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From Med School to Founding Tekmetric: Lessons in Leadership
From Med School to Founding Tekmetric: Lessons in Leadership
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About this episode
Sunil Patel shares his unique journey from med school to founding Tekmetric, a cloud-based automotive repair shop software. He discusses the challenges of starting and growing a repair shop, the pivot to software development, and the importance of leadership evolution. Sunil emphasizes decision-making, hiring the right people, and adapting leadership styles to inspire teams. He also highlights Tekmetric's focus on innovation, platform integration, and maintaining a strong company culture. The conversation offers valuable insights into perseverance, leadership principles, and building a successful business in the automotive tech space.
Topics:
career pivot
automotive repair shop
software development
leadership evolution
decision making
hiring and culture
startup challenges
Tekmetric platform
innovation
perseverance
Cars:
Porsche 911
Sunil Patel shares how his path from medical school to shop owner to Founder and CEO of Tekmetric shaped his approach to leadership. He discusses how a personal shop struggle inspired Tekmetric, why staying focused on your vertical drives success, and the leadership lessons he’s learned building a platform for automotive repair shops nationwide.
Check out the full video version of the podcast on YouTube!
About the Episode
- Host: Jay Goninen, WrenchWay, [email protected]
- Guest: Sunil Patel, Tekmetric, [email protected]
- Sponsor: Jasper Engines & Transmissions
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Technical
Too Afraid to Ask
Car
911 Porsche Gt
"...ostly European and high-line vehicles, mostly the Porsche GT series, Lamborghinis, Ferrari, those are the kind..."
Select text to request an explanation
If you're running your business as a shop and you want to be an amazing shop owner,
there's a lot of skills you have to relearn and there's nothing to do with fixing cars.
Beyond the Wrench with J. Gannon from Wrenchway.
On today's show, we welcome Sunil Patel from Techmetric. Sunil's got a very fascinating story.
I know I say that a lot whenever we have interesting guests on the show, which is
every single week, but this story is fascinating. I was telling Sunil before we hopped on and hit
record that Techmetric had put together a video on his story that I was able to watch this morning.
If you get a chance, go out and check it out on YouTube, but just a really, really fascinating
background. Welcome to the show, Sunil. How are you?
I'm doing great, Jay. Thank you for having me on your show.
I was watching this video this morning and it appeared that you came from pretty
humble beginnings in California and just worked your way up. It didn't come automatic that you
were coming into the automotive industry. Your origin story is very fascinating because
that wasn't something that you were born into. This industry wasn't something that
really, I don't know if you even saw us a line of sight to this industry early on in your
career, but let's talk about that a little bit. You grew up in California. What was it that led
you into the automotive world? I grew up in Southern California and-
I'm sorry, California, yes. Yeah, Southern California, yep.
I would tinker on my dad's old 1978 Ford Z4 station wagon. He bought it the
year we were born, my twin sister and I. We've had that car in the family forever.
It's no longer with us just to be clear. It was just sitting in the parking lot forever
and I don't know why, but I just wanted to crank it up every now and then. It had an
old six-cylinder engine inside of it that was carb rated and it wouldn't start sometimes or take
forever to start. Ultimately, dad and I just decided, let's just figure out what's wrong
with this thing and fix it. We would go to the local parts store, we would buy parts for it
and then he and I would replace a bunch of parts. I think he tried to fix things on the car,
like such as the timing of the engine. He didn't really understand how a timing gun worked at the
time, but ultimately that's where I kind of started tinkering in cars over time and I really
enjoyed it. There was just something about taking vehicles apart, putting them back together
and then getting them back to their original state, their operating state was something
fun for me. That's how my career and automotive started. Were you ever afraid that it wasn't going
to go back together all right? I mean, if it's a family vehicle and you're relying on it,
I know when I was young, I was always terrified if I were to put something back together and
it didn't work. You probably had a little bit of a different mindset there.
Yeah. This was just to be clear. This was the spare car. My dad was the only car in
our family. My mom did not drive ever, even up until now. It was a spare car and so if it
didn't go back together or something broke, my dad didn't really care. That was nice to have that.
Yeah. You kind of had this interest in tinkering on cars, but that didn't immediately parlay
into a career and automotive. It did not. My parents always wanted me to be a physician,
and I can remember even up until I was 10 years old, we would have relatives come over to the house
and they would tell my relatives, like, my son's going to be a doctor. I'm like, how do you know
that? I'm 10 years old. I guess the constant brainwashing over the years and years and years
ultimately led me to, I graduated high school early. I did it in three years instead of four.
I just wanted to be done with it and I just want to go straight to med school. I found a program
overseas. I went to med school and ultimately completed my medical school training and my
internship over there, came back to the US, joined the Baylor College of Medicine's internship
program here in Houston, actually, and decided that medicine wasn't really my thing. My wife
and I both graduate. We were classmates from med school and she got into infectious disease,
I'm sorry, she got into internal medicine initially in Henry Ford Hospital in Michigan.
I was just waiting with her. I was not into medicine. I didn't really want to become a doctor.
