Cody Fallon shares his journey of building a successful auto repair shop from scratch after years in the construction industry. He discusses his experiences working for various companies, the challenges of unorganized operations, and the importance of preventative maintenance. Transitioning from heavy equipment to automotive repair, Cody emphasizes customer service and communication as keys to his business success. With no formal advertising, he has built a loyal customer base through word of mouth, while also navigating the challenges of being a one-man operation.
Topics:auto repair businesscustomer servicepreventative maintenancetransitioning to automotiveone-man shop challengesword of mouth marketingtraining and educationorganization in repair shops
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In this episode, Jeff Compton is joined by Cody Fallon, owner of a one-and-a-half bay mechanic shop in Newark, Ohio. Cody reflects on his journey from working at major companies to running his own business, sharing insights on the importance of organization and preventative maintenance. Jeff emphasizes the significance of continuous professional development and hands-on training, highlighting how these elements are crucial for success in the automotive repair industry.
00:00 Left for heavy equipment opportunity at another company.
05:16 Constant issues, limited support, and suggestions are often ignored.
08:47 Flexible work schedule; task-dependent start and end.
10:35 Good money, freedom nice, but not returning.
17:09 Preventative maintenance neglect leads to costly fixes.
19:05 Didn't get along with Kokosing's fleet manager.
24:08 Service information is essential for practical training success.
25:10 Hands-on learners prefer practical demonstrations over reading.
30:13 I accidentally discovered the podcast ASOG group on Facebook.
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Left for heavy equipment opportunity at another company.
Constant issues, limited support, and suggestions are often ignored.
Flexible work schedule; task-dependent start and end.
Good money, freedom nice, but not returning.
Preventative maintenance neglect leads to costly fixes.
Didn't get along with Kokosing's fleet manager.
Service information is essential for practical training success.
Hands-on learners prefer practical demonstrations over reading.
I accidentally discovered the podcast ASOG group on Facebook.
Select text to request an explanation
They were basically, you know, telling us to slow down on fixing stuff or not. Don't do any preventative maintenance or anything like that because they don't have a budget for it. I think there must be a stupid profit margin in the construction industry because just the amount of money and stuff that I saw just wasted over the years, man, it's just unreal. I'd like to have just a fraction of it.
Welcome back to another exciting episode of the JD Mechanic podcast. I am sitting with a good guest, a good friend of mine, Mister Cody Fallon. So, Cody, how are you tonight, man?
I'm doing all right, Jeff. Doing all right. Just another day in paradise over here.
So I see for the camera you're sitting in your shop right now.
I am, I am. I'm a one man show. I've got, I've got, at the moment, one and a half bay shop. And I do everything out of here just by myself for the most part. And this, the shop is my office.
Okay. How long you been doing this?
So I went out on my own here. It's been about two and a half years ago now. Yeah, about two and a half years. I've been, been doing my own thing. It's been. Spent a wild ride, man. I've learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes. But, you know, here we are.
Where are you located?
Newark, Ohio.
Oh, nice. Okay.
Yep. Newark, Ohio. Man, that just, that's about 30 to 40 minutes east of Columbus.
Right on. Yeah, right. Not, it's not too hot there today.
It's high eighties. It's probably 88, 89 degrees. It's a little warm. But, you know, this time of year, we're used to it by now.
So that's about what we got right here, right now. Today is around 83.
Well, give it a. Give it a couple months and we'll be complaining about the colds.
So you said you stepped out on your own recently. What was what, where were you before that?
I started my career probably as most mechanics do. Just out of high school. I went to trade school, c tech. It's local here for diesel mechanics. Their diesel mechanic program graduated there with my diploma for that. While I was there, I got an apprenticeship program with a YDE, big construction company down here, Cacosian Construction. They're the biggest in the state, actually, as a truck mechanic for their truck shop. So spent eight years with them working on all their trucks.
They had a fleet of over about 800 pickup trucks and probably about another 300 or so big trucks. They're way bigger than that now. Even but, yeah, they were a good company to work for, but like I said, I spent eight years with them and just was kind of getting burnt out, wanted something a little different. They were a good company to work for and stuff, but I wanted to move over to heavy equipment, and ultimately they ended up telling me they had me where they wanted me, wasn't going to switch me over to heavy equipment side, I can respect that, but wasn't quite what I wanted at the time. So I ended up jumping, shipped to another local construction company, George Igle company, on their heavy equipment. I spent five years with them, and after five years, I was just. I can't. Well, I don't know.
