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02:19
You know, there's a legacy in this industry that we have to preserve,
02:24
but at the same time, we have to do better every day. So I keep saying, you know,
02:28
just shoot to be 1% better tomorrow than you were today. You're not going to do it every day,
02:32
but at the end of the month, if you're 10% better at something, 10% is incredible.
02:37
That's a major milestone.
02:46
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen to another exciting episode of the Jada mechanic podcast.
02:50
We are running right into the Christmas break. And you know, I've got, I worked really hard
02:56
yesterday and I got all my work done. And I was able to like take a day. So we're recording this on
03:01
the 23rd of December. And I'm sitting here with somebody that everybody will probably recognize
03:06
by now. He's repeat guest, very, very popular individual, very the kind of people we need in
03:13
the industry. Mr. Sherwood Cook, how are you this morning, Sherwood? I'm doing fantastic. How are
03:17
you? How are you doing? You ready for Christmas? I'd be lying if I said I'm ready now. Are we ever
03:23
ready until the morning of? I haven't even put my tree up yet. So I mean, I'm gonna, no, I know,
03:28
I know. My wife does all that. So
03:35
now when I say I put it up, it's a pre lit little four foot tree. I just live with myself and my
03:40
little dog, right? So she, she's totally good. And that's pretty much all I do. And then I'll
03:46
travel to my folks when I say travel, it's only like a 20 minute drive. I'll be there for a place
03:51
Christmas morning and do the whole prison's thing and all that kind of stuff. And they'll probably,
03:55
we're not sure yet whether I'm going to cook Christmas dinner or they're going to cook Christmas
03:59
dinner, but we'll do breakfast at one location and dinner at another. It just depends on how,
04:04
how active I feel about cooking. So nice. And then pretty, it's a small get together. We don't,
04:11
you know, I don't travel anymore. It used to be when I lived away in Ottawa. The Christmas holidays
04:15
were a lot because it was always like we were traveling two hours to, I mean, I drove an old
04:21
Cherokee through some white out blizzards to get home and to get back. So I mean, it was pretty
04:26
cool. Now I don't miss those days. Yeah, I imagine it's you've been up here for a couple of Canadian
04:33
winters for every once or twice. And you know, it's well, I've been up there. What I would consider
04:39
winter, but you guys consider it spring. I was in there in April and driving in snow storms,
04:44
right? Going up from Toronto to Berry. And yeah, I guess there's a snow line right there or something
04:50
or something that they say is the snow line. We're above it, which Berry is above it and
04:54
Toronto's below it. Yeah. Yeah, I hit that. And it's like, yeah, I just know everywhere in April
05:00
and I'm thinking April, man, we're at the beach. What is this? So yeah, it was, it was, it was
05:06
different. And we had it, we had a ton of snow like two weeks ago, and then we got a warm spell
05:11
here and it all melted. Yet, you know, you drive over to like just over to New York State, and
05:16
they're sitting in, in deep, deep snow banks still. It's, we're so close to the Lake Ontario
05:20
right here that it has a real effect on how our, how much snow we get and then how long it lasts.
05:26
We just take a one little light, you know, warm spell and it all just goes away. It's, it's pretty
05:31
good. So I fixed my, I fixed my coworker snowblower for him and he got to use it one time and now
05:37
it's like put away again. So, you know, it might figure out how plenty of use for it up there.
05:42
Um, so we saw it, you guys talking, you had your, your tech, your junior technicians night,
05:46
which is now, I want to say probably the second or third time we've kind of shared that with us
05:51
on the, on the internet. And I mean, it's, this year was a huge turnout for it, wasn't it?
05:55
Yeah, I want to say it was our eighth or ninth year doing it. We had 125 kids sign it up and we
06:05
had 88 show up, which always happens, right? And, um, we were supposed to cap it at a hundred,
06:12
but, um, my, my daughter, I think it was my daughter, like Sherwood. So I think, I think
06:16
Sherwood blamed it on his wife. It's like, we can't figure out how to turn it off,
06:19
how to turn the sign up, the registration off. So we had 125, which worked out fine.
06:25
And, uh, yeah, it was, it was, we actually added some, uh, some stations. We had a,
06:32
we had to say one station, one station, maybe two stations. We added a tire removal. So aren't
06:38
our tire, uh, you know, dismounting and mounting actually, we added three stations. We added a
06:42
station where they took them, took it off the car. Yeah. And, uh, so they took the tire off,
06:47
they were jacked the car up, took the car, the tire off, put it back on. We volunteered,
06:51
Sherwood's Prius for that. And he's like, well, we'll see how many, how many, uh,
06:54
lug studs he's going to have to have later. But that was a good station. And then we
06:58
had the tire dismount, mount balance. And then we had Tom, you know, you know, Tom,
07:06
he did an electrical station and we had a, um, and actually a tech that flew in,
07:13
she flew in from Arizona to help us with it. And she did the electrical station with Tom.
07:19
So it was really, really cool. And it was, it was the kids like that. I did an electrical station,
07:25
I think it was a first year. It was first year and had the scope and was showing on the scope
07:29
and all kinds of stuff. Yeah. They had zero interest in that. Tom and I kind of put our heads
07:34
together and went, how can we make them like see it and like it? And so we had them actually
07:40
build a circuit. We had the battery there and, you know, just have, they just had to connect
07:45
the wires up. And some of the older ones that the, um, the teenagers we were, because we did have
07:50
some that were middle school age, we're supposed to stop at 12. We had some older ones, but they
07:55
were really into what, cause we had a, for a fuse, we had a, um, load light place of the
08:03
fuse. We, we did this last minute, literally my handyman guy was here and we're like, Hey,
08:07
we need a wooden table. And he built that wooden table in 45 minutes, literally went to Lowe's,
08:11
got the stuff, came back, built the table so that we could put this, because otherwise
08:15
they're going to be sitting on the floor, right? And so, uh, we had a load light in a place of
08:21
the fuse. And so the kids were really asking real good questions like, well, why is that light lit
08:26
up? And why isn't this light lit up bright? And, you know, so they were, they were basically asking
08:30
why, why we had a voltage drop. They didn't know that, you know, but it was really, really cool
08:36
because, uh, it shows that they're thinking, you know, they're, they're, they want to know. So
08:41
yeah, sometimes before they even know the terminology, they know they can spot that there
08:46
is a problem, but they don't know necessarily even how to vocalize it. Like I see that that
08:50
probably is not the way this is working. Why is it not? You know, and that's the coolest thing. If
08:54
we can sometimes just get the, the terminology out of the way and just go, what's, what's the end
08:58
result you want to see happen here? And what are you seeing? It makes it so much easier. You know,
09:03
I know I struggled a lot with just the language on some of this stuff of when I was first starting
09:07
out of trying to learn it. Like I knew I needed to turn a light bulb on, but I'm like, oh, like,
09:11
you know, it's, it's a lot for kids, man. And, and there's so a lot for me. We're talking about
09:19
if anything, I think that might be one of the reasons people like me is because I try to,
09:23
listen, it's got to be simple for this brain to process it. And so I just simplify everything
09:28
that I possibly can. I don't try to be, you know, more than I am capable of. I gotta ask,
