Podcaster Kevin Brown Puts the Auto Repair Industry on Blast About Diag Fees

And here's the thing. I don't give a shit if I sell wiper blades, but I do give a shit if we spend let's charge a guy $5,000 to fix everything on his damn truck and his wiper blades are freaking ripped. And you're too goddamn lazy to put wiper blades on. That pisses me off to no end, you know.

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another exciting episode of the Jaden Mechanic Pod. It's a Thursday night. It's unusual to record on a Thursday night, but I mean, sometimes your guests are literal, like superstars and are busy and, you know, you have to make it happen when it can happen. So tonight I'm sitting with a fellow podcaster and somebody that I've been talking with for the last six months off and on. He kind of comes across as very much like me, sometimes very crass, very opinionated, very believes what he says, you know, take no prisoner type thing. And sometimes, you know, he'll say things in a way to poke the bear. And he said some stuff the other day that got me poked. And we're like, okay, finally, that's it, Kevin.

You're gonna be on the fucking podcast. So. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Kevin Brown. Kevin, how are you, buddy?

I'm great. And that doesn't sound like me that you're just kind of painting the picture of. I don't know who you're talking about.

Go back and watch one of your clips here. Kevin, you're kind of like. I don't want to say you're a big deal, but in Michigan you're pretty successful, man, aren't you?

Yeah, I've been in the business for 35 years and I'm well known, that's for sure.

Yeah. You own five businesses now?

Yep, I own three different. I have two locations. I have a trailer parts store, a truck collision shop. I do sandblasting there. Painting, obviously. We do box repair.

Yeah.

And my Farmington location, we do everything bumper to bumper mechanically. Cars, trucks, medium heavies, whatever, trailers.

And you're a technician at heart. Like you were a tech?

Yes, I'm a master collision, master truck, master auto and master motorcycle tech.

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

I'm like, don't know that, right? Yes, I started out in 1990. I graduated in 89. In 1990. I started at my first shop and I've worked at. I worked at that shop. Then I worked at Sterling Performance, which I did high speed boat motors.

Okay.

And then I went to Garrett Otto and truck in 1995. And now I own Garrett Otto and Truck.

Very cool. Very cool.

I'm the guy that started making the fries at McDonald's. McDonald's.

What's. What's it like to work somewhere and then eventually own it? Because I know that that's not all that uncommon necessarily, in our industry. We do see people that were like, well, I worked here forever, and then eventually the owner sold it to me. Was it kind of that way for you, or was it like a. Was there a hostile takeover or did it just be kind of. It was an opportunity that presented itself later. And you went in and bought it. I guess what I'm asking.

I'll just give you the short story. I started there as a tech. I became friends with the owner who really didn't know a lot about business. They were struggling when I started there. I started 11:50 an hour. And they didn't know how to write an estimate, really, back then. They would just do the work and give the people the bill. And I used to call it four o' clock holy shit hour.

It was religious hour because everybody would say holy shit when they get their bill. In my first shop, Hal's Auto Clinic, he was a very sharp businessman. So he showed us how to write our own estimate. So as a tech back then, I would check out the vehicle, I would write my own estimate. I would mark everything up per his sheet he gave me, and I would sell it.

Right, Right.

So what I didn't realize back then, I was learning how to be kind of a service advisor right. Of my own. So when I went to Garrett Auto and Truck, I was there about three months, and I said, you guys aren't charging enough. You're charging $100 for breaks when right across the street at Hell's Auto clinic, he's getting 350. So they started letting me do my own estimates. Well, that caused a problem with the old man who owned the place. I would sell, say, an estimate for $350. He would say, that's highway robbery.

He would cut it in half and sell it to him in half and give it to him on credit. So fast forwarding through all that, his dad retired. Steve started letting me run the shop more and more. Well, I came to him one day, I said, steve, I said, I'm literally out of experience. I don't really know what to do any more than I've already done. And I pulled out a piece of paper a couple weeks after that. Nothing came of that. He's kind of ignoring me from management success Mike Le I said we should go to this Pennsylvania two day class in Ohio on how to run a shop.

So we drove to Ohio or Pennsylvania in my truck and at that point they sold us to. Gave him $10,000 for a consulting program. He put it on his credit card, Max, his credit card out. And we had to get to Glendale, California. And that's where the journey really begun, where we learned what our numbers were and how to mark up stuff and how to actually run a business by statistics. And that changed everything.

Right. What was the, the, the senior, the old man, the father's position? What was his thinking and why? It was like he had to cut the bill that you created in half and then give the other half of it. Like essentially you were saying, like he made them pay. So did I hear that right? They paid half and then the other half had to go on credit.

Yeah. Or he would just cut the bill in half. It was 300. He'd say, give me 150. And sometimes he'd say, give me cash and I'd put it in my pocket. Or they didn't have the money, he would put it on account. So either way, the shop wasn't seeing the money. Right.

It was, cash was going in his pocket because on credit, these people weren't paying. They had no money.

Right.

So crate, it was burned and everything.

He set himself up as that shop that was like the, the last ditch. Everybody with the sob story and no money wound up there.

You're 100% right.

I wish that's. Why is that such a prolific pattern that seems to happen in this industry? What? Like, because you, as long as you and I have been talking, which hasn't been a long time, but I, like you, don't suffer any fools. You knew very early on that that was not, I want to say, probably before you went on the management course that you just spoke of, you knew that was not. Right. Yeah. Why do so many just think that that's the way it has to be?

Honestly, Jeff, I don't believe that most shop owners are evil. I think most shop owners are egotistical.

Yeah.

And I also believe that they can't look at somebody and say, I just don't know.

Right.

I don't know what to do. Okay. Like, I've seen this over and over again where these guys are broke because they won't sell somebody something. Then I've seen the other side of the coin where the shop owner lives in a mansion, drives a Mercedes, is always crying how broke he is when he Just got back from vacation for two weeks and expected a service advisor to kill himself to run his business.

Yeah. Yeah. I can't say that I've ever seen middle ground between those two extremes. You know what I mean? In my career, a lot of the time I worked with way more barely getting by, you know, having to count the pennies type of owners because the, you know, they're not putting the priority on where it should be, which is taking care of themselves and their people. They're always thinking they got to serve the customer. And then I've seen that the, the ones that you spoke of, the greedy, wealthy, you know, always saying they have no money. That has been my experience, has been at the, the dealership level. Right.

Which is a different thing. So. But I can't say that there's some middle ground there. Not until I started to meet some with my networking than I do. But I can't say that I've ever worked for the ones in the middle. You know what I mean?

No. And, you know, one of the things I pride myself on, number one, I was a technician first. Okay. I have my guys on flat rate. I've asked them all, hey, do you want to go to hourly? You know what their answer is? Hell no.

Yeah.

But I am one of the few shops around that charge for diagnosis, and I don't for diagnostic work. Okay? I do not. And then the customer comes up and says, well, if I buy the cylinder head, you know, job, because it's got a leaking head gasket, will you roll the diagnostic work into the repair order? And my answer is always no. The reason why that technician spent, we'll just say from 8 to 10 figuring this problem out and writing it up. Why would I steal two hours of that man's life? You know what? Steve Jobs had it, said it the best. The journey is the reward. You cannot buy. The one thing you cannot buy, no matter how much money you have, is time.

That's right.

Okay. So these guys breaking their bodies for you and everything else, as an owner, you have to look at it and say, okay, I'm going to take care of these people. And unfortunately, the way it is, the customer has to pay for their expertise. And if they don't, I'm sorry, but they're at the wrong shop.

Yeah, yeah. So this shop, the, the, the, the old man that, you know, was giving away everything and, and cash and all that kind of stuff, he started to work with his son and bought the business.

Me and his son became best friends quickly.

Okay.

I actually he died. It was the second year. This year he had a five year journey with cancer. We started Motor City Truck Truck Collision together too. He just was a low key guy that if he made just enough money to pay his bills and he didn't have to really work hard, he was okay with that. He used to always tell me, my God, Kevin, you're always moving the goalpost on me. You're always pushing, pushing, pushing. And I said, because I'm not happy making the money we're making.

I want to have a shop that I can pay my bills and pay my people and go home at the end of the day and not worried about paying my bills tomorrow because I didn't make enough money.

Right.

And be honest with you, Jeff, for a long time I didn't know what that looked like because with him, with him owning the shop and later. I'll get to that. I bought in. I actually he came back from vacation one time after a two week vacation and in the meantime when he's on vacation, he left me to do everything. I said, I'm done. I talked to the Mackell man. He, he said, you should get a route. We got one right open.

A guy retired. It's a huge route. I said, all right, put me in. So they signed me up and I had everything ready to go. When he came back, I said, I'm all done. I'm just not running your shop. He said, what if I make you a part owner? I'll give you 10% and every year till I sell it to you, I'll give you 1% equity. I said, that seems to be okay.

And I ended up doing that. And at that point I had a little bit of skin in the game, right? I wasn't working to make somebody else money. And at that point, you could ask my guys, you can interview all my guys. They thought I owned the place as they started working, because I did every, I ran everything, I made all the decisions at that point. And he kind of let me do what I wanted to do. So I applied everything management success taught me. And you know what ended up happening? I ended up turning over my crew. I ended up having everybody quit because once I started putting metrics on guys that I was paying hourly, and I'm not saying every guy's like this, don't get me wrong, but the guys I had there, you know, we're paying them for 40 hours and they're doing 10 hours of labor a week.

10.

And that's 10. I remember Al McCoy was doing 9, 10, 11, hours a week. I'm like, I'm paying a guy for 40. So I said, listen, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put you guys on flat rate. Back then it was commission, remember? You know, so they would make the same amount of money if they turned the same amount of hours. So I didn't screw them. Pretty much all of them quit and I turned over the crew at that point, the shop just changed. Back then I was a lot more, believe it or not, I was a lot more high strung.

Push, push, push. But you know, all them guys are with me still today, except for one. He got all crazy and just quit. But these guys all make a really good living. And I'm proud to say, like my service advisor day tomorrow, he's taking. I came in, he said, guess what I did? I said, what? He's like, I sold my car. I bought a new Tesla Model 3. He was happy and I was happy for him.

Yeah.

I'm like, good for you, man. I said, I'll come over your house and hook up the charger for you. I said, I know how to do it. They don't use a neutral Tesla. I just did it. Blah, blah, blah. And that makes me happy. That did not make me mad.

That made me happy. That man can go out and buy a car and can be excited enough to tell me, hey, I just bought this.

Yeah.

I'm like, good for you.

Yeah, that's pretty, pretty rewarding. The low producing guys that you had, do you think that was just the way they always were, or could it have been a byproduct of having to work for that gentleman, like where they. It was always done cheap and nobody was really watching. Did it just. Do you think they just evolved into that?

I believe a little of both. 100%. I believe what? They weren't the right people, but I do agree with one. 100%. If there's not metrics on you, you know, you've been a tech for a long time. You want to hear, hey, hey, Jeff, you did 45 hours last week and you're here 30. You're like, hell yes. Right?

Yeah.

Never want to. You're like, hey, you're here 40 and you did nine hours. You'd be like, right, right. So this, that just goes to show a mindset on them guys, if you ask me. And one had a drinking problem. We helped him. He ended up quitting. I just, I just don't think we had the right people in the right places.

How's that? They didn't want better for themselves.

Yeah, you gotta have like. And I'm not, you know, the skin in the game thing, you know, I'm not quite there where I'm completely, I understand it. I think it does work. I think it's, it's a very good way. I'm not trusting enough yet for most employers that I would say, oh, yeah, I want skin in the game. But I do see how it does work for the right people. I think that those people that we see low performing a lot of the time, you know, when we talk about it in the groups, sometimes you just like, you see shops and they're like, oh, I can't get my guys to do, you know, 20 hours a week. What do you pay them? And it's, and it's crap.

And it's like, okay, so you have, you've hired crap and you're getting crap results. Where's the confusion here? Like you, you know, crap in, crap out. Like you, you get what you pay for, as I always say. But then you'll see some other people where it's like, they're legit paying really, really well, but their people are still not producing. And then sometimes it's like I always. That what my intrinsic brain wants to know is, okay, so I want to then see your sheets to know how you're charging because maybe then their production is low because you're again, you know, not charging enough hours or are they just not motivated because they have bad attitudes? You know what I mean? That's.

