Becky Witt Talks Technicians and Customer Communication

If you're just dying for Chick Fil a and you won't take any other substitutions and you want a Chick Fil A on Sunday, what do you do? You wait till Monday. So when I tell people, when we went from doing business four days a week to only being open three days a week, what happened? We wrote more tickets, but he said those guys make a lot of money. Or he said, you can hire somebody who has potential to become a unicorn and train them.

Yeah, a thousand percent.

All right, so this all sounds good, but it takes years to train somebody running a business. You need somebody today. And frankly, I have spent too much of my life being mom to all these mechanics that really have trouble fixing a sandwich. So the first half of my class is financials. This is a class that I wrote probably 20 years ago. I got a degree in business. I majored in accounting. I've taken as many hours as it takes to be a cpa.

Okay.

So I understand it.

All right?

I bought a senior level textbook, cost accounting. I read the book. 356 pages. I spent 155 hours to write this class, to read the book. And it's all about cost. Accounting is the science of eliminating steps in a process that add cost but not value.

Right.

So the perfect example of that is you. You got two Tauruses in for brakes. You had the brake pads on the shelf for the first one. You didn't have the brake pads on the shelf for the second one. So now you've wasted 15 minutes of technician time waiting for the parts store to deliver the brakes. So you park them out front. Which one cost you more? Well, you'd say. One person would say they cost you the same.

No, they didn't. Because you got 15 minutes of wasted time on this one.

Yeah.

So I said, here's how we're going to do this. We're going to look at gross profit per hour. The industry wants you to look at percentages, which is fine. But I take two examples. The first one is, is a, a job like a rear main seal. The parts are nothing. It's all labor.

Right.

And this is the problem with selling diagnostics because there are no parts.

Right.

It's all labor. This is why everyone says you can't make money with diagnostics. Well, that's funny, because I do, because I charge.

Yeah.

For it. And I have eliminated about a bunch of makes of cars that I don't take them in. I only take in Hondas and Toyotas. So we learn the product, we get to Be real good at it. Most of the things that happen We've seen 50 times before. It's easy.

Yeah.

And that. The first. The first half of the class is all about how to make money so you can pay a unicorn.

Right.

So once you can pay a unicorn. Oh, now you got it. So then the second part of the class is, how do you do the things that would attract a unicorn? Gotta have a clean shop. Gotta have all update equipment. And the big kicker for me was a short work week.

Yes. Yep.

So as you increase your efficiency, you build more hours.

So, ladies and gentlemen, who you just listened to is a really good friend of mine, Becky Witt, who I'm a new fan of Becky Witt in the sense that, like, I'm chubby and I like donuts. So Becky started with a series, Donuts with Becky a few months ago. And so I'm not a shop owner, I'm just a tech. I'm not. Somebody admonished me yesterday and they said, don't just keep calling yourself a technician, just a technician. I'm a technician, but I'm a technician that's been through who I network with. And as long as what I've been doing, I've started to get into what makes one business more successful than another business, what makes one business have a better culture than another business. And Becky has been the most effective person I've seen to date in being able to take things and simplify it to such a effective rudimentary.

Get your point across as fast, efficiently as possible as anybody. I've had the pleasure of starting to follow and read and everything else. So that's Mrs. Becky Witt for us. And I just wanted to sit down with her today. She gave you kind of a little synopsis of what her class was today here at ASTA 2024. And, Becky, thank you for sitting down with me.

Well, it's my pleasure.

Yeah.

I. Go on.

Oh, please do.

Because now I talk about what would a unicorn not want? A unicorn doesn't want to work on junk.

Yep.

And shop owners are frequently their own worst enemy because they think, I need money, I'll take this in, or I've got a great customer. Great customer. They just. They just bought a Peugeot and they got a great deal on it.

Yeah.

And they said, I really need you to work on this. So we're afraid we'll lose the whole account if we don't take in the Peugeot. Yeah, it's a nice Peugeot. Leaks oil, doesn't run right, needs stuff fixed.

Sounds like a Peugeot?

Yeah, it's a Peugeot.

Yeah.

It's no accident that I would mention a Peugeot. And they finally say, well, can you just change oil? I just had this happen just a few days ago. One of my former customers bought a Kia. I said, I don't do Kias. Well, can you just do oil changes? I said, here's the deal. Nobody makes money on an oil change. Everybody says, can you just do an oil change? There's a lot more that's needed.

Right.

So you need an engine, air filter. I don't have that. And she said, I get it. Okay? But as I explained in my class, I look at gross profit per hour, and then I break it down by the minute. There's 60 minutes in an hour. And I showed them, you want to make money, and you're going to service a car and maintenance a car, you need to have on hand air filter, wiper blades, battery.

Yep.

And I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but it was like hundreds. $350 an hour to put on an air filter. Because it's minutes.

Yeah.

300 bucks gross profit an hour to do wiper blades. We're overlooking this because it's. It's. There's no money in it. Look at an air filter. Okay, well, price it so there is money in it and put it in. We're. We're doing this too hard.

The reality is, if we break things down to the minute now, things starts to come into focus better.

So can I ask you right there, when you say price it so that you can move it, are you referring to the markup of the part, or are you talking about the labor on the install?

You got great questions, Jeff.

I do?

Yeah.

I know. It's gross profit per hour, which is labor and parts. Doesn't matter. The example that I gave to the class was you've got a rear main seal to put in, which has hardly any parts and all labor. And when you break it down, you're about $500 short of making your gross profit per hour. So what do you do? Well, the first guy in the first row says, you just add dollars to the job until it does match what you need. Bingo. There's your answer.

