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Communication is SOO Key in Auto Shop Success! Cecil Bullard Joins to Rant
Communication is SOO Key in Auto Shop Success! Cecil Bullard Joins to Rant
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About this episode
Cecil Bullard joins to discuss the crucial role of communication in automotive service success. He emphasizes the importance of a positive mindset for service advisors, advocating for the car rather than making assumptions about customers' finances. Bullard shares insights on building trust, understanding customer psychology, and the need for collaboration between technicians and service advisors. He highlights the detrimental effects of discounting services and the necessity of presenting value to customers. The conversation is rich with anecdotes and practical advice for improving shop culture and profitability.
Topics:
customer psychology
service advisor training
building trust
communication strategies
value presentation
shop culture
collaboration between staff
mindset in sales
discounting services
customer decision-making
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Cecil Bullard is the Founder and CEO of The Institute For Automotive Business Excellence. Cecil discusses the financial challenges repair shops face, particularly customer resistance to pay for necessary repairs. He emphasizes maintaining integrity and communication when presenting repair value to customers. Cecil also highlights the internal issues within shops, such as poor dispatch processes and the need for better technician productivity.
00:00 Building value to preempt customer questions efficiently.
10:11 Prefer familiar car history over uncertain POS.
14:11 Customer decides; techs estimate repairs without bias.
16:47 Trust and culture are crucial for business success.
25:02 Mindset shapes business practices and customer perception.
28:37 Don't discount tickets; keep value tangible.
33:46 Cut pay; don't expect productivity improvement.
37:17 Streamline processes, improve efficiency, and ensure timely resources.
44:22 Scared customers might reject recommended car repairs.
49:31 Customer insists on fixing a beloved car.
58:06 Transition involves losing customers and attracting new clientele.
58:48 Fish where salmon are, use appropriate bait.
01:08:11 Avoid "no" to win sales conversations.
01:10:30 Prioritize fair treatment to retain skilled techs.
01:14:49 Please provide the text that needs summarizing.
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Filter:
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Technical
Too Afraid to Ask
Car
Chrysler 300
"...pinion of Cecil's gone down. But I had a Chrysler 300 for a long time. Yeah, I'm a big guy, big car, co..."
Car
Ford F150
"...omebody and be like, oh, yeah, I'm driving a Ford F150. Oh, my God. Ford F150, man. Twin. The. The. The ..."
Car
Ford Mustang
"...n Palm Springs, 117 degrees. I'm behind her in my Mustang. She's in front of me in her Honda. And in front ..."
Car
Toyota Camry
"... had customers call me and say, I've got a Toyota Camry, right. And so I write that down and got a check,..."
Car
Volkswagen Bus
"...e these potholes and dirt, and there was, like, a bus on the side that was on jack stands, and there wa..."
Building value to preempt customer questions efficiently.
Prefer familiar car history over uncertain POS.
Customer decides; techs estimate repairs without bias.
Trust and culture are crucial for business success.
Mindset shapes business practices and customer perception.
Don't discount tickets; keep value tangible.
Cut pay; don't expect productivity improvement.
Streamline processes, improve efficiency, and ensure timely resources.
Scared customers might reject recommended car repairs.
Customer insists on fixing a beloved car.
Transition involves losing customers and attracting new clientele.
Fish where salmon are, use appropriate bait.
Avoid "no" to win sales conversations.
Prioritize fair treatment to retain skilled techs.
Please provide the text that needs summarizing.
Select text to request an explanation
It's about trust. It's about culture. It's about doing your job. And your job as a service advisor is not to discount my tax labor. And by the way, that's somebody that doesn't believe in your price.
Right.
Or the value of what you do. And I can't have somebody that doesn't have their head in the right place on my service counter. It'll cost me tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of doll.
Welcome back to another episode of the JD Mechanic Podcast. I'm sitting here with somebody that I don't know too, too well, but I want to know more and get to know better. I'm sitting here with Mr. Cecil Bullard of the Automotive Institute of Automotive Business Excellence. Cecil, how are you today, bud?
I'm great. Yeah, I'm always great.
You are, Cecil. I first met you, I came here three years ago, and I sat in your class on service advisors. And I'm not a service advisor.
Right.
I'm a technician. And so much of what I took away in the class within the first 20 minutes was. It's about. It's more about psychology. Right. And what. How you approach everything and what you're trying to.
I think all of life is kind of about psychology. If you. If you start defeated, you end up defeated. If you believe that you can't, you can't. And we have a lot of service advisors who really aren't salespeople, haven't been trained to think. Right.
Yeah.
And so they go into it. You know, you have this. Well, even. Even tax. You know, this car's a pos.
Mm.
And, you know, you and I were kind of talking last night. I'm my job. At least if I'm a service advisor. And what I teach my service advisors is I'm not making decisions about what's going to be done on the car. My job is to advocate for the car. So if it needs. Whatever it needs, I'm going to make a list. I'm going to price it out the way that I need to so that we're profitable.
And I'm going to present it to the customer in such a way that the customer is going to. If I'm doing it right, I'm kind of preempting questions. So I'm building value into the sale. I'm helping the customer understand why we would do it the way we do it and getting them to kind of go, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, Cecil. And now that I have you at that place, now we can talk about what the cost is because you've already made a decision. You're already on the buyer's side. And there's a whole psychology around when you like starting with no and trying to get rid of no and put yes in the box, that is, it is five times, ten times more difficult. So when you're, when you've done.
I've written service for most of my adult life, I've sold so many different things that you can. Even for a year and a half, I did door to door sales.
Right.
Which, which is another game all in and kind of itself. And the person that you're talking to is different. So you think, you know, selling somebody, you know, $10,000 worth of work on their car is hard.
Yeah.
Go knock on somebody's door at seven in the evening to sell them something they don't know they want or need.
Yep.
And that's a whole different game. But I learned a lot about psychology and sales. And then I'm. I have a couple of degrees. I've got an engineering degree, which means nothing, frankly. I've never used any of it.
Right.
But. And I'm close to a psych degree. If I decided I wanted to go back, I could probably get a psych degree in less than a year. Yeah. Because it's all part of the, it's like part of the game. Yeah. There's so many people that they're like, oh, that guy can't afford to fix this car. Or look at that guy, he probably won't buy this, or whatever.
And the minute you start there, you just greatly decrease the odds of making the sale.
The thing that resonated in my head from like 15 minutes within the starting a class is stinking thinking.
Yeah.
Right. Like you reiterated and reiterated again through the whole thing. And I came away like, that's a key. Like, that's a key thing that you were trying to get into people's heads is just thinking. It's a defeated mindset.
Yeah. At the institute, we have a service advisor program, a training program. We work with hundreds of service advisors. And years ago, when we decided, okay, we're gonna have this program, there were three of us, pretty good salespeople in the industry. And we sat down and we said, okay, what should we teach service advisors? And so, oh, you gotta teach them how to handle objections. You gotta teach them how to deal with an angry customer, and you gotta teach them how to manage a technician and workflow and, you know, how to estimate properly and, you know, all of these things. And we came up with A list of. It was like 110 things.
Took us all day, right? So we're there and like, well, what about this? Oh, yeah, we gotta have that. So you have all these different concepts you're gonna teach. And then it took us two more days to decide. What do you teach first? Right? Because you go, oh, you gotta be able to handle objections. Oh, that's gotta be at the front, right. You know. Oh, you got to be. Know that's got to be at the front.
And what. What it came down to. And I think I was the, you know, the. Since I'm the owner, I get to make the final decision at least. And mine was you got to be in the right headspace. Yeah. You have to. You have to understand that this person's coming to you with their car.