Or you have the wrong service advisor in place.

Yes.

I told your story the other. Not to cut you off. I told your story the other day. I said, I was talking to Jeff and he said the service advisor didn't sell something. Jeff said, you need to pull the money out of your pocket right now and pay me. Give me the money if you're not going to sell what I told you, give me the money because you're costing me money. And I believe that 100%.

Yeah. And I'm not proud of the way I was back then. Let me, let me just reiterate that I'm not proud of the way I was, but I was in a place where it was like I, I knew I was right because it was A, it was told to me, B, if you tell me to go check out a signal light problem, but you tell me that the customer is not going to buy a bulb, okay, cool. So I go out and I pull the bulb out because that's how I have to do my Testing is at the bulb and I see the bulb is bad, but I still do my testing and prove out that it's a bulb. And I go back in there and I say, okay, that's 15 minutes. Right? I proved out what is wrong. It needs a bulb. Okay, well, she's going to take it and have her husband put in.

Cool. I got no problem with that. You know, I could put that tail lamp back in in two seconds with my eyes closed. You still got to pay the technician because you, you tasked him with inspecting this problem. And it was, it was, you know, the money is the money. Right? It wasn't the money at that point. It was the, the, the, the, the. What's the word I'm trying to think of? The principle of it at the time was why I was so angry because we're, it's, it's like double speak.

You're telling me to do something, but you're telling me that if I find this solution, it's not worth anything and you can't pay me because you can't charge them. The communication breakdown was that you didn't convey to the customer, I'm gonna have to pay my person to inspect this. Where he's going to inspect it, he's going to give you a result. That's what you're paying for. Now, if you want to go home and put a bulb in yourself, that's cool. He still is going to confirm it only is a bulb. That's worth something for somebody to say, I'm not going to pay you because it's just a bulb. You still task me with doing the job.

When you task me with doing the job, I do the job, you get paid. It's as simple as that. There's no flex for me on that. When I fail to do the job, then we could talk about not getting paid. Totally understand that if I make a misdiag, I don't expect to get paid. But if you tell me to die something and I diag it for it, you're gonna pay me 100%.

And you know what I tell my guys? We have a sheet actually in my shop, if I ask them to do something, they fill out the sheet and I tell them, hey, I'll give you a 0.5 to do that. Fill out the sheet and they give it to the service advisor and gets put on their paycheck. He gives it to my wife. Because once again, you are not there for free. Now, if you want to give your time away for free, that's a whole different story, right? But at my shops, nobody's allowed to give anything away for free but me. And we don't do it. And it's not that I'm a dick, but people need to pay for your expertise. There's lots of years of knowledge.

There's tools, there's. There's struggles, there's. I can't tell you how many Christmas Eves have been ruined over my life, at my life over that shop. I started closing. I started closing Christmas Eve because shit would happen Christmas Eve that would ruin Christmas. I would be sitting there at Christmas with a stomachache.

Yeah.

I just don't do it anymore. You know what I realized is it's easier to forego the money than deal with the pain.

Yeah.

That's kind of the way I look at it.

And you mean like cars that didn't get done on time and they.

I'll give you an example. We freaking did four wheel brakes on a Grand Marquis and the guy didn't tighten the lug nuts up. The guy made it about 30 miles and the wheels fell off the freaking car on New Year's Eve on Christmas Eve one year. The guy's name was Herb Frost. His car, okay, he worked for Gale Insulation. Tell me that's not burned into my brain. You know, we had to have a tow truck get a car. We had to figure them out a rental car on Christmas Eve, okay.

It just wasn't worth it.

I can tell you a Christmas Eve story. I remember working at the dealership. We were closing at 4. Now this was a dealership. This was Christmas Eve. We were lucky that we're closing at 4 and not at 5. They had forego for another year, decided they weren't going to buy us any kind of special lunch or anything for Christmas Eve because you know, the dealer wasn't doing what it had to do. And I can remember having a customer come in at 3:30 for a brake inspection on a caravan.

And I only had to drive around the building to know that it was like the front brakes were absolutely metal on metal. Like it was pass the point of friction material. You're metal on metal. And I'm not talking squealers, I'm talking like the sound, right? And then so of course it's drums, drum breaks in the back of them on, on the older caravan. So I fight to get the drums off because up here, you know, in the Rust belt, they seize on. I get them all apart, I prep the estimate just for the customer. And it was one of them names with a Whole lot of consonants and not all too many vowels, you know, and there was a language barrier just for me to explain to him and get, you know, prep the estimate for the brake job and all that kind of stuff for him to say, well, I'm going to go to Canadian Tire because they're cheaper. Now, that was my Christmas Eve.

Now this gentleman, he didn't celebrate Christmas. It's not in his religion, which is fine. And I'm not trying to sound like a racist dick or anything and just whatever, but it was one of them things where I was like, I made the vow right then and there. I was never going to work another Christmas Eve or the 24th of December, anywhere. I don't do it. It's just a rule of mine. Now if I do have to work it for some strange reason, I'm gone by noon. That's my cut off.

Because it was like I'd been there all day long. It was not a busy day. And you know, I'm doing something that was just a waste of my time, you know, because I got paid 0.5 for that brake inspection, but I had more than 0.5 into it by the time I got it done. It was a customer that had never been there before, never saw him again. You know, we, we sacrificed me right to, to make a half an hour labor. And I just was like, I wasn't good with that anymore.

Yeah, that's kind of how I with Saturdays too. I ended up when I got rid of my service advisor, been with me for 14 years because I caught him doing some bad things. I started looking at Saturdays and realized my guys were coming in and they weren't making hardly any money. So we had a couple fleets. I called the fleets up, said, hey, we're closing Saturdays. And one fleet said, well, if you close Saturdays, you lose us as a customer. I said, okay, well, I'll bring your extra keys back. And it was great doing business with you.

Yeah.

And we never looked back. And we work 7 to 4, Monday through Friday. No holidays, no weekends. And my guys love it. You know, every other shop around here, 6:30, 7:00 clock at night. I think by latest now 6:30, they after Covid, the dealership guys were like, we're not doing this nine o' clock bullshit.

Yeah.

So if you're a business owner that knows how to run your shop and mark up your parts correctly and write your estimates correctly, you could afford to make enough money in 40 hours to let your people have a life.

Now, going back to the Saturday thing, When you said your guys were not making a lot of hours on Saturday, was it just the work wasn't there or was it the situation of like. Because I know I would come in some Saturdays and like, we had one advisor, I really liked him, but he despised the fact that he had to be there. So he was not motivated to sell. So you knew that if you picked that if you were on that advisor Saturday, you weren't going to have a good day because he was not going to make a lot of appointments. But people may drop in, but he didn't make appointments for Saturday. The other guys, when they had to, knew that they were going to be on the schedule for that Saturday. They made appointments. You know, if Mrs.

Smith called on Wednesday, I'm going to be here Saturday. Mrs. Smith bringing in Saturday, you know, you got a breakbook complaint. Cool, we can get that done for you on Saturday. The other advisor would not. Then when he was also there, he didn't like. He hated, he hated to sell. He was, he was very much.

He.

He did estimates from his wallet, his own wallet. Like he had his emotionally invested, as I say, all the time. Whereas then I could work for another advisor on the same Saturday. And again, I wasn't smart enough back then to be looking at car count Kevin and all that stuff. Like I would be now, right. To say, how many ROs do we open today versus this day? That was the stuff of the manager's job at the time. But I knew that if I was going to work with that advisor, I was going to have like, I had a 28 hour day working with that advisor one day Saturday.

So how it started with us, we had all these fleets on Saturday and we had autonomy with them. You know, they were longtime customers. So they'd say, hey, you could do X, Y and Z. Like we had capital tire. Mark, the manager wanted his Isuzu trucks followed exactly the manufacturer's recommendations. He had run his trucks at 350,000 miles and he would scrap them. Right, right. So we could do trans flushes, brakes, whatever, kingpins, no problem.

A new manager came in, they tapered it down. You're allowed to spend $400. Then this company, that new manager came in, you're allowed to spend 300. So instead of us, you know, doing work that the trucks needed, we're doing oil changes and tire rotations on Azuzu trucks. And the guys are not making any money.

That's right.

So I'm like, it's not worth my guys not coming in there. It wasn't that we had. We weren't open on Saturdays for the general public. We were doing all these fleets. So basically, the times change. You know, the bean counters got involved.

Yeah, it's. That's a funny thing, A. Because, like, I've. I've met in my background, too, a lot of fleet managers, and some of them are great, and then others are absolute tools. About, like, all they're trying to do is boost their. Their bonus by spending almost nothing on the fleet. Right. And it almost seems like they were allowed to be.

Well, it's okay if we pay four times as much next year for tow truck fees to tow it in when it's, you know, something could have been prevented, happens. That's okay because that comes out of this column. But the end of the year, we're like, if we did just flush the coolant out of that, you wouldn't be overheating on the side of the road. And, you know, but it was okay because that. And then I had other fleet managers, just like you said, that were like, you know, whatever the book says to maintain the thing, do that as the bare minimum and anything else you see. And they were great. Not because we were taking advantage of them, but because their stuff never broke down, you know.

Yeah. Most people don't realize it because most people don't really know their numbers ever. A problem that's going on in our business not only with medium heavy truck cars, everything is. Car counts are going down, cycle time is going up because their cars are more complicated. And, you know, I talked to my friend Hal. He's like the one thing I used to always struggle with was, you know, my car count going down. I'll go, yeah, but look at your. Your average repair order has gone up, and they're here longer because cars are so much more complicated.

Like, last month, I did 879 jobs at Garrett Ottawa and Truck, and I did 22 at Motor City Truck Collision. Okay. I know my numbers and I know why they are, why they are. I sit there and I dissect it. And the reason I'm going into this, because a lot of these business shop owners do not take the time to learn their numbers. And what ends up happening is somebody's got to get screwed. So they start cutting pay, cutting advertising, stuff like that, because these guys don't know what they're doing, right. And it's causing a problem through the industry, you know? You know, there when I look at TikTok, I look at all the different shop owners, like, check engine Chuck.

He's probably one of the smartest guys I've ever met when it comes to electronics. The guy's a freaking genius, right?

Yep.

Brandon Sloan, you listen to him, he knows what he's talking about, right? All these guys talk about the mechanical part and they're all damn good at it. There's not a lot of guys that actually break down the numbers of where they should be in a shop. You couldn't ask these guys, hey, what percentage of your gross should be your payroll? What should be your insurance? They don't know this stuff. And they don't also know how they say, oh, I pay a guy $45 an hour. No, let's go ahead and put 22% to 25% on top of that for all the wages, all the taxes, not wages, tax, you know, the benefits, PTO, vacation, stuff like that. And if you're charging $100 an hour because you really don't know what you're doing and your guy is making 55 of that hundred, you're making 45. Yeah, you got a problem. Who's going to get screwed?

The shop owner, right now. Let me ask you a question then. Can the shop owner still be a working tech and be really like, know the numbers and be effective as what you're implying?

I will tell you what I believe and this is what I got taught from Mike Lee. If you are a shop owner and you work and you're a mechanic and you work in your shop and know what you'll get fixed? Cars. If you're a business owner and you work on your business, your business will run good, right? I, when I was a tech, I was also the service advisor too. I never really had to run the business, what I do on a daily basis. It would be really tough for me to work on cars, right? I would get, you know, I, I don't now can it be done? If you're a one man show, absolutely, right. You could write your service, you could do everything. You're just going to work a lot of hours. I run a commercial operation, so I try to.

I'm a very, very deliberate guy of chains of command. Like I said in my other podcast short, I have two guys that were my, both my head guys. I said, listen, I'm gonna give you each 10% of my company. We're gonna go to the lawyer and I'm gonna give you 10% of the profits. That means you're gonna take 10% of the shit too. So you're gonna run the shops when I'm not there and you're gonna run it like it's your own because you get 10% of the profits. I write them guys pretty big bonus checks. They both have company trucks.

I pay for their fuel, I pay for their insurance. I'm glad to have them.