And. And the second example that I used was a catalytic converter. The converter is 1200 bucks. The dealer only gives you 20% off. It's only an hour labor to put it on. So your whole gross profit is going to be 27%.

Yeah.

So what do you do? You can turn the job away. Sublet it or mark it up to industry standards. Fine. So I point out that your gross profit on the part is going to be 240 bucks. Gross profit on the labor is going to be 150 bucks. So you got about 390 bucks gross profit. What you need is 150 bucks an hour to run your shop. So your gross profit is 390 bucks.

You only need 150. Why do you care about the percentage? Yeah, it's the same with your engine air filter.

Great point.

So. So your engine air filter, maybe, maybe you've got 20 bucks profit in. It takes two minutes to put in. So now 20 bucks 20 times 30 minutes is what, 600 bucks. So you're going to make 600 bucks an hour by putting an air filter in.

Yeah.

Not bad.

No. Yeah, you can do that all day.

Yeah.

Lots of jobs that aren't going to be that easy to implement that exactly.

So well. But, but what happens is we're taught as an industry that we need to have 60% gross profit total and we're ignoring how long that takes. And then we need to go a step further, Jeff, and forget about build hours and look at actual minutes we're at work. Because if we are, if we are taking too long between jobs, we're wasting an hour between jobs. Well, that's not accounted for if we're only looking at build hours.

That's right. Exactly.

So let's start looking at how long we're at work. As we start to eliminate these different steps, we actually can shorten the work week. So what I found originally was my shop is not on a main drive. I don't have a lot of drive by customers. I don't have a prime location to find my place. It takes a compass, a map and a Sherpa guide to get you there. I decided there ain't much going on Friday afternoon. So we're going to start closing Friday at noon.

So we closed Friday at noon. Sales didn't go down well. Then we. Nobody wanted to make an appointment for Friday morning because we're only open till noon. So we started closing Friday. Altogether, sales did not go down. So now I got a four day week and I'm working real hard to find a unicorn because I know if I got a unicorn, I can bill more hours than we've been billing. So my ad listed all the cool things that we do and it concluded with, I'll pay you for five days, you work for three.

Sign me up.

I know. I had 30 guys apply for the Lube Tech position, I couldn't get anybody to apply, and in walks my unicorn. He's worked like every place in town. Doesn't like the ethics, doesn't like the way the place is run, doesn't like this or that. And we just were a perfect match. We think exactly alike on taking care of a car. Like, you got a few oil leaks. So what? So what, is it broken? Could I fix it? Could I make money fixing it? Yeah.

Does it really benefit the customer? No. If they got a leak, they're going to tell me, right? Unless, I mean, if it's leaking onto a coolant hose, it's going to do some damage.

So let me. Let me. Let me think. So what about then, the DVI and the 300% idea that everything needs to be written up and tabulated and presented, Yet I'm feeling like we understand the same. I'm on the same thing. If I've got an oil leak, that's a seepage issue. It's not dripping on the ground. It's not going to cause the alternator to fail because it's not leaking on the alternator.

It's not. It's not. I need to make the customer aware that there's a little bit of seepage there right now.

Why?

But.

Well, why?

Because. Okay, so why would be. I guess if somebody else happened to look at the car and made a note of it, and I had never made a note of it, they're going to be like, how? Well, Becky, have you been looking after my car? If you. This has been an old thing and you never told me about it, that would be one answer. Maybe somebody would answer you with that as an example.

Well, nobody ever looks at my customers cars because they always come to me.

Yeah.

All right, so let's address this. Let's first talk about the DVI. I don't do DVIs. I know. Everybody says, well, what, you don't do the eyes?

Yeah.

No, I'll tell you why. Because I see all these photographs. I'm a professional. I've been doing this for 50 years. I know everything about a car. I don't know what half of these damn pictures are. How am I supposed to explain to a teacher who teaches English what this rusty thing is?

Yes.

So why don't I just tell them, hey, your car's in great shape. You need front brakes. Here's the measurements. Everything else is perfect on your car. Boom. There you go. What the industry wants us to do is to do a DVI on every car that comes in and to do it for how much, Jeff?

Free.

Okay. Thank you. I don't do anything for free. You want your car checked out? Pay me.

Yeah.

So let's talk about this. Covid taught me that I couldn't have any more people waiting. I used to do a ton of oil changes while you wait. What I discovered during COVID is that the people who wait don't buy anything. They're sucking my business dry. And just to be sure, I lost my butt. I had to have an extra service writer and an extra staff to do this. And this extra staff had to be somebody in the budget priced category.

Yeah.

So here we are. Now I'm all set to lose money. So the first thing. Are you paying attention? So the first. The first thing I did is I said, you know, I'm using a synthetic oil that's rated for extended service and a filter that's rated for extended service as well. They will go 8,000 miles. Gee. That's when your tires need to be rotated according to the industry.

Rotate tires. The problem of the old 3,000 mile oil change is now you're all out of sync. You got to remember.

That's right.

When do I do this and that? How about if I just do a package? I start with a road test. I road test every car. I bring it in. I do an underhood inspection. I place it on a lift. I lift it up in the air. I check the steering, the suspension, I pull the wheels. I inspect the brakes.

I do measurements on all eight brake pads. Then I rotate the tires based on the factory. I do a fabulous job of computer balance so that when your car comes out of my shop, it's as smooth as it's ever been and it will not shake the fizz out of your Dr. Pepper at 80 miles an hour.