I was kind of trying to figure out what I'm going to do and ultimately decided to take my
vehicle in for an alignment at our local repair shop over there. I looked on the local
online Mercedes-Benz forums called, I think it was called mbworld.org and it's still a very active
forum today. I would go on the forum and I had a pretty big presence on the forum and I just asked
a bunch of guys, hey, what do you recommend for an alignment in Detroit area? They recommended
me to this particular shop in Commerce Township, Michigan. I take my vehicle in there for an
alignment and ultimately got to know the owner of the shop over there who happens to be a
radiologist that quit practicing radiology to open his automotive repair shop and that was
the moment that it clicked for me where I came home, told my wife, I am done with medicine,
I'm going to open an automotive repair shop. What was his story to step out of radiology to
start an automotive shop? Similar to you, right? Kind of a wide swath or a completely
different pivot. Yeah, so he's got an interesting story too. He's actually also a master
electrician. He's also a pilot. He's a physician and now he also runs his repair shop. So I think
I started doing some research on this particular topic of how people are switching careers. So
like any vastly different careers and hobbies. And so my wife helped me introduce me to this
word called a polymath, which I did not know what that meant at the time. Up until last
week, let me just put it that way. And she explained to me that your life has always been
like this where you dive into so many different things. And if you just stay focused on one thing,
you'll actually not be successful. The ability to be able to go into so many different areas in
life actually helps you in your full-time day job. I thought about that and I think
there's a lot of truth to that. I think that alone helps peak curiosity, right? When you're going
through life and a lot of times maybe it can get mundane or don't want to say boring, but maybe
you're not challenging yourself to what you could challenge yourself to be. Maybe introducing
something completely different just helps maybe generate that part of your brain or activate
that part of your brain to where you are curious. And it is maybe a little bit more
exciting than your normal day-to-day. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. So you go down the
automotive path and eventually start your own shop, right? Is that correct? That is correct.
So I came to Houston to find a place to build a repair shop and ultimately found an empty building.
There was a warehouse that used to be owned by a company called Granger. They're a pretty
large industrial parts distribution company in the US. And so I ran out of the building out.
It was $10,000 a month for a 10,000 square foot building. I did not know how I was going
to come up with the money, signed the lease, and ultimately raised a little bit of money from
my cousins and a friend and started the repair shop. I did actually build a business plan,
but I don't know if I really stuck to the business plan. But ultimately, at the end of the day,
everything worked out, right? So I ran that repair shop. We were profitable the first year.
We did about 750K in annual revenue that first year. And then we jumped to like 1.2, 1.6,
and then we just kept going up all the way to close to 2.8 million in revenue annually.
Did you know anybody in Houston when you went? Why Houston?
My twin sister. My twin sister happens to be living in Houston. I wanted to be
somewhat close to family. And then we were in the process of relocating my parents to
Houston too. So that's how Houston started. Interesting. So you're moving there.
I can't imagine you had a whole lot of connections or contacts there when you go.
No, I didn't actually have any J. I didn't really have any connections in the industry.
It was just, I had a pretty large virtual presence on the online forums. And so
as soon as the local Houston crowd came to know that I was opening a repair shop for
European cars, a few of them started bringing their Mercedes to me for service. And a lot of it
was just word of mouth. And then we would like, we built these tri-fold brochures and then we would
go to the mall parking lot and we would stick them on the windshield of cars that did not work.
Just to be clear, like I don't even think I got a single customer from that effort.
But we, and then I tried to do Google AdWords myself because I couldn't afford to hire
an SEO specialist. And a lot of it was just trial and error and just learning.
Trial and error is easy to say when you've got money, but when you don't have money,
how difficult is that trial and error? Because that is, you hear it from so many
business owners that I think they'd love to do trial and error on a lot of things,
but maybe don't quite understand how to do it without a budget.
True. Mine was very risky. And look, at the end of the day, it worked out. I did not recommend
anybody does it the way I did it. I think we're all that way. Was it scary? Like when you're
going down and you sign that lease? I would say it wasn't scary for me at the time,
although I was married. I didn't have any kids. And my naiveness just doing this
without thinking about it actually helped me. It pushes you, right? Like you have to,
you have to just be focused in the moment and you just keep pushing yourself.
How many hours were you working a day when you first got to Houston?
12 to 14 hours a day morning. And then so I would take in vehicles in the morning,
talk to customers, occasionally work on. And remember, this is me inside this entire
building. And then ultimately I would try and fix the vehicles at night
and then rinse and repeat. And then it got to the point after like four or five months,
I couldn't do it anymore. I needed some help. And so I hired my first technician
and that took a lot of my plate. I don't think people understand what you took on there, right?
We talk a lot about the tech metric stuff and all the great stuff you've done there. But
that step right there and those long hours and just trying to make it work,
I give you so much credit because that is, and maybe it's because you're doing what you love that
you, you know, maybe it doesn't feel like work as much, but there had to have been some stress
there, right? And making sure that you could pay the bills and making sure that the work is
still coming in the door so that you have something to pay the bills with.