Right.

Not one time me or my wife, know what she said to me the other day? We wrote bonus checks, their quarterly bonus checks. She's like, this makes me really happy. We get to do these for these guys. They work their ass off for us. You know what? And that kind of, that makes me proud that I could say I can do what I do for these people because of how I am. Yeah, I mean, it's just, I'm bragging a little bit, but it makes me feel good.

No, it's nothing wrong with bragging. I mean, it's, you know, I like to see people brag about when they're bragging about how they treat their people. You know, I've heard enough people blow smoke about what their shop did, you know, for hours or numbers or whatever, car count and all aro and all that kind of stuff like that puts me to sleep. But when people start to talk about how they treat their people, that's what really gets me fired up. Right. Is because. And I think people should brag about that. I think it's the next metric that we really need to delve into in this industry is like, how really, you know, because everybody, I've talked about it around where I am, everybody thinks that they're not paying flat rate.

They're really doing the technicians that work for them solid. And, and yeah, sometimes if the market sucks or you, you know, you have low performing service advisors that won't sell the proper time. Yeah, you might be taking care of me by paying me hourly, but like, I've also seen lots of people who go, I pay my guys hourly. And when you clock out at the end of the day and look at what they did, those texts are turning 12, 15 hours a day for them. And yet they, they, they paid him eight hours, you know, pay. That's not looking after them. Right. So.

No, I agree with that. And it goes both ways. You know, I've had situations where. Here, here's one. When my very first shop I worked at Hal's, I was in commission. If we finished a job and it didn't get picked up, we didn't get paid for it. How messed up is that?

I don't understand that because I've talked to so many guys that work at the dealerships and it's the same thing. Like when they're. The truck is finished, warranty has not paid them out yet, so they haven't been paid. I see. When I was there, that was never the case. As soon as I handed the work order and the keys over, normally the next day or within the day after I was paid for that job, even if the claim hadn't been paid yet. I got paid because they knew so many, because we did a pile of warranty work. We did a pile of retail work too.

But the bulk of it was started out as warranty. If they didn't pay you, you weren't looking at the next car. That was just how we were. It was like, why am I going to look at this if. If I these. These technicians that say, you know, I put an engine in or I got an engine on teardown and it's been three weeks to wait for an auditor to come in or whatever like that. And I haven't got paid for my time. I look at them and go, you guys are nuts.

You're stupid. How do you keep all that straight, right? And I know how I used to do it. I had a notebook, lots of technicians, you know, I wrote down every RO number that I did what my time was supposed to pay out. And then when you got your flagsheet the next day, you just looked at the two numbers at the end and went, cool. I was supposed to get 12, I got 12. That's all I really cared about. These guys that are like three weeks, four weeks, a month before they get paid out on job, I just say, nah, that ain't for me. Look, just pay me my eight hours.

I'm gonna come in, I'll give you all the time that I can give you in that day, and that's it. I'm not, I'm not trusting you to not it up to not screw me, you know?

Yeah, I. What I did, my guys, they get 50% done with the job. They get paid 50% of the job. That way they get a paycheck. Some of our jobs down at my truck shop, that job could be 40 or 50 hours.

They're big jobs.

And also what, Also what I do for cash flow, just a different topic. I take half down on these huge jobs to get started because it helps me with cash flow. Because sometimes I get a hundred thousand dollars worth of parts in one month and we might not be done with them jobs. And I like to pay my bills on time.

And when they're fleets, you're still taking 50 right?

Up a Lot of them. Now, the fleet companies, their self, like, you're talking Aris, the Enterprise. No, I don't worry about that.

Right. But if. If a mom and pop construction company had a fleet and. And you do the whole fleet like you're. You look after it, you're making them pay.

Absolutely.

I like that.

You know, honestly, it's a comfort level. A lot of guys don't have the balls to do that. They're so afraid they're going to offend them. But it's how I sell it to them. I got a pretty big customer right now. The other day, we were slow, so he called. He said, hey, guy knocked the corner of my hood off. Can you fix it? I said, yeah, I could fix that Motor City.

I just happened to answer the phone. I said. He said, well, I'll get it to you next week. I said, why next week? He said, well, I have no driver. I said, I'll drive over and get it. So when I got there, he said, hey, Kev, it's really a pain in the ass bringing a check for half down every time. I said, well. He said, the credit card charge, we don't want to buy.

I said, for you. I said, you put on your credit card. I'm not charging the credit card charge. He said, you kidding me? I said, no. He's like, that's why I like doing business with you. He's like, you're very precise on your rules. And he said, but you just broke a rule for me. I said, I value you.

Okay. So he's happy.

You got to be flexible, you know, you got to be flexible. Like, somebody was just talking another conversation about how, you know, we provide a service, not every customer necessarily drinks the coffee in the waiting room, but everybody pays for the coffee in the waiting room. Like, not everybody, you know, sucks up the air conditioning, but, you know, everybody pays for the air conditioning. That's where, you know, you build your whatever you want, your experience for the customer off the sake of everybody. And that's why some people can hold different value. Some customers are just more valuable to you than other customers. Right. I always understood that from even as a flat rate tech standpoint.

Like, I had customers that if I was doing the oil change and, you know, trying to think of an example here, they asked me to throw a cabin air filter in it, and I was doing the oil change in the tire rotation. I just throw the cabin air filter in it for them. The other customers, I wouldn't like. You had to pay me the 0.3 the cabin air filter. Because I had never seen that customer again. I didn't have a report with that customer. Like, we didn't have, you know, history going back. And they're like, why are you flex? Why? Because I know that customer that I have a relationship with, right? It's.

It's the same. You know, the joke we. I'll get you on the next one. Some customers really will get you on the next one. But then other times the shop just says that and you don't ever get it back. And I think that's got a lot to do with how some texts, their attitude, seems like they won't do anything. But I know lots of texts that are very generous, generous with their time. It just.

You have to appreciate them and you have to pay them when you're supposed to pay them, and then they'll turn around and they'll help you out, you know, when you don't like. I go back all the time to wiper blades, right? We used to say all the time. They ran a wiper promo, and they didn't pay us to put blades on. We didn't put the blades on. We put them on the front seat, and the advisors would put the blades on, and then the advisors would crack the windshield and bend the arms, all the. And everything else. So pretty soon they just started paying the technicians point two to put the wiper blades on. Like, it was just, you know, and because.

And you're like, well, why did you have to get paid to put wiper blades on? Well, because sometimes they would send it to the back for just an oil change and two wiper blades and, you know, you might spend point six to point. You know, not point six. Excuse me, 0.1 to 0.2 with a set of blades while you stood at the parts counter and waited for them to get them and, you know, blah, blah, blah, for free. Why would you do that? It wasn't.

You know how I got around that? I pay my guys a dollar of wiper blade at the end of the month. Bring me all your box ends, and I'll give you a dollar wiper blade. And you know what? That would end up happening. And here's the thing. I don't give a shit if I sell wiper blades, but I do give a shit if we spend. Let's charge a guy $5,000 to fix everything on his damn truck and his wiper blades are freaking ripped, and you're too goddamn lazy to put wiper blades on. That pisses me off to no end. You Know, so I pay these guys a dollar a wiper blade.

Yeah. And that's. Eventually Chrysler had to come up with a program like that where they. Bonus. They spiffed you on. If you sold more wiper blades, more air filters, then they would give you, like, a dollar at the time. But I mean, so, you know, and that's probably. They got us cheap then because it's like we're doing oil change, and I get two more bucks because I put two wiper blades on.

Wipers are a thing for me, too, because it's like, it's the first thing that I turn on in every car when I get into it, because I just. It's my own pet peeve of mine. I probably change mine on my Jeep, like, probably every two months, because as soon as they streak, get noisy doing, I throw them in the trash and I get another pair. And it doesn't matter, you know, up here, they're like 50 bucks sometimes for a pair of good blades. I don't care. It drives me crazy to, like, all right, not windshield. Like, it's such a safety thing for me. It's so stupid.

But it was just the way the advisors were like. Or at the time, it was the manager. Well, you guys should just do that for free. Everything. So, like, it's. It would be so simple if everything could be done for free. It's because we don't have to have the tough conversations then. Right.

But this industry is about having tough conversations.

Yeah. You know, I'll just kind of give you a rundown. We. Since I changed from Mitchell1 about four years ago to shopwares, it's really helped us sell stuff because you got to realize. I guess. Let me back up. You got to realize when I was selling service, I would have to call you up and try to paint you a beautiful picture of your brakes grinding. Right.

I had no way of sending emails and stuff like that with pictures, you know. Now we do a dvi, right. On their phone. It uploads the shopwares. We could send pictures of everything. So everything gets a pre. Our service advisors, they get paid hourly, but they're also on a bonus. So when a vehicle comes in, on every repair order, I have an intake checkout.

We take a picture of the dashboard with the vehicle running so it catches all the lights that are on. The mileage. We check four corners of the car, the windshield, the tires and everything. And reason we do that is you as a technician have known when you're really busy, you get. You pull a job and you drive it, you do all this stuff and you're like, shit, was a check engine light on? I don't remember. Now we could pull it up and see that it was on or off. And people can't blame us for doing that. There are little things that I've done over the years to kind of inoculate us from having the huge fights with the customer, getting blamed for stuff we didn't do.

Yeah. Are you familiar, Kevin, with some of the talking industry? The 300% rule?

Okay.

Is it something you follow?

300% I do. Let me tell you, at my shop, every vehicle that comes in gets a bumper to bumper inspection, right? We offer everything to the customer. The last 100% is what the customer buys, right. We 100% checkout 100% sales and they can make the decision of what they want to buy. In our industry, a lot of my customers buy pretty much all this stuff because they don't want to come back next week. Their fleet.

Now in the non fleet situations. So I'll give you, ask you this kind of question, right? Your technician, they do the, the, the MPI multipoint, you know, dvi, whatever, and you know, the, the technician creates the estimate. The estimate gets tabled to the customer, the customer declines. Some work, all work, whatever, you know, next time customer returns from an oil change, three months, four months, six months down the line, you go through the same process again, same DBI, same MPI, same 300% rule, or are, how are you guys handling? When Mrs. Smith calls and makes an appointment, do you pull her last ro and look at her, Rex? And on the phone with her or through email at that point, are you starting to say to her, Mr. Spence, last time you're in, we noticed this and this. Are you interested in having that done?

Every time when they're on the phone, we pull them up and our program, Shopwares has it what they declined. Last time, we say, hey, you did this, this, we offered this, this and this to you last time. Last time, right here, you declined the brakes. They're at 20%. I'd imagine they're probably pretty much ready to start grinding. Would you like us to do a brake inspection? I try to articulate to most shop owners I consult with, you know what the best customer is? The customer that always already trusts you. He's already a customer. Take care of him.

Trust you, he'll, he'll listen to you. And if he's coming back and he didn't buy it last time, you don't know what his financial Situation. It was, it was end of May, he's got to buy school clothes. Okay, now offer it again and again and again. It can't hurt. You're doing your job.

Right. Right. Because I know I, I struggled with the first time, first shop I ever worked in where we got really hard on the 300 rule and the DVI and the, you know, multipoint is because we would do these elaborate inspections and, and these big, you know, found all this stuff and it was, you know, green and, and yellow and, you know, all that nonsense of yellow shouldn't even exist. It should be red or green. That's it. Anyway, then we would prep these estimates, we would see these customers come back sometimes a year, two years later, they've been still coming in from that original DBI that we did for them. And none of that work has been done yet. Oh, and I'm just, at some point, Kevin, do you, do you cut that customer off from the fray and say no? Or what's the sense in doing the DVI and the MPI and, you know, paying your advisor to do the 300% rule and apply it to everything if the customer will not do the work?

Well, a lot of the times, believe it or not, we don't have problems selling stuff. I don't know if it's the way we just present it to people. You know, when I get on the phone, which is very rarely, my sales tactics is a lot different than my service advisor. My tact is you don't have to do the brakes. If you don't do the brakes that are 20%, you might go another couple months. If they start grinding, it's more money for me. I'd rather put rotors and calipers on it for you too. So that's up to you.