Right.

Then I put in my synthetic oil and I do a second road test just to make sure that rotating the tires hasn't changed something. That runs about 475 bucks.

Some good profit there.

Yes. Everything is priced at the normal rate. And when people say, I'd like to make a point for an oil change, we say, have you been here before? No, I haven't. Well, here's how we do this. This is called an annual maintenance. This is about 40 bucks a month. Is all. Is all.

40 bucks a month is all?

Yeah, it's 40 bucks a month. You only have to come in once a year. 8,000 miles. I'll take care of everything with your car. And what happens is they realize they don't have any trouble they can keep their car. Most of our customers have over 100,000 miles on the car. And, and when you go to my shop, there are no oil spots out front. My customers, cars don't leak oil because the synthetic oil keeps the seal soft.

So we don't have leaks.

Right.

And then we've tracked battery failures. And battery failures in my town ramp up dramatically at 39 to 42 months. So we recommend a battery every 36 months to protect you. Women will tell you that when a car fails to start, it could be a potentially life threatening situation.

Exactly. Because that's the thing. Like it drives me crazy. And it always has. Where somebody would pay for a AAA services. An example.

Sure.

That security thing of you can get a free tow. I have as, again, as I've, I've gotten wiser and older, I realized that that's still a very traumatic experience for somebody. Even if the toe is free, even if the boost is free. For a lot of women, that's still an uncomfortable thing. When a guy that might look like me shows up with some greasy coveralls on in a really loud truck, says, hi ma'am, I'm here to drag you wherever you like to go. It's still not a comfortable thing. Right.

What happens while they're waiting? Yeah, who's to say that the tow truck driver ain't a pervert?

Exactly. So the idea that people have been for years spending how many hundreds of dollars for maybe for a triple A membership for protection, when the idea that it's like, what are you calling out there most of the time for a tire failure or a battery failure? I, as somebody, an advocate of the industry, I'd rather make sure that before it gets to that point, let's change the battery out, let's change the tires so that they're not to where they're looking like I can see through them and maybe it's going to leave her with a spare. The inconvenience thing alone is enough to say we should be advocating harder for this. But the safety aspect of this particular scenario we're talking about is another one that should be very easy to sell a battery. Just because the car started today doesn't mean I can't talk to you about having a conversation about replacing your battery. That to me is just asinine. When people, somebody says, well, if they had to boost their car, no, why are you trying to sell them a battery? It's ridiculous.

The difference is because most mechanics are guys. If a woman's car doesn't start it's a potentially life threatening situation. If a guy's car doesn't start, it's just another adventure.

Right, Exactly.

They don't get it.

Yeah.

And this is why guys don't get. If you take, if you take a room full of people and you ask the guys, what do you do to protect yourself against a sexual assault when you go out, they'll all look at you like what are you talking about?

You're taking away my good time.

Well, yeah, but you ask the women and they will all say I do this. I hold my.

They have all have a checklist.

They all got this checklist. All right. So women will not park in a, in a parking garage after dark. The problem that this industry has is as guys they're not advising and they're not offering. What I have found in addition to. To the battery replacement at 36 months is that I can make a starter and an alternator last longer because they're not worn down.

That's right.

By a failing battery.

Yeah.

And I'm here to tell you, and I'm really proud to tell you Jeff, that last winter we had five days in Lincoln, Nebraska below minus 20. Not wind chill.

Yep.

Actual temperature AAA was two days behind.

Yep.

You know how many cars we had towed in were regular customers? Not a single one.

Exactly.

Zero.

Yeah.

Every one of my customers cars started because they were our customer.

And that's incredible. Right. Because think about when the weather is all of a sudden like that situation. You get a blizzard or something like that. Those tow ins always happen when you're. When you're swamped.

Sure.

Right. And it's unexpected. And you they. Regardless of whether that's in for a rear main seal or something like that. Mrs. Smith. It's just an unexpected toe in batteries dead. It.

It. Even though it shouldn't can it jumps the line to become the priority to get Mrs. Smith back. Because it's an easy job, it's an easy repair, get her back on the road. I have no problem with that. The idea that we couldn't though when we don't think in this industry. So enough about how to prevent that whole scenario from even happening.

Exactly.

For the customer or for me as a shop owner.

Yes.

It's called ineffective planning. Right. I could plan for you. People think advocacy is advocacy. Advocacy is also planning for the best outcome for you. There's nothing wrong with trying to say, hey, here's the scenario. What could happen if somebody says I don't want to put the battery in because it's still working okay, cool. I'm still going to warn you about the scenario that could happen.

Sure, if you want to roll the dice. Hats off to you.

Yes. And I remember when I very first started talking about this to my customers. They all cocked their head like the bird eye and the worm and said, but I haven't had any trouble. I said, well, the whole idea is to not. And I knew I'd finally arrived after a year or two of this. When a woman come in, batteries, dead, she said, I should have listened to you. There you go.

So when you're. I don't want to say necessarily. I don't. When you're coming up with these concepts, maybe that's not the best utilization of the words. But when you're. When you're doing what you're doing with this and you get a little bit kickback, do you have the numbers and the stats to kind of show the customers, like your example? You didn't have one of my customers tow in. Is that normally enough, Becky, for the people to start to wake up, smell the coffee, and realize what you're trying to talk about?

Well, I would tell them I've tested 5,000 batteries. I have recorded the failure rates in the ages. I have run a scientific formula for probability on them called standard deviation. And the numbers say that failure rates in Lincoln, Nebraska, ramp up dramatically at 39 to 42 months. There you go.