Yeah, that's very true. Yeah. Yeah. So you get the shop up and going,
your first hire, is that a technician? It was a technician from the Mercedes Benz store,
the local Mercedes Benz store here in Houston. And he stuck around with me for a good five,
six years, I think. Wow. Wow. And was there any kind of getting to know each other as he comes in?
And maybe you always kind of hear of technician turn manager and maybe sometimes their expectations
don't align with that new person coming in. Or maybe that person, we just call it like
the Michael Jordan effect or Wayne Gretzky effect, right? Where you have this excellent
tech that brings somebody in and maybe they can't do all the same things that I as a person can do
in terms of fixing a car. Did you experience any of that or was it pretty seamless?
It was fairly seamless. He was a very strong technician. He would be able to
diagnose and replace parts very quickly on the electronic side is where he struggled a
little bit. So that's the part I actually enjoyed working on. And so using an oscilloscope and
looking at waveforms and looking at wiring diagrams. So those are programming, coding,
CAN bus networks. That's stuff I really enjoyed. And so we made a good team.
That is you always kind of, I think advice in general, surround yourself with folks that
might not have the same skill set that you do or add something to your skill set.
And so it sounds like you did, you did that. Now, as you're building this shop,
did it occur to you right away that, hey, maybe I want to start a software company someday?
No, no. So my goal was probably to build multiple of these repair shops.
And I would get stuck in, so first of all, remember this idea of shop coaches. I don't
know if they existed or not, but I wasn't privy to any of them. So I kind of had to
figure out how to run the shop myself. And I think we were pretty successful out of a
five-base shop generating about 2.8 million in gross revenue.
Same.
And ultimately, I wanted to open more of these repair shops, but then I would get stuck in,
it's already hard enough with the hiring the people and the talent,
and then what if somebody's absent? And then I was thinking like,
if I multiply that by a second or a third shop, that's going to get even harder.
And so later on, in about 2012, I started a vehicle sales business within my building.
We cordoned off the front of the building as a showroom. And so for about two or three years,
we ran that vehicle sales facility. And we did mostly European and high-line vehicles,
mostly the Porsche GT series, Lamborghinis, Ferrari, those are the kind of cars that we
would sell. And then I had a business partner at the time. And then ultimately,
I wanted to grow that business much bigger, and he wanted to keep it smaller. And so we decided
to part ways. And so I'm like, you know what, why don't you just buy my share out? I will
go do something else. And at the time, I didn't know what that something else was. And so
I started thinking about, so also at the same time, I actually switched to a on-prem system
at my repair shop that kept on crashing. And ultimately, we struggled a lot with the system.
And so I reverted back to my original point of sale system, which was also an on-prem system.
And ultimately, what happened was I started thinking like, there's got to be a better
way to build a cloud-based point of sale system. I didn't know how I was going to do it.
I just knew I wanted to get it done. I did program a little bit in the old
arcade languages like C++ and Microsoft Basic. But those languages are nowhere to be seen in
the space that we operate in, in cloud. And so ultimately, I hired a local company in Houston
to build our first version of TechMetric back in 16. And this was like after I sold the vehicle
sales business, I just had the service business. I was in the process of selling the
service business because I wanted to focus all into the repair software and the TechMetric
system. And ultimately, the software that this company built for me locally was a disaster.
Like multiple people couldn't log in. It was very slow. It wasn't even complete.
They used a very non-standard tech stack for the software. It wasn't scalable.
And ultimately, we had to pull the plug on them and start all over.
And that was a tough decision to make because I had taken in some money from friends and
family to raise the initial pool of money to build the software. And ultimately, it all went
to waste. We had some of it left over so that we lost a decent amount of money.
And then it's so hard. Sorry, Suniya. I just want to ask you about this part before we move on.
How hard are those conversations to have? Just being able to
have the confidence that you still have something there, but knowing like, hey,
we need to start over again. We can't keep going down this path.
That's got to be an interesting pivot and just a huge risk. I think at some level,
you're probably trying to earn trust and trying to get people to... Even though the first
go failed, you're still pretty confident in this thing.
Yeah, Jay. So I don't like sugarcoating things or hiding things from people. I always
wanted to be very authentic with every... That's just one of my life mantras is just being very
honest and authentic with high integrity. And so we just were all very honest with that. Like,
look, this is what happened. This is why it happened. And this is what we're going to do
to prevent it from happening again. And ultimately, so there was four of us,
one of the guys decided to back out and decided to... So we gave him his money back
with interest. And ultimately, there was three of us left. And the three of us were like,
we still feel like there's still something here. And so let's just keep going at it.
And let's just learn from our mistake. Learning from your mistake and growing from it
is a true definition of growth mindset. And it's actually one of our company's
number one fundamentals, which is actually the basis of the success of TechMetric today.