I think I was burnt out on turning wrenches before I ever went to them, to be honest with you. But they were pretty unorganized and how they did stuff. Great company to work for. They took very good care of me while I was there. I've got nothing bad to say about them, but just the way that they did things, it just didn't quite go with how I like to do things, I guess, for lack of better words, I guess, rather than a stressful situation.
Like, is it like a hive? Was that the pace or.
No. So I'm a pretty organized person. I'm probably a little OCD even. But the biggest issue was their parts department, man. Like we did. You know, we would look up, I would go out, look at a piece of equipment, okay, and I would go through, look up parts, send in a requisition with part numbers and everything to our parts department at igle there. And then they take care of order and everything and getting the stuff to the job, whatnot. And it was just.
It was just issue after issue there, and just always setbacks and stuff. And for the most part, you know, they never got worked up too much about stuff. But in my eyes, I'm out there working in the field and, you know, I'm trying to keep equipment going and, you know, keep everybody happy, make sure their ac is working, their heat's working, all that kind of stuff. And when you just run into issues like that over and over and over again and there's, you know, I was always putting suggestions out there on how we could, you know, maybe make things more productive, make things better, easier for everybody. And it. I don't know, sometimes they'd be receptive to it, and then other times it's just in one ear and out the other. And that, you know, after. After five years of that, I finally did.
I came home one day and I brought my laptop in the house and typed up an email to the vice president, my supervisor, and I was just like, hey, like, I'm gonna go ahead and put in my two weeks. Like, I just, you know, I just had enough.
So what was. Let me. Let me stop you there for a second. So what was your day to day like? Did you get into a service truck and. Broken piece of machinery to. Broken piece of machinery, yes.
So I would. My boss at the time, he would usually send me an email of my list of stuff to start on for the day. I would get it usually around midnight or so, which I'm asleep, so I don't even know what I'm doing for the next day until I get up for the morning. Not all the time, but most of the time it was that way. And then basically, I would go out. I'd start on that list of stuff, going out, checking out equipment. I stocked a lot of parts and stuff on my truck. A lot of the stuff you see, I mean, you know, it's just same as working on cars.
You see the same stuff over and over again. But then after I would get that list done, I would get with him and wait for my next place to go. And that, you know, that was another thing, too. I mean, which they. They had him. They had too much on his plate, and I would end up waiting, I mean, sometimes for an hour or something, you know, before I'd have another place to go to. And I. I have trouble doing that, especially if I'm on the clock for somebody.
It's just, I'd rather bust my butt, get everything done that I need to get done for today and. And get home to my family, man. And. And, I don't know. It was just very unorganized, and. And it wasn't trying to think of a good way to put it, but they. They never got too excited about stuff. And, you know, that's okay for.
For some people. I mean, they. They. They had some decent guys and stuff there. They were probably a little undermanned. But another thing that they weren't big into, which really bothered me, was training. They did little to no training, and that was something I really pushed for hard while I was there. And.
And they just. I don't know. They just weren't into it. They would act like they were, but it would never.
Lots of road service guys that I've talked to, the beef they might have is like that they'll start almost the same time every day, but they might not know when they get home that night.
Oh, yeah, time.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, and actually, I can't say I always start at the same time every day. It depends on what I might have been going to for the next day. I'd like to, whatever list that I would get, you know, in my email that morning, I would like to try and get the jobs before they started, to try and get stuff checked out and fixed so I don't have to go look for equipment and stuff like that while they're running it and everything. So. But, yeah, that, yeah, I mean, I might get home at 02:00 in the afternoon or I might get home at 10:00 at night. Usually. Usually it was somewhere, you know, around a certain couple hours there, anywhere from 03:00 p.m.
to 06:00 p.m. roughly. But, yeah, you never know for sure. I mean, because you just don't know what you're going to get into for the day. And that can be frustrating sometimes, too.
Working outside in the cold, in the wintertime.
That's the worst, man. That's the worst. I'm not a fan of the winter. My wife and I, we've talked a lot about potentially moving south someplace where it's warmer year round. But at the same time, though, too, I feel like we haven't had much for winters here for last five or so years, maybe even longer than that. Not, nothing like it was when I was a kid. I grew up right here, so. But, yeah, I, and not only that, I mean, working outside in the, you know, 95 degree sun, no shade, you know, middle of a job site, nothing but dust and stuff, like, it's, it's, it wasn't an easy job by any means, but I've done that.
I don't, yeah, I didn't love it.