And if they say to you, becky, I don't know how old the battery.

Is, well, then I can either. I'll give you a couple of choices. I can try to look at the battery, but if you're in doubt, let's put one in.

Right? That's the answer I like.

Yeah, let's put one in.

I mean, I just bought that car, Becky, last year. I don't know how old that batteries are.

Right. So when you've just bought a car, the best thing you can do is let us put in a battery, new wiper blades to do an annual maintenance that will. That will take care of most of what we know your car needs. Then we subscribe to carfax, so we can look and see if there's any recorded history of other maintenance items. But. But I'm not. I'm not into this. This dissection of a car, looking for things I can sell.

I want to look for things that matter. That's how we work. And my unicorn guy that I hired, it's exactly the page he's on.

That's awesome. So when people say that this industry is not about sales what's your, what I, I think it somewhat is.

Well, yeah, it's all about sales.

Okay.

It's got to be about sales, but sales shouldn't lack ethics. If I sell you a battery because yours is over 36 months or I sell you brakes because the linings are thin, that sales. Right, okay. And, and at my shop, I only do the high end stuff. When I say high end stuff, I don't mean like, like a Rolls Royce.

Right.

But I mean if I'm going to do the brakes on your car, on your Honda, on your Accord, you're going to get the Akebono brand, the original vendor for Honda and you're going to get the, the, the rotors that are coated to retard, to resist rusting. Rusting. And they're going to be the top end rotors. Since I started doing that, I have zero comebacks for break shake. Any complaints, boom, there it is. And, and, and people are paying. They're, they're just paying what I'm charging. And, and I won't tell you on air.

No, that's how much.

But higher than the local dealer. Yeah, good answer.

Yeah.

Higher than the Lexus dealer.

Yep.

And nothing. And you don't get a lot of kickback. I'm thinking on that because you're probably pretty good at vetting your customers out that they're not there for about price, they're about service, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, it, it's a, it's about, it's about service. It's about product knowledge. It, it's being able to come to you and say, Jeff, I have, I've done the research on battery failures. I can also tell you that if I replace your battery on a schedule, I can make your alternator last longer. I do. I make your tires last longer because they get rotated on schedule where they should. And you can go out and look at my tire pile out back and see that all my cars are there aligned because the tires, that's what we did.

The tires are worn evenly and I get the most out of them. And furthermore that I replace your tires, I start recommending replacement at 5, 30 seconds because skid tests on wet pavement have shown that you've, that your, your stopping distance is way longer. So I have reasons for everything. And, and pretty much all my customers know I can't shut my brain off because I'm, I'm always thinking about this stuff.

So when you talk about at the beginning about like finding the unicorn and you're going to then develop one within the Shop. What kind of processes do you have in your shop that are mentoring that younger person or that less experienced person to that level? What do you do?

This has to start, this has to start with who, who are you starting with? In my case, my unicorn is highly experienced. I ain't telling him nothing. I don't tell him how to do a job because he wouldn't listen to me anyway. And I tell him that he knows everything.

Right.

And, and so we joke about that. I wouldn't tell you how to do the job.

But in, in defense, that really is his, his profession, that's his thing is fixing the car.

Yeah, yeah. My job is to watch kitten videos.

But, and we laugh at that. But that's really in a perfect. If everything is, everything is aligning, everything is in synchro, it can really be that simple.

It's too much work to do it any other way. So I'm asking this guy, how did you find me in the beginning? Because I'm like every shop owner. I'm utilizing all the search places, you know, and, and, and this, this guy and that guy and everything. And he said I was on Craigslist like every other mechanic looking for a deal. I come across your ad and I said to my buddy, I said hold my beer, I gotta call this when there's no way this is a legitimate deal.

Yeah.

Not five days pay for three days work.

Right.

So he called up, we had an interview and you know, now it's a process of getting to know each other. But, but the guy showed up with a flatbed trailer that looked like he just bought it the day before. Towed by a 10 year old pickup truck that looked like it's never been driven, including the underside. Completely painted and rolled up. His big snap on toolbox. And as he's going through, I can see that this big drawer has all of his air tools lined up in a little rack. Everything is just. So I go, we found our guy.

That's a professional.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then I hired, for the front counter, I hired a woman who has got a long history of interaction with the public. She is just fabulous. So the tradition, the traditional line of thinking in the car businesses you need, you need a person with mechanical background on the front counter so they can explain to people what's going to be done. And, and you can have somebody there that knows everything about a car and hates people.

That's what I was just going to wonder because my exit strategy is hopefully is to get into like. Because I'm sitting, you see me sitting Here, fidgeting, you know, I have aches and pains and I'm, I'll be 50 in two years, right?

Sure.

Well, I'm 50 in a year.

Yeah.

I don't want to be 60, pulling on a wrench and racking cars and everything else. Right. So if somebody was to come to you and they'd say, so you're unicorn. I don't know the age, but say the unicorn at 50 is still in your shop and starting to struggle with some physical limitations.

Sure.

Would he be a good fit for going to your counter?

No, he hates people.

Okay.

He's real, he's real up front about I hate people.

Yeah.

Okay. I don't know. I don't know how this is going to end. I personally, I would like to think that he can continue doing highly technical stuff and, you know, letting young, young people take care of other things. I just recently bought an air powered wheel lift.

I saw that.