And 99% of the people that are coming to you with their car, you're in the driver's seat because they, at some point picture you as the person that can take care of their car. They wouldn't be here. They wouldn't give you their keys. They wouldn't. Yeah, you know, they wouldn't shake your hand, blah, blah, blah. And so if I'm already in the driver's seat, then. And you really want me to help you understand, you know, what's going on with your car, you know, et cetera, then I have to be in the right headspace in order to help you. Because if not, I might.
I might work against you. Yeah, I watch service advisors, and they go up and they're like, oh, you know, your car needs. Blah, blah, blah. You know, maybe it's a coolant flush, maybe it's a brake flush. Could be a brake job, could be tires. Right? Wow. Hey, can I. Can I get by? How long can I get by? Right? And you know, you could say, oh, well, you can probably get by for couple of months.
But I wouldn't do that.
Right.
I mean, because the technician says, we need this and this is creating other problems or potentially could create other problems. So if you can fit it into your budget and you're here, why would you postpone it? You should do it now. Yeah. Doesn't that make sense?
But when you lay it out exactly like that, it seems so simple.
But you have service advisors that will say, oh, yeah, you don't really have to do that today. And then that's all there is. And so it's. Now it's on to the next thing. So you've given the customer permission to say no when they probably really shouldn't. You know, and you think, okay, cool. And flush. There's some people that are like, oh, you never flush coolant in the car.
And of course, some of the manufacturers are coming out, going this lifetime coolant. And my experience would say they're nuts. Nuts. I remember when they came out with dex clogged. And I actually owned a minivan, my wife's minivan. And we ended up doing a sixteen hundred dollar intake on this thing because the DexCool eight through the aluminum.
Sure.
Right. And if somebody had said to me, and by the way, yeah, I was a tech and yeah, I was a service provider by the time, I should have known. Right. But I didn't think about it on my wife's own car.
Right.
You know, I, I brought the car in, gave it to a tech and said, service the car. Right. And nobody ever came to me and said, hey, you got dex clog in that thing. You know, you probably ought to change that. Yeah, right.
Yeah.
And so a simple thing like a coolant flush. Well, should I do it or not? Well, do you have to do it today? No, you really don't. Frankly. You could do it tomorrow.
Yeah.
You could do it next week. Probably not. But it is eating the aluminum in the engine on the inside passages and you're already here. Yeah. And so what? Why would you not take care of that? Why would you wait until you have a major problem? And then there's, you know, empirical statistical data that says if I take care of my car, it's going to last twice as long. And you know, when I started working on cars, you know, at 75, 80,000 miles, you were having engine failure, transmission failure, et cetera. You know, we're talking about 1970s automobiles. They were crap.
And so not servicing the coolant or not servicing the brake fluid, the car was going to blow up anyway.
Right, right.
But today most cars, you know, 300,000 miles is a reasonable expectation out of a car that's been maintained. And then, you know, you always have your, in my opinion, Mercedes and some of the higher end stuff that could go 500,000 or a million miles if it's taken care of.
Yeah.
Then there's a whole financial piece of it that you. I always have service. Well, the car's not worth it. Well, wait a minute. Right, that's. First of all, it's not your decision.
Right.
Second of all, what's the option? Right. I think you and I were talking about this a little last night. And that is if somebody's driving a pos, why are they driving A pos, they either love the car or they don't have much money. And so if they don't have much money, is it better for me, the service advisor, to say, oh, don't worry about any of that and. Or not to sell them the service? I mean, if They've got a $2,000, $3,000 car and the car needs $3,000 of the work, what's a better option for them? Have the car blow up. Right.
And then have to go find a car.
Yeah.
And by the way, worst case scenario.
When I go find a car, what am I gonna buy another pos, a used POS somewhere? And I don't know, you're tech and you've looked at a lot of pos's, right? Awful used car lots and you found $4,000 worth of crap the car needed. And so if I have the car that I have, then at least I know the history of the car and I know what's what. I mean, I had a Chrysler. Some people are going to go, yeah, okay, well, now my opinion of Cecil's gone down. But I had a Chrysler 300 for a long time. Yeah, I'm a big guy, big car, comfortable for me. I drove that thing for like 307,000 miles.
Love those cars.
Yeah. And. And then all of a sudden, you know, one morning, the transmission wasn't quite. I mean, it was shifting, but it wasn't. To somebody that knows what's going on, you're like, I took that thing and traded it in. Who do you. Who, where did that car end up? Right? It ended up on a used car lot because it was clean, clean, clean, because I take care of my cars. But somebody bought that car and shortly afterwards probably had to put a transmission.
Right.
And I don't want my clients in that situation. Or you could buy a new car. I mean, holy smokes, they'll give you a new car for almost nothing today. I mean, you know, you just sign away nine years of your life at 21% or 29% or 17%. And so if you're broke, is that a better option than putting three or four grand into the car you have or what?
And the quality of stuff that's built now, you may still end up having to put an engine in it. It's just. The difference is you're going to put it in under warranty. Yeah, well, that should scare a lot more people driving around. And it's like I got one of these little Ford escapes with a turbo in it and it's got 50,000 miles on it. And they just replaced my engine because it burned so much oil that it punched a hole through the block. It didn't matter. Like, I got all my main.
Like, they still at least are looking after the customer. But if you're a customer and you think that, oh, the next one's not.
Gonna do that, oh, man, it's not gonna happen.
Like, that would scare the death out of me to be, like, in 50,000. I'd be driving around going, a ticking time bomb.
You know, what amazes me, frankly, is that I know most of the people I know are in this industry, so they've either been techs or service advisors or owners or all of it. Right?
Yeah.
And. And so you'll talk to somebody and be like, oh, yeah, I'm driving a Ford F150. Oh, my God. Ford F150, man. Twin. The. The. The one with the twin turbos.
Absolutely. Oh, it's 70,000 miles. You're going to buy turbos. Yeah, probably, right? I mean, yeah, it. And by the way, tell me something. I can buy that. I. I can guarantee that nothing's going to go wrong with it, right? It's not possible.
No.
So it's just funny because you'll be teaching a class. You'll have, I don't know, a hundred people in a class, and you go, hey, how many of you could work on my Ford? And a bunch of guys will be like, oh, you have a Ford? And there are other guys that are like, oh, Fords are great. Right. Or I might say, hey, what about my Mercedes? Or what about my BMW? Well, all the BMW shop owners I know love BMWs. The reason they love them is because they fall apart. Like, the cooling systems are a disaster.
Oh, yeah.
Leak oil. Yeah. And they put a diaper on the cars. Now, back in the old days, we didn't have the belly pans and all that because the cars weren't supposed to leak oil. Right. But that kind of amazes me, and that kind of leans into probably the attitude of the tech and the service advisor things that you and I were discussing. I like to make sure that my techs, number one, know what their job is. And for my tax, I want you to look the car over and tell the service advisor what the car needs without prejudice, without.
This car's a POS. Now, by the way, if we can't take care of the car, if we can't fix it and make it safe, I don't want to work on it.
Right.
Let's send the customer away. But if we can fix it and make it safe, then I want the customer to have the option to say, yes, that's what I want to do. And I don't want you holding back because you don't like to check coolant systems or you don't want to do coolant hoses or whatever, because that's not what we're here for. Right? And then for my service advisor, it's not your job to decide how much time that will take or what's needed. That's a tax job. So for my techs in my businesses, they estimated what the car needed, why it needed it. That was on our estimate ticket, the parts list, what parts you need to do the job right, and the time. And we had some rules around time.
We'd like to be plus or minus 20%. But if you said, if you're a tech, like one day I had a Ford 5 liter truck in the shop and we're talking us probably 15 years ago, so we're talking much simpler, easier to get to crap, etc. And it needed valve cover gaskets. And my tech comes in and the estimate comes in. I'm not talking to the tech because I have a great estimating process. I believe my tax. And he says, I want 6.7 hours to do valve cover gaskets on this thing. And the book time was 2.5 or something.