Yeah, I, I did not love it either. And I, that's something I would not go back to, I don't think. I mean, the money was good, the freedom was nice. Freedom was definitely nice being able to, especially, you know, I had myself in a position with them where they, they didn't worry about me. I could, they could let me go and I would get stuff done for them. Even, you know, even those times when I'm Youtlanden, you know, waiting on the next thing to do. Mean, I would always take care of people, you know, whatever people might need on job, look at stuff that's sitting at the time, whatever, just whatever I needed to do to stay busy, but, yeah.
Yeah. So then, so you would always worked on equipment now when you started your own business, here is that. Did you stay working on equipment or have you kind of transitioned down to cars and trucks?
So I have transitioned to just cars and pickup trucks. At first, you know, when I. When I left igel, I didn't have a game plan. Wasn't. Wasn't quite sure what I was going to do. Figured I'd take a break for a little while and kind of regroup. We had some money saved up and stuff, and, and just figure out what I wanted to do. And I.
I figured at the same time, too, could turn some wrenches on the, you know, under the table in my shop here at home and. And see how that went or whatever. Well, it just. It really started taking off, and I would also get those calls. People want me to work on equipment. People want me to work on cars, pickup trucks, diesel trucks, whatever. And it got to a point where I decided I needed to just stick with one or the other, you know, paying for service information and getting parts and stuff like that for automotive stuff and equipment and whatnot. It's just, it's too much.
You can't. You can't do all of it, unfortunately.
When you said that the, your former employer was not big on training, like, what's the training like available in the equipment side of things?
More than what you'd think. I know Ohio cat here in Columbus, they, they do a lot of different classes and stuff like that. The little bit of training that Igel did do, that was usually their go to. They would. Unfortunately, we would end up doing one or two of those classes every winter when things are slower. But that was really about it as far as that goes. But they would always book us for, like, the same classes that we had the year before. So it got to the point with me where, you know, I had told my boss, actually, probably the year prior to me leaving, like, hey, like, I've already done this.
I just did this class last year and stuff. Like, it, you know, not. Not that it, you know, maybe wouldn't have been a good refresher either way. I can't even remember what the heck the class was now, to be honest with you. But it just, they didn't put much effort into trying to find anything else. Cummins, they have a very good online school that they do. They also do some training at their facilities and stuff. From what I understand, you have to have so much of the online stuff completed first before you can even book any of that stuff, and the hands on training.
So I never got to that point. In fact, they didn't push any of the online training or anything. They didn't even know about it. As a matter of fact, I actually introduced them to it because I knew about it from my time at Kikosing. Kekosing did do a lot of training and stuff for us. But, yeah, that kind of, that part of it was pretty disappointing to me because, I mean, this, you know as well as I do, Jeff, whether it's the automotive industry, anything mechanical related, repair related, that the technology and stuff is changing every year and you never get ahead of it.
Right. You're not even, even with it. You're always behind.
The best you can do is know. You can't know all of it, unfortunately, but the best you can do is try and know a little bit about everything and then have the right service information and stuff to get you, get you where you need to go. But, yeah, I felt like, you know, the few years within, I felt like the first couple years I was with Igle, like, I was, just felt like I was getting behind just not, you know, not staying up to date with stuff. And like I did with Kakosi. I mean, they were great about training. We did weeks of training every single year.
But so did, if you, if you struggled with igle at a job because he didn't have training, did it, did it affect your pay in any way or just your frustration level went up.
And that was frustration, frustration level, yeah. No, the pay was good. They took good care of me. I, I mean, I could, I could do whatever the heck I wanted to do there pretty much. I mean, they, they, like I said, I've got no complaints. Like, real, they were a good company to work for it just for my personality, what I like and stuff. I mean, it just, I want to continually being, pushing myself forward and getting better if I can, if this is what I'm doing. And I didn't feel like I was in that realm while I was at Igel.
It was just, and one of the older guys there told me once we were talking about doing preventative maintenance and stuff, you know, I go, did very little, did none. No preventative maintenance on stuff. And he told me once, he says, well, it's not preventative maintenance here. It's just panic maintenance. And it's like, well, that makes a lot of sense, actually. It stuck with me ever since then because it was, I mean, you just fix stuff as it broke. You didn't try and catch anything ahead of time.
Aaron, that's so frustrating because it's like when I was coming up through equipment, everybody was like the buzzword was downtime. Downtime, downtime. Right. Because you're paying an operator sometimes to stand there and watch the tech fix the machine.
Yeah.