It's your car. I'm here to tell you that you're at 20% and it could get dangerous and you might not be back in the time that's always been my go to. Like, I am completely brutally honest. And you know, another thing is, this is going to sound really shitty, but I say this a lot to people. They say, why the hell is it taking you so long to fix my car? And I always say to them, let me ask you a question. When your car is done, what do I get? They said, what do you mean? I said, I get paid, right? I said, I want your money just as bad as you want your car. I said, so I'm not going to sit on your car any longer than I have to. And a couple of them are like, I can't believe you just said that.

I said, that's the truth. My wife sits next to me sometimes when I happen. She's like, what the fuck is wrong with you? I said, but I had a service. I had an old folks van, senior living, assisted living van, that the new fleet manager did not want to put exhaust manifolds on this V10. And the manifolds are broken in half and the rear studs are broken. And they brought it in for smelling. The guy declined the repair order, but brought it back the next week. And he needed AC underneath the carrier unit.

The one fan was bad and had a hole in the condenser. So we wrote him like a $4,000 estimate and he approved it. And he was kind of an asshole. And I said to him, I said, how long have you been a fleet manager? And he said, he said, I've been doing this for a month. He said, you do realize this thing has a leaking exhaust manifolds. I said, so I understand why you're fixing the air conditioning, because all these people are going to be dead from asphyxiation. So you want to keep them cool so they don't smell. He said, what the hell is wrong with you? I said, what the hell is wrong with you? I said, you're not qualified to do your job.

Needless to say, he fixed the exhaust manifolds. He didn't know what he was doing.

Yeah, I was going to say, maybe he thought because of the average age of the person riding around in the van, they couldn't hear the exhaust leak, but they would certainly start to sweat and they might smell bad.

But my point to you is a lot of this time, like it's gotten to the point now where I just think it's so ridiculous with some of these customers. And so this will lead me in my next thing, educate them. You know how I did that? I built a GPT. I don't know if you're into AI yet. Okay, so we have chat GPT, but I built my own GPT and I had my friend and my son who works for me now, he programmed it. It's programmed for my technicians, my guys pull a microphone out. Everybody has a laptop supplied by the company with printer and lube sticker and key tag printer on their toolbox. They will say, write me a description for R and R exhaust manifolds on a Triton V10.

These studs are broken. These could possibly think this AI will write it all up, spelled correctly, with all the four parameters and everything, and it'll Put the parts and they'll put disclaimer. We programmed it so it punctuates spell checks and writes it up professionally. So it has tripled the amount of verbiage on a repair order. Why have I done that? To educate the customer. They could read exactly what we're doing versus R&R exhaust. Manifold exhaust is spelled wrong and manifold spelled wrong. Because most techs, let's face it, we don't spell very good.

I'm one of them. So.

Yeah. Or we're watching and we don't. We leave a letter out or it gets, you know, dislikes. It kicks in. Right. And you have the A before the U and. Yeah, okay. A before the U.

Right, exactly. So with this new AI of what I've done is my repair orders are beautiful. They're spelled right and they have really good descriptions. So I educate the customer. If they say, well, what about this? I say, my service providers say, you need to read what we sent you. It'll explain everything. You could literally tell my AI to write it so a fifth grader could understand it. And they will.

And that has helped my shops immensely. The collision industry and everything. And one of the things I offer these shops that I'm consulting, I'm showing them how to write the proper verbiage through AI onto their repair orders. So they look very professional. And a lot of the times I could tell them to put. I could tell the AI now that I've built it out, put the Ford procedures in there or the GM procedures in this operation with the TSPs that need to be done and everything. So the customer. So you get our repair orders.

They look great and they're spell good. Because when you go to the dealer, you can't even read the repair orders by design, I believe.

Yeah. Especially if it's a warranty thing. Because if it's a warranty thing, it may just have a labor op number with hardly any kind of description at all to what it was. Right. Especially if it's a warranty thing and it's a known pattern failure. I've seen it. I. I haven't done it because it was back a long time ago, But I would see it where it was like, customer addresses.

You know, check engine light on labor op number as per bulletin replaced, you know, blah. There's no real description there. It's performed labor op number and that's it. And I was like, the customers just like, accept that. Well, when they're not paying, it's free. Right. It's a warranty, but it like if you think dealer people are listening when all of a sudden it seems like the car hits, you know, 101,000 miles, kilometers up here, 101,000. You never see that customer again.

It's because sometimes we haven't even explained to them what they've been doing. The car's left and it's been fixed, but nobody had a conversation with them about what we actually did to fix the car because that advisor had a hundred customers to deal with that day and he didn't have time to stop and talk to Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Brown about each one of their complaints and what they did. Like they just don't have time. Right. So I think chat is going to be a great thing to be able to.

You know, my reluctance with all this tech, sometimes there was a conversation that happened about it last week is like people I've worked with, advisors that don't want to talk on the phone or don't want to talk at the counter, they want the, the, the DVI done. I would, I would get so frustrated with this one young lady because I would go out and I would say, customer's standing there waiting. And I'll go out and say, yep, I checked it out. The brakes are shot, needs brakes, you know, calipers are pushed back, needs pads front. And she would not address the prep the estimate, address the car, address the customer standing there until the rest of the multi point DVI was filled out and submitted electronically. So she could then go over to the customer with the DBI and show them the rest of the dbi. And I'm sitting here going, if we call by now we can get that parts run. That's always happening now we can have these parts here in 10 minutes with your around.

We're going to be an hour and a half before we're going to get these parts because we're not going to get the next run. You know, like that would drive me nuts. So the process that they were taught was like when the DBI is finished and you have the multi point filled out, that's when you then table the estimate. And I'm like, the customer's in front of you, it's 600 to break. So interest in spending 600 bucks today, yes or no? No. Okay, I'll have them put the wheels back on. Yes you are. Okay, I'll get the parts coming.

The DBI at that point. Right. Can, can wait. It will still get done. That stressed me out because then or they don't even want to phone the Customer, they just want to sit there and go, well I sent them a text and I sent them an email. I'm just going to sit here and wait.

Yeah, that pisses me off too.

Why don't you call them up?

I agree with you 100%. And so first thing in the morning, my service advisors go through the list and they call the customers and give them an update. That way you wouldn't have the phone ringing off the hook. Number two, my repair orders behind me. Can you see the tv? If you've seen my mister or my shopwares, you would see all my text names and they have boxes underneath them and they have timers on them. So what I do in my text, turn in a repair order to the service advisor. They go into estimate needed column and it has a timer on it and it starts timing. So if I walk in the shop, which I don't really have to anymore, and look up and say why the hell is that repair order that needed to be estimated for eight hours.

You are costing mechanics money. Get the goddamn thing going and do it now. You guys got an hour to start working on it. If you're working on a big one, pull this one down. Order the, send all the stuff that you need, parts quotes onto the whoever. In the meantime they can send you the parts quote. You could work on this one, but that thing better not be sitting there because you're costing the guy out back money. And that's one of the ways we do it.

But I agree with you, the dealers seem to be, they just want to sell everything possible and it just doesn't matter. Not all of them, but I have friends that work with a dealer. Like it's getting really challenging.

It is because, and I'll tell you why that is, is because the technicians in the back a, there's a lot of them. Right. So it's a very competitive thing and you're selling a lot of stuff early if necessary at all. That's the stretch because otherwise like there isn't enough work just coming in that's going to get you eight hours that day. Like if we just, there's so many texts now that if you had so many scheduled recalls and, and you know, pre sold services, there's always more text than there is work. So you, it's, it's implied that you're going to find the rest of the work. Now. Now I've said this before and everybody, oh, you know, dealer technicians are absolutely way too aggressive.

Yeah. Because if they only relied on the work that came in they'd only make five hours a day. Right. And who go to work and only make five hours? Not, not flat rate technician. Unless they were there, you know, unless they're going home at 11, five is okay. Right. But if they're going to be there from 8 in the morning till 5 at night, they want at least 8 hours, at least. So that's why you'll see them like that.

Service interval is not really happening yet, but we've got it on extreme use and that's why we're selling it that way. Like I worked at a dealer like that. That's how we all made money because there was too many of us. Yeah.

Did you see that one post I put up? I got screwed up the first one. So I took down and redid it. My wife's Yukon. We changed the oil on it and we started it up and it freaking grabbed the main bearing, started knocking right in the freaking bay. What is the chances of that?

I saw something about that and it was like, it's under warranty, right? Yeah, yeah. That six, two engine recall, it's funny, at the, at the lot that I'm working at right now this morning, we've got two of our. We have a fleet of rental units as well. So we've got two Silverados right now that have gone to the dealer for that recall. One, they did an oil change, change the cap, sent it back. The other one, they didn't even change the oil, just change the cap, sent it back and we're like, you know, they're like, well, we'll just monitor it. And we're all like, well, these are, you know, these are rentals. Like we, they get used hard and we know that as soon as the warranty's up, we're flogging them anyway.

We're not gonna, you know, we probably won't even sell these to, you know, on our lot to a customer because we don't want to see it after the fact. We'll probably ship it to auction because it's a six, two and a Silverado. Right. Like you do.

What has that done to my wife's freaking Yukon? Denali, ultimate freaking price that I paid a hundred thousand dollars for. Now when I go to trade it in. So they're going, I don't want this piece of shit. I'm gonna say it has a new engine. Oh great. So all the bolts are gonna fall out of it because you know what, we got that thing, my guys picked it up and I do business with this dealer, my son and My main guy, I was up north. He went and picked it up. Jason said to the service advisor, hey, the trailer hitch covers missing.

He said it was not on it. He said, she doesn't pull anything with it. He said he got an attitude, walked in the back, and guess what? He came out with it and put it on. Then Jason took it over. He's my lead guy, my vice president. He took it over being him. He's like me. He took over and put it on the hoist.

They put a radiator at the fan. Shroud was in. It crooked. The alternator bracket that holds the wiring harness away from the alternator was missing. Okay? So he had to fix all that. And I'm like, if we didn't know, think about this. If we didn't know any better, that wiring harness was going to get hit by that alternator and probably short some out. It's like, I understand that, but if you're a tech.

And now, don't get me wrong, I've done some stupid as a tech, so you know what I mean? I've left up whatever, you know, how many engine covers have you done work? And then you're like, oh, I left that off. But to leave a trailer hitch cover off. That service advisor, in my opinion, was not trained correctly. He would have said, oh, hang on, sir, let me go look for it, before immediately going, nope, it was gone. You don't know. Yeah, and that's the problem. I think the dealership guys are so overworked and they're. They're.

Everybody's getting a piece of the pie, so they're hammering everything. I feel sorry for him in a way, honestly.

And I do too, because you hear me harp all the time about how I'm not pro flat rate, because most of the time in the experience of the dealer. But the reality is, is, like, some of these guys that, yes, they're fast at getting those jobs done. For sure, they're fast. But some of them could be still fast and the quality would go to another level if we just, like, put. I don't know, I guess if we ran the Matrix. If they could run the Matrix, I guess, on a warranty repair the way we do in the aftermarket. It. Kevin, I think it would make that little 10 difference of the quality that would come out of the dealerships.

I really do. Because every dealer tech I've met, most of them, they genuinely want to do a really, really good job because the. The truck is still relatively new, right? But there's always like this pressure that like get this done, you know, I, I know it's a 28 hour ticket, but you did one last week in two days. So I've got the customer told that they can pick it up Tuesday night at 5. Well guess what, you know, you don't want to have that conversation and tell the advisor because he's going to be like, he's going to go to the service manager, Service manager is going to walk out and go, what's wrong with you? You did the last one in two days, this one. What's fucking taking you so long?

No, I agree with that. And one of the things I'm going to be doing in the short term here, I've already started building it out. I'm going to start building training videos for service advisors and I'm going to charge a nominal fee for a monthly thing for like service advisor university on videos and stuff. Like then I was playing with the idea of having five or six service advisors get sent here and train them for two days. Okay, I went to service, I didn't have to go to service advisor school. Let me correct it, my brother did and Steve carrot did because they could sell shit to save their lives. I never had a problem selling, as you could probably only imagine with my mouth. But I went to this business owners with management success.