09:33
what's the volume level like on junior tech night in the shop? Does it get pretty
09:40
loud? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you watch the live, but I mean, when I do, when I say,
09:45
so it comes over the intercom, we have somebody timing it. We have a client, he loves coming
09:50
out here and he times it, right? But he couldn't make it this year. So we had one of one of my
09:57
girls inside the intercom time to switch. And I got to go into hockey coach mode. And it's like,
10:04
and I forgot I had the mic on the first time. Yeah. And so we're live on Facebook. And I'm like,
10:09
so it's like, Mike, Mike, some computer speakers or something there. But no, it's,
10:21
it gets very loud. I mean, it's, you know, you imagine that's, you know, roughly 90 kids,
10:27
not just the children though, because parents are there. So it's 88 kids plus all the parents
10:33
that are following the kids around, right? Yeah. And it's, it's, there's a lot of people
10:38
in the building, a lot of people in the building. Did you, did you see any future superstars this
10:43
time? So we did something different this time, because we had Matko got involved and sent us
10:51
some cool prizes to give away. They sent a remote control car and they sent two really cool little
10:57
Nerf guns that looked like impacts. Oh, nice. That was pretty cool. But we had a subscriber
11:03
that sent us five fully stocked craftsmen tool kits. It had a value of like 847 bucks. I don't
11:14
know what they were selling for, but I mean, a lot of full of tools. So we had five of those
11:17
stacked up. And so we had eight, eight, what we call big gifts to give away. We gave a whole
11:23
bunch of other stuff. I mean, Matko gave us a bunch of yo-yos and I mean, you know, just
11:28
and grip edge gave us a bunch of stuff. I mean, of course, Harbor Freight gives us a bunch of
11:33
stuff. So the kids were just leaving with booty, right? They had all kinds of stuff they were
11:37
leaving away, right? But we had, I went around and I had some stickers, right? And I said,
11:43
we talked about it beforehand and talked to the tech said, if you see, you know, anybody that's
11:49
really standing out, I was like, really paying attention that looks like they're engaged,
11:54
then let us know. And so Tyler, one of our younger techs actually, he was like, oh,
12:00
he actually pulled me over like two or three times, like, this kid's really, you know,
12:05
and so we went around and we gave those stickers to those eight kids. Actually,
12:12
a little funny story with this, I gave eight stickers out. Let me say that. I gave eight
12:17
stickers out. Understand, there's 88 kids in here. It's a madhouse, all right? And we know
12:22
it every year. It's like, I always tell everybody, all right, we're 10 minutes, this place is going
12:26
to be, you know, a madhouse. And then, and then it just like, when it's done, it's like, you know,
12:31
but I mean, it's fun. But when it's when everybody's out, it's like, you got to take a breath,
12:35
you know, because you're going steady for that whole time. But we had eight stickers. I gave eight
12:46
come and we told them, save the sticker. We had a little star on the back of it. Don't peel it,
12:51
don't stick it somewhere because the star was on the peel part, right? And we're like, and don't
12:56
leave early. Make sure you hang around. And so those eight kids came over and we had a giveaway.
13:02
Well, it wasn't eight kids. It was seven kids. I gave one kid two stickers. I literally went
13:08
up to one kid and twice, two times independently. And it's so crazy. I didn't even remember it was
13:14
the same kid, right? That's how, you know, your brain's going. And so, but luckily, right before
13:22
I figured that out, we had a mom and a young girl come over and she said, can he, you know,
13:28
the mom said, can she get a picture with you? Because this is, I think was her third year or
13:32
something like that. And she just absolutely loves working on stuff. And she's doing great.
13:36
Well, she didn't get a sticker for some reason. So we, you know, she fell through the cracks,
13:39
it happens, right? And so she was leaving. And I found out the kid said, oh, I said,
13:46
why do you have two stickers? Oh, you gave me two different stickers. And I'm like, oh, perfect.
13:50
I took one, I ran out the door and grabbed that girl and said, get back in here, right?
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14:24
Cool. And so, and then we ended up doing a drawing for the, you know, eight gifts.
14:30
And it was hilarious. It was one of the funniest moments of the night was,
14:37
of course, the remote control car. A lot of them wanted that, right?
14:43
And the one kid really wanted that one. The Nerf guns, they were cool, but these kids are the ones
14:49
that want to work, they want to work with their hands, right? They wanted the tools.
14:53
And so, the tools and the remote control car were the two big ones. Well, the two oldest kids,
14:58
they were the teenagers. I was actually in my wife's middle school. My wife knew them from
15:04
lunch room and middle school. Won the two Nerf guns. And they were like, oh, and they were
15:09
already, they were the two first gifts we gave out. And they were already trying to say, oh,
15:12
who wants to trade? Come on. You know, they're trying to make trades right there. And then we
15:17
gave out the, I think the remote control car was next. And it went, the kid that was thinking
15:23
about trading for a Nerf gun, he was like, oh, on the fence, like, well, maybe I'll trade for the
15:27
Nerf gun if I, he won the remote control car and he's the one that wanted the car. He's like, oh,
15:31
literally the instant that he wanted, he's like, trade deals are off, right? It was hilarious
15:35
listening to these, to these, you know, kids that are just like talking like adults, right?
15:42
And negotiating. And then the five kids that won the, the toolboxes, the older kids were like,
15:48
come on, you want to trade? You want to trade? And they, they were like, nope, all of them,
15:51
like almost in unison. Nope. And then one by one, this was not scripted. One by one,
15:56
they walked over and the boxes were sitting there. And they literally each, each grabbed the handle,
16:01
boop, walk, boop, walk, boop. I'm like watching this, like, you could not, there's no director in
16:09
the world that could have done that and made that any better than what that just was. And literally
16:12
walked out with these two kids holding the Nerf guns, like, come on guys. So, but it was fantastic
16:18
that we were able to do that. And it was a little different, like I say, than we normally would do,
16:24
but I loved it because it, I'm hoping that some of those kids down the road, you know,
16:28
they'll take this stuff home and they'll work on stuff and they'll, you know, they'll piddle around.
16:33
That's how I got in. It was piddling around. Yeah. I mean, and that's the thing like,
16:36
we forget sometimes that like our previous generations, there was always a set of tools
16:41
somewhere in just about every house, like there's always a basic hand tool set. Now you don't see
16:45
that, right? Like a lot of people, you know, maybe live in an apartment, don't even, if you go
16:50
underneath their sink, there's nothing there. You know, there's no tools or a junk drawer.
16:54
A junk drawer. A junk drawer that had like a claw hammer and maybe some slip joint pliers
16:58
and a couple of screwdrivers and that's when whatever the dryer needed to be fixed to the
17:03
lawnmower or, you know, you had to go whack on your starter in the morning, you know,
17:07
you always had that stuff. And now the modern day is being lost by that. Like we have all this
17:12
information, but we don't necessarily have the hardware to get some of these basic problems.
17:17
And that's what gives people confidence is just being able to say like, hey, I fixed my dryer
17:21
or hey, I fixed, you know, I put a new spark plug in my lawnmower and now it runs better.