He didn't write any note as to why. So as a service advisor, I'm like, I can't sell this thing at 6.7. I don't know why. So I head out and he sees me coming, he goes, oh, oh crap, I forgot to tell you why. But come see this. Someone had welded all the brackets to the engine and to the, like the AC compressor. The bracket was welded, the bracket to the alternator was welded to the alternator. And so we had to cut the whole thing apart, clean it all up.
I think I charged the customer like 11 hours on that. But I don't want my service advisor making the decision on time. They haven't seen the car. And by the way, I also don't, I don't want my service advisor out there looking at the car. It's not their job. Right. And we have shops where the service advisor saying, well, the technician's wrong, so I'm not going to sell xyz.
We, you and I talked about that last night, right? Where there's such a dynamic that so many of us work in, where you can go to pro demand. Mitchell, whatever, pull up the labor time and you can 2.5 and they come back and hand you the ticket and it's only got two on it.
Yeah, yeah, but that, See, that would not fly in my business. I would be all over that service advisor. And it's about, it's about trust, it's about culture, it's about doing your job. And your job as a service advisor is not to discount my tax labor. And by the way, that's somebody that doesn't believe in your price or the value of what you do. And I can't have somebody that doesn't have their head in the right place on my service counter. It'll cost me tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales and profits in a year and potentially. And I think the part that doesn't get noticed is it's going to cost me customers because now I have a tech's got a.
Can I say shitty? A shitty attitude. Yeah, right. And so this tech is like, give me two tenths for this and it should be five tenths and I'm getting ripped off. And so they're not giving it their all. And now that thing goes out and it has a problem. And you know, some of my customers don't come back when they have a problem. They go somewhere else. And what do you think the other shop's telling them? Oh, those guys are great over there, right? Oh, it's just a mistake.
Don't worry about, take it back, let them take care of it. Or are they saying, oh yeah, those guys are crappy, blah, blah, blah. So, and the other thing is, I never want to see my client on a tow truck, right? And then I also understand kind of human nature. So I don't remember if I told you the story last night or whatever, but my wife picks me up the airport at midnight. Sometimes I'm flying in late. It's like 35 miles from my house. And so she comes, she comes and picks me up at the airport. We get in her car and the oil lights on, you know that.
And I said, honey, how long's that light been on? She goes, the teapot light? I said, yeah, the teapot light, right. And she goes, I don't know, three, four weeks.
Three, four.
And the lifters are tick, tick, ticking. So, you know, this thing's like. And so I have to drive about a mile to a gas station. It's midnight. You know, there's a. You can go in. It's one of like a set with a 7 11, whatever. And I have to buy two quarts of oil and put it in the car so I don't blow up the engine.
On the way home, my wife got in an accident. We're going home from church. It's July in Palm Springs, 117 degrees. I'm behind her in my Mustang. She's in front of me in her Honda. And in front of her is a motorhome. And we're two and a half miles from the house. And the motorhome decides not to make the left turn and backs up over the Honda and rolls the radiator kind of over the engine.
And the radiator dumps all the fluid. I didn't see a lot of transmission fluid, but all the coolant gone, right? And so the cops come. We pull to the side of the road. The cops come, and I'm back 25, 30ft from where they were because I didn't want to get in the middle of it. And cop comes, talks to the guy in the motorhome, talks to my wife, comes and talks to me as a witness. And I'm talking to the cop and saying, yeah, here's what happened. He goes, yeah, that's what the motorhome guy said. We maybe spent two minutes, real friendly.
And I turn around and the Honda's gone. It's gone. It's not there. And it's my wife and kids. She drove it home. She got in that car and drove it home. And the tow truck that I had called showed up about five minutes later. And there's no car to pick up, so I had to tell the guy go to my house.
And she fried the head gasket on the Honda driving it home. And so I understand that my customers are more like my wife than me. I mean, I was a technician for. I was a master tech for, I think, 27 years. And I worked on cars a lot. I haven't in the last 12 or 15, but prior to that. And so I know what's going on with the car. And if my car.
If somebody did that, I wouldn't be driving my car. But my wife is like, it's hot out here. I'm going to the house. And if it blows the car up, who cares, right?
She might think it's already. It's already dead anyway. Yeah, yeah.
So it's. So what? I guarantee the insurance company paid for the radiator and all the other stuff. They didn't pay for the head gaskets and the, you know, back then in the. With the Honda's, when you milled the Head. You created additional pressure in the system, and then the thing ran hot forever. Forever. You couldn't. I had to end up putting a new engine in it so that it wouldn't overheat on her.
Yeah. But the. So my service advisor's job is to take care of the car and sometimes basically tell the customer, I'm sorry. You know, this is what you got to do. Right. And my text job is to find out what's wrong with the car and let my service advisor know.
So we see a lot of time where it's like you're kind of saying, and I don't want to use the word bad news, but it's kind of like you have to give the tough talk sometimes to. As a service advisor's role. But I see so many times where it's like, they try to put that onto the technician.
No, no, no.
Like, it's an emotional thing. It's like, listen, this customer is in this situation, and you and I talked about last night where it's like, it doesn't matter.
What's not my situation?
No, it's not my situation.
I didn't. I didn't build the car. I didn't buy the car. I didn't drive the car. I didn't break the car. It's not. I should not pay for it.
Yeah.
The. When you have a shop where the owner or the service advisor is emotionally discounting giving stuff away and that's hurting the staff. That's not fair. Yeah, it's not. Okay.
Yeah.
And. And so, like, if I came into your shop and I caught the service advisor discounting your labor, I would be like, uh, no. Also, the owner owns the shop, and if they decide to give away 100% of your labor and just pay you, I. Okay. Right. You're taking the heat. You're not taking the money home to your wife and kids, that's fine. But when the money hurts you because I made a decision to discount the customer, it's not okay.
And so I can't as a shop owner, when I was as a consultant, which I am. And service advisor trainer, which I am. No, we can't do that. It's not right. It's not fair. Plus, it's not the shop owner's money, and it's not the service advisor's money. It's the customers.
Right.
And if that's what the car needs, I'm sorry, you're in a bad situation. You may not be able to buy it, but if I go to the grocery store and I Put a gallon of milk on. And I go up to the counter and I say to the person that's checking my groceries, I say, hey, wait a minute. I've been coming to your grocery store for 25 years, and I spend tens of thousands of dollars every year on groceries because I4Kids and their friends and blah, blah, blah. And you know, today I'm in a bad situation and I don't really want to pay for that milk. They're not letting me have the milk.
No.
Right.
Yeah.
And when my electricity bill shows up and if I call them up and give them the, oh, man, things have been really tough, blah, blah, blah, they might send me to a program. I might get to a point where I fill stuff out and I can get some kind of a discount. But mostly it's like, we're going to turn your electricity off. You don't pay the bill. So why would I have an owner or a service advisor giving my work away? I think at that point I've got a right to be upset.
So when you go into a shop, Cecil, and we talked about this last night, but we'll touch on it again for the benefit of everybody else. You go into a shop and you look at how it works and how it runs and everything else, what's the biggest obstacle you see in from a process standpoint or what do most of them do? That is the. Is the thing that you see the most times that you have to get it corrected if they're going to turn their business around.
Well, it's always in your head. Everything's in your head. So if I believe that my customers can't or won't pay the bill, and by the way, that might be true if I'm running a bunch of discount coupons, et cetera, I may have built my whole customer base on people who can't afford what I do. And so it might be true, but I have to get my head on straight. And so there's easy things to do. Like you look at your parts matrix and you say, wow, your parts matrix is screwed up. And so you put a new parts matrix in place, and then you teach the service advisors, you don't get to change the job. That's the price of the job.