I went through part one and two. I've gone through every possible seminar on running a business I could ever have ever came up. And what that's done for me is I know where my numbers should be. So when I pull up my p L sheet for the three month window and I say, okay, customize it and I want to see a percentage of my income and I check all the fields and I say, oh shit, why is my marketing, you know, 40% when it should be, you know, 10% of my, my gross if I'm trying to grow, 5% if I'm trying to stay stagnant and you'll just get, you know, status quo right now, you know, your insurance 5 to 10%, your payroll 23 to 30%, you know what I'm saying? All this is stuff we need to know as business owners. Right? And then we can kind of trickle it down to give the numbers to our service advisors, what to meet. Right. There's nothing worse than telling a service advisor you need to sell everything like they do at the dealers, but never give them a target number. Right.

They don't give these guys a percentage number. Yeah, right. How can you do an estimate if you don't know a percentage number?

So you probably, I don't know how far back you've listened to me, but I used to, for the longest time I used to say that it was crazy that we put the technicians on flat rate and we put the advisors on a salary. I thought, we thought that that should have been flipped because I've seen so many lazy, unmotivated, no skin in the game advisors where now and for two reasons. Sometimes their, their basic wage was. And they work for somebody that gave them no commission because I didn't want them to know how much the shop was really making. And then even, you know, I'm not giving even 1% of that. Or they were like so comfortable on what their basic wage was, salary, whatever it might be, that it was more money than what they would have made at McDonald's. And yes, you had to have some difficult conversation with the customers, but it was like I got, you know, a different uniform and a comfier chair. I can, I can sit here and look at this keyboard versus standing at a window going, do you want of that? And so they, they weren't really all that motivated to sell.

They didn't push that next little bit to get the customers sold because they're. I can remember we had a, an advisor, he was new and we told him, oh yeah, you sell whatever a month, you get a bonus. While it was tire season up here and he hit it big time selling tires. He got just about 50% of his customers that came in. He sold four new tires on their car. Well, at the end of the month they looked at that and they went, oh yeah, we should have told you tires weren't part of that. Sorry. And they.

Yep.

Well, you could see Kevin, his attitude to the whole place changed just like that. And, and they completely did it because they had never told them tires weren't legit, like didn't work towards it. They just never had somebody sell that many tires and they would have had to send this kind of bonus out at the end of the month. They lost money to him.

What.

So he went again. He didn't care if he sold an estimate or not. He didn't care.

What is. What are your service advisors a good healthy service advisor make for a wage in, in Canada?

I don't see it's funny. I don't really know. I want to think that probably like when I was at my core like my, I say my good old days at the dealer, I think a couple of the advisors were probably back then hitting 6 figures, then the one probably maybe hit 50k now he didn't want to, he didn't push hard because he said like he, he had an ex wife that the more money he made, the more money she made. So he was not motivated. But the other two were like they were sharks and I'm sure. So back then around 2004, I want to think they were probably hitting sick.

What are the text making in Canada on your industry? Like a good solid a tech back.

Then they were not hitting 6. Back then. I don't know of a technician up here that's making six. Especially working in a dealer because there's just not the work. You know, in Ottawa, which is two hours away from me and the door rates are a little bit higher and the money's a lot better. There might be a couple guys at some of the high end cars lines making six, but 60 to 70 I think is probably typical.

See yeah, our service advisors, they're pretty close to six figures right now. And technicians anywhere from a B Tech making 65 to 70, pretty easy up here and good ATEX or buck 25, buck 50 up here. It's, you know, the dealers have everybody on the piece of the piece of the pie. And I think that kind of, I understand why they do it, but it kind of causes the environment to be really competitive and really cutthroat. And then they say, oh, we're gonna have a team building exercise. Go fly kites together, you guys.

I was, I, I, like I said before, I, I won't go back to work at a dealer. Not because I can't do the work or can't get the cars done or whatever. I don't like the kind of person that I am when I work there under that environment. I do not like me because I am the type that like my coworker could be sitting next to me and him and I could get along really good. But if he's struggling with something and I know the, the answer when I'm flat rate, I probably won't give it to him because I can hope that he'll like wash his hands, put the keys on the board and I'll get a chance at that car. That's how I was brought up when I was flat rate the dealer. That's how we were pitted against one another. When I'm hourly, I'll go and spend 20 minutes with them and teach them a lesson on, you know, how to analyze that data better and how to fix that car because we're all as a team.

This idea that you flat rate people in a dealership in a lot of shops, even the heavy incentivized flat rate and think you're a team. I not such a good team player, me, because I, I want. If he can't do it and I can, I want that work order. That's the way I look at it. If he can't and I can, I want them all. That just seems to me the right way to do it because like you want it fixed. He can't fix it. I can.

That means I get it well. And yet, you know, they don't. I've worked in dealers where it's like, well, you all got to get along. Why? Why, why do we all have to get along? Like we're, we're literally competing with each other. You're showing me, you know, the hour sheets that go around and you see the same tech number at the top of it every week after week. You know, he's at 150 and everybody else is at, for a two week period is at 80.

You know, yeah, I'm working, I'm acting. You set up the system. I'm just living in it. So if you don't like my attitude, change the system. You set up my shops. My guys are flat rate. They help each other, they hang out on the weekends. There's definitely a pecking order.

Obviously Jason's at the top of it. And you know, a lot of times I'll show up. I usually get there after I leave the collision shop in the morning. A lot of times I do a lot of the estimating out here with the guys because we do a lot of weird stuff. I show up around 11 and if there's a problem, Jason will usually come and give me go, hey, let me run this truck by you. We look at the scan tool. With me, you go for a drive life. I'll help the younger text.

And one thing I wanted to touch on that, you know, gave me, which I really don't care, but because people really didn't watch the whole video or listen to it very closely. When I talked about that guy that came and got me with the alignment, remember that video? Probably the first video of me and you talked. So let me go ahead, break this down for you. This guy comes into my shop, he says, I'm a front end specialist. I say, okay. He said, I want, I don't remember what you wanted. 35 or 40 an hour, flat rate. I think it was right around there, whatever.

And I said, okay, you're a front end specialist. That means you can go out there and use My hunter rack, without my help whatsoever. I don't have to look at you, talk to you. I just give you alignments, you fix them. If they need cams, whatever, we'll sell it. You'll do it? Absolutely. Okay. That Monday, a Dodge truck came in from Farmington Hills.

Collision pulls to the. I don't remember if it's right or left now. And I said, okay. I give it to him. Phil is on vacation. The one service advisor. I give it to him. He comes and gets me.

He says, hey, I got this thing on the alignment rack. Everything's green, and I don't know what's wrong. I said, well, I walk out there, and I'm like, okay, the thrust angle's wrong. You can see it right there. I said, let's go out and drive it. Did you fill up the tires? No, I said, fill up the tires, and we'll go drive it. So we go drive it. I get it on the crown of the road.

I put it in the middle of the road. The truck's not pulling. The steering wheel's crooked. So I said, the steering wheel is crooked. We'll go back, we'll straighten the steering wheel. Well, he gets upset with me, man. You know, I'm this, I'm that. I said, listen, we're gonna.

I'm gonna take you and show you how to straighten the steering wheel up. I don't want to hear you cry. And if you think I'm gonna tell you, you lying to me and all that is okay, you're wrong. So we go back, we straighten the steering wheel. They go drive it. The truck's fine. I think everything's fine. He quits the next day.

Okay.

Yeah.

In my world, my thought was the TikTok video of the Chihuahua lying on the job application. They put him in the cage with a pit bull to fight. It's like when you lie on your application, you might yourself. Yeah, and that was kind of my thing. And, Jeff, you've been in this business long enough that you could smell a liar 20 minutes after they get to your shop.

Oh, I. Yeah. And. And, you know, like, so start this with front end. We all at the dealer that I worked at way back in the day, became very good at it because we had two alignment racks that were not like anybody could use those racks. Two technicians lived on them. They did all the alignments. But they would be, like, being Dodge products, they're written up all the time for front end noises.

Right. Squeaks, rattles, bumps, clunks, the whole thing. So we all got very good at doing steering racks in them. Doing ball joints in 2500s, about 3500, 4500, 50000s, the whole thing. You the recalls for the Jeep Liberty when they had the ball joint recall, we could do them so fast and make your head spin like. We were all good at front end, but only two guys did alignments. So none of us were ever doing alignments. But we all did front end because they would have had to then have two less techs in the shop and not doing oil changes or breaks and things.

So the way alignments went in front end in general was that at the end of the day, those two guys that only did alignments, that's all he did from lunch on was finish up the alignment. So I may do a tie rod end and then it need alignment and it would sit there the rest of the day until he could get to where he could set the toe. After I did the tie rod end. Right. All day long. That's not the necessary the way to do it, I think. But if there was no alignments that day, they could still do oil changes and brakes and tires and everything else on that rack. Right.

That's how they treated it. We got all really good at doing front end. So I can't say that I was good at alignments until I got out of that shop. I wasn't because I never did one. Didn't do one for eight years. But I. But the guys that would come in and say, oh yeah, I used to work across the street at gm. I'm here now because, you know, you pay a dollar more an hour flat rate.

And I do drive electrical. And I'm like, okay, cool. I would teach them how to do the system in terms of like how to navigate the Chrysler service system them. And then I would just watch them after a little bit how they approach doing diag and drive building. I'm like, you don't know how to do drive building electrical like you, you don't you know how to fix maybe the gmz, you know, the common pattern failures. But you don't know how to necessarily apply that process to this brand. Right. And that's, that's so when you talk about being able to the meter.

Yeah. I mine became very tuned in very good for one particular facet of fixing cars. The rest of it, you know, it's like asking me an AC problem. I'm not your guy.

Yeah, I. When I got my, my alignment rack, my first line rack, I did. I was out in the shop half the time. I Did all the alignments for a year because my alignment game was weak. So I figured if I did all the alignments, I could help the guys. And I got really proficient at alignments, so I could pretty much look at numbers after a while and do them. So we don't do a ton of alignments anymore. Believe it or not.

That we just don't.

We would if. If I got handed one and it was like car pulls, the first thing we all were taught to do was check the tire pressure, make sure that it's got the same four tires on it. Right. Not two of one kind and two of the other on different supposed. And then here's what's the crazy thing. He rotated the tires either left to right and oh my God, 85 of the time it fixed the pole. Because none of the dealers at the time that I worked in had. We didn't have road force that could set it up to either.

Do you want, you know, minimal vibration or do you want minimal pull? That's why I love those machines. I had a good conversation with somebody at tools and they're like, how come shops don't, you know, more shops aren't doing road force? I'm like, I don't know. Because I said to me, it's the only the right way to balance and if you're not doing it, you're not really truly getting the best balance of tire. Well, it takes so much longer. So why don't you sell it? We do sell it, customer. Yeah. Oh, well, it could take because you could put four tires on and go road force it. And it could force match all four and you're back to the machine.

Break them down, spin them. Okay, but is the tires now the best balance they're ever going to be on that rim? Yeah. Well, then that's the right way to do it.

Right. I have that new hunter machine and it actually has me force match the rims a lot of times. So what we do is we charge RNR tires and then we also charge 0.25 per wheel to road force them. And now I just raised it to 0.35 because a lot of the matching now because the tire qualities are so the force matching is more prevalent than ever.

So help me out with the math then. Four tires for you guys is. Did I do the math right? Is you're almost two hours.

Oh, that's just for the balancing. Oh, that's just for the balancing. I would get an hour. You would get two hours for mountain balance four tires and balance them road.

Force them and then retrain the tpms.

Yep, Another half point five.

See, and there's all the people in the tire business because people have listened to me for years. You know, I hate the tire business because I think it's a joke. Not a joke in the sense you can't make money. But it's like I, I feel like there's a whole lot of shops that should just do tires and shouldn't have done anything but tires, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

I agree with you. Last month my. I looked this up the other day because a guy asked me, I did 49hp on tires in my category of tires.

Okay?

A lot of guys are making 10 to 15.

Yeah.

And they said, the guy told me that, he's like, I can't get more than 10. I said, you're doing something wrong. Let me show you how to write this up.