And so we decided to move forward with just... So I went to Scrum School at the time
and decided to learn how software development should work. I also had this failing as a
learning lesson on what not to do. And so ultimately, we hired a UX UI designer
to build screens for us for about six months. And then we hired our first engineer,
whom now is our CTO, Taylor Fuqua. And ultimately, Taylor built a version of
TechMetric, which was pretty fast in response time, scalable. It didn't have all the features
and everything today that we have, but it still proved a point or a concept that
we have something. And ultimately, I think we can continue building on this to see what happens.
Now, when we launched it, soft launched it back in 17, 18, it was tough still, Jay.
I still couldn't get people to use it. I couldn't even get people to use it for free.
And I still remember going... I was at my sister's house in Atlanta.
I took a rental car and I was going shop to shop and I would get kicked out of shops.
I didn't have a sales team and I would just try to get people to use the software for free and
it wasn't easy. But I still didn't give up. And we got a little bit of a following online on Facebook
through various groups. We would go to all of the trade shows. We would spend most of our
money at trade shows actually and try and get that because that group was very
forward thinking, wanted to see what the best technologies are. Everybody was using an on-prem
system at the time. And so we contained focusing on the trade show route and we pretty much attended
every single trade show that there was in the automotive space for the US. And ultimately,
that gained us a lot of success, a lot of attention. Now, remember at the same time,
there's also competitors coming out with cloud-based point-of-sale systems.
So my focus was like, let's just focus on winning and it's also one of my leadership principles.
Just keep focusing on winning. Don't shit talk the competitor. Just focus on winning
the hearts and minds of users of the product. And it's interesting with trade shows, right?
Because I think early days of a company, we went through something similar on our
wrenchway side where it does generate a lot of conversations. And I don't know if you experience
this, but our early days, even to this day really, our booths were typically back in a closet
somewhere and people had to really want to find us to find us. But I think that helps get some
of those conversations.
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Do you recall maybe first customer, first good experience where it just kind of gave you that
warm feeling that, hey, we're on to something here, we're getting it?
We had some customers that were very interested in using the product, even though I knew we
were not ready for these customers. Stefan Gribina, he owned a shop that mainly did BMWs on the east
coast, Scott Elmore out of Colorado Springs. I'm like, guys, you guys are like much bigger shops
and we're not going to be able to support. I was honest with them though. I was like,
I think that was the one thing that they really appreciated is that I was just honestly
telling them we're not ready for you. Even then, they were like, we see what you're
doing. We've been watching you for a couple months. We see how many features you're coming out with.
We didn't want to give you a shot. We did and we got a lot of the early
shop owners to adopt our product, even though we weren't ready for them. They had a lot of
workarounds to get everything working in the system to meet the same speed and efficiency
that they were doing with their previous system. It was just awesome and eye-opening to see
how these customers just truly believed in what we were trying to do.
I think the biggest validation for us was in 2018, late 2018, Christian Brothers Automotive,
at the time they were 220 stores. They put an RFP out. We were part of it. They had four
point of sale systems and they gave it to us. It was the same story. It was like,
I was like, are you sure you want us? Because we weren't ready for a big
enterprise customer at the time, but we're like, well, if we get Christian Brothers Automotive,
we'll more than double our roof talk count. They were a very supportive group of guys.
They still are today. It's one of the best run organizations that I've ever worked with.
They're truly a partner. It's just been awesome to see how they truly work with us.
They actually, in the early days, helped introduce us to large parts players.
We would work with them very deeply on future development. Ultimately, they've been a great
partner and they just renewed their contract about a year ago, I think. They're really a
good organization. Congratulations. Now, as you go through that growth, I know in my experience,
one of the things I tell my friends and family is that I had read a lot in business books about
growing too fast and the challenges behind that. When we first started our company,
I was like, whatever. Then you go through it and I,
the hiring, the cash flow challenges that presents, it's a lot to come at you at one time.
Did you experience that as you're taking on a Christian Brothers or even some of those larger
shops to start? Yes. You have to think about when we were a much smaller company, we didn't have
a people and culture department. We didn't have a true vetting process and hiring employees.
It's basically like, hey, who do you know that wants to get a job? Who has a pulse
in the industry? Let's just figure out how we can get them to fit into what we're trying to do.
Many of the folks at TechMetric were multitasking. They would do maybe sales and support and
onboarding and product requirements. You just did everything at once. A lot of startups have
this. A lot of software startups have this culture where you're doing a little bit of
everything. As the company matures, you have to put structure behind it. You have to put some
rigor in your process of interviews. You have to score card employees. You have to do all these
other things. What happens is some of those early employees that started with you don't want to be
with this company anymore because it's not the same company they joined. I believe it's a
natural evolution of a company. I think it's very tough to keep that startup mindset
as the company matures into much larger revenue multiples than numbers. It's the same thing we
saw. We have maybe two or three people that started with us at TechMetric that are still
with us today, and now we're an organization of more than 300 employees. It's just natural
to see that attrition rate. It's pretty incredible what you've built. As you're telling
that story, it reminded me of our early days. I found myself almost trying to talk people out of
coming to work for me because I was like, one lady in particular came to work and she was coming from
corporate America. I said, listen, make sure you talk it over with your family. Make sure this
is not a certainty. This is so much different than the corporate lifestyle joining a startup.