17:26
Like it's that little stuff is being lost on people. And I think it, you know,
17:30
I think the desire, yeah, I think the desire from people just general. And listen, there's a good
17:38
side to this and there's a bad side to this, right? The good side is to what I'm about to say,
17:44
I kind of need to finish the thought, I guess, or is that, you know, there's, there's a loss of
17:50
wanting to do things like that, right? We pushed people, kids to begin with and then they become
17:56
adults is we've pushed them so far away from wanting to work with their hands that they don't
18:00
want to do anything. Not only do they, and then because they don't want to do anything when they're
18:05
kid, right? They're, they're, you know, playing video games or doing anything other than, than
18:11
working on stuff, right? And, you know, I don't know, I haven't, I haven't seen a kid build a fort
18:16
in forever, right? I mean, I'm out there with back in the day with, you know, sheets of wood and
18:22
whatever I find anywhere and building a fort together, you know, I built a submarine one time
18:27
where we had a hatch going down the top of, I mean, it was, you know, but, you know, you don't see
18:32
it anymore. Now I'm starting to see some kids across my street. I have a big field next to a
18:35
church and there's a nice tree for climbing and stuff over there. And I've lived in this house
18:39
for 26 years and very rarely do you see kids over there. And here recently, I'm seeing kids over
18:43
there. I saw, I see a kid with a little dirt bike over there. I haven't seen somebody riding on a
18:47
dirt bike and, you know, a little tiny dirt bike, you know, like we used to have. So it's coming
18:50
back around, but we lost it. And so these, a lot of people don't have even the, the skills to, to
18:59
maneuver their hands in a way to even use tools, right? And the good side of it is that it brings
19:06
a lot of work into the shop because nobody's out there. Very few people are out there working
19:10
on their own car, you know, you know, but which is fine. But the downside is like, where are we
19:16
going to find people to do this stuff, you know, and it's becoming a, it's becoming a big problem.
19:27
I mean, we've always been able to hire and stuff. And it is becoming, you know, you're up against,
19:36
at least for us, we have a, we need you to be good at what you do. But we also need you to
19:44
understand what we're trying to do, which is make people's lives easier, you know, and that might
19:49
mean not just fixing a car, you might have to do some other things that are involved in this stuff.
19:54
And, and, you know, generally speaking, technicians are, you know, we're not built like
20:00
that. We're built to fix things, you know. And so it's a really hard find to, to get, there's
20:07
lots of great guys out there that are super smart, but they just don't have the, we don't,
20:11
a lot of us don't have people skills, right? We fix cars, you know, and so I think that
20:19
um, this is going to be a bigger problem, I feel like,
20:26
not just in the automotive world, I'm talking about in the trades period.
20:29
Yeah. This is going to be a far, far bigger problem than, and I'm not a doom and gloomer guy,
20:36
you know, but this particular thing, I think is going to be a big problem coming, you know,
20:41
coming up. Well, look at your, your little, your little shorts that you did on your chat,
20:45
well, they weren't shorts, but your chat TTP and your AI using it to actually,
20:49
you know, you did a couple of videos or shared where you showed how, how it walks through the
20:53
process of, of what would be, you know, causing this Honda nut to start, right? Or, um, and I,
20:59
I sit back and I watch that and I think, okay, so that's a really neat tool, maybe for a customer
21:06
to understand better, but what's going on when they just ask the question. But I don't think it's
21:11
ever going to take over the way, you know, some people are saying, oh, AI is going to fix everything
21:15
for everybody. Like they're going to be able to go and get a toolbox and, and it's going to walk
21:20
them through. I don't believe that is, we're going to see that in my lifetime ever.
21:24
You're not, I don't know. You, you might see that when, I mean, when they, when the AI starts
21:31
building the robots, right? Maybe at some point, right? I mean, which will happen eventually, I guess.
21:36
Wow. I mean, I'm a firm believer. I listen, I watch Terminator, read it very, you know, pretty
21:40
young. I thought that's what I believe is going to happen. That's just me, right? But, but until then,
21:46
we can enjoy the benefits of AI until it figures out that we don't, they don't need us anymore.
21:52
But no, I, you know, I was having a discussion actually with somebody the other day
21:57
and he said that he had watched a video with one of the creators of AI
22:01
and one, that that person had said the only jobs that are going to be
22:08
secure, that are, that people are going to need are going to be mechanics, plumbers,
22:14
electricians, right? Framers, carpenters. You know, he said everything else,
22:21
a lot of everything else is going to be AI. You're not going to need a CPA. This was him,
22:28
not me. You're not going to need a CPA. That stuff can all be dumped into an AI model and be,
22:32
and be done in, in literally a minute, right? You're not going to need lawyers. You know,
22:38
it can all be dumped in an AI. A lot of the lawyers are actually, somewhere lawyers have
22:41
gotten in trouble because they actually let the AI build their, their briefs or whatever, you know?
22:47
So, I mean, if they're doing it already, clearly AI can do it. So you might need somebody to sit
22:53
there and argue it, but it's just what the AI has come up with. So, but nobody, yeah, that Honda,
23:01
I'll say AI fixed it, right? But it actually didn't, it missed a step. Now, it didn't,
23:09
in that particular instance, the step didn't matter because it got us to the problem. But,
23:14
but for me, as a human being, technician, knowing is like, there was another one more step we
23:20
should have done before we just put the part on it, right? And that was the thing is like, well,
23:24
potentially somebody could have put that ignition switch on there and it not fixed the vehicle.
23:29
And then what would you have done? Well, you go back to the AI and go, didn't fix it, right?
23:32
And then I wouldn't know what, what it would have done then. But now the other one was a BMW
23:36
and it failed miserably on that one, right? But I do, this is another thing that I'm, that, you
23:42
know, I think for the future, and we may have a hump that we have to get over, we may have this,
23:48
this, you know, no availability of technicians in a certain age range, right? In a certain
23:54
generation, we'll call it. But then I think that we will, because I think, I think we're starting
24:03
to see a little bit of it now, where we don't all have to be like, you know, college and,
24:09
and go and want to work in an office job, right? We, the trades are a viable option.
24:14
I think what we're going to find in the future is, I think that we're going to see technicians
24:19
and, and, and, you know, other trades making the money that, that a lot of lawyers and, and,
24:28
and other people are making today, right? You know, because, because you're going to have
24:32
such a shortfall of personnel to do it. And you're going to, and the demand isn't going
24:37
anywhere, right? I mean, the demand's not going down. The cars, honestly, for me, the cars are,
24:44
I hate to say this, again, I feel like I do a doomer, gloomer on this. I mean,
24:47
it's right before Christmas, what's going on? You know, but to me, the cars are getting worse.
24:51
Yeah, they are. The ideas that we've come in with the, the idea of increased efficiency and,
25:00
you know, more horsepower and smoother drivability, you know, you don't even feel a car shift anymore,
25:06
right? Because technically really, you know, CBT doesn't really shift. But it's all been
25:10
out of compromise of, of what I say is longevity. And, you know, we have to remember a lot of time,
25:16
like, you know, our old small block Chevy's, they used to get flooded so much like a caused
25:20
engine wear. But I mean, if you knew what you were doing, you could always get it to start and
25:23
still go, you know, you could make it to work. Now, the stuff that people are being told, yeah,
25:27
you can go 10, 12,000 miles and never change the oil in it until then. And yes, you got to lift
25:33
the hood constantly and add oil to it. But that's perfectly normal. Don't worry about it.
25:37
That's not progress for people. Because I mean, if we haven't, you look at the typical motorist out
25:42
there that wouldn't even be able to find a dipstick on a car, or the car doesn't even have a dipstick,
25:46
and you're being told, yes, but you need to pull one in every week. They're not, they're not, we're,
25:52
we're selling something to people that's less maintenance and easier to operate.
25:57
But it's not a shortened lifespan. You know, these cars are not going to be worth, look,
26:01
I mean, let's put the name out there. A lot of Hyundai's and Kia's, especially up where I am,
26:06
they're not worth putting an engine in from the standpoint of, you know, what the rest of the
26:10
car and condition wise is, we've got two of them sitting on my lot right now, both need that engine,
26:14
both are not being covered under the recall, both junk, gone, you know, they're not rotted away yet,
26:20
they're not, but they're just constantly not feasible, not viable to put a motor in.