But I see it all the time, Kevin. Guys say I can't charge more than one point due to do four tires and rebalance. And I go, why the fuck? Why can't you? Especially if you're roadforce. Oh, the customer don't pay for it. Are you explaining what roadforce really is? Are you explaining why it takes you longer to do it because you're doing a better job? Well, no, not really. Okay, why are you not explaining? Well, my wife, the advisor doesn't really understand.

Okay, so that's where my AI comes in, Jeff. I have it programmed. You could say, write me a description of exactly what you do when you're roadforcing these tires. And I said, I want it laid out step by step so the customer understands what's going on. It'll write a five paragraph dissertation on fricking road force and why it's so valuable. And then why it's going to cost you $150 more. Okay. And I'm telling you what it's not.

This is all. A lot of the problems in our industry are training problems. People are not trained correctly. Text service advisors, owners, everything. That's why I'm like this consulting thing. I took five calls yesterday with shop owners. It's blowing up my TikTok. And know what I tell them? I talk to them for five minutes.

I say, listen, I'm going to charge you X amount of money a week, week to help you. Well, I don't have that money. I will show you how to make that money. I said right now, two or three more hours of labor sold a week will cover what I going to Cost you and you're going to make more. And it's a training issue, it just really is. And I was one of them guys that really didn't know what, how to do it till I went to management success. And you know over the years I've actually tried stuff, changed stuff, done different stuff. And you know when you have have a profitable shop and you put like I've always put 10 of my weekly sales in a savings account if I don't have to use it.

Great, right. It builds up. A lot of these shop owners have a warranty problem or something, they don't have the money to, to fix it so they screw the customer. They rather burn the customer who's been coming there for years than actually take care of them. Yeah, you've seen it right off.

We have that conversation in the groups almost once, once a week. Let me ask you something. Somebody with a very somebody posted last week about customer comes to you and says they need this done because of whatever reason. And somebody responded with you asked the customer why do you think you need that? Somebody very well known in the industry from a coaching group said that is the wrong answer. That is the wrong answer. The wrong way to talk to the customer. Those are very, you know, computer aggressive question. You're not supposed to, you're not serving them, you're supposed to just say yes.

Okay, when can I have you come in and do that? And this is a person that's very successful, very well known is telling us that the verbiage that we used is wrong. Yet you seem to be the type of person that's just like, it's very straightforward. Like you're going to ask, they're going to say I'm, I'm here for a tune up. Do you say okay, we're doing a tune up or do you ask them why do you think you need a tune?

I ask them why I ask. I tell my, my okay, my son Lincoln who is 18 now, he graduated from high school and he wants to work at the shop. He has his own business and he's like, he wants to do what I do. Half the time I feel bad that I'm bringing him into this business and the other time no, we've made a lot of money doing this business. So yeah, what the hell is wrong with asking a guy why do you think you need a tune up? Well my brother in law who thinks he's a mechanic that rebuilt his 350 Chevy in his sandblacks one time at high school told me so okay, I Got a story for you. I had a guy come in and said, my transmission's making noise or my, my throw up bearings making noise in my jeep, I need you to put a throw up bearing. And I said, okay. This was years and years ago, if I knew any better.

I put a throw up bearing in it, it got all done, started up, still made the same noise. I parked it outside, called him up, said, new throw out bearings in there. He had a fit. I said, you told me to put a throw up bearing in it, I put a throw up bearing in it. Now if somebody says, hey, I was at a shop down the street and they said I need this. I said, you're gonna have to pay us an hour diagnosis to recheck it out. We don't believe anybody. What anybody says, okay, what it is.

The next question I had for you because I'm trying to get a feel for where you are aligned with versus some of the other people I have conversations with. There's talk in the industry sometimes about doing free diag or complimentary diag. So like if a customer calls up and says, I have a check engine light on, blah, blah, blah, the car seems to be running fine with the check engine lights on. Do you answer with, okay, my initial inspection fee is going to be 149.95. That includes a scan, you know, one hour labor spent, check for TSBS, visual inspection, rack the car, all that kind of stuff. Or do you say, okay, bring it in right away and we'll have a look at that for you?

We say, oh, absolutely. We could check out your check engine light. It's going to be a one hour diag fee for it. We'll check it out. If we could fix it in one hour. Say we pop the hood, we scan it, it's got a lean code. We find a broken vacuum hose and it's a piece of vacuum hose for six hours. We put it on it costs you an hour.

If we pull the check engine light and you got a bunch of codes or one code, we'll pull pinpoint tests on it and give you a diag on it. If we need more time, we will call you back and say, this is where we're at, this is what we found and you're gonna, we're gonna need more time. That's bottom line.

Because like some people have felt that what they have to spend in marketing just to offset now the cost of charging for diag, they've been able to reduce some of their marketing costs by doing complimentary dyes. Now, I'm not trying to say that like, if the customer comes in with an intermittent thing won't start, and it's a can problem that they're doing that diag for free. But a lot of what is, you know, check engine lights on, got a little bit of a misfire maybe, or a chuggle or something like that. They just inspect the car, scan the codes, do the visual, you know, do the whatever, perform a relative compression test, something like that, swap a coil real quick, and then they sell the repair because it offsets. They don't have to spend all this money every year in marketing and, and, you know, flyers and, and customer acquisition, all kind of stuff, because they just are saying yes.

Well, I'll make it really simple. Last month I did $20,800.39 in Diag alone. 20,000 1,800. Okay, and how I know this, I just had my meeting with all my categories for my guys. Every. Every operation in my shop is broken down into a category. And I look at every category with the guys and say, well, what happened in this category? Why is this low? And my guys, my service advisors can tell me now. So let me get this straight.

We're doing a complimentary diag with a complimentary scan tool. And the technician who's flat rate, he's complimentary too. So when his Edison bill is due and he's $185 short because he didn't get paid for that diag, is the customer going to go, don't worry, sir, we'll go ahead and take care of your Edison bill and we'll make your snap on payment or your Nortel payment, your Altel payment.

No.

Okay. Scan tools cost money and they're really expensive now, as we all know. So that whole notion of, yeah, I'm saving money in marketing, I would highly recommend charging for a diag and paying your people. That's just the way we do it at my shop.

Well, when you think about it, you know, for the people who are listening, the idea that you, like you would not take $20,000 and just stroke it from your invoices for next month because to try something right like you, that probably that idea that Kevin prob makes you sick to your stomach to throw $20,000 out the window.

Yeah, I just, I just, I think that, you know, I go to Walmart and if I buy eggs and milk and butter and bread, and I walk up there and I go, hey, I, you know, do I really have to pay for this milk? And they say, no, the Milk is complimentary. Okay? Nobody cares. You know, I probably sound insensitive, but a lot of shop owners need to hear this. Stop being scared to charge for your time. We are a dying breed. Guys that can fix stuff are a dying breed. Stop giving your time away because that customer is going to throw you over for a dollar. If the guy down the street's gonna do something cheaper, you're gone.

So that. That makes an interesting point because we had a talk. I talked with a guy from TikTok just the other day. Now he's in. You might have seen him. We've been going back and forth a little bit. Frank from 3D Auto, he's up in Elmer, Ontario here. And Frank does a lot of those videos that are talking about the.

The new safety inspections that we're having to do in Ontario. Right. With the tablet and the whole thing. And Frank's been doing really good about showing people, well, see this rusted car that somebody just bought, it didn't have an inspection. Now they want a safety done. And I have to condemn the car because it's rotten. The frame has been already welded and fixed. That's not.

That won't pass. Frank and I got talking. This is the. When you talk to me about, you know, what are techs making and door around him, door rate's still at 100 bucks an hour. That's the typical door rate. Everybody. If they said if they went to 110, they would lose their business. That's the thing.

Is there any way in this industry that we could all, without being accused of collusion, could sit down and say, okay, tomorrow we all open up. It's 150 minimum, no matter where you are done.

Well, the problem with that is they taught us this years and years ago. You have to figure out your cost of your late to set your hourly labor rate. It's dictated by your overhead, what you pay your guys and stuff like that. You should be making anywhere from 56 to 63% on your hourly labor rate after you pay your tech and all that stuff and your parts markup helps with overhead stuff. Right?

Right.

So what I have always thought is when I call Jeff and I call Bob and I call Frank, I go, what's your labor rate? And they say, well, it's this, this. And so everybody adds it up the same. Well, you might pay your guys a lot more than the other guys. Right. So you're actually just now making less money because his labor rate. Everybody's the same. Now. I've always said this.

I don't really have to worry about how many cars are in my area or trucks in my area because all the shops around me, if I take their customers and I do a good job, I got all the work, you know what I mean? And that's kind of the marketing, where your marketing comes in. We do a lot of stuff. Like I've had a website since 2011, Garrett Auto Truck. It was unheard of in our business to have a website. I do a lot of stuff different. So my labor rate's a lot different now. My labor rate being where it's at now, all the shops around me have pretty much mirrored me. I've never.

I talked to them all. I'm friends with them all. But we don't talk labor rates or whatever. We're friendly. We send work back and forth or whatever. But they all know that I'm an absolute number nazi. So my labor rate is what my labor rate is now. I will tell you one thing I had a really struggle with, and I don't know if this happened in Canada, but it happened here.

So it had to happen. After Covid the numbers, the prices of everything was going up so fast. I had a really hard time getting a handle on where my labor rate should be.

Yeah, it's not.

It was crazy. So I think we went from 189. Now we're at 217.73 an hour. And for trailers, I charge 185.32. And what are the 32 and the 73 come in? That's exactly what it cost me to run my business to the penny per hour. That's a mathematical number that I have a sheet that I fill out when I hire a guy and all his loaded costs are in there. So I know exactly what to put in my shop management program. What that guy costs me actually cost me mean the loaded cost per hour.

So the short answer, Jeff, I really don't know how you could set the labor rate. You know what I mean? You have to just kind of your owner, shop owner, you have to kind of just say, I'm going to do it. But if you're in a depressed market, well, you don't have to necessarily raise your labor rate. You could bump your labor times up a little bit.

Okay. So I worked at a shop that had a really high labor rate rate, and it was probably $30 higher than most of the other three shops that were, say within five miles. It was like 30 bucks more an hour. What that tended to do was that the owner started looking at each repair, total cost. And what I found him doing was he was shaving labor out of it to try and bring it back down to a competitive number, which then makes the, the tech look really inefficient because we're working on a lot of 10 and 12 year old cars, cars that needed more time. And we were shaving the labor because the door rate was higher than everybody else, because he was paying higher than everybody else. Like he was the highest paying tech or shop around, but. And he had the labor rate to support it.

But then he was not running when he should have run a matrix, you know, because the car was 10 years old and the matrix should have put it up another, what, 25, 40% on time. He wasn't doing that because it pushed the price way out of the stratosphere of what people would then do. Right. And we do have. My area is known for people price shopping really bad. They know like, what Midas will charge for breaks. So then it becomes a situation, Okay, I already had a set of Midas brakes, Midas for life. And they, they make noise.

And I'm never going back to Midas again. But like, I don't want to pay more than what Midas pays for brakes. So you have to make them come in under that price price. Even though I wasn't happy with the Midas brakes, that's the price that I'm not paying more than.

So I had, I learned a valuable lesson years ago. There's a customer of mine called Wilson Group. They used to do AC ATM balancing, and they used to use them little Escort Z X2s. You remember them little wagons that always had trans problems.

Yeah.

He would told me he needs the cheapest brake jobs possible. He said, your brake jobs are too expensive. And I was doing a lot of work for him. He had Neons and he had PT Cruisers and all that.

That.

Yeah, right. So he said, how can you make my brake jobs cheaper? What I realized was if I was selling on Wagner brakes, say I was paying $30 for the Wagner brakes and I was selling them for 50. And then I said, okay, my labor, my labor no matter what, right? So let me look at these Beijing brake pads. And I call them up and I say, hey, do you want, I could put some economy brake pads on that I paid $10 for. I could sell them for 45 and get him where he needed to be. I was actually making more money on the cheaper brake pads. My labor was still the same. So the job ended up being cheaper.

And he was well Aware that I put on there because we always use quality. But if you want shit, we'll put shit on there for you. If you're a fleet. I knew the guy, right? So I think that's what Midas did for a long time. Remember, they put them paper, toilet paper pads on, but every time you came in you needed calipers and rotors.

