, not really.
And also urge you to maybe check out
some of the other content generators or providers,
if you will, of the Aftermarket Radio Network, except Craig.
Okay, especially Craig.
I think I'm going to be on Craig's show,
so that might be one worth skipping.
I don't think so.
It might be really good.
Sean's going to be on there.
That's his famous brother.
So yeah, I would say definitely check that one out
to listen to the sheer brilliance of Sean O'Neill.
Yes, let's do that.
Thank you again for listening.
And until next time, take care.
Come on the show.
Matt is all for advancing the Aftermarket.
Find Matt Fonzlo on social media and connect
or on aftermarketradionetwork.com.

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