26:26
And it's, we look at this, you know, direct injection and low tension oil rings and all
26:31
this lower emissions when it first starts. That's the kicker right there. You named the one that
26:35
was the kicker right there. Yeah. And the oil rings are the big one. I think that should be like,
26:41
we really need to look into our, what do we really do into the customer when we sell that as a,
26:47
this is, you know, greener for the environment, but at the cost of the car, no, no, it's not,
26:53
sure would you know. I mean, and listen, I don't want to get, we're not, I'm not going to get
26:56
political on here at all, right? But let's just talk about just a pure, let's just, you know,
27:00
like I always say on the, on our channel, we just give facts, you know, I give my opinion
27:05
on some stuff, but we're just going to stick to facts here. If, if we have low tension oil rings,
27:11
so that we have a better, better gas mileage, I mean, we all know that works, right? We, yeah,
27:14
of course, because the ring is just scraping against the cylinder wall. Of course, if you have
27:18
high tension, when you remember back in the day, we, I tell people all the time, we put pistons
27:22
back in the day, rings on, you're tapping that thing down with a hammer and it, it ain't wanting
27:25
to move, right? I mean, it took some, today you've put them in there and just, you know, right? So,
27:31
I mean, the things, you got to catch them from hitting the bottom, right? So, I mean, it's, it's,
27:36
but that we understand that gets better gas mileage, but then at the same time, because of that same
27:43
improvement, we have to add oil to it all the time. I don't understand the logic of
27:49
we, we are getting better gas mileage. We're keeping, we have obviously better emissions,
27:54
but we're using, we're dumping oil into the atmosphere through the tailpipe, you know,
28:00
and we're having to use extra oil that we wouldn't need to. I, I just feel like we're just playing
28:05
a numbers game. It's just like, oh, we're, all we care about is a number that we can come up with
28:09
in the beginning. We don't care about the ramifications. And then yeah, on the, the long
28:13
term is we're dumping a bunch, we're getting rid of a bunch, a whole bunch of vehicles that in the
28:18
previous, you know, lifespans would, would last a long time. So, you wouldn't have to buy a car
28:23
all the time. That's right. Now you've got all these cars ending up in the, in the junkyards
28:26
or being crushed or whatever it is. It's still waste, right? And you can't recycle. You can
28:32
recycle a lot of it. There's a lot of computers in those cars. Yeah. And, you know, that's,
28:37
that's, that's stuff right there is tough to recycle. And I just don't know. To me, the
28:43
again, I'm a very simple, simplistic, you know, person. I just try to make things make sense
28:48
and some of it just doesn't. Now I wanted to touch on, you know, because we talked about
28:52
this a little bit, the, the parts issues, because I know that that's, I go back to that Nissan that
28:57
you had, right? Where AI is not going to fix that car no matter what anybody thinks it's not
29:00
going to happen, right? Like if it takes you that long to track it down, flush it out and finally
29:04
get it resolved, there's not an AI program built that's going to even come close. But
29:09
what are you seeing? Because I know that the, you know, we know that certain brands and certain
29:15
names and kind of stuff, but are you seeing a lot of the dealership parts even having
29:18
like a lot more of the quality down?
29:24
I have, I want to say this right. There's been for a long time, there's been a lot of talk in
29:33
this industry about you need to use only OE parts, only OE parts. I mean, you've got,
29:39
you've got a lot of guys that just like, they just, you know, they've been beating that drum for,
29:43
I mean, quite honestly, more than a decade, right? And I was never a part of that, right? I was like,
29:51
listen, these other companies are not out there building stuff that are going to fail quickly
29:57
and staying in business, right? I mean, you know, I'll mention one name, Felpro.
30:05
They've been around for a very long time, right? And I've used it, I mean, my gosh, I would never
30:13
even know the number how many times I've used it, thousands and thousands of times, right?
30:17
And no problems. I was, you know,
30:22
I am, you know, on the boat, moving across to the island of, you know,
30:29
of the gotta use the OE parts, you know, you know, stand over there because
30:37
we are just seeing so and we do a five year 50,000 mile warranty. I gotta be sure that we're
30:43
doing something that's going to last that long. And I'll give you a perfect example.
30:49
There's a manufacturer of timing chain components that again, I've used my entire career, we won't
30:54
mention the name here, right? I don't know how that works on how you want to do that. I'll be
30:58
careful. But they've been around a very long time. I've used them countless times. And the
31:06
forward timing chain is just it's we've had about four or five of them that the tensioners have failed
31:11
and have cost us dearly. We didn't we've done many, many of them, right? But we can't have five
31:20
failures. If we've done 50 of them, five failures is a way too big of a number, right? So we are
31:27
gonna, we're at this point, replacing every one of those with OE parts. So far, we have had some
31:36
failures with OE parts. I will tell you in the beginning of my career, you just really never
31:40
saw an OE part. I mean, if it was defective out of the box, like it was broken, the box was damaged,
31:45
and it was, you know, something damaged, that's what you saw with that, right?
31:49
Once it was on the car, I can't, I can't remember putting an OE part pulling out of the OE box,
31:57
putting on the car and it being a problem. I'm sure I did at some point, right? But
32:03
today, I can name a few of them, you know, it is happening. And I think again, we are
32:10
we're in this race to see, you know, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, just build it cheap. And I don't
32:16
care what the manufacturer is. I don't care who is the badge on the front of that car. They're
32:20
all in that, in that same, some of them are better than others as far as trying to keep a quality.
32:26
But none, I don't think, and listen, you know, who knows, they might come after me for this one,
32:32
the manufacturers, but I don't think any one of them is really looking at can we make a car last
32:38
a long time? Yeah, I just don't think that that's even, I don't think that that's honestly even in
32:43
their thoughts anymore. I think it's can we get the car out of warranty, right? And then get them
32:52
in another car. It used to be, it used to be, can we get it to 100,000 miles without big issues?
32:57
Because that was the magic number, right? And then the 100,000 mile number just went away for me.
33:02
I mean, it's like, shoot, I bought a car with 90,000, 90,000 miles on a good car, right? The 90s
33:07
cars seem to be pretty decent. Like late midnight, it was OBD2, 96, 97, 98, 99. Good 2000, you know,
33:16
up to the 2000s, 10s, 11s. Now, it's like, I mean, yeah, it's, it's like something changed. You
33:25
know what I mean? Like it's after 15 something changed, like I see the last 10 years of where
33:30
we are in this industry. And I look at 2015, anything 2015 caravan, I go, oh, like so many,
33:37
you know, weird, wonky electrical things in it and hard to get parts for now. Somebody was just
33:42
talking to me and they're like, they're trying to get an electrical part for a car. And it's
33:46
eight years old. And it's in its phase that like, oh, no, I can't be because I thought it used to
33:49
be the mandate had to be there to support for 10 years. That's not true anymore. They're not doing
33:55
Did you let somebody fact check this? I'm not saying this is a fact. I'm going to say this. I
34:00
heard this. Somebody told me that and now obviously you're in Canada. So I don't know how it affects
34:06
you. It's going to affect everybody. Honestly, I'm sure because but somebody told me that when
34:11
they did the cash for clunkers back, and that was back when Obama was in there. So that was
34:15
probably his first term, I think first. So 2000 was at 10. Yeah, eight, 10, something like that.