And your job is to help the customer understand the value of you doing it. So you're a tech, and talking to you last night, you were like, I'm not the diet guy. I can do some, but I'm really this guy. Right. And so you're a technician, and you look at the job. And you go, oh man, you know, that's. That job in the book is four hours. And I can do that in two.
Right. Should we charge the customer two or should we charge the customer four?
Charge the customer four.
Well, of course we should. Right. Because that's legitimately what the job is worth. And just because you got good at it. I have, I don't know, 215 or 216 scars on my hands between the two.
Yeah.
I'm. I'm a little OCD. So I'll be sitting in church bored out of tears, and I'm like 12, 34, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. And I'm counting the scars on my hands.
Yeah.
And those are. I earned those. Yeah, right. I did stupid stuff. I tried to unscrew something while I was holding it in my left hand with my right hand and drove the screwdriver through my palm on my hand. I reached up and grabbed the wheel with one hand, thinking I was Superman instead of two and almost ripped my top of my finger off. Those are earned scars. And I learned how to do the job by modifying my equipment.
I knew which shortcuts I could take and I created shortcuts because I was a flat rate guy. And if I could do the job, get paid for two hours and do the job in an hour, I took more money home to my family. Right. And who is the service advisor or even the owner to say that doesn't have value? Right. And we go to the customer and we're not in the right headspace and we're thinking, oh, this poor guy. And we discount before we even find out what the real situation is. And I'm not saying you shouldn't have any compassion or anything like that. Because if you're a salesperson, you have no compassion and you cannot demonstrate compassion.
You're not going to sell much. All right. But we just have to stop in this whole industry giving everything away.
Yeah.
And so you asked me what they do wrong. A lot of things, they don't follow their parts matrix. They look at a part and they go, wow, that's really expensive. I certainly wouldn't want to pay that. And they cut the price down. And you were talking about 20 years ago or whatever. I was in a class and some guy said you'd be better off to go to the get $20 bills and hand out $20. That was me.
I teach my owners and Service Advisors. Take 500 bucks out of your pocket, your money and go down to the bank and get $20 bills all crisp and keep them in your pocket. And by the way, I still have, I have those $20 bills in my pocket right now. And then when you want to discount the ticket, don't build it out the full price. And if you really want to help the customer, reach in your own pocket and take 20, 40, $60 and hand it to the customer. Because the, the ticket is not real. The ticket is this imaginary. You know, I don't notice that I gave away $50 or whatever thing, but if I had to reach in my pocket every single time and take out 50 bucks, how often would you do that for a client or a customer? I mean, don't get me wrong, I love my clients, but if they don't pay the bill, I can't help anybody.
And so that was similar to, like we were saying, if you want to do it every day and take 20 bucks out, most people don't do it. But yet when you look at it from the technician standpoint on a production based flat rate. Let's go back to the wiper install conversation we had last night. Say for instance, it used to be you got paid point two to put two wiper blades on. And then we decide to run a promo all of a sudden, and we give free wiper blades to the customer. So they're free now. We had to buy them, but we're free. And all of a sudden this is like, you're going to put them on for free.
And all of a sudden that technician is like, you don't want to give 20 bucks out of your own pocket.
I'm taking it out of yours. But yeah, and you have no choice.
That's right.
So vehicle inspection again, back in the day, 15 years ago, my guys are doing vehicle inspections. I'm not really paying them for the vehicle inspection, but I'm charging 5/10 for the service. And we call it a service and we're charging enough that I can pay that five tenths. And my guys came to me and they said, well, we want to get paid for the service. My tax, we want to get paid for the inspection. And I said, okay, here's what I'm willing to do. I said, you're doing. We were doing, I don't know, four or five brake flushes a day.
We had enough cars that we would sell four or five brake flushes. And I says, currently, I'm paying you an hour for a brake flush. We know it takes 20 minutes. And so I'm going to cut the brake flush down to five, ten, and then I'll pay you the five tenths for the inspection. And oh, by the way, coolant flushes. We know we hooked the machine up. We know it takes 30 minutes here. I'm going to cut it down to 6:10 instead of the hour that we're currently paying you.
And so you can either get paid for the inspection an extra 3/10 or you can keep. Blah, blah, blah.
Yeah. Your gravy work.
And my text said, we'll keep the gravy.
Yeah.
All right, but. And maybe that's devious or, I don't know, maybe somebody would look that and go, cecil, man, that's just really low. But my techs could inspect a car in 12 minutes.
Right.
And so if you can't change the oil and inspect the car in half an hour, today, it's a little different with DVIs. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the, you know, 15 years ago rules apply to today, but back then you could do a service on a car or change the oil filter and Inspect it in 20, 25 minutes if you were paying attention. Right. And so I didn't have a problem. But let's go back to your wiper blades. So if I'm an owner and I decide to give away wiper blades as part of a, I don't know, a promo or whatever, I Pay the technician 2/10, I0 out the labor.
Yeah.
And that's going to change my effective labor rate. And then when my consultant comes in, he's not going to say, oh, your people are unproductive. He's going to say, who's given my stuff away because I don't have an effective labor rate. That is where it needs to be. And so you can fool yourself with your numbers, you can make almost anything look good.
And the technician standpoint, like your elr, I'm not really too stressed about it. I mean, I probably. If I'm really going to be invested and involved in my business, I should know it too.
Well, you probably should be, because it's going to affect whether or not I can write your check on Friday. But.
But the end game is when somebody ask me, what's your production look like? Right. If I'm shopping myself to a next employer or we're just shooting the bull, I gotta show my production is good.
So in management, I have some rules about that. One of my rules is people cannot be held accountable for things they have no control over. So if someone's discounting your time and taking it away, you have no control over that. And now I'm gonna come to you and go, well, hey, you're not very productive. Excuse me, that's not fair. I have no control over that. You keep giving my time away. Yeah, and, and I think techs, I work with a lot of techs and I are one.
Right. Deep in my heart, I'm still a tech. Yeah, we got egos, right. And, and I want to be, I want to beat the time and I want to be the best tech and I never want to have a comeback and blah, blah, blah. And when you make a tech look bad because you're discounting and giving stuff away, I don't think that's, I don't think that's going to get you what you want with your tax.
No.
So, you know, you want to fool yourself and say, I'm just going to take this two tenths off and not pay my tech. Okay, go ahead. But then don't try to hold the tech accountable for productivity. And so I was, you and I were talking about all this and I have, I've looked at, I don't know, I estimated in the 20 plus years I've been doing this, I've been in about 3,000 shops and I work with about 3,000 shops. And productivity is one of the things we look at. Are the techs productive? And when you go into a shop, like I was in Salt Lake at a shop even, I don't know, two, three years ago, and we're looking at it and the techs are very unproductive and the service advisor, sales are low and the average apparent is low and the margins are low. And you're like, okay. And so now I'm sitting down with the techs and I'm like, hey guys, you're not very productive.
You know, you're only billing out, you know, five and a half hours a day. Help me understand why that's happening. Oh, that this owner, this sob, the service advisor, you know, he, I estimate the job at five hours and it comes back and it's three. And you're like, oh, okay, you know, or you know, I come in at 8 o'clock, I don't have cars to work on.
Yeah.
It's not until like 8:45 that I get a car dispatched. And by the way, there's all these cars out here, but I don't get any paperwork, I can't move forward. And then you also have, well, the service advisor takes three and a half hours or four hours to estimate the job. Right. And so I talk about a Brick wall. Right.
I was just going to ask you.
About the brick wall.
Right.