Now it's, if the operator was the one that broke the machine. But if you go in and you have, like, a completely preventable failure because preventative maintenance wasn't done, now you're paying a tech to be dispatched out there to fix the stupid thing in the field, which normally takes more labor than doing it at the shop. And then secondly, you're paying the operator to stand there and watch the mechanics. Sometimes. Sometimes you get them another piece and move them on. Right. But I never understood that when, that when I still see, and, you know, even after I got out of my training from college, which was in heavy equipment, and then I go to the real world and you see all these places, people that have this leased equipment or, you know, older equipment, and they're doing no preventative maintenance on it at all. None.
Like, if it's, the preventative maintenance was a circle check that the guy was supposed to do on the machine in the morning, and that was it.
Right.
And then if it broke down, we tried to get it fixed as fast and as cheap as possible because that thing had to work. I never understood how it couldn't be. They couldn't grasp the concept of, like, this is costing us so much more money. But what I saw the cycle became is the more that it costs them, the more they just had to charge the next job and the next job and the next job, and it became an expense versus, like, preventative maintenance is just a cost. You know what I mean? The difference between a cost and an expense. They couldn't grasp it. And that's why I think when, like, so you've probably run into some fleet managers in your day, right? They get a bum rap sometimes because everybody thinks, like, that they're, they're a holes and don't want to spend money on this and don't want to spend money on that. But they're given a, sometimes an unrealistic budget to operate like a fleet, and that's it.
They have to work within that. Did you, did you run into that or.
The a hole fleet managers? Yeah, that's, that was part of my reason. But behind leaving Kokosing there, I did not get along with their fleet manager, and he was the one that ultimately didn't want to move me out of where I was at. But, but no, I, you know, I don't know what little bit that they would let us in on, you know, I guess, financials and stuff. I, I always heard, and especially at Igel, that we were always running under our budget for repairs and stuff. Every year, there might have been a year or two, maybe, where we might have went over a little bit, but it. There was never a, there was never a time where, you know, they were basically, you know, telling us to slow down on fix and stuff or not don't do any preventative maintenance or anything like that because they don't have a budget for it. I think there, there must be a stupid profit margin in the construction industry because just the amount of money and stuff that I saw just wasted over the years, man, it's just unreal. I'd like to have just a fraction of it, but I.
Yeah, I mean, for the most part, you know, it was very odd to me because, like I said, I started out at Kekosing, dude, and the way that they operate, they're all about preventative maintenance. I mean, they did federal inspections on pickup trucks every single year, which didn't have to be done, but they wanted to do yearly federal inspections on them, just keep up on everything. And my supervisor there at the time, like, his theory was, like, if you see something on that truck that isn't going to last for a year, you need to replace it. Like, if it can't go until this time next year, when it has this next federal inspection does done, you replace it, like. And that kind of makes sense to me because this, these trucks, equipment, whatever, like, they're out on the job sites there. You need to keep them going. That's what's making the company money. And you don't want that stuff to break down at the worst possible time, because that's when it always happens, it seems like.
And not only that, you know, it puts more pressure on us as a mechanic or whatever, when. When you've got a piece of equipment or something broke down in the middle of the road someplace or on a really high priority job or whatever, that stuff's got to keep going, because then, then you've got upset superintendents, informants and stuff breathing down your neck, trying to. Trying to get you to get stuff fixed, which I never ran into any issues there. I always took care of people very well. Not, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's a different, it's a different kind of work, for sure.
So to come and do this now, to go to cars, like.
So I'll say this. When I interviewed at Igle, I was coming from working on mostly pickup trucks and I had a decent amount, and I had spent three years working on heavy trucks there at Kokosing on their night shift. And I told them this. I said, you know what? It's all nuts and bolts. Like, as long as you got the service information, the right information you need for the most part. I mean, it's similar stuff to an extent. And, and I feel, you know, getting into just the automotive stuff here within the last two and a half years. I mean, I feel, feel that it's still the same way.
I mean, it's not, it's not rocket science, in a, in a sense. Now, there are especially newer vehicles and stuff. You got a way more computerized systems than what you do on some equipment and heavy trucks and stuff. The heavy truck industry has always been behind, been behind the automotive industry. But luckily, my time at Kekosing, like I said, I stayed up to date very well with pickup truck stuff and whatnot. We always did a week long training with AC Delco. They would send down the trainer and stuff, and we would do it right there in their training cacosing's training facility and stuff. And it was always a good class.
They would tailor it to whatever we were interested in or wanting to learn more on and stuff. And it was good staying up to date that way.