34:22
Um, somewhere in that legislation was again, what I heard was that that manufacturers don't
34:30
have to support the vehicle after seven years. Yeah. Now, I don't know if that's accurate or not,
34:35
but that's what somebody, well, if somebody told me that and then I can see that stuff like this
34:40
happens, you know, and I was talking to them, I'm like, yeah, I had a 68 Camaro was was one of my,
34:46
you know, cars that when I was growing up, right? And, um, and I wish I had that 68 Camaro today,
34:52
but, you know, this was back in the in the 80s late, you know, mid late 80s. And I could go over
35:00
to the Ford dealership and buy window crank bushings and anything you want to pull the
35:06
microfish up and it's in stock in the building, right? 20 year old vehicle and they got it today.
35:10
I mean, you're lucky. Chrysler and they're unlike ABS models. I mean, if you got an
35:15
ABS model for a 2012 Chrysler product, you, you're not going to have ABS. You're just going to be
35:19
either going to park the car or you're going to drive with no ABS on. It's just that simple,
35:22
right? You're not getting one. Not that we've seen anyway. Yeah. We can't find anybody that
35:28
can fix them or clone them. I was left with somebody to tell me that they can.
35:37
My brain just did an immediate check and I'm like, can, and I'm like, no, I don't think he
35:42
can do ABS modules yet. I know he's had some luck being able to do the ECMs and stuff like that.
35:47
It's the same as the Tipham thing. We talk about Chrysler all the time about Tiphams and Tiphams.
35:51
I just saw, so here's the thing, 2008 Jeep Wrangler for sale on Kajiji Facebook marketplace,
35:58
$3,000. Now, like everybody's going, well, that's not that expensive. I mean, in the pictures,
36:04
it doesn't look all that terrible. And then it says been parked for two years. It's not running.
36:09
Somebody diagnoses a Tipham, can't find a Tipham for it. Now we know that you can,
36:12
but it's an aftermarket Tipham. So then what's the, you know, under the people are there,
36:16
but I'm thinking there's something that essentially was working one day and then all of a sudden it
36:20
doesn't work for somebody and they parked it for two years. Now up here, that thing's destroyed.
36:25
And once it's been parked that long, it's rusted. You're not, you're going to be in the,
36:28
probably fixing the frame and all that jazz, but I can remember changing Tiphams when they were
36:33
cost 200 bucks and we had 10 of them on the shelf and the dealership and they were that
36:37
problematic. I was doing five, six a week for different complaints. Now it's BS to me that
36:44
they've been completely phased out from the manufacturer and we have all these cars that
36:49
essentially are working great otherwise, but now they just, this module can't be repaired,
36:54
can't be replaced. I think that's crap. I think it's terrible, you know.
36:58
So I was talking to a, I guess I can say this, I don't want anyone to get in trouble. It would
37:06
be hard for them to find this person, I guess. I was talking to, we've dealt with the same
37:11
BMW dealership for forever, right? And the parts guy there has been around for,
37:20
he's been there the whole time I've been using the place.
37:23
And one day we called, we had a guy, actually the guy who likes to do the junior tech night to
37:28
talk on the mic to say switch, right? He's got a 99, 99 or 2000 BMW five series, right?
37:36
He loves the car. I know a lot of people just went, oh my God. Yeah, I know, but, but he loves
37:40
this car. He takes care of this car. So he needed a bezel and a knob for his headlight switch.
37:49
All right. And this goes back several years ago, not tons of years ago, but several years ago.
37:55
And so we called BMW to get a price on those parts. And, you know, you could see in the,
38:02
in the thing online, the whatever the, we weren't on ISTA, we were on whatever one of those generic
38:08
BMW deals. And you could see the original price on them. They were like 20 something bucks and
38:12
30 something bucks, right? Okay. So we called the dealer. We're like, we didn't talk to our guy.
38:16
We talked to another guy there. And, and he's like, yeah, I can get them. And they're $250 for
38:23
one and 300 something dollars for another one. This is a bezel, plastic bezel, right? And no,
38:30
you know what I'm talking about. And so I just thought, oh, the guy, the guy looked up something
38:35
wrong. I mean, guy clearly has got to be. And I jumped on the phone. And of course, my guy
38:40
sees the call coming in and answers it immediately. And he goes, I knew you'd be calling me.
38:45
And I'm like, okay, yeah, man. I was like, is he off? And he goes, no, he said, I checked it.
38:50
It's right. And I said, you're kidding me. And I said, how is that even possible? And then he
38:56
explained to me for the first time, how this works. The car is made. So let's say they make,
39:03
you know, a half a million of a car just on a number out there.
39:07
He said, they'll make 750,000 parts. They have whatever, different parts. He said,
39:14
that way they have 250,000 spare parts. Right. Well, those are made when the run of the car is made.
39:22
So 500,000 of those parts went into building the cars, 250,000 went into inventory. Right.
39:28
And he said, so clearly, those are way made, those are way cheaper. Because they made them,
39:33
when they made 750,000 of those bezels, he said, but when they run out at this time,
39:40
now this has been several years ago, he said, when they run out, BMW still wants to be able
39:44
to service those vehicles. And so what they do is they go and they do them in small batches.
39:50
Small batches are exponentially more expensive, but you still can get the part. Right.
39:55
Okay. Well, that's great. And it worked for a long time. And if you want, you know, now our guy
40:00
opted not to purchase that. And in a lot of cases, a 3D printer, something could come along and
40:05
somebody could do that, you know, that technology has gotten to the point back then it wasn't
40:09
available. Yeah. But now I'm wondering if that still holds true today with the spare parts
40:17
amount, right, with who's calculating the number of spare parts that they're going to build.
40:23
And then I don't think, I don't know about BMW and Mercedes. I mean, those cars,
40:27
they, those are manufacturers that tend to want to be able to service their,
40:30
they don't like their people to buy the cars when they're third owners and all that kind of stuff.
40:33
But they also know they turn into classics at some point. So maybe they want to parts to be
40:37
available, whatever. But I don't think that anybody else is doing a small batch run on anything.
40:45
I think that's dead and gone probably from everybody. And I don't think that they're doing
40:50
very many spare parts, right? So then it becomes, and then here's the kicker. Here's when it goes
40:56
real south. Something's bad. Something just sucks. It just, your tip-ums, right? And then
41:03
they're, and then they're like, you know, trying to figure out, well, how can we make them? We need
41:08
to fix them. We need to make them. How many do we need to make? How many can we get away with?
41:12
And they'll, they'll run out of warranty. How many do we, are we going to end up replacing,
41:16
right? And how many do we really want to put in so that people can buy them later? Because,
41:20
yeah, at some point, they're going to fail. Let's just say they fail on everyone, right?
41:23
I mean, like the old Nissan CVT transmission, it wasn't, it wasn't about, you know, if it was
41:27
about when, right? So how many are we going to have? And then at some point, they don't have it
41:34
anymore. And then the car, unless an aftermarket, and that's, here's the thing, that people bash
41:39
aftermarket companies, I get it, I'm on that boat. But if an aftermarket company does not pick it up
41:45
and say, well, we can build it, you're tip them, right? Well, at least there's an option. It may
41:51
not be a good option, or a great option. But your other option is to park the vehicle and let it
41:57
just literally rot into the ground. So it's becoming a, if you would have told me in 2000,
42:07
that in 2025, your hardest thing is going to be parts, I would have laughed in your face.