Because I'm, look at this, I'm going, you know, we can't be doing heavy work. So I don't take in heavy work anymore. If car needs a head gasket, I'm probably not going to do it.

Wow.

Well, you know, a repair shop is nothing but an empty building without your people, right?

Yeah.

So you got to do everything you can to take care of your people. And if you've got somebody that's really worth being taken care of, you take care of them.

It's very profound. I mean, it sounds simple, seems simple.

It's about not being selfish, it's about having empathy, and it's about understanding what do I need to do.

So if you had a tech that didn't hate people, could you see it that they could transition to an advisor role?

Do you follow car racing at all? Joe Gibbs. Joe Gibbs became an owner in nascar.

Yeah, I know the name for sure.

All right, so Joe Gibbs was football coach. He won a number of Super Bowls. He coached the Redskins, I think. Okay, so he buys, he, he buys a NASCAR race team. So the first thing he does, he starts looking at this whole race team and he said, we got mechanics running out, changing tires. This particular position right here is the Jackman. He has to run out and put the jack under the car and jack the car. Said, we need a guy with a linebacker's body or a tight end.

He needs to be about 6, 3, 2, 40 and real fast. He revolutionized the pit stop just by analyzing what's the skill sets. You got a car repair shop. There's not anything any different. You look at this position. What are the talents that this position needs to have? You need to be able to do clerical work. You need to be able to type fast. You need to be able to, to understand people.

You gotta, you gotta got to be good at psychology. You have to have empathy with people. You need to be good with numbers. That's your talents.

Yep.

So when you're going to fill that job, you got to say, who's got the talent to do this?

Great point.

Yeah.

I never really. Again. That's the beauty of you. You just break it down to such a simple, simple points. Right. It's fantastic because that's what I talk to a lot of technicians. Right. And as we're, you know, where we are, we're in the middle of this technician shortage.

Right. It's hard to find one. We're not even necessarily looking for a unicorn. I talked in an analogy in one of the episodes. It was like we're kind of looking for four leaf culvers. Right. They're not. How many times do you bend over and it looks like four and it's three or five.

Sure.

You know, so I, I'm always thinking of, like, how do we kind of. When that transition is going to happen where we're bringing a bunch of you? Because we are. We're going to get young people in this industry. One way or the other, it's going to happen. But there's going to be a skill gap there and then there's going to be an age gap where it's like these unicorns are maybe not going to be able to retire yet financially, whatever. What do we do with them?

Great question.

Yeah.

I talked to a good friend of mine. His technician of 20 years, 21 years, essentially has mentored his son into the business himself. And lots of chances, lots of choices, lots of coaches, lots of one on ones. You got to get your stuff together. You got to get your finances together. I'll go to the bank with you and try to figure out where your money's going. Didn't happen. The attitude just continued to sour.

Sure terminated.

Well, the problem with too many parents is they want their kids to fill out their dreams. Ain't the kid's dream. My dad was a jeweler. He was very good. He wanted me to take over the jewelry store. I didn't care. I can't sit still.

Right.

What do jewelers do that make custom jewelry? They sit at a workbench and they do fine work in front of them all day. I wouldn't last 10 minutes. Ain't me. Dad was heartbroken. He tried each of the kids, nobody wanted to do it. Grandkids, nobody wanted to do it. Same thing. Yeah.

You know, think how cool this could be. Well, doesn't matter now.

When you talked about the beginning of the thing, it said too many technicians need to be mothered. What do you mean by that? I think I know what you mean. But.

What I mean by that is every position, every industry, every profession has about 20% of the people that are good at what they do. 80% aren't. If you ain't paying top money, you're not getting a unicorn, your life is hell. I was constantly mom and of course my management style wasn't very good. I brought a lot of trouble on myself because I felt like I had to be mom all the time.

Is that in a term like you were sympathetic to the screw ups that maybe they were doing well?

I'm trying to tell them how to do the job. I'm micromanaging at the finest. Okay, well you know, look, you got a tech and he's not, he's not. Tighten the lug nuts in the right order, what are you going to do? You're going to go say hey. That and the way you do it, you alternate, you crisscross. You don't go around, you crisscross. I, I am, I've done every position there is. I've worked as a tech.

I've, I've been through the dealerships. I've been, I've been a service advisor, I've been a assistant service manager. I've been a service manager. I've been a parts manager. I've been a service and parts director. I didn't like the way I was treated. I didn't like the culture. I didn't like the way they treated our customers.

Didn't like they were treated the way they treated a help. And I'm at some of the finest places there are and I'm fed up with it.

What about the idea then that the people that have allotted years in at a dealership don't fit well into our side of the industry. What's your take on that? Can a dealer mechanic be a good mechanic? In a lot of these independent shops?

We're right back to the 8020 rule. Most independent shops are not very well run at all.

Yeah, I'd agree.

Okay. Most of them are dark, floors dirty, take in crap. All you got to do is drive by and look at what's parked out front. That's the best way to find out what I work there. This is why in my class how to attract. How to attract a unicorn. Have the place clean. I pioneered the phrase soap, paint and lights.

Clean a place up so it's spotless. Paint everything so it looks good. Put in brilliant lighting. I got a photograph that's in my. In my overheads, my PowerPoint of my shop. I've been. The shop's been open 29 years. I got a whole row of rotary lifts that look like they're brand spanking new because I paint the arms every year.

Yeah, everything looks like it was just put in. That's the beauty of a car repair shop is, you know, they don't have tail fins or not tail fins. You can't tell.

Yep.