And so for me, I'm very visual, so everything kind of becomes a visual for me. So what I picture is someone, one of my employees coming up against a brick wall. Right. And it's got a lot of bricks in it, and it's high and they can't get around it, they can't get through it, and they're what happens if, you know, your treasure's on the other side, your lunch is there and you're starving and you can see it and you can smell it, but you can't get past the brick wall. Right. You get frustrated. Right. And so I talk about bricks and there are two types of bricks in the wall.
There's company bricks and there's employee bricks. So you might be a guy who's disorganized.
Yeah.
Okay. So you, you put all your tools in your, your little roll around tool card. And when you're, when you need to find that 10 millimeter socket, you spend 15 minutes trying to dig it out of the pile of crap because you don't, you're not organized. Right. That's a personal brick. That's your brick. You own your disorganization and that's keeping you from getting your lunch. Right? Yep.
But when the company doesn't have a good dispatch process, when the service advisor is discounting your labor, when we're not estimating and dispatching quickly. Right. And then there's a parts brick today. And by the way, you know, 20 years ago, the parts brick was easy to remove. You found a better vendor. You said, you know, I'll charge them a little more. Get the parts here that happened today, that's a bigger brick and it's much harder to get rid of because we have parts, what they call supply problems and stuff like that. And so when I'm looking at that brick wall and I'm identifying bricks with my employee, one of the bricks that's going to come up is a parts brick.
Okay. And so if I can't make sure that I always get the right part and it's always here in a timely fashion, what else can I do that helps the employee be able to get their lunch, get the reward on the other side of the wall. Right. Well, if you remove the dispatch brick and if you remove the. We didn't estimate enough time brick. And if you remove the I show up and I don't have any work, or it takes two and a half hours to estimate a job because I don't have enough staff to do the job properly. Or if you remove the service advisors, you know, I absolutely detest this. I'll walk in a shop and if you're good, customer calls you.
Customer says, I got this light on my dash. And you know, the car just doesn't feel right. Right. And so the service advisor is like, oh, that's going to be a check in July, middle light diag. And it. Okay, it's we're $123 or $140 or whatever it is. Right. And they write that down.
And then they get the customer's phone number, they book them in for tomorrow morning, whatever it is, customer shows up. And if you're a good service advisor, when you're having that interaction, you say, is there anything else that you'd like us to look at while the car's here? And the customer says, yeah, you know this horrible rattle when I go over speed bumps. Right. And the service advisor writes it down, but it's still only $130 Diag.
Yes.
And then this customer says, oh, and by the way, the right rear window, once you roll it down, I mean, it takes forever to try to get it rolled up. Sometimes it won't even roll up. Can you check that out? Yeah, you write that. Service advisor writes that down. And then they hand this to a tech and it's still only got $130. It only has an hour worth of diag time on it.
Yeah.
And they're giving you three different systems to diag. And I think you and I talked about like, you know, you, I. I've had customers call me and say, I've got a Toyota Camry, right. And so I write that down and got a check, engine light, blah, blah, blah. And the car shows up and it's not a Camry, you know, it's not even a Toyota.
Yeah.
So just because you told me something doesn't mean that what the tech's going to find is, you know, they're going to put the scanner in and find one code for one system or two codes for one system. They might find 15 codes for 12 systems or. And when we're looking at multiple systems, it's not a one hour diag anymore.
But that's such a tough conversation for them because they've got the customer. I think so many do it wrong. Cecil. The customer comes in and then that the way of voicing. Is there anything else I can look at you for today as if to say, like, I'm going to help you with this, I'm going to like, is there anything you want real quick?
That's my job is to help you with it. But by the way, you know, I call you to my house. I don't know, you're a bricklayer, right? And I call you my house and say, here's a wall, and I need you to build that wall. What's it going to cost? And you look at it and you go, well, time and materials, $3,000. And as you're walking out, I say, oh, and there's this wall over here. And you're like, oh, I'd love to help you with that. Right. I'm not expecting you to do that in the original $3,000 estimate.
But we as automotive, we've kind of like, this has become our habit and we don't even think about. Now I've got the guy doing three different things. And so if the customer called me and said, I got a problem with the rear window, right. It won't roll up and down like it should. My diet for that's an hour. And I know that I may have to pull the door panel, and I know that I'm going to have to tech. You know, I might find that in 10 minutes, I might pull the switch, you know, a couple of clips or whatever, pull the switch out. And the switch is bad.
Right. I can always tell the customer, hey, you know, it didn't take as long as we thought, so I lowered the bill. But if I tell the customer, it's going to cost you 20 bucks. And then I have to take the door panel apart and it ends up being, you know, the window motor and a bunch of other stuff. It's not 20 bucks anymore. It's taken a lot more time and time. I don't make money when I don't charge for time. Right.
And what's the purpose of my business?
Sell time.
Yeah, I sell time and parts. Right. And I buy time from my techs and parts from my suppliers. And if I'm giving it all away, then I become a charity. Yeah, we have a lot of charity automotive shops, Right.
It's that expectation, though, I think is the customer. They just assume that because of the way we voiced it that we're will there. It's a situation that we're trying to.
Help, but the service advisor right there should be saying, okay, now we're gonna be doing three different things, right? And so now this is the new diag Cecil.
They're so scared, though. They have that stop.
Yeah, customers can't hurt you. Right. Don't get me wrong. There might be a crazy person out there who for some reason, they don't like your fact that you have a beard or they don't like the fact that you have white hair or whatever. And so they go out to their car and they get a gun, they come in and they kill you. Right today. Now, 15 years ago, I probably wouldn't even have said that could happen right today. Man, there's a lot of people that don't.
The elevator doesn't go all the way up. Right. But in general, the customer is never going to hurt you. They can disagree with you. They can say, no, I don't want to buy that. I had customers come in that said, I want you to check these five things. And I'm like, okay, the original estimate was going to be 160. Actually, ours was 250.
That's where we started.
Yeah, yeah.
But now it's a thousand dollars. And customers, whoa, wait a minute. Right. I said, well, we got to do this, we got to do this, we got to do this, we got to do this. Now we've, we have a lot more time involved, and so it's going to cost more money. And the customer's like, I don't want to spend that much. Okay, great. What would you like me to do? Yeah, well, we got to fix this and this.
Okay, now that's 500. And the customer says, okay, don't look at the other stuff. That's the customer's prerogative. Right, Right.
Or is it because we're scared that if we all of a sudden don't want to do the freebie, we lose the appointment that they came in for.
I think we're all, I think our industry runs unscared. All right? And it's, it's. As a, as an owner, if I manage my staff, if I tell you, look, I need 10 hours of productivity out of you every day, that you're going to be mad at me because I'm trying to get your productivity up and trying to hold you accountable for being productive. And yet the average productivity in the industry is 72%. And that's costing the average shop probably somewhere around 80 to $100,000 a year in bottom line profit. And if I had an extra 80 or $100,000, I could buy a boat. Or maybe not. Maybe my employees could buy boats.
Right, Whatever. But we're scared, right? We're scared that if we tell our customers, hey, this car needs $6,000 worth of stuff, the customer will Say, I'm not going to put that money into this car. And by the way, if I do that and I don't do it right, that's probably going to happen. If I do it right and I build value and I talk about why this is a good thing for you to do, and if someone says, well, geez, I don't really want to invest that money in this car, I say, okay, so let's talk about options. What are your options if you don't invest in this car and you don't fix these brakes? You know, now what, are you going to take the bus? You're going to buy a used car? Let me tell you my experience with used cars. Right. Let me tell you about my experience with paying car payments for nine years.
Right.
Well, by the way, I don't have nine years. But I never. I won't find this car more than three. Yeah, but nine years, right. You know, after the first year, those car payments get to be kind of painful. And you know, nowadays you're getting a $600 to $1,000 car payment if you buy anything.
Yeah.