She ultimately still made the call to come and had a very successful career with us, but
it is one of those things where there's people's lives at stake. Maybe that's
a little dramatic, but their own family's financial future lies on your shoulders at some
level. You don't want to bring somebody on and then fail and then feel terrible about
their own, maybe they're putting them in a bad financial spot. I always found it interesting
from my shoes of the pressure on a business leader from that sense. It's easy to talk about,
but until you're in that position, it was a real stressor for me.
Yeah, it was tough. Even I still remember, I wasn't taking a paycheck in the early days,
even until we got Christian brothers because I just had to figure out how am I going to pay
the engineer salaries. We didn't want the engineering team to know that we were running
out of money. I still remember, I met a physician friend of mine, I'm like,
hey, bud, I need some money. He wrote a check for half a million dollars and said,
I know you've got something here. Yeah, that was a huge thank you. We paid him back with
interest in everything over time, but ultimately, I don't think we would have made it without all
of our friends' support. We would just be knocking on friends' doors.
I think that's part of our conversation today is on leadership. I want to take what you just
said there and build upon that, but the perseverance that you've really established
throughout your career, it feels like there were many opportunities for you to just
fold up and not continue on. I just want to understand what pushed you to drive through
these things because these aren't easy obstacles to get around.
I don't think I've spent a lot of time thinking about this until much later in life.
And so one of the things I said in that video that you watched earlier was struggle has created
way more champions than privilege ever has. And I truly believe that because I think when you're
faced with hard decisions, and so this goes back to that whole poly-map thing again, right?
So one of the things I didn't touch upon is I'm also a law enforcement officer.
And when you're faced with life and death decisions. So it's not even life and death,
it's like decision making, right? You're forced to make a decision in law enforcement
and you have to own the outcome. That principle of being able to make decisions
very quickly in a high stress environment, I have translated that to in tech metric.
And so if you think about what leadership or what leaders do in our company or in any company,
it is all about decision making. The most important thing that I have to ensure that we
have in our top leaders is the ability to make great decisions. Because if you actually go into
Adlerian philosophy, all of the world's problems are interpersonal relationship problems.
And so if you distill that down to just human beings interacting with one another,
all of the problems that we create in the world are because we create them. They're all
people problems. And I, this is just my belief when it comes to SaaS software,
if you have great product market fit, your talent is what's going to hold you back
from success. And why is it that the talent is going to hold you back? Is it lack of
decisions maybe? Is it interpersonal relationship problems, other teammates, whatever that is,
there's a bunch of reasons why that's going to hold you back. And so we as a leadership team do
spend a lot of time, especially when we're hiring executives at the company, and we're
scorecarding them. How do you make decisions? What's your framework on making these decisions?
Because these are very important, large decisions. And I want you to get them right
most of the time, not all the time, most of the time.
With your shop background, do you see anything that maybe that shop
leader that's out there listening to this right now might be able to learn from what
maybe you see on the SaaS side or the software side of leadership and the reason I'll
maybe put some context behind this. I think a lot of times we see a lot of struggles in shops
because maybe they're not hiring the right people or they're desperately hiring people
and trying to get people in the doors. Maybe it's people that don't have a cultural fit.
As you're going through and explaining some of your learnings, even from early days,
tech metric to today, do you see anything that maybe that shop leader that's out there could
learn from your path and kind of what you've built out and maybe lessons that you've learned
from the software side? Jay, before I answer that question, I will first say I was a horrible
shop owner. I don't want to say typical. I was a shop owner where I had a very
heavy hand in trying to get my team to do things. It was always by authority and it wasn't by inspiring,
it wasn't by motivating, it wasn't by mentoring. I took a very wrong approach at running your
shop and yet we were still pretty successful. But then if I was to ask those people that
worked with me back in the day, how did they feel about me? I'm probably going to get an
answer or something along like he was tough to work with. He was a hard ass or whatever it is.
There's the multiple things that would have come up and it's taken me a long time to realize that
leadership isn't just one thing. It's multiple things that you have to learn.
And so if you're running your business as a shop and you want to be an amazing shop owner,
there's a lot of skills you have to learn and there's nothing to do with fixing cars.
It's all about inspiring people, inspiring your team, motivating them, mentoring the right way.
And then there's also this difference of you're trying to teach maybe younger folk
and you feel like your generation is the best generation and this new generation doesn't know
what to do and how to live. I think that's just such a wrong philosophy. I believe it's
the older generation that actually has to adapt to the newer generation and learn how to work
with the younger generation. And that's great advice and I think something that a lot of our
industry struggles with. You look at that service manager that's out there. I think we've got a lot
of shop leaders that are very similar to how you used to be where you really rule with that iron
fist and I think at times it can create maybe it's definitely more of a stick versus carrot
approach where you're kind of making, I don't know, I grew up in that shop. In my family shop,
my dad was that way and it was until I left and went to other places to work that I started to
understand that there were leaders that maybe didn't kind of have that leadership style.