42:13
Yeah, we don't all said no, it's going to be right to repair and access to information. And
42:18
that was the always the biggest obstacle I always saw. Oh, it's going to be tough, man. Like, you
42:23
know, the, the service information now, a lot of time is written is even wrong, writing diagrams
42:27
are full of mistakes and all kinds of stuff. But it's going to be like, that's going to be the
42:30
biggest struggle. IAT and everybody's right to repair, right to repair, you know, it's going
42:34
to be hard to get this access you're going to need. Now we look at it and it's like, well, the
42:38
dyke's done. And I can't get the part I need for my customer. Like, and then we still have to make
42:45
that phone call, you know, and yeah, that's the, that's the, that's the tough part because they're,
42:51
they're disconnected from our reality. Like they don't realize they just assume that, you know,
42:56
you just don't want to try and find it for me. No, that's not the case at all, man. Like, it's
43:01
just doesn't, what'll happen is it'll be something that because here, okay, let's put the other,
43:06
let's lay another brick on top of this wall that's going against us, right? Okay, they're trying to
43:11
make everything, you know, a theft related part, right? So, okay, so now if everything's going
43:18
to be a TRP, you see, you can't use a used one, and you're not going to supply a new one, right,
43:25
that we can, well, listen, I have no problem going to a client and say, hey, it needs a module and
43:29
it's going to be whatever the number it is, the number is what it is. I mean, I don't control
43:33
that, right? So, I don't mind doing that, at least it's an option for them. I feel bad sometimes
43:38
because it's like, well, you need a $5,000 repair on something that's a module, you know, but,
43:43
and if we could get a used one, if it would work, it would be a tenth of the price, perhaps,
43:48
whatever, I'm throwing some numbers out there, but, you know, the problem is that they make those
43:53
things, you know, where we can't, you put a used one in it, and then if nobody can figure out,
43:59
like the Chrysler Analyze Brake module, if nobody can figure out how to break that,
44:04
and so we can do it, again, you literally don't have a car, you're down, and so not only are
44:11
they not making the parts, but they're making the parts where you can't put a used part in it,
44:16
and that's getting to be more parts that are becoming, I mean, what a lot of even technicians
44:24
don't understand is that could be a headlight, that could literally be a headlight assembly,
44:28
right? You don't think that's just an engine control module or a transmission control module
44:34
or a BCM, yeah, those have been around, they've been doing that for a little while, now BCMs,
44:39
they've been doing that forever, right, and now they've just started going, oh, well, you know,
44:43
and so, but now they're starting to do a lot of stuff, and it is, again, you got some crazy smart
44:53
people out there trying to, trying to, you know, hack into these things to figure out how we can
44:57
make them where we can put them in used, but I don't know that they're going to be able to do
45:01
everything, you know, and then sometimes the hacking part of it takes so long,
45:07
now we've priced it out of doing the job too, I mean, hacking the module and getting it to where
45:11
we could do something to make a use when work will take so much time that it would have been cheaper
45:18
to buy the brand new stinking module and begin with it, they would offer it. And I don't mean to
45:22
throw shade, but a lot of those people that figure out the hack, they keep it so closely guarded to
45:27
themselves that it never really gets out there to have the effect that we hope that it would have
45:32
anyway, like if you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy, he managed to hack it, but that's,
45:38
we're talking like in very tight-knit circles that we run in, you know, we know of a guy that might
45:43
be able to do that, but it's such a small scale, sure, that they can't get it out there to all the
45:48
people. And then what was the point then to begin with, you know, like, congratulations, you fixed
45:53
three cars. I can, I've mixed feelings on this, because, I mean, you know, you know a lot of
46:03
these guys that do this stuff, I know a lot of these guys that do this stuff, and they spend an
46:08
inordinate amount of time doing this. This is way more effort than people think sometimes,
46:17
because once the solution is found, that solution, not always was like I just said,
46:23
sometimes the solution is extremely intensive, right? But a lot of times the solution is quicker,
46:30
you know, it's fairly quick, you know, an hour or two hours, maybe three if you've got to pull,
46:34
you know, but the finding of the solution might have taken somebody weeks of work, weeks and
46:40
weeks and weeks and countless hours, right? How do they recoup their money if they just
46:45
immediately turn around and go, oh, well, post it on a forum or something and say, here's how you
46:50
do it, right? And, you know, it's like, I won't, you'll see me do things like with a Mercedes,
46:55
with the steering, you know, lock, steering column, you know, lock. Yeah, I've shown how to do that,
47:01
right? But in reality, you still have to buy the tool, you still got to buy the software,
47:06
and all that kind of stuff to do it. But, you know, that's been around for a very long time,
47:10
nobody's losing sleep over that. But I would never honestly, I mean, I want to share a lot of
47:15
stuff with a lot of people, but I'm not taking somebody else's hard work that they've then
47:20
been kind enough to show to me on how to get into this thing and do this. I'm not putting that out
47:25
there just for anybody and everybody to do that, because that's not fair to that person, you know,
47:29
because they need to make their money back on it. But then like you said, at the same time, I said,
47:33
well, we want to take care of people, how do we do that? I think that the only way to do that would
47:40
be, and I think this will turn into something, I mean, listen, what happened with COVID happened?
47:45
You couldn't get modules. It became really big, really quick to be able to do these, you know,
47:52
eProming and things like that, right? And it's now it's died off again. But I think it's going to
47:59
come back and I think that's going to kind of be its own, it could literally be its own industry,
48:04
its own sect of this industry, right? Where you got guys that just, I'm just going to do that.
48:09
And people like you and me who just don't want to, I mean, this whole room is full of these
48:13
kind of tools to do this with, right? And quite honestly, every single time I pull one out,
48:18
it's just a pain. I don't do it every day all day. So I got to relearn it, you know, I got to,
48:23
oh, that's right, you know, what's tool do I got to use for what? Because you know, there are only
48:26
400 tools, you know, so it's like, you know, to me, if I knew, like an entity that I trusted
48:34
that I could go, I'm just going to send you this thing, just do it. Here's two models, just do it.
48:37
I'm just passing that on to the client. And it's just probably going to be easier for everybody
48:41
anyway, right? But yeah, and those guys need to, the problem is that not only do those guys not
48:47
share, they share with me, I'm not saying anything bad about them, because I got a lot of them that,
48:51
you know, are great guys, great friends that share stuff with me. But a lot of times they
48:56
don't share with each other, right? They know that that company will start doing it and they want
49:02
to be able, but I mean, how much can you, if you're one guy in your house, doing this in your garage,
49:07
how many can you physically do, you know? So it's, you know, it's a thing there, you know,
49:13
I don't know. I had a really good conversation with a group chat that I'm in and we get talking
49:18
about the real value of a job, you know what I mean? And everybody decides they're starting to
49:22
step away, show it from the idea that it's this amount of labor hours and this amount of parts
49:27
margin. And they're just going, if I'm doing this, you know, high pressure fuel pump in this diesel,
49:33
it's going to have a value of this. And that's when we're going to sell the value for it. It's
49:36
just because of the what it ties up and all that kind of jazz. We have to get, I think in going
49:41
forward, when this becomes a much more specialized and craftsman level, you know, repair versus
49:48
just a job, we have to start thinking about the, what's the real value? And it's not like we're
49:53
trying to gouge the customer, but like there's some things there that if you're the only one that
49:57
can do it, it makes me crazy when somebody says, well, that's not worth a thousand bucks. Excuse me,
50:05
like you took a module that you can't buy and you took one from a car and you made it work again.