That's still the game they're playing there, Kevin. And, and I'll tell you a story. My years ago at the dealer, my service manager, the brilliant idea that he wanted to run a brake promo where you got pads and rotors in the front of anything for 250 bucks out the door, labor parts, all that stuff. So what he did is. And this is a Chrysler store. But we were like. So we were then went and bought a pallet. The brand I'll never forget.

No, your camera's still gone. I'll never forget the name of the caliper the rotor was in. Robo E N R O B O And I don't know if they were ever sold in the US or not, but they came from Quebec. And he would buy a pallet, a skid like as tall as I was back then, full of all these different part numbers of rotors that would fit these Chryslers. Well, that promo ran about three months and we did half of them over again on warranty because most of them, when you put them on, you would have to cut them after you put them on the car or they make noise with the pulsate. Like it was just, it was, it was crap. We, we did this brake promo for 250 bucks. And I'll remember we were at one point like if a customer came in and had like a Chevy S10.

Can you do brakes on that for 250 bucks? Sure. Right. Like it was everything that you could come in the door with the exception of like you know, a solid axle 258 lug Dodge. No, we couldn't do that for 250 bucks. Rotors are too expensive. Right. But we did every Neon and caravan and that we hadn't seen in years. All of a sudden we're seeing these cars back for these 250 brake job and you try to sell them the rest of stuff.

I'm like, nope, just the brakes. And it makes me laugh because I see that. I don't know if you watch Netflix and you've seen that series Tires.

Oh my God, that show killed me. I watched it last week.

I'm watching it for the second time again because it's, you know, they started with a cheap oil change, and there's the guy in the back going, this fucking oil change thing doesn't work. We got to sell all these tires change. Well, I mean, it's so poignant because, like, how long have we been in this industry and we've said that loss leader oil changes don't work, right? But yet there's a real. There's a real contingency group in. In the industry that's still showing you the numbers that it can work if you have a. A loss leader oil change to drive car count. Now, you know, there's a lot you have to be able to execute on the back end, right, in order to make it work. That's what my local Midas does between their lifetime guaranteed breaks that we were talking about where, yeah, they're guaranteed to make noise.

And every time you go in, the pads are free. But.

Right.

Like, you're getting new rotors and calipers every time, every time. And a flush every time, no matter what you're getting, you know, so it just became a ripoff. And my customers then would. Would come into our shop and be like, but I could get them done at Midas. Why are you talking about getting them done at Midas? You've already had them done at Midas and you're not happy happy. Why are we still talking about what Midas can do for the price? What. What's it. Why? That's the part that makes me want to just, like Mike smile.

I twitch and, you know, wants to run to the back and, you know, drive the air hammer into the side of the hoist, right? Because I can't. I can't have those conversations with people. It makes me frustrated.

One of the things that I did, which was we started doing brake fluid flushes when we do brake jobs, and people flame me, but we do the moisture tabs and we look at it and we look at the brake fluid. I will tell you, when I started doing that, people, after we did their brakes, they're like, man, my brake pedal hasn't felt so good in a long time. So guys that say we're screwing people, they had their grandpa's car, still has original brake fluid since 1985. Good for you. Things are different nowadays. There's all kinds of valves and ABS parts and stuff like that that they demand you to change the oil and keep the moisture down. If you look at the cars, you know, the maintenance logs or schedules in the owner's manual, a lot of them recommend it so you're not ripping anybody off if the manufacturer recommends it?

Well, I talk all the time about Nissan. They've been running DOT four forever. So like every Nissan that I saw, the factory OE publish service interval. It was 20,000 km. Kilometers, not miles. Kilometers or 12 months. Every time we got a fluid flush, brake fluid flush, and people would just pay it like they just were like, hey, if it says so, it says so. And I'm like, you, you, it's been a year.

Yeah, but you, you went 500 kilometers. Like you probably could go, no, no, get, get that fluid. And I'm like, okay, pays me an hour, I'll do it, you know, no problem. But I, and that's the thing, like I'm not as meticulous on my own maintenance. Like my, I, I've been driving my wrangler for three years. I haven't flushed the fluid yet in it. But I will when the brakes and I have to change the pads and rotor soon. When I do, I'll flush the fluid then.

But I mean, I try to always advocate for my customer, but I have to admit that like sometimes I advocate better for them than I do for myself.

Well, I, I have all my trucks on a maintenance schedule, all my pickup trucks. In my companies, everybody's truck is a trans flush. Once a year we do the brake flu. We do it. We don't cut rotors anymore like most people don't. I put rotors and pads on stuff. I'm very meticulous about my company vehicles because like, here's an example, my body shop, the pickup truck started rustin. I see there, pull that thing in, put fender flares on it or get a bed for it or sell the fucking thing.

We'll go buy a new one. We're not going to be the premier truck body shop in Brighton, Michigan, driving around with a rusty ass truck. What does that say about us?

Us?

My guys are like, you're anal retentive. I go, no, that's just simple freaking brains. You can't drive a rusty truck around being a collision shop. It's kind of like that comes over to your house that says he's the best roofer in the world. He's got three different wheels on his truck that's falling apart, leaking oil over your driveway and one broken ladder. What does that say about him?

Yeah, it's saying that he's not putting the money that he's making off you back into the business is what it.

Says at the very casino. Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Going back to Tik Tok. I get some flack once in a while for being on it or, you know, I have some friends that are like, they're, they're, they're holding out on it, but, like, I'm sure. And I see you a lot and you see me a lot. It's been very. I have to say, it's probably been very good for you, right as it has for me. Like, you mentioned some key names that like, a year ago, I didn't know who Brandon Sloan was. Was.

It's been a little over a year. I didn't know who. Check Chuck was. Like, you know, it's been so good for me. Ryan Mullen, what an amazing young man.

He.

Well, he's not a young man, but what an amazing young tech he is for how long he's been in the industry. The level that he's gotten at so fast, it's incredible. I would have never known these people existed if it wasn't for Tick Tock. Not at all.

Yeah, I agree. I talked to a guy in Romania, Europe, about his motorcycle shop the other day. I thought that was just cool as hell. He said, I sit there and watch all your videos. And I talked to a kid in Alaska yesterday. I watched all your videos. I'm like, how cool is this? I'm in somebody's house in Alaska and they're watching me.

That's.

I just found that fascinating. I got on Tick Tock just because I thought it was fun. Then I kind of started my podcast. I started my podcast a year ago. Then I got on TikTok. Then I realized when I'm watching all these guys, I realize there's a place for me to talk about running a profitable shop. It's kind of where I'm at. It's fun.

Now, I, I mentioned it to you and you hadn't given me an answer back yet, and I'll mention it again. We have an event coming up in September in, In North Carolina, Raleigh, in and called asta, and I've asked you if you're thinking about coming. As far as I know right now, Chuck's coming, Brandon's coming. They were both there last year. That was Chuck's first event. That was Brandon's kind of first, not first major event, but first event where it was. A lot of business owners traditionally had gone to, like, other transmission and driveline kind of, you know, shows. But I, I'm asking you because I think you would really, really, really enjoy it.

And I think a lot of people, once they got to talk to you would really enjoy you, if you know what I mean, in terms of your, your straightforwardness and, and you've got an interesting story to tell to share a lot more people too. And I think you should really, if you can commit to it, Kevin, I think you should make the commitment to go.

What it, what exactly is it? Why don't you go ahead and tell me what it is? Not, you know, whatever.

Now you're gonna, you're gonna put me on the spot here. Asta. So it says Trade show and Expo, Raleigh, North Carolina. The 20th of September 24th to 7th or 23rd to 7th, I believe is the dates. It's the Automotive Service Tire alliance is what it is.

Okay.

North Carolina. And it's, it's a, it's the biggest trade show that happens in that section of the country and it's quickly really becoming the go to event of the year, like you've probably heard. Have you heard of Vision before?

No.

No. Okay, so see, this is an interesting thing because we talk all these time about these, these destination training events, how there's so many people in the industry have never even heard of them. Right. So Vision is the one that was always known forever, but ASS is the first one I went to three years ago, right as Covid was wrapping up. And it changed my life in terms of, of networking with other shop owners and other technicians. This is. I. The first time I went, Kevin, I didn't even have the podcast yet.

And then it was like I went there, met all these really cool people that I, I had a really bad attitude about shop owners and a lot of texts. And then I went and did this event and I came away with a lot better understanding about what shop owners are, who there are, what they're like and why. And that was, that was key for me.

Is there training events and stuff there?

All training, all training. If you want to take technical training, if you want to take business training, that's the. Yeah, I'll. I'll send you the links and you can check it out, but it's asta. Asta.

I'll probably come. You know what? I, I absolutely love going to business training courses because you could always learn something from anything. Yeah, 100%. I, I just like numbers. I like running my businesses lean, I like running clean. So I would definitely be interested in going and doing something like that or looking into the training.

I think you'd be an asset to have there because it's like you're going to be able to meet a lot more people that like haven't got to where you are. But you're also going to talk to some people like that have been coaching and training and consulting as you're doing for a really long time and have a big success at it. Right. And you're going to be able to share some of the things and you might not get a ton out of the training from the business side of it because you're already doing a lot of things very well and you're already forward thinking. Have been a while, but I still think you, you would get a kick out of the, the networking that goes on. And I think it's going to be really to your benefit to go, yeah, you know what?

I've never had any, I've talked to Chuck one time messenger for a minute or something, a couple just exchanges. But I've never really talked to Brandon or Chuck or anything. So. You know that Craig guy, Chris Craig, yeah.

He's so he's actually speaking at the event he's presenting, which he's.

Sharp kid.

Sharp, very sharp kid. Yep.

I tell him, I always tell him, hey, you know what? I always do too. I always tell these guys, man, I like your content.

Yeah.

Because I think sometimes they, they need to hear it. He's. He said back to me the other day, say, I really like yours. You definitely. I forget what he said. He basically said, yeah, you always give us new content to talk about.

Him. And I like, sometimes it seems, I think if people read the comment threads back and forth because like most of his videos, I comment at least once and you know, and he's not like he. I'll say this, he's very good and very professional at what he's doing and it's coming out very well. We don't always see eye to eye at the same on everything. He is strictly like his whole thing is dealer, right? It's dealer, dealer, dealer. He is, he's the company that he works for. Rocket is about enabling service advisors to be better at the dealerships, you know, so that's, that's his number one ticket. So that's why it always kind of comes from that perspective.

So again, of course a lot of the. My dealer experience gives me like ptsd, right. And then it triggers me and I go into rants. But I've had him on before. He's been on, he was a guest on my podcast probably a year ago and he's a super sharp guy. He's presenting. Chuck will be there. Brandon Paul Danner, scanner Danner will be there.

There's a Lot of other people.

What about Mr. Subaru? I see him pop up once in a while. Do you guys there?

Last year I did an interview with him. I think he's coming this year. He's. He is a super guy too. He, he. A lot of people don't know how to take him. And then when you meet him and you talk to him and you understand, you get it where he's coming from. He's just, he's.

He's like you. He's very blunt, straight to the point. If he doesn't know, he's not going to pretend he knows, but he knows a lot about a lot of things. And when he's right, he's going to tell you that he's right, you know?

Yeah. What about. What is it? Dave's Automotive.

I would love to get Dave's Auto to attend, but I don't think that's going to happen. Happen.

Yeah, there's. Who's that? No else videos I like. Is. Is it Emerald Automotive?

Oh, royalty.

Yeah, Royalty. They seem like they do a pretty good job too. I. I watched them and listened to him talk. He's a sharp guy.

He is a very sharp guy.

They're.

They own two stores in Georgia. Two. Two or three, actually. Andrew Fisher, who is one of the. Going to be a trainer at Aston, going to be presenting. He used to work with Sherwood at one of their stores, one of their shops. And then Andrew moved back up. Trying to think where he lives now, but he moved back across country and is now running a shop and doing very super.

I talked to him at Lancaster, but I don't know Sherwood's coming. I'm gonna reach out to Sherwood. I'm gonna reach out to Ivan from Pine Hollow. Those talk that he might make it, which Ivan I don't see on Tick Tock, but he's huge on Facebook or huge on YouTube. Obviously. Eric O. From South Maine. We're hoping that he comes.