When you're young, I think I kind of assumed that or when I was young, I assumed that all
leadership styles were kind of that way and had I been caught in the shop not actually doing
something, I was going to get my ass chewed. It was not going to be good. And so it's interesting
that you talk about your evolution as a leader because I think that is a lesson that all shops
can learn. Regardless of how good of a leader is in that shop or running that shop, that there are
things you can learn. You can become a better leader. You can get kind of those raving
fans within the shop that really want to go out of their way to help you out.
I'm interested with your experience. What made you shift? Like what made you change?
I think this goes back to always wanting to learn. And so I read a lot. I read about
two books a month at least. And they're typically not, a lot of them are personal growth topics,
but I just like learning constantly. And I think the hardest part for a leader is personal
growth. And are you ready for that? Because I think the one question you have to ask or any
leader has to ask themselves is if you reflect back on the years that you've actually been leading
up until now, how is that gone? Is there room for improvement? Like could you do things a little
differently? And I always try to, so like I talk about this in my leadership team.
And to me, it's easy to find people to do tasks, right? Whether it's a great finance person,
whether it's a great engineer, whether it's a great sales leader or an account executive,
you're trying to find a person that's the best at those skills.
The hard part about this is orchestrating all of those people together
into one unisome orchestra. And making everybody hum to that tune is not easy to do
because everybody learns differently. Everybody is inspired differently. And if you ask most people
like what's the most important thing for their career, money is usually not the number one
thing. Money is one of the things which is not the top thing usually. It's basically how
does somebody feel when they come to work? And it's the CEO or the president or the
shop owner's job to ensure that they create a culture at that company to make people want
to come to work. That is our responsibility. It had to have been hard for you though because
when you look back over the course of your career and the growth you had in the shop,
at some level you have to kind of question wasn't it that leadership style that got
that growth? When you had turned a shop that you started from scratch into that level of shop,
there's got to be elements of that that were effective.
Potentially, Jay, but I think we were just so focused on providing great service store
customers and fixing vehicles and complex problems that other shops would turn away
or shy from. I believe that gained us more customers and more revenue. But if you actually
ask the question to our internal teams, what do you feel about the culture of your repair shop,
I think the answer would be very different. Did you think about culture when you were in the
shop? Not a whole lot. No. Or you're just day to day get through the fires, get everything
taken care of. I don't think that's too different than a lot of the shops that are out there right now.
Yeah, you're probably right. Yeah. Just to continue on this path, we've done a lot of
surveying of technicians over the years. Most times it comes down, you talk about those
people skills, a lot of the complaints that technicians have are because of lack of communication
or lack of respect. You talked about in those interpersonal relationships that create
this lack of culture or maybe this budding of heads constantly each and every day. I think
there are a lot of things that if that shop manager that's out there listening to this right
now, if you were to do just like Sunil just said and do some reflection and look at yourself
in the shop and how you interact on a day-to-day basis, I think there's always room for improvement.
But even for those folks, if they question themselves on a Sunday night going into a Monday,
am I looking forward to talking to the people on my team tomorrow? If the answer is no,
you might want to change something. You're absolutely right. And that's good.
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more about the money-saving value of Jasper. You're just a genuinely good leader and you
talked about the reading and how much that's important to you. I'm in the same boat where
I love reading about leadership and love reading about culture and just ways to do things better.
As you go through this and you apply the lessons of leadership that you've learned over the years,
what are some key things that you would point out in leadership that somebody could learn and
take back and use today? I actually went down the process of creating my own leadership
principles. The leadership principles that I created were based on all of my readings and
then how they applied to our company Techmetric and how we've been able to scale and grow the company.
I would focus on areas that teams are struggling in. I'll give you this small
example. Most companies will have a bunch of individual contributors. Let's just say
technicians. Let's just use a shop example. You'll have a bunch of technicians and you have
this technician that's amazing at diagnosing vehicles and repairing cars as fast as possible,
low comeback rate, and he just does a fantastic job. The first thing the shop owner is going
to want to do typically is let's promote him to a team lead. You just took your best tech
out of the field and you promoted him to a team lead.
It's just very natural to correlate personal output or individual person's output
to a promotion. This happens not just in automotive shops. This happens across every
industry in the entire world. We, as a company, have started focusing on like
when you do that, though, when you start promoting an individual contributor to a manager
or a team lead, you are potentially giving that title to somebody who's never managed
a human being in their life. That's something that people forget about because if you're
managing and responsible for another human being's success, that is not something that
you're born with innately most of the time. At Techmetric, we have actually started
to build out our own internal program where we are training individual leaders to be great
managers. It has nothing to do with how they perform as an individual leader.