50:11
And I can't, I'm not smart enough to decide what it should cost, but I know that pretty much whatever
50:16
it will support people will pay is where it should start. You know, that's the true value
50:23
then of that. And people don't like to, to have that conversation because it's like, oh, you're
50:28
taking advantage of the customer. But I mean, ultimately it's still a free, a free market.
50:33
And if somebody is willing to pay, it's like a break job, right? If somebody's willing to pay
50:37
$2,000 for a break job, then then it's not to say that somebody won't pay 2,500 and 2,800 and 3,200.
50:49
We're all just talking about what do they really want? You know, is there a market out there still
50:54
for a $500 break job? Sure there is. But I mean, it doesn't mean that we're not comparing 500 to 35
50:59
as being the same thing anymore. There's very different levels to this. The true value I think
51:04
is what we have to learn how to sell and really show the customer what you're truly getting, you
51:10
know? Let me, I love that you just brought this up. Yeah. We have a lot of different people that
51:19
follow us on social media, right? I mean, a lot of different people. And I'm sorry I keep looking
51:24
up, but we're having some electricity thing, the lights are flickering, my backup power supplies
51:28
beeping like crazy. So, as long as we don't go out, we don't go out. So, I mean, we have,
51:35
I've had two 80-year-old women, one of them, the son said, can you, well, both of them, the son,
51:41
one sent me a letter, said, can you call my 80-year-old mom? She loves your, you're, you know,
51:46
watching you. And we just had one with a, one of my service providers walked in and said, we've
51:50
got a rear request, you know, this guy called and said his mom's 80th birthday is in a few days.
51:56
He'd love for you to just be able to do a little video and so, so he can send it to her, right?
52:00
Not me do a video and post it, but like, success to her, right? And, and I'm like, yeah, yeah,
52:04
of course we'll do that, right? But we have a lot of different people that watch. And then,
52:07
of course, we have technicians and we have shop owners and, you know, but so, so,
52:13
yeah, I want to teach technicians how to fix cars. I love the fact that they watch and they go,
52:19
oh, I see those techniques and I see the, you know, here's what you do and here's what a
52:22
vultures drop is or here's how you test a can network or here's, you know, how do you use a
52:26
scope? What are all this good stuff? I love that stuff. Yeah. I love being able to educate clients
52:34
in, you know, what, what, what happens in a repair shop, what happens behind the wall, right?
52:41
You know, it's not just plugging something in and telling you what's wrong with it. I love
52:44
educating that, you know, here's the thing that, that I will tell you that I have seen
52:51
and I was guilty of it, with the exception of corporate run shops and with the exception of
52:57
dealerships, most small shops are opened by former technicians who are still technicians and they're
53:05
just, now they're just got a job in their own shop, right? Yeah. And we as a group do not value
53:17
what we do. Period. Yeah. Right. I have had so many guys tell me, you know, when I say, listen,
53:26
you know, and we won't go in the numbers here, but, you know, I tell them that you can charge this,
53:29
you know, you're not, man, nobody's going to want to pay that. You know, we've got two guys here in
53:35
town. I love them to death. They've been, they, they, their shop is in the part store that I first
53:41
started in in like 1984. Okay. It looks like a junkyard, you can't get in the property, right?
53:47
You know, they work outside, they don't go inside the, you can't get in the building,
53:51
it's just full of junk, right? We have torrential downpours here every June through August,
53:55
torrential downpours every afternoon, they've got a little pop up, little like tent things,
53:59
you know, there's skeletons of those everywhere because the fabric wears off, so they just buy
54:03
new ones, right? Yeah. I love them. They're great guys. They were 75 bucks an hour up until fairly
54:10
recently. And I had a conversation when they bring me cars all the time for me to fix, right?
54:15
And it's like, and I send them clients all the time because people who want something inexpensive,
54:18
I know they won't take advantage of them. Yes. But I told them that you guys can charge more.
54:23
Oh, sure. Would you have your customers and we have ours? And that, you know, ours won't pay that.
54:27
I said, they will. They like you. I see online, they rave about you guys. They like you. Yeah,
54:33
you're cheap. You think that you charge more and they won't come to you. They will. And honestly,
54:37
you guys could go up a lot and not be anywhere near where everybody else is around here, right?
54:42
So don't think you're taking advantage of people. I've had guys say, well, you can't charge that
54:47
much for a spark plug, right? They don't want to mark up a spark plug because they see it as,
54:54
well, I can go buy that spark plug for this much. Well, the person can walk in and buy the spark
54:58
plug for this much. They are not in your building because they want to go down to O'Reilly's and
55:03
buy a spark plug and put in there. They're in your building because they want the convenience of
55:06
having you do it, right? And there's costs involved in that. There's the phone call or
55:11
being on the computer to order it. There's the getting it delivered and working out the paperwork
55:17
and all that, paying the bill later. I mean, at some point, you've got to balance your books
55:22
and pay your bills and that's the time that you're sitting somewhere doing that, right? So you've
55:25
got to do that. That all has to be factored in. And as a group, we just don't value all that time.
55:33
We just think, oh, well, somebody else, they could do it themselves and it wouldn't be that
55:38
much. They don't do you. I don't want to do my plumbing, right? If a plumber's coming to my house,
55:44
I'm like, dude, I don't care. You got to dig that pipe, the drain. I mean, maybe the intake, okay,
55:50
but the drain, yeah, dude, whatever. I don't care what it costs. I don't want to be in that, right?
55:56
So that person can tell me a number and if I've got the wherewithal to do the number,
56:01
I'm just going to let that guy do it, you know, or girl do it. But, you know, we as a group,
56:07
and I hear it all the time, oh, we're treated worse. You hear this all the time. As a trade,
56:13
we're treated worse than plumbers. We're treated worse than electricians. We're treated worse than
56:18
everybody, right? Guess what? Electricians value their time. They don't give it away. Plumbers
56:25
value their time. They're charging you for the moment. Their butt hits the seat in the van to
56:29
come to your house, not when they get in your driveway, right? So they value their time. And
56:34
we don't. And we don't value the fact that you can mark up the parts. It is part of the repair.
56:42
You mark it up appropriately. That's what's going to get us to the point where we can then
56:48
start making a change and a shift. You're not ripping people off. You're not ripping people
56:52
off. It's a quality craftsman work. You said it a minute ago, we need to be craftsmen. No,
56:58
actually, you said when this, what we do becomes somewhere where people think of themselves as
57:06
craftsmen. You just said something very similar to that, right? Okay. We should already be craftsmen.
57:12
I tell that to my guys all the time. I don't care if you're doing an oil service. Be a craftsman,
57:17
right? Make sure everything is just right. It should just be part of who we are internally,
57:24
right? Once we do that, and everybody gets into that process,
57:30
yeah, the price is not going to be the factor. People spend $80,000 on a car. Are they not?
57:36
Yeah. $100,000 for a pickup truck. You know what I mean?
57:40
But we can't charge $200 an hour to work on them. Come on, man. That doesn't even make sense.
57:47
Here's the thing. What about some of the people that said the reason that we've had this obstacle
57:52
in getting into this is because of the fact that we always used to close that toolbox at
57:58
five o'clock and I'd go home and then I would work till nine, 10 o'clock at night on my clientele.