And for four months worth of payments, I can make this car run well, it looks okay, it works for you, it can stop, etc. And so what's smarter to go in debt 60,000 at, you know, 9%, 17% or to spend 4 and fix the car I have so I can drive this for the next couple of years?
Yeah. And I plead with all the time with shop owners because they're like, it drives. It's never in my career made sense to me when they keep saying the customer doesn't have any money and then.
You drive out, how much money do I have in my pocket?
I have no idea.
You have no idea?
Zero.
I have currently have about $2,500 on cash.
Right.
All right. And by the way, don't mug me, okay? No, but, you know, you have no idea. And I might look like, you might say, here's a guy, he's wearing nice slacks, he's wearing nice shoes, so he must have money. You know, how many people have like this big beautiful house and you go in their house and there's no furniture.
Right.
Because their house poor. Or they're driving this really nice car. They must have money. But they have a $1200 car payment. And so they're car poor.
Yeah. They're renting, you know, but you also.
Have people that are dressed where you would look at them and go, they're driving this piece of crap. I had a customer in Palm Springs, whose father built the tramway. Palm Springs has a tramway that goes from like 160ft up to the mountain to like 9,000ft. It's, you know, this thing that when you go there, you're like, oh, it's 120 degrees. And you go up the mountain at 60 degrees and beautiful. And this guy was worth $14 million. Now, by the way, what he drove was this four door Chrysler, crap, brown, rusty. The door, the windows had wood wedged in the windows to hold them up.
There was a stick that he had in the front seat to hold up the headliner. The back was full of newspapers and whatever. And you would look at this guy and you would think this guy's homeless guy living in his car or whatever. Except he was worth $14 million and lived on a house on the hill, beautiful home. And, and he was a funny guy too, because he would put like, he wouldn't fix his windows, he wouldn't fix the headliner on this car, but he would put $6,000 into suspension work or tires or an engine on this car. And I had a customer, had the exact same car, same year, same color, you know, a third of the miles, maybe 70,000 miles. The car was mint, mint, mint. And I told him, I said, you know, you need 6,000, we need a transmission in this thing.
We're going to spend six grand. I said, I had a customer selling one just like it, but Perfect for like 4,500. You should find that guy. And he goes, nope, fix it. Cecil, right? You don't know. Yeah, I had a experience, young service advisor, feeling sorry for everybody. Guy brings a Dodge Dart puke green slant six, just car worth 800 bucks in mint condition. And the guy gets picked up by someone in new Mercedes.
He's got a five carat diamond on his hand, he's got a Rolex watch on his hand. He's probably wearing a $3,000 suit. Old guy. Like back then, I wasn't. He was like me. Yeah, white hair, sure, old guy. And we're gonna call him Mr. Jones.
So I dispatched the car. He says, cecil, service it and I want this car. Whatever it needs, we're gonna take care of it. So I dispatch it to my tech, my tech inspects it. Brings back six pages of crap, okay? And it's over six grand. It's like $6,500 to fix this car. And I call him up, hey, Mr. Jones.
Cecilia, you got a moment? Yeah, Cecil, I had a moment. You know, hey, you know, man, your car needs a lot of stuff. And unfortunately, it's probably not worth fixing. He lights into me, Right. Who the hell are you, you know, to make that decision? Do you know how much money I have? Do you know what I'm worth? You know, I gave away a brand new Mercedes because I didn't like the way it ride. He said, I like that I love that car more than I love my wife. He's, I'm gonna be buried in that car. Fix the damn car.
And I'm like, But, Mr. Smith, the car's only worth like $1200 and we're gonna put 65. He goes, look, if you're not willing to fix the car, I will come pick it up. I'll drive down the street to the shop down the street and have them fix it.
Right.
And I was like, Mr. Smith, I'll have that car ready for you in three days. Right. But it was a lesson to me.
Yeah.
Right. Don't make decisions for the customer because you don't know. And I have friends who will put their crappiest clothes on to go down and buy a car.
Yeah.
Or to go down and drop their car off at the. At the mechanic.
Yeah.
Right. Because they're trying to work you to get you to feel bad for them. So the price is going to be lower.
Yeah.
And why the heck would we do that?
Yeah. I, it never, it always drove me crazy when you work for somebody and they go, they don't have any money. They don't have any money. They don't have any money. And the car, you see the car leave, you do a diagonal inspection of the car. Car leaves next week. They're driving in with another car they don't have anymore.
Or worse. You go down to best Buy on the weekend.
Yeah.
And you see them and they're carting out an 80 inch flat screen TV.
Yeah.
Brand new in the box.
And I'm not trying to fault anyone for living the life that they want to live.
No.
Right. But my job has never been about why does I emotionally invest in this transaction when at the end of the day they're still going to do what they want to do. Now, they have obviously come into my place because they want their car fixed.
Yeah.
But I can't allow them to have power over me to control the process, control the transaction.
I have a different job. If I'm a tech. I look the car over. Whatever it needs. I say, this is what it needs. I put it in the order or I estimate it the way that my shop tells me to do that's. How we do this here. And I hand it to the service advisor.
The service advisor's job is to write all that up, price it all out properly so that we make our margin so everybody gets paid, and then present it to the customer in such a way that the customer builds value and helps them understand why they should be doing the work with us. So you're a tech. I'm adhd. You may not have noticed that as we talk, but I'm all over the place. I picked it up and I'm thinking, you're a tech, and where would be a better place for me to take my car than you?
None.
Nowhere. Okay. And so why would I not, as the service advisor or the tech, say, you should have this car fixed here. And by the way, in most cases, most cases, and I think this is the fear part, I'm afraid that you'll say, well, the guy down the street can do it cheaper. You know, my answer to that is cheaper is not always better.
Yeah.
In fact, I think that smart people understand that they get what they pay for. Here. We're going to do this and this. We have this warranty and we. And I'm going to build value and I'm going to close again. Right. But a lot of guys are like, oh, my God, he said he could get it done cheap. Well, of course you can.
I mean, come on. Yeah. Hey, these are the parts. Well, I can buy them cheaper, right? Sure you can. And by the way, if you and I spend five minutes on the Internet, I bet we could find them even cheaper. Problem is that 20%, 25% of the parts online are counterfeit and they're not any good.
Yeah. That frustrates the technician so bad, because I see right now the warranty things. He still seems to be such an avenue that we're playing and we're putting on some parts that we know are not gonna last as long as the part that we took off.
Why would I do that?
I don't. Because I can offer a better warranty.
My father said when I was a kid, he said, Cecil, and his name was Cecil, too. So kind of some weird issues there, right? He said, cecil, if you have time to do it a second time, you have time to do it right the first time.
Exactly.
There's one right way. And I'm very much like, I have this morality thing and this, like, ethics thing, and why would I put a cheap, shitty part on your car when I know it's not going to last? Just so I can give you a Cheaper price. Is that value? Or is value getting a really quality part with a great warranty and knowing that that part's going to last another 100,000 miles? I don't understand the thought process that says, I can buy this cheaper part, give it to you cheaper, but I also know that it's probably not going to last on your car.
What about if we take the cheaper parts, Cecil, and because of who we supply it from, we get a warranty that covers it.
I still am not buying a cheap part and putting it. Would you put it on your car?
No.
Right. And so the answer is with. Even with my customers, I would not put that car part on my car, and therefore, I cannot put it on yours. It's not what I do. If you want someone to do a cheap job on your. On your car or your truck or whatever, here's the guy's phone number, right? We had a shop, like, three doors down from us. And when you drove in the shop, part of the pavement was missing, so there were these potholes and dirt, and there was, like, a bus on the side that was on jack stands, and there was these old parts laying around. And you go in the shop, and it's filthy.