It's key, isn't it? That's the thing. It doesn't matter what you work on. You need the service information to be able to fix it. But then there's so many things that you take from the training, especially when it's, like, geared to what you work on that your instructor can show you. Like, it was the same for me when I go on Chrysler training, and I didn't take a ton of it, but, I mean, when you were in the classroom talking to the other guys that had been in the shops running into this and that, or the instructor who's like, yeah, well, wait till you start to see these come back for this reason. And then, you know, here's the little trick. To be able to navigate that job faster, that was what was way more valuable for training for me was how to apply it, because the guy that writes the book doesn't fix the car, and the guy that fixes the car should not write the book. But there's a, you know, there's a fine line when you can get it down on paper or in a teachable format where it really works well.
And that's, it's finding that, that mix. Right. I always found, I'm a hands on learner. I'm not like, I can read well, and I do read a ton, but I'm a hands on guy. I've got to see how you actually, like, put that valve back together. You know what I mean? A blow up on the paper doesn't do anything to me. If you show me, like, kind of how you got to cog it to get it to slide in. That's because I'm one of those people where, like, if I spend too long and there's some kind of trick and how you got to hold your tongue and it won't go, I get frustrated with the whole engineering of it and I throw it through the window and I go back to what I know.
That's how my brain works. Right? Whereas if you're working with somebody that's, like, just done it a couple times and they can show you, oh, no, click. Oh, that's how. And I. That same process I apply it to now, how I teach my young people with, with electrical and drivability. Right. Let's just start at the very, very root of the problem. The basic thing.
Don't worry about what you don't have. Show me what you have. Let's get that out of the way to eliminate that, right. And then go on to the problem. It's amazing how much better that works when we start to actually approach it that way. For people, training is one of those things. So you took some AC Delco training and you're working a way out. I guess I kind of say you're kind of working at nights on people's cars and trucks, and you just built your business that way, basically.
Yeah, man, I. At first, you know, well, actually, even now, I still have not done any real advertising or anything. It started out all just word of mouth and stuff. And, I mean, things, it took off like crazy, man. One I learned very quickly, like, if you're you, you just take care of people, treat them fair, communicate with them very well, whether they understand what you're talking about or not, and just treat them fair. I mean, I had no trouble whatsoever. I've probably got, I'd say maybe 150 customers and over the last two and a half years, and probably 120 of them, or returning customers, maybe even more than that. And, I mean, it was not difficult for me at all, getting a customer base build up.
I mean, it. And I do have a website and stuff now. I do have a Facebook page. I used to do a little bit with my Facebook page, but, gosh, I haven't even touched that thing in months now. Well, being a one man show. I've got too much work at the moment. And that's part of my, my frustrations at the moment, I suppose, is just having, you know, being too busy and just not, I suppose I don't have the best process in place to, you know, working at my house here, my shops at my house. So part of the problem when I first started out, I was using my, my personal cell phone number.
I learned very quickly that I don't want people calling me at all hours of the night and seven days a week about their, you know, their issues or whatever. So I got a separate phone for my shop. But my problem now is everybody still hands out my. Not everybody, but some people that started off with my personal number, even though I've communicated with most of my customers that I have a shop line now, they still seem to call my personal phone. And not only that, but hand that number out to other people also so that, yeah, and I don't, I should have just made my personal number, my, my shop line and just got a new phone number for my personal numbers. What I should have done.
But, yeah, it's tough though, because, like, I know my phone number has been the same now for the last seven years. And then when I switched providers, I had to get a new phone number. So, I mean, I had that phone number for almost ten years. So it's like the only two numbers I can ever remember anymore is my own phone numbers. I can't remember it trying to call. Right. It's all stored on my phone. So I'm leery of like when I, when I have to give people my new number and if that should ever have to happen, hopefully not.
How the heck is anybody ever going to be find me meanwhile, like, you know, we're all linked up now with messenger, so it's like, who even needs a phone number anymore, right?
Like, we're all right.
Our digital, our digital id. When you, you kind of talked before we got on here about how you listen to my podcast, you listen to changing the industry. Yeah, there's a lot of people just like yourself in changing the industry podcast and that in that group. How did you find that group?
You know what? I was thinking about that the other day after we talked for the first time there, and I do not remember how in the world I figured out about the changing the industry podcast and the ASOG Facebook group. I must have just been messing around on Facebook or something one day, I'm guessing. And because I honestly cannot remember how I figured out about that, I know, it wasn't anybody that told me about it. Not that I can think of, because it was after I started my business that I found out about your podcast, about the changing the industry podcast and the ASOG Facebook group and stuff, and a few other ones even I can't remember. I cannot remember for a life of me how I've, how I heard about it. I'd say I was probably just messing around on Facebook, looking for information or resources, and probably stumbled upon it. If I had to guess, that's probably how it happened. But that's been too long ago for me to remember.
Now it changes.
So can I say.
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