They just have some unique skill set, the way to inspire, the way to talk people that maybe
makes them a better manager than an individual contributor. I spoke about earlier like my
leadership principles that I've created. One of my biggest or my best or my favorite, I
should say, is speed and accuracy of decisions by our first principles. First principles,
thinking is not something that it is a difficult concept to understand because most human beings
start involving bias in decision-making. Aristotle was the first philosopher that actually came
up with first principles thinking. Our most notable and most famous person today is probably
Elon Musk that has implemented first principles thinking in everything that he does. Elon Musk
decided he first made an engine. He basically emulated something that's been happening since
the 40s. It's liquid oxygen combined with another chemical that provides the thrust in
these rockets. Remember the key difference that Musk wanted to do was he wanted to provide a
reusable rocket. What was happening though is because of this earlier propellant,
there's a lot of carbon buildup that required a lot of cleaning because he was reusing the rockets.
He's like, let's wipe the slate clean and let's start all over. Because when you do that,
if you try to build something based on how something else was built in the past,
you're confining yourself in what you actually can do. Ultimately, what it does is it limits
the possibilities of what you can do. What he did was he ultimately got his engineers together
and they built a version of this rocket which is the cleanest. I think they're the only ones
who use this rocket, but it's the cleanest form of propulsion with also the most amount of
power that any rocket engine is able to provide today. He wouldn't have been able to do that
if he used an engineer that built the previous rocket. You basically want to try and break
that norm. We do this all the time at Technectric. Let's just say there's a decision that has
to be made. Maybe it's around hiring somebody in a leadership role in the company. What
you're doing is you're assessing the person's capabilities based on maybe your experiences in
life on this particular role. What I try to get everyone to understand is Technectric is a very
different company. I don't care about how you used to do things in the past, how you've managed
this person before. I want you to remove all of that. I want you to think about what are we
hiring this person for at this company today? Then let's figure out what are the skills that
we're going to test against this person to ensure that they're meeting the bar for this role.
What you end up doing is you hire a person that is very different than the person you
thought you were going to hire. We've had some great outcomes here at Technectric using
first principles. It is a muscle. It takes time and energy and skill to keep working on
this muscle on using first principles thinking. As it relates to people, is that similar to
getting the right person on the right seat on the bus, or is that different altogether?
I think it's a little different altogether. Maybe there's some correlation. Lentioni talks
about this, getting the right people on the seat of the bus. I believe it's a little bit
different because you're actually going a little deeper into understanding the capabilities of
that person on the bus. Maybe there's some correlation, but you're trying to really dig
deep into the capabilities of this person and then finding the seat for that person.
How do you find that out? Is that through some type of aptitude testing? Is that through
experience with the individual? How do you come to the conclusion of where their best fit is?
A lot of interviews, Jay. We spend a large amount of time in interview process because
one or two hour interview is not enough to figure out how a person is. Especially when
you're looking at executive level positions at the company, it takes a lot of effort to...
Remember, you're going to be marrying this person literally. You're probably going to be
spending more time with this person than your own spouse at home. You're trying to figure out
how this person thinks. There are a series of questions you can try to use to get to that
conclusion, but ultimately, I also try to look at the most recent decisions they've made in the
last six to 12 months in the previous company to understand why or how they came up to that
conclusion to make those decisions. Interesting. It so contradicts so many other companies,
not just in our industry, but companies as a whole, that are very reactionary in the hiring
process rather than really going out. When you said the point about an hour or two with a person
really isn't going to give you a whole lot of information, that is so true. Even for me,
taking advice out of this, I think that is such a great point. In Dave Ramsey's book,
Entree Leadership, he talks about how they go out to dinner together. Because he said,
I can hire this person, but if there's a disconnect with the spouse, that's going to
cause a lot of trouble at work. What you're talking about to me falls in that same vein of
really trying to get to know somebody in a time when that can be a real challenge, especially
we talk with a lot of shops, very reactionary in hiring a lot of times because, hey, we need
somebody to work on this car. We need to get somebody out there as soon as possible.
So we end up hiring somebody that's not a fit just because we have to fill a hole.
And I just feel like that is the source of so many of our issues as an industry,
it's just maybe not being as intentional as we should there.
Yeah, so you bring up an important point, Jay. So the importance of getting the spouse on board
with this big decision is very important. In fact, I have the numbers of all of the spouses
of my leadership team on my phone. I do that because there is a text message that will go
out every now and then to see how they're doing. I also asked my direct reports on how
their spouses are doing because that time that you're going to need your employee to work with you
for 10 to 12 hours on a particular project away from the kids at home,
it's going to go a long way when the spouse is on board with what the mission of the company is
and what this person's doing. Man, that is, that right there is, I don't do that. And that
would be something I could learn from. And I think it's, if you think about the normal
at home life, if that employee is having to go home and tell their spouse, hey, listen, I'm going to be
at the office for a lot of time here this next week, because we've got a big project,
we've got to get done. It almost feels like maybe a little backup for the employee too,
right? To be able to go in and say, we got this long road ahead of us here and we need
to put the time in right now. And it's not just like, yeah, I'm just going to go spend some time
hanging out at the office, more time at the office, so I'm not at home. I don't know, it just makes
so much sense to me. I'm really glad you brought that up. As far as kind of your vision for the
future and obviously you're an excellent leader, as we're talking here, I'm just taking notes and
I'm learning so much from you. When you look at a software company and being able to kind of
continually push the limits, my own family shop is on tech metric. I can tell everybody that's
listening, it is fantastic software, very user friendly, very easy. How do you keep innovating
and really even understanding what to innovate on? Okay, so we have shifted as a company from a
point of sale system to a platform for automotive repair shops. And the platform eventually will
consist of the core and key things that a repair shop has to do. We have over 100 integration
partners into our ecosystem with our API. We are not trying to replace all of those partners
with building product. But I believe there are some key things that should be native inside of
the point of sale system, which is like the core point of sale system we're going to
continue innovating on. Payments is fully integrated and embedded into the product.