58:03
I've always felt that, listen, I've done it. I have done side work in order to make a little
58:09
extra money to when I had a lean week at the month of the dealership or I had to put some
58:15
money into my own car and I was already strapped. I would do it. But I look at that and I'm like,
58:20
that comes right back to the idea of value or something because one minute,
58:24
royalty auto service has got a door rate of whatever, $150 an hour, just hypothetically
58:30
round numbers. And all of a sudden then you've got somebody that goes into their caves and somebody
58:35
goes, I work, here's my Facebook marketplace ad. I work for $50 an hour. And all of a sudden,
58:43
everybody goes, well, why is $150 and $50? We're talking completely different overhead.
58:51
It's the fact that we've always done that as an industry, I think, has been a major obstacle
58:56
for us. But yet you cannot convince so many people that it's wrong because they go, listen,
59:00
that's how I built my business. I built my clientele on that side work that I did.
59:08
I know I got you thinking, I'm sorry.
59:11
I love that. I always, I just, I love just seeing everybody's different sides of things
59:19
because everybody's usually got some kernel of something in there that's good.
59:28
First of all, you get a lot of shop owners that will just absolutely say, no, I'm not
59:33
going to allow you to do side work. You can't do side work if you work for me. And I look at that
59:38
and go, well, you don't really have a say because that's that human being's personal time. If that
59:46
person wants to go jump on trampolines for the next 12 hours until he comes back to work,
59:53
that's his deal. If he wants to work on a car or she wants to work on a car, that's their deal.
59:56
Where you would draw the line is you can't take clientele from your shop. If somebody walks in
00:01
the shop says something and then all of a sudden they're like, Hey, man, here's my car. Give me a
00:04
car and I can do it cheaper. Okay, well, that's dishonest. That's not real. We don't do that,
00:08
right? And it can turn into that, you see, because there's where the problem is, is like, well,
00:14
once people find out that that person is the same one that works in the shop and then he's got a
00:18
little thing over at his garage or maybe he's got a little, down here, they use mini storage
00:22
places, right? They use little storage facilities and there's shops just all over the place,
00:26
like Jacksonville is just filled with shops inside storage facilities. And then that becomes a
00:34
problem because they're coming to you but they would come to us. It's a problem, right? Now,
00:42
as far as from the technician side, first of all, I don't want my technicians to have to do that.
00:50
Right. You know, I want them to make enough money. You know, think about this. Should the surgeon,
00:59
you know, like he works at the hospital for four days a week and then, you know, he's like,
01:03
well, you know, I need to let me make a side cash. If you need that hernia done, I can do that over
01:08
my, got a little clinic set up over here. I can do that. I mean, you know, it's not a thing, right?
01:12
I mean, but it's common here and it's because part of it, listen, you're always going to have guys
01:19
that are going to do it. There's guys that make $200,000 a year and they want to go work on stuff
01:24
on the side, right? And make $230,000 a year, right? I mean, I have no beef with that whatsoever.
01:30
If you're just, you're that hungry and you just need that money, you go make that money, right?
01:36
But majority of people are just trying to make a certain level of money. You know, and
01:43
they should, that should happen in the shop. That should happen in the building where they're
01:48
employed, right? And then, you know, they wouldn't need to go do that. They could go spend time
01:53
doing other things, whether it be family or hobbies or whatever it might be, right? And
02:02
I just, it does, again, it's their own business to do, but it does kind of
02:10
lessen the value of what the shop does, but what people don't understand is like,
02:15
like you said, there's less overhead. Yeah, yeah, that's 100%. I mean, we all know that if you're
02:20
doing it out of your garage at your house, it's basically zero overhead, you're paying for the
02:24
mortgage and everything anyway, and you used to always hear that, right? You know, oh, yeah, if
02:27
you just work out of your garage, you know, zero overhead, you know, it's like most municipalities
02:30
are not really keen on you doing that, first of all, right? But getting us away from that,
02:37
it's like, now people are going to come to your house. And I've literally had it happen, right?
02:43
They don't know boundaries. They will show up there at two o'clock in the morning,
02:47
they'll show up there whenever they feel like it. And here's the kicker. Here's where it goes
02:53
real south. Yeah, the overhead is less. The value is less. And I just had, you just had a whole
02:58
bunch of guys, and when I'm doing the same job, and they're doing it right, they're saying it
03:02
right now, hold on. When that vehicle, because it's inevitably going to happen, none of us are
03:09
perfect. When there is a deficiency in that repair, whatever caused it, parts, labor, whatever,
03:17
you cannot, as a side work tech working out of your house or storage unit, you cannot provide
03:26
the service that the shop can provide. Yeah, because you're not available in that, in all
03:32
of those times, right? The shop is pretty much available. I mean, if they call, we can get the
03:37
call, we can, you know, they can leave a message, we'll check, we can have something happen, even
03:41
if we can't fix it, we can get them a tow, we can get them, you know, something can happen
03:45
pretty much right away, right? Whereas that guy's got to wait or girl's got to wait till they get
03:51
off work. And then what if they already have something scheduled, because they're only one man,
03:55
what if they already have something scheduled for that night, but now you got to come back?
03:59
What happens to that person? So there is a less value for that. There's, there's, it's far less
04:04
value. Yeah. And, and yeah, there's no insurance. What happens if your car gets damaged while the
04:08
person has it? Where is that, you know, we all heard those horror stories, you know,
04:13
building burns, you know, cars lost. Yeah. Yeah. Who's going to pay for it? Because the insurance
04:19
for the car is going to be like, well, you had it in this, you know, well, wait a minute now,
04:21
that they're not dumb, they're going to try to figure out how to get out of it, right?
04:24
And the guy's homeowner's insurance, he ain't paying for that. Well, you were doing work on the
04:28
work, you know, on the professional work and you're, oh, no, this wasn't a commercial
04:33
situation. This is your personal house. I mean, and then who's, you know, somebody's got to come
04:37
out of pocket with cash. Does that, does that guy got the pot that got the money in his bank
04:40
to buy you a 30, $40,000 vehicle? I mean, maybe, but yeah, you know that that's probably not going
04:47
to happen. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's a tough one there. I mean, you brought that, you kind of
04:53
got me on the out there. Because when, when I, when you mentioned your, your local shop that
05:00
you know that you've, you know, known forever and they're 75 were just recently $75 an hour.
05:07
The industry has always had a place for, for a shop like that, right? There's a,
05:11
there's a market for them. There's a customer for that type of customer. But when you look at them,
05:16
Sherwood, what's some of the advice or things that you, if you could just
05:20
say, here's three nuggets, these three nuggets can turn your business to the next, I don't want to
05:25
say turn it around, but go to the next level. What's those three things Sherwood parts mark up?
05:35
You know, because some of the coaching companies will say,
05:39
well, to turn the corner, you got to go, you know, flat rate pay or, you know, you have to,
05:46
what's some of the other things you have to spend X amount of dollars in marketing. You
05:55
at least one thing because you asked me for three. Yeah. We'll start with one. The number one thing,
06:02
the number one thing is give great value for what you do. You know, you can't,
06:12
I think I told you in the first, maybe when we were talking some point or maybe in the,
06:16
in the first time we did an interview, I've been with a lot of coaching companies over the year
06:21
and they've all helped me in some way, shape or form.
06:26
But I figured something out. Thank God, very early, which was you can't just,
06:32
should you have the proper parts margins? Absolutely. What the proper parts margins are,
06:37
that's fluid, right? I mean, it's definitely changed since I've been doing this, you know,
06:42
and but, but you 100% should have the proper parts margins. You know, I just said a minute ago,
06:48
you know, we can't charge $