You just paint everything up. Oh, damn, this looks great. Guy comes out to do the annual lift inspection, looks like I've never used him because I went through and I oiled everything and I got the little, little gear things replaced that were worn. Yeah, you just stay on top of everything. That's how you attract a unicorn. If you don't have the money to pay a unicorn now, you end up with the 80%. Then you have to do the coaching. Then you got to stay on top of it.

You got to mother them.

You got a mother. You got to mother them because they insist on being mothered. Don't want to be mothered. Don't require it.

Very cool. What about. Because this is something that's been coming up in my kind of conversations for the last month or so, I see that sometimes, like the quality of advisor that comes from a dealership, they have a little more hustle, they have a little more can multitask better. Sometimes they're used to a higher count, I guess you could say, of people that they're going to deal with. In a day where it's been my experience and I've come out to the independent side of things because I've worked both for years and like if they have five tickets to handle in a day, the wheels come off.

That's a great observation. There's a couple of differences. The first difference is the dealerships aren't there to fix the car. They're there to get car count out. They don't care if your car doesn't start next week. They don't?

Nope.

And the service advisors don't have to look up parts. They don't have to find anything. Generally at too many dealerships, the service writer is only there right at the initial write up. Maybe make a phone call, make a sale, and they Never see the ticket again. They got a booker that books it up. Average service writer is going to do 25 to 30 tickets a day. I did it for 15 years. I wrote 25 tickets a day with gusts to 30.

When I was at Oldsmobile was 12 tickets a day because every car had insurance that you had to call and you were on the phone forever and you never dialed up the number unless you had a stack of tickets to figure in front of you. But at the Honda shop, we could do 25 tickets. It was all customer pay.

Right.

And, and they, they don't do long explanations. My tickets have long explanations on. I mean we really get into explaining. Here's what we did. There is no R and R alt.

Right.

Yeah.

So now this is part of my service advisor class. R and R, what does that mean? I mean rest and recuperation. That means you take the alternator and you put it to rest. Put it on the counter with some, with some low light soft music, maybe a little fishnet stocking, little chai tea. Yeah. You know, it'll be okay in the morning.

Yeah.

So we, anyway, we, we ride out more. The, the, the dealership service rider is probably going to make a lot more money. I know that, that when I, I advertised for a service writer years ago and everybody that worked at the Toyota there came and applied. They write more tickets and, and they run more volume and they're going to make more money. But the reason that people say the dealer is high priced isn't because of the price, it's because of how you were treated.

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I went to work a lot of days with the, I wasn't there advocating for the customer as a technician. Every day, every car was completely removed from whoever might own it, whoever might drive it. I didn't know, I didn't even care.

Sure.

That is a ticket for me that is like how do I maximize the profit for myself on that ticket.

Yep.

If it was going to be a job, no fault found. Wind noise at a, you know, 100 kilometers. I'm Canadian. Right. So 100 kilometers is like. I can't drive that 100k on 100k today. Traffic's terrible.

That's right.

That's why no fault found because I didn't. Maybe I knew what to look for, but I didn't feel like I needed to invest that much time that wasn't going to pay.

It's so common. We have initials for that. Npf.

Yeah.

No problem found.

Yeah. We don't even bother to write it out. Yeah, It's NPF and Jeff. Every technician has a hearing impairment even when they don't.

Even if they're not married.

Even when they don't. Yeah, yeah. It's got a noise. I didn't hear it. Yeah, Yeah, I didn't hear it.

So how does that work, Becky, with the. The idea, though? Because, like, I mean, the whole thing about production comes back to, like, and you. So I'm thinking with your idea that everything is about the gross profit. It's not the huge metric then for you that it is for somebody else. Am I right to say that?

I don't know where you got that idea? Well, that's all at the front counter. You got a noise. It's going to be 215 bucks. Two testing and inspection. We charge money for every line on the ticket. There is no such thing as a no charge.

Hallelujah.

Yeah.

Well, yeah. And I tell a customer, you know, you're gonna charge me just to look at it? No, I can see through the window, it's green.

But see, that's the exact sarcastic joke that so many texts I've. I've read in Forbes. We even do it work? It's like, oh, yeah, just look at it.

Yeah, yeah, it's out there you go.

Yeah, it's lean a little bit. You might have a broken spring.

Yeah, exactly. So you have to explain. All right. What's going to have to happen to do this noise? I'm going to have to take a drive, hear the noise, then I'll bring it back in. I might check for service bulletins just to see if there's a bulletin that covers this. And that's an important step. That takes time. Then we're going to do whatever we need to do to.

To evaluate what's the noise. We may put it on a lift. We may do an under underneath inspection. It's going to depend on where's the noise and what's what. But that. That's what's involved. That is only a couple hundred bucks to do that. That either will fix it, or I'll be able to call you and tell you what it is.

So I'm going to sell the value to the customer of here's what's going to happen. And then I'm going to ask the qualifying question. And this is the real kicker. You want the noise fixed or you just want to know it's safe to drive?

Right? Yeah.

Two different things.

Yeah.

Huge.

Yep.

You got a bad strut mount that squeaks when you hit A certain bump, a certain thing. Cars 10 years old, probably not really high on the priority list, Right. Of being. Keeping that vehicle reliable and safe. You know, we just.

We just had one that we put lower control arms on. It was. It was a. It was an old pilot with 280,000 miles or something. We put lower control arms on it and sway bar links and something else. And it came back a month later with a noise. I said, now it's something you guys did. So we checked it out and the nut on one of the struts had backed off.