I haven't heard yet. Keith Perkins from L1 Automotive Training and Diagnostics. He's attending. He's a super sharp guy. I talk to him a lot. Is Lucas and David from Changing Industry. They'll be there. Mike Allen, who I think you really should meet.

If you, if you make it. I'll definitely introduce you to Mike because you two are kind of the similar, kind of same type of, you know, peas and carrots type thing.

So, you know, one thing that I, I'd love. I'd like to go there. One thing. I forgot what I was gonna say. Damn it. It'll It'll pop back. It must have been a lie, but it'll pop back into my head in a minute. But, yeah, I'd be interested in doing it.

How is it. How busy is it as far as hotel rooms? So I need to book now or.

We should probably get you booked soon. Yep.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you sent me a link and all that stuff, I'd be. Yeah, I would probably take Jason. Jason. You didn't get to meet Jason yet. I can't. Went on Jason's podcast about a year, two months ago.

Okay.

And I signed up at the same studio. I did some podcasts. I went on his podcast. I end up clicking with them. So I just started my own studio. I just said it. I'm not going to pay somebody. I took one of my rooms, redid it, as you could see, and I brought him on.

So we're kind of doing stuff together because he does consulting, too.

Okay.

He doesn't know anything about the repair business, but I do. So, yeah, I've been doing the consulting thing with him. But the one thing I want. This is what I wanted to talk about. You know, the gentleman. I think his podcast or his TikTok is changing the industry.

So that's Lucas Underwood.

Okay.

Yeah.

He brought a very good point up, and I messaged him and we had a little bit of exchange. But one thing I wanted to bring up, which makes a lot of sense, is a lot of shop owners build the processes around their self. How do we get out of that process? That's a big thing, because as a shop owner, it could eat you alive. So one of the good things is running your shop profitably so you can hire the right people so you could have your life back.

Yeah. And. And I'll. I'll share with you. So Lucas is kind of the reason that I'm. I'm where I am. Right. Lucas and I have been friends for almost 20 years.

Lucas and I were friends on Facebook before there was ever a change in industry podcast. There was ever a Jaded Mechanic podcast. It's because I did an episode of theirs way back when, when I was sitting unemployed during COVID Mad as hell about the industry. Hated the industry. And Lucas has known me a long time and always had heard me kind of take the. The. The opinions and perspectives and share them on Facebook. And it really set up some core values on what he felt when he built his shop.

From 3 to now. He's got a 10 bay garage mall. It's a beautiful facility in North Carolina. A lot of What? I always didn't like the scars that I took from the industry. What Lucas, when he built his shop and hired people, he didn't want them to go through what I went through or felt the way I did. So he set me up in this podcast. So Lucas is like. Like, Lucas is the.

The engine in what I do. And like this Jaden Mechanic podcast. So he is the guy. He is the. And then David. I can't. I can't. I always say Lucas and forget to.

David is the other 50%. David is the. The genius behind all of it. David is the one that, you know, realized how effective a podcast was and how it was taking off, and now everybody wants to do it.

So.

So if you can make it. Yes, we'll sit down and, you know, you'll get to know David and Lucas and you'll understand. Lucas is struggling right now because he has a very high. What's the word? It's very hard for him to step back from the business. He is very emotionally invested in it, the way he has built it. It's not a case of he won't hire good people, he won't pay good people. It's just that he's struggling to try and figure out how to step away from it. And it still be what he wants in his mind, a proper run shop to be his service manager that he hasn't had, I guess he had about five, six months.

They just parted ways the other day. Lucas says that's going to be for the best. The shop is already doing better with him gone. So, you know, you might be able to lend some perspective to Lucas on how to, you know, be a little bit more removed and. And still be involved, if you know what I mean.

No, I agree. And, you know, metrics put in place on people so, you know, they know what's expected of them is a good thing. Believe it or not, I like what I do so much. I would work. I work five days a week most time. In the summer, I take Fridays off, usually to go up north or whatever, but lately I haven't just because I. I'm having so much fun doing all this content and all this stuff up. So I know exactly how he feels.

But, you know, I have gotten to the point now where I get up in the morning and I don't run out of the house like I might have a cup of coffee, you know what I mean? Because our whole life as techs, as business owners, there was always a fire to put out. I finally got it now that it's calm enough that I could just show up at 8:30 at My Body shop, go over all the stuff with them guys, go down to Garrett said 11 if I want to bug out at 3 o', clock, I could bug out at 3 o'. Clock. That's taken me me 35 years now. It's a trained behavior because I worry myself sick when I'm out the shop for a long time. But now that I told these guys, you have to talk to the managers, you can't call me. If it needs to come to my level, let them call me.

Right?

And nine times out of ten my guys are like, yeah, this can wait till Monday when you get back. They don't even tell me I walk in Monday. These are the problems we had. This is how I handle it now if they handle this, it not exactly how I would have handled it.

Right.

I can't complain. Yeah, I wasn't there. Did the place burn down? Did we lose customers? Are we getting sued? No, no, no. Well, the will happen. They'll learn, you know.

Are they still a teaching moment right then and there when that happens?

Yes, I will correct it if it needs to be corrected. But nine times out of 10, the two guys I have in place pretty much do the same thing I would have done now. And I will tell you this, I short circuit my own processes. I don't know if I said that earlier. I short circuit my own pro. I'm better off staying out of it and I'm definitely better staying out of it. If there's a customer problem, customers getting really unreasonable, I'm the wrong guy. I'm better off letting my service advisors deal with it or my managers because I'm liable to tell them to go ahead and jump in a lake.

You know what I mean? I just don't. I'm jaded. I'm the jaded mechanic at the that point. You know, I don't want to put up with it.

I know, I know where it comes from 100%. And, and that's the thing, like I, I keep saying that like I'm good at talking to customers, but it can, it, it starts with how their attitude is towards me, right? If they come at me with this like typical, oh, you're here to rip me off and you know, you're full of. I, I have no time for you, I have no patience for you. I don't like it's not going to go well. You do not want me to come talk to that customer. But if you've got a very nice Response, receptive, inquisitive, curious customer. I'm your guy. Like, we're gonna have a great conversation with Mrs.

Smith, you know, but if you've got somebody out there that's got a problem car and they're already, like, trying again and they're angry and they're skeptical, I'm probably not your guy. You know, there's a better advisor for.

That, so I agree with that 100%. I'm fixing my TV here. As you see. We've been talking so long. All my cool stuff is happening here.

Yeah, I won't keep you for much longer, Kevin. I just. I wanted to ask about the ASA thing, and I think, like, because I think you and Lucas and David are going to have a really good conversation, we might, when we get there, we might sit down and have a round table. David is a very. In a very. Everybody should meet David, and everybody should have a conversation with David. He is an. He's the smartest guy I know by far.

David Roman.

What does he do?

He owns a shop in Kansas. Yeah. And Lucas owns a shop in North Carolina. And then they. The two of them run that change in the industry podcast and the change in the industry group group on Facebook, which is.

How does that. How does. What is exactly. They do. They just help people type of stuff and all that.

There's a mastermind group, which is kind of like for people that are struggling, shop owners that are struggling. They kind of. The mastermind group happens behind the scenes where there's essentially, like, consulting and coaching that you do. No charge to them. You know, they get in, they get. They. What's, you know, why is an aro important and what, you know, all that kind of stuff. They go over all of that with them, and it's a.

It's a sounding board for a lot of people to get in there and. And talk about, you know, how to make your shop better. Because Lucas and David both agree, like, if you're going to fix the industry, you got to fix the shops first. You know, we have a technician shortage for sure. And I, you know, me being the technician in the room and a lot of these conversations, it's like they keep talking about technician competency and all that kind of stuff. And yes, it sucks. Some of technicians shouldn't be techs, and some technicians need to do a lot more training and be a lot more. Spend a lot more mere time really looking at who they really are.

And the elephant in the room is how good are you really? But there's a reason that Young people won't work in shops for a lot of them is because frankly the, the industry hasn't been good for a lot of them for a long time and they figured it out and they're not coming into it. You know, the kids that got sucked up in the fast and furious days like I did and wanted to work on really cool stuff stuff and we saw the reality and we stuck it out and now it's becoming better. It's only becoming better for us because there's a shortage and like, you know, we have no choice. I agree. You know, the, the young people now that have figured out that this stuff is really hard and the tech is crazy and a lot of people that you work for still don't want to pay. Like your gentleman that you spoke to me about. Right. Your new hire.

Hire. Newer hire that came from the shop down the road. I could show you so many technicians that message me every week, Kevin, that are exactly like that young man. And they're struggling to find a shop like yours where they, they, they get the right opportunity. Because as much as like in the sounding boards as all the technicians, every shop owner out there thinks they're great and they're doing well and, and you know, they're trying as hard as they can. That doesn't mean that they're still a good employer for a lot of these young people. People, they don't. Can't necessarily nurture them up.

They can't get them to, you know, take them from being a C tech to an A tech. They don't know how to do that. They know that they I need to hire an A tech, but they don't know how to build a C tech into an A tech. You know what I mean?

Yeah. My best guy is a guy I trained by hand.

Yeah.

He worked with me for years out there in the shop and, you know, I'm glad to have him. And it's definitely, it's been definitely interesting. And it's only going to get hopefully better because people have to realize they have to start treating their text better or their texts are going to go somewhere else or quit the industry. A lot of them are. Right now, statistically, a lot of them are going to h vac.

Yeah, 100% because there's a lot of.

Money in it and they don't have to work as hard and they only have to have minimal tools.

That's right. So if people want to find Kevin Brown, they find you at repair shop reckoning.

Repair shop bracketing. On YouTube, we got Garrett Auto and Truck Service, Garrettauto.com we have MotorCityTruckCollision.com and we have Tick Tock Repair Shop Bracketing, Instagram Repair Shop Reckoning. I haven't bought a. Built a website yet for it, and now I'm getting ready to launch Loudmouth Studio, which. This studio that I put in place. Guess what we're gonna do? We're renting it out. Why not? It's sitting here. So Jason's gonna spearhead that and people are.

We already have people signed up. They're going to start doing podcasts out of our studio when it's idle, when I'm not using it.

Passive income.

Right?

That's what it's all about.

Hey, I, I, I, I. This is fun.

I know. I agree.

This is fun. This, I like this. This is favorite part of my life now. Building all this content, talking all kinds of. And I, and I, and I, and I. And I'm very deliberate. Some of the stuff I say to get to clicks. But, you know, and I poked you the other day, you know, and it was just like, eh, I just do it, you know.

And one thing I want people to understand, the I say if they say stuff back to me, I don't take offense to it. Everybody is allowed to have their own opinion. That's okay. They could be wrong, but they could have their own opinion.

So I have to tell the backstory and then I'll let Kevin go because he's a busy, busy man. The first time Kevin and I ever talked, we talked on the phone for over an hour because, like, again, the conversation had happened and I had some opinions and he had some opinions, and we didn't come away going going, that guy's a jerk. Or I didn't come away going, that guy's full of himself. I think we both came away from that conversation with a lot of respect for each other. And you know what we're about. And we're on the same. We're essentially heading the same direction. Right? We're.

We're both trying to get the same end result. And, you know, and that's why, like, when you, when you poke me or you say things, I think that, you know, are like, hey, Jeff's gonna respond to that. I appreciate that because it means that you, you value my opinion and I certainly value yours. And, you know, it's not a situation of you're right all the time. Because I'm not right all the time.

Absolutely.

You know, if I was right all the time, I'd be very boring. And I had to quit already.

So, you know, I have a wife that tell me I'm not right pretty much all the time.

So with that being said, Kevin, I will send you the links to Asta. I hope to see you there.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. I enjoyed it and hopefully I'm again, I want to have you on in my podcast eventually.

Here time anytime. I. I would love to sit down with you guys. Guys for sure.

All right. Take care, man.

Take care, everybody. Love you all as always. We'll talk to you soon. 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.

Podcaster Kevin Brown Puts the Auto Repair Industry on Blast About Diag Fees

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