I mean, I was afraid to walk in this guy's shop. And I called him up and I said, hey, Tom, you know, my name is Cecil Bullard. I'm taking over a shop down the street, and, you know, I'm gonna have some overflow. And I really wanted to have somebody to send customers to. Do you mind if I come down and shake your hand? And I went down and met the guy, shook his hand. Cheap shop, no problem. And I handed out cards of his to customers who wanted cheap.
Right?
Be who you're supposed to be. Don't be somebody else. Right? There's only one right way in my mind. There's only one right way. And somebody will. You'll podcast this, and somebody will go, oh, that Cecil's full of crap, or whatever. Okay, fine. You can feel that way.
You have a right to feel that way.
Yeah.
And by the way, I don't care. I don't know you. I don't care. There's one right way to do the job. It's the way I would do it on my car. I won't do crappy work on your car. I won't put cheap parts in my car. So I won't put cheap parts on your car.
And if you say, but, Cecil, I cannot afford that, I say, I absolutely understand that. And here's a solution for you. That's not me. Because this is what we do and this is how we do it. And by the way, so if we're doing marketing study. Excuse me, we're doing a marketing study. You know, I always draw this thing out when I'm teaching marketing and I say we're gonna study population, right? And so, you know, 1% of the population, maybe one and a half, they're just, they're crazy, you know, they're just insane. And so do you want those people as customers? That's not your market.
Okay, you got another 1%, 1 1/2% that. I don't know if their mom dropped them on their head when they were babies or, you know, I don't know what happened. Maybe they didn't get enough oxygen or whatever, but they're always going to be the cheapest person in the room. They're always going to. They're going to drive 15 miles to save 2, 10 of a cent on a gallon of gas. And they're also the ones that in the grocery store will look at milk and find the cheapest milk that maybe is ready to expire, that's on a discount or the meat, you know, but that's one and a half percent of the population. So are those my customers? No, they're cheap. They're never going to be my customers.
They're never going to spend the money want. And then there's somewhere right now in our population, there's maybe as much as say 16 or 18% that are cheap out of necessity.
So let me ask you the question. Say the typical. A lot of shops, I don't want to use the word typical. It might offend. If a shop starts out and they built their business by being the cheap.
Yeah.
And Cecil, what is the. Can you take that customer base and convert them to the higher prices that you're.
No, you'll lose. You'll lose a majority of those customers. So when you're doing that kind of transition, one of the hardest transitions you make. So if you've been running a lot of discount coupons and you brought the cheapest guys in and you were letting them bring their own parts and all that, and you stop, you raise your price a little bit, you market to a better audience and you talk about different things. So you and I are going to go fishing, right? We're going to fish for, I don't know, salmon, right? And we're going to go into Utah, in the middle of Utah in a lake, and we're going to fish for Salmon. We're going to use stink bait. Okay. Are we going to catch any salmon? There's no salmon in the middle of a lake in Utah.
At least I don't think so. Somebody might go, wait a minute, Cecil, there's these salmon, but there really aren't. Salmon are up in the Northwest in some of the rivers and they're in the oceans. And, you know, maybe it's tuna we fish for and, but they're also not going to bite on a stink bait. Yeah, I'm going to get catfish or I'm going to get carp or whatever. And if I don't, if I don't want, if I don't want trash, if I want salmon, then I have to fish where salmon are and I have to use the bait that the salmon want. So, yeah, so when I, when I change my marketing, when I, when I go, look, I have too many cheap customers here, I start by increasing my price a little. I start by saying, no, we won't use your parts anymore.
And here's why things have changed, right? I mean, you could have done the business one way yesterday and decided tomorrow you're not going to do that, and I'll lose a few people. You know, like, I had a shop up in Come on, Rhode island, went in the shop, Garage Mahal, Beautiful shop. Average repair order, 325. Not making any money, you know, Etc. So I'm like, okay, we're not going to do oil changes anymore. And oh, by the way, we're also not going to be open on Saturdays and we're not going to allow people to drop their, to wait for their car. So we're making those three changes, right? It's like, oh, my God, see, I can't do that. So I'm like, yeah, but we are, right? So he buys in.
The very first customer that calls him says, I'd like to schedule on Saturday. He says, we don't do Saturday stuff. He said, well, I like to come away for the car. I said, we don't do that anymore. Well, why not? Well, cars have changed and you know, the 1960s model of change the oil and do it quickly and get you out. That's only taking care of a very small part of your car. Really needs a good inspection by a technician. And my technicians are busy doing things and they may not be able to drop what they're doing and get right on your car and blah, blah, blah.
And the guy says, well, that's really inconvenient. And the owner, God bless his heart, he's like, yeah, I know, I'm really sorry about that, but if you need, we'll get you right home or whatever. And the guy says, you know, what if I got to leave the car? You know, all that list of things that we've been talking about for months and months and months, I'd never do. He said, why don't you do all that while the car's here? Yeah, right. And so a guy in, in Utah, shade tree, Tom Lambert, great guy, comes to me, low average repair order. You know, he's working his butt off. They're doing over 2 million, but they're not making any money. And I'm like, okay, Tom, we got to get our average repair order up.
We got to do, we're going to get rid of waiters. And, and, and Tom's like, oh. She's like, I can't do that. But he does. And today I think they just did over $4 million. Probably do four and a half this year out of a, I don't know, it's a 12 day shop and their average apparent is, I don't know, at this point, well over $800. And they don't have waiters. You know, they still do oil changes.
They still have the oil change thing, which, you know, he and I will, he'll give me crap about that if he hears the podcast, but I'll give him crap back. But it completely changed his life in his business. But it took a while. You can't just go in and go, we're going to double our prices. You might be able to, you might get away with it. It's probably not smart. So you need a plan that you're going to do this over like two years if you're going to make those adjustments. And then you make smart adjustments over time to get from A to B.
Right. So you don't just leave yourself with your cheese in the wind.
We forget sometimes. I think when it's like when we have the dynamic of the customer that always wants to wait is we keep thinking that that customer, or I know a lot of the conversations, that customer is a cheap customer. Sometimes I forget we, I know we dropped the ball because it's just like your example that you said your scenario, if I can get them out of there, I take that stress level of sitting there wondering, oh, it's been 18 minutes, that oil change is still done. If I can get them out of there, I bet there's more of them will say, you know what, while I'm there, just go ahead and do that.
Thing that you talked about when you. There's some, again, empirical statistical data. When you get the customer to leave their car, they will buy more.
Yeah.
Okay. And it's only because they're not here waiting for the car. So go back to the service advisor in the beginning, right? What's the problem? Or the owner. So what do you think? You have to change your thinking. So a customer who's waiting for their car, what are they thinking?
I need to be somewhere.
And by the way, when I'm. When I'm done checking your car over, and then the service Advisor takes another 20 minutes to write the ticket up and figure out this cost this, and this costs that. Now I'm going to sit down with you. I want to spend 10 minutes telling you what you need. You. I have no chance of selling you. Yeah, because you need to be somewhere else.
That DVI thing at that point, in that scenario is pretty ineffective because you've. Now, they've seen the car get pulled outside, parked, they signed the tech baby, drop in and hang a key on a board. Now you go over to them with their DVI results and they're sitting there or whatever you call.
And then why won't they let us out of here? I need to get out of here.
I gotta go.
I gotta pick up the kids. I got it. Whatever. So you don't, you know, you want the customer in the right frame of mind, and a customer is in the wrong frame of mind has no value to me whatsoever. Right. So a waiter has almost no value to me. And don't get me wrong, you know, the blind dog will find a fire hydrant every once in a while. A clock is right twice a day, broken clock or whatever.