We have a CRM product or marketing product that is fully integrated into tech metric,
but it should a shop owner want to use something else they're totally welcome to.
But we want to let shop owners to pick and choose whatever they want to use.
There's a couple other things that are going to start working their way into tech metric,
which is VoIP or phones fully embedded into tech metric. And then the last thing is the
repair guide, automotive repair guide for technicians. And so to me today, that's
going to round out our product set for being a platform. But the sky is the limit, Jay.
Honestly, every six months, some new idea will crop up and we'll think about doing something
that is tangential or in a different vertical. I don't know. There's all kinds of things that
we can continue innovating on. But at the end of the day, we want to provide the best
platform for automotive repair shops. You understand what to say no to.
That's a hard one. So several years ago, we were in Austin, Texas doing an offsite
and we decided to make a decision on what we're not going to do. And so we made an
intentional decision. We are not going to build software for heavy duty shops, marine shops,
you know, jet ski boat, RV, motorcycle, like all of these other areas.
And what we did was we said we are going to build a point of sale system for general
mechanical auto repair. And we did and we stayed focused on that. So what happens when
you stay focused on your own little vertical is that all of your resources and your energy
and your people are all geared towards winning in this one vertical. And we've been pretty
successful in doing that. Two years ago, we released a tire module, which is for tire
specific shops. And we're continuing to work on the tire space. But for the, you know, I can't
think of us going into any other areas right now anytime soon because there's just so much to do in
general mechanical auto repair and tire right now.
A really good, honest answer. And I give you, again, a lot of credit for having the
discipline to kind of have that meeting, right? To have the meeting of what to
say no to. I don't know that there are a lot of leaders that would have that conversation. And
I think it's a balance between the hyper growth of keep growing, keep growing, keep growing,
but also being like, I want to own this space, like this, this space is our space and we've
got to dominate that one space. So I think that's interesting perspective. I honestly don't know
that I've heard of anybody doing a what to say no to meeting. But I give, I give you a lot
of credit there too just to have the wherewithal or the thinking to be able to drive that conversation.
Now, as we get close to the end of this podcast, we have our three questions that are kind of
maybe a little off topic, but a little on topic. So I'm going to start with
if you weren't doing this job, what would you be doing?
Jay, I would probably do one or two things, be flying the plane or
focusing on law enforcement and helping people.
The law enforcement thing, I didn't even get to ask questions about that. And I have so many
questions about that in general. So that we'll have to have you back on some time to talk about
that. Do you fly currently? I do.
We do. All right. How long have you been doing that for?
It's been about a year. So I'm still in the process of completing my private pilot
license. But it is a, like there's a lot of time you have to spend in order to
complete everything. So time is always my limiting factor.
Interesting. What was your first job?
Movie theater, the dollar of theater in Amarillo, Texas. I was the
guy that was cleaning the popcorn machine for the longest time. And then eventually became an usher.
Anything you learned from back then that you kind of still apply to this day?
Not from that job.
Interesting. Last rapid fire question here. What time do you get up in the morning?
I get up at 4.30 in the morning. And I am in the gym usually by 5.15.
And I usually work out four days a week.
For you, has that been consistent throughout your career, early riser?
Early, it's something that's like, I can't live any other way.
I see a consistent trend with a lot of our high-performing guests when we ask that question.
Very early to rise, get a lot of work done before anybody else is even awake.
And I think when I look at you as a whole, it's such an impressive
career and really legacy that you've laid out now. And I think it is routine that really
drives a lot of that. On top of you just being an incredibly smart person and well-read
person and doing all of the wonderful things that you've done.
So I can't thank you enough for coming on the podcast today.
This has been an absolute pleasure. I've got an entire page full of notes here that I took
over the course of the podcast. Just really looking forward to following along what you're
able to do with Techmetric in the future. It is really, really exciting. And congratulations
on everything. Thank you, Jay. It was a pleasure being here with you.
That wraps up another episode of Beyond the Wrench. If you liked this episode,
please show your support by rating and following the podcast.
You can also watch the video interviews on Wrenchway's YouTube channel.
Speaking of Wrenchway, did you know Beyond the Wrench is managed and produced by the
Wrenchway team? Wrenchway is an online community dedicated to promoting and improving
automotive and diesel careers. We help technicians find the best shops to work at,
and we also help auto, diesel, and CTE instructors get more support from local industry.
You can learn more by visiting Wrenchway.com.
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