So now it's making a pop noise up and down.

Yeah.

So what are you going to sell? Tightening up the nut.

Right.

So I talked to my technician. He said, we really need to replace the struts. This is my unicorn. So I call a customer and I said, the nut came loose. I said, I've been to nut and bolt school, and I can tell you that the first time you tighten a nut, you get a certain amount of compression on it. But the second time, you don't get hardly half of that. And if I just tighten it up, it's coming loose again. And being loose now, it's probably chewed up the threads.

The proper repair is new front struts. Most shops would have tightened it up.

Yep.

I sold them $2,000 worth of front struts.

Yeah.

Premium stuff. All. All put together ahead of time.

Easy swap.

Easy swap. 2,000 bucks. And the lady said, she. Well, it looked like. It looked like it was our fault. You just worked on it.

Yeah.

This is the. Everett sent you?

Yep.

Everett sent you. Work on it now. It does this. I went to the repair manual. I looked up we'd done a lower control arm. I printed the instructions on how to do that job. Here's the instructions on how to change a sway bar link. Here's the instructions on how to do this.

None of which are anywhere near where this thing is.

Exactly.

So there you go.

Yeah.

They bought the repair.

So it's important then when you're sitting at the counter and somebody's. I don't want to say challenging you, Becky, but we could kind of say that that's what that customer is doing and that they're challenging.

Rightfully so.

So we have to be, like, prepared not to get into an altercation, but to be able to, like, give a point of counterpoint back that we didn't touch that. So your front counter person has to be prepared enough or know how to get the information to make the argument effectively that we're not responsible for this we're too many. Just Becky, go ball it up, tighten a nut, fix it. No charge, no, no pay to the tech. Ship her down the road. Tell her if it comes back now we're going to have a problem because now we're going to have to fix it and you're going to be really upset with me where instead of just educating them right at that point and saying okay, this is what we know it to be. We didn't touch it unfortunately, like you're less than 100% satisfied but here's the cost.

You need a unicorn service advice.

Yeah, yeah, I'm people people shake their head and they laugh at me now. But it's like in the last year I've comment on and share this really I make the argument and please train your most importantly, set the podcast to automatically download Train your front office staff. I think if you only have a limit of I was talking to Chad Whitman this morning and I said if you only have a limited budget, please join us. You can only send one of the office thank you to my partner. I think if the shop has already got a high level performing remember what I always younger person in this industry, less experience. Here's hoping everyone finds their missing 10 millimeter and we'll see you all again. Some of the training happens organically right in the shop through you know, just like in nature, older, more experienced brings up younger, less experience at the front counter. There's methods there that have to be shown to be the effective method.

The processes have to be done. They can't necessarily in a lot of shops they're not learning that from anybody because there's nobody there that has it. And then we just continue the cycle, rinse, wash and repeat that we've always done. So owners that are listening to me right now think about that from a real serious point. If I only have a little bit of training, I might have to modify what I book in because I don't want to get into the high end diag if I don't have somebody that can do it, don't take it and put that training into somebody at the front counter that can even have the conversations of why we're not even going to do the diet instead of we got to do something, we got to bring it in and then it just becomes a can of worms at the back. It's people look at me like I'm crazy, but I don't think I'm crazy when I think that that's what more right now the emphasis needs to be on training your front versus training your.

Back, I think the emphasis needs to be understanding. It's a team.

Yeah.

You know, you're screwed. You're screwed either way. I will tell you this, that a highly skilled front office person can make sales and keep customers coming back and save a shop more than a great tech. And no offense to the great tech, but if the front office is ticking all the customers off, you ain't got any money, so you got to be able to make a sale. Then you have to be able to depend on the person. There's too much animosity. Us versus them, you know, these guys versus those guys. Forget that we're all in the same boat.

You can't tell somebody their end of the canoe is sinking. And each, each can make the other's life hell or heaven.

If their end of the canoe is sinking, I gotta paddle faster and harder.

Yeah, but you gotta get to shore. That's what you gotta do.

At some point. They're dead weight though.

Get out of this stinking canoe.

But you know what I mean, at some point they're just dead weight.

Oh yeah, yeah.

I got a lot of unpopular opinions.

Sometimes it's not for me.

No. But from everybody else in the industry. Sometimes I, I got to remember that like it's like 5% that listen to that come to these kind of conferences and listen to this chatter that we have right here. And so when I go back sometimes and I talk to people that are not, they know about the, the, the, the network but they're not in the network. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

That's tough then because they look at me side eyed, like I must have hit my head.

Okay, So I need to cover this.

Okay?

Saving the industry. Screw the industry. Save yourself.

That sounds like a typical flat rate tech at a dealership's ideal.

Well, what I mean by that is your shop make it better than everybody else. Worry about yourself. Quit worrying about trying to raise the standard. We gotta raise the standard. These people are ruining the industry now. They're ruining themselves. How does that affect you? It's just like at my shop, okay? I am who I am. I do what I do.

I'm better than everybody else. I am.

Yeah.

So what do I care about the guy down the street that's doing breaks for 69 bucks? My customers are never going to see them because they want their car done a certain way.

Right?

This is no different than a cheap hotel opening up right next to a Marriott. Whoa.

What is he going to do?

Well, you got to stay at the Marriott.

Yeah.

And as Bill Haas, one of my favorite trainers, he said, if you're just dying for Chick Fil A and you won't take any other substitutions and you want a Chick Fil A on Sunday, what do you do? You wait till Monday. So when I tell people that when we went from doing business four days a week to only being open three days a week, what happened? We wrote more tickets. We literally wrote more tickets.

You had a bigger pile to look at next Monday.

Yeah.

That's awesome. It, it comes down to confidence. All right. Because it's like. And this is it. It sounds so simple when I say that. Oh, yeah, of course. Sales is all about confidence.

But it's. It's confidence that past the point of sales, it's confidence in the fact that, like, I don't need that customer that will not accept that I'm not here Friday, will not be there Thursday, Wednesday afternoon, I'm kind of there, but I'm running around trying like, it's the confidence in that. Why, why do we not have that? So many of us don't. Why? On the front counter side of things.

Beliefs, false beliefs.

Go on.

We, we believe that we have to do things a certain way. That we can't deviate from that. We believe that the customer is always right. We believe that we have to have to offer convenience. We believe that we have to do an oil change while you wait. Because everybody wants things fast. So my marketing has been, you say you want things fast, but you really don't want things fast. What you really want is to not have to come back.

What you really want is for your car to last and you want your car to not break. That's what you really want. You can say you want it fast, but if you get it fast and you have to give, give up all these other things and then you really don't want it fast.

Right.

Okay. You want to go. You want to have a chef prepared meal. And I showed a photograph of Nebraska hamburger. Nebraska is the number one beef producing state in the United States.

Higher than Oklahoma.

Yes.

I did not know that.

The western part, northern and western part of Nebraska is sandhills. That grows. The grass that grows there is the most nutritious grass in the world. I don't know how or why it came to be, but. But you go through the sand hills and it's just. It's rolling sand dunes that are left over from an inland sea and they grow this grass and the air is so pure, you can smell water. You can smell water. You can tell when you're coming up on a lake.

And the ranches are huge, and the farmers are stewards of the land and they know how many cattle it takes to be sure that all of this is taken care of. And these cows produce the finest beef in the world. It is called I Interstate 80 beef in Japan. It's the most prized stuff. If you have ever had a filet that you literally can cut with a fork, you take a knife, table knife, Jeff. And you hold the meat and you put your fork in and you pull off a piece. You don't tug, you don't yank, you don't twist the fork.

Yeah.

Pull off a bite and there's more juice on the plate when you're done than you can sop up.

Right.

That's Nebraska beef. So I showed a hamburger that is leaking juice that I cooked over a smoker was an Applewood smoked Nebraska beef burger. And it is oozing juice on a plate. That's China. That's 108 years old. Noritake china. That's a burger. You go through a drive through.

Yeah.

You ain't getting that burger.

No. Or the china.

Or the china. Yeah. The strategy, if you want to really be successful, is to be that burger for your shop to be so uniquely different. There are people who want quality and there are people who will pay for it if they know they're going to get it half. Well, my customers are over 100,000 miles on their vehicles, and I keep them going. And I got eight loaner cars. We give you a loaner car. We don't have any promise times.

When you say, I need my car by three, I say, well, Jeff, I hope you get it. Here's a key. Here's a car to drive. We'll be done today. Beats me. I don't know. Yeah, I take in what I think I could do in a day, but I don't know what I'm going to find. I don't know who's going to say yes.

I have no idea where the part's coming from. Don't make me lie to you. We're all about ethics and credibility here. And it's a trust thing. Once you have a trust with somebody, now you got a customer for life. It isn't about price anymore. Now it's all about value. What do I get? I get to drive my car that I love for another year and not have trouble.

And I know that if it goes down to 20 below, my car will start. I'm good. And I know that if it snows a foot, my car will get through it because I got good tires on because Becky made sure I did. Boom.

That's amazing. I. This has been awesome. I've been wanting. Since I followed the donut thing, I've been wanting to sit down with you, and I've reached out to before, and we've had some conversations, and, I mean, I can't thank you enough for how refreshing and your confidence is. Just. It's. I wish everybody had it.

And that's why I wanted to have you on here, is just to share it. You're a gift. And, I mean, I love the fact that you're here having this conversation with me.

I love you. You really do a great job of presenting the technician. And, you know, I don't think that the general public understands how physically demanding it is to be a technician. What you have to go through, the heat, the heat that you have to endure, the cold you have to endure. The toe ends when it's 20 below that, you got to get pushed in. And the differential is so cold, it doesn't want to turn. And you guys make it look easy because technicians are inherently lazy. They find out the easiest way to do something.

And no tech ever pushes in a toe in when you can fire it up and drive it in.

That's right. That was my. That was my life forever. If I could diagnose the car out in the parking lot, I didn't even want to push it in.

Sure.

Because. Because I worked at that lifestyle where it was like, that guy next to you, he didn't want to talk to you. He'd throw a wrench at your head if he could get away with it. Right. So he wasn't going to help you push that car. So I had to learn how to. What can I do out in the parking lot that I can get this thing mobile and get it into my bay or do the diag out there and then not have to tie it. My bay.

I could be doing something easy on my bay.

Exactly.

I want to thank you for coming on. This has been amazing.

I'd like to thank you for having me on your interview. You're doing wonderful things. You're achieving fabulous things.

I'm trying to.

I'm honored to be your guest here.

I really am. And that's the thing. Anytime. If you want to come on again or I will reach out to you again at some point, I'd love to have it, because I think it's something that we should need to continue to share. So with that, everybody, thank you very much. Becky, thank you for being here.

Thank you.

Dude, I adore you. Evadon and everybody.

Becky Witt Talks Technicians and Customer Communication

Porsche 356

Honda Accord

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