But the majority of the waiters, they're not going to listen to what you have to say. And they're not there where I need them to be so I can discuss what they need of their car and make sense out of it for them. They don't have the time. They don't have the patience. And if I'm trying to shove that down their throats, then it's even gonna piss them off more and I'm gonna lose. Don't. My father loved to play, like, card games. Loved to play card games.
And he cheated like you wouldn't believe. It was almost a joke with us. If you. If you like, we were playing. He loved to play rummy or poker or whatever. And if. If he dealt your cards and you had to go to the bathroom, if you take your cards in with you, you might be safe for that, but I guarantee the cards in the deck that are coming next aren't going to work for you. If you leave your cards when you come back, it's not going to be the same cards.
And it was a joke. It was like for my dad. My dad's one of the most honest people in the world. Great morality, but he just loved to pull one over on you when you were playing cards. And to him it was like, if they don't catch me, then it's honest, right? It's okay. So why would you set yourself up for failure when you could set yourself up for success, right?
So many technicians. I know we hate the waiter thing, and it's such a bane. We hate waiter oil changes. And the thing that's made it worse is we hate waiter oil change with the dvi because as maybe not vested in business, as a lot of techs aren't, we know by the tickets that come back the success rate on that transaction is really low. Now the argument, Cecil, that you could say, well, I still have to inspect the car and they're going to come back for the work.
Well, sure, but if they leave the car, I can inspect the car. And by the way, they don't have to come back for the work because the car is already there and they're not, you know, loaner cars. In my opinion, one of the best things you could ever do to sell. Hey, you know, you need. Blah, blah, blah. Can't get the car done today. Oh, no problem. I've got your car.
Great, we'll see you when it's done. Yeah, there's all kinds of, like these things. I always talk about stacking the deck. You're stacking the deck right? The way that I don't. I never had waiters, never. We didn't do an oil change. People call me and said, hey, like an oil change. I say, well, we don't really believe in oil change.
We don't do oil changes here. What do you mean? Oh, of course we're going to change your oil and filter and that's important for taking care of your car. But it's really a very small part of it. The most important part is having your BMW looked at by a BMW technician that knows and understands your car so we can catch things when they're small and less expensive until they become big and inconvenient.
What about the threat, Cecil, of like you? They're waiting. You give them the estimate, they leave. You think in your head that they're going to Come back and get work done. And they're right at your competitors now.
Oh, dude, I'm never going to hand you an estimate like that. You also have lazy service advisors that will send the estimate out with a checkbox, and the customer is making a decision based on what?
Yes or no?
Yeah, whatever it costs. I talk about, like, going into the doctor's office and you're like, oh, what procedure do I need today? And you see it on the wall, and you're like, wow, that MRI is like 1,000 bucks. I want one of those. Right? And then, well, blood test, 600 bucks. Enema 97. Oh, I think I'll take two enemas today. Right? You know, you're like, yeah, I don't want. And then there's the psychology around.
If you have no in your brain, getting no out and getting yes in is very, very hard. It's much more difficult at this point. So when you're. When you're selling and you're prepping your business and you're creating all this, you're creating it so that you're winning more than you're losing. And one of the winning steps is to not have no in a customer's head. So I'm not going to give you prices. I'm not going to send an estimate with a bunch of prices on it. Going to send an estimate that says you need these things, and then you and I are going to talk about it.
I'm going to build value. I'm going to answer your objections in the sales presentation so you can't have them. And at the end, I'm going to get you to agree that the work needs to be done and it should be done. And then at the end, we're going to talk about price and negotiate that. And even that's not really a negotiation. And if I'm smart, when I built the estimate, I had one or two things on it that don't really matter, don't have to be done. So if you're like, hey, Cecil, can you save me some money? Sure. We don't have to do the Rondell.
I'll save you $115. And, oh, by the way, we could probably flush the brakes the next time you're in. That might save you $140. And so, yeah, I think we can save you close to 300 bucks. Oh, you know what, Cecil? Why don't you just do it all while I'm here? Yeah, I've had that experience, I don't know, 8 million times. If you set it up Right. You're going to get it now here. I want to say one more thing before we, like, wrap all this up.
Yeah, yeah.
We have to understand our value, number one. Number two, we have to work together. The service advisor and the technician and the owner, and really, the client should all be on the same team. It's not a different team. It's not front versus back. It's not us versus them. It is. We're all on the same team.
And if I've got a good owner, manager, someone's looking at the places where the techs are being pissed off and saying, is that right and fair? Is that not right and fair? And we're not doing things that are unfair. All right? And by the way, we have a lot of techs that are pissed off. Some of those guys are going to be pissed off no matter what you do, right?
Yep.
And those guys, I don't care about. I don't want them in my life, I don't want them in my shop, et cetera. But if you're upset as one of my techs because we're taking away time from you, that's not fair. It's a brick in the wall that I need to save, because if I don't fix that, at some point you're going to start looking at the over the fence, at the grass on the other side. You say, man, that look, that grass looks really green. That guy's telling me he's not going to do that to me, and you're going to be gone. And frankly, in today's day and age, I get a good tech in my shop, I should keep that person okay. And do almost whatever I can to make sure that person, it's all just and fair, etc.
We're not working against each other. It's not the service advisors against the tax. It's not the tax against the service advisors. Our primary job is to make sure for the business that we inspect enough vehicles, sell enough work, and get enough work done so that we make the most customers happy today and so that we're all productive and we do what we need to. It's this whole, you know, my owner sucks and the service advisor sucks. That might be the truth, but as long as we're working against each other, we're not going to be working together. This shit needs to stop. And we need to work together because we're all underpaid in this industry.
And, you know, if I was a coach working with dentists or doctors or something, I make three, four times what I earn right now. You guys got to get it together so I can charge you more money.
You're not wrong, my friend.
No, I'm not.
I absolutely love what you're about. Like I said, it was a pivotal moment for me to meet you a couple years ago and sit in on that class.
Appreciate that.
And, you know, I can't think of a better person that people need to listen to what you're saying and get that stinking thinking out of their head and move forward in this. And, you know, like I said at the beginning, before we turn this on, I feel so empowered when I talk to people because I'm starting to see that people are looking at me and they're like, he's not trying to fight everybody. He's not trying to divide everybody. He's just trying to get everybody to.
Hear, how do we. How do. If I'm a tech, how do I get them to understand and come from where I. Where I am and how I feel? And you know what? I'm a very direct person. I'm very open. I don't have a lot of compassion for BS at all. But I don't want to do something that's not fair. I want everybody to win.
Yeah, Right. I don't want to play in a game that people get hurt so that I can win. Right.
Yeah.
I want to play in a game where the rules are even and everybody has a chance to win, by the way. I'm going to win, but I want it to be fair. Right. And so I get it. There are a lot of angry texts. They've been mistreated. There's a lot of angry owners who don't have any money. There's a lot of scared and angry service advisors who also have been mistreated.
How do we pull it all together so that we can work together for the benefit of the people in our business and for the benefit of our industry? And that's what I'm all about. And I will be until I drop dead. Yeah, right.
Me too, man. Me too. Anyway, I want to thank you again. This has been any time, absolute blast. And, you know, anytime that we can sit down and do this again.
Yeah.
Either at an event like this or log in one night and we'll do it. I'd love to do that.
Let me know.
Love it. Appreciate you. Thank you.
You're welcome. Thanks for the opportunity. Bye.
Hey, if you could do me a favor real quick and, like, comment on and share this episode, I'd really appreciate it. And please, most importantly, set the podcast to automatically download every Tuesday morning. As always, I'd like to thank our amazing guests for their perspectives and expertise, and I hope that you'll please join us again next week on this journey of change. Thank you to my partners in the ASA group and to the Changing the Industry podcast. Remember what I always say, in this industry, you get what you pay for. Here's hoping everyone finds their missing 10 millimeter and we'll see you all again next time.
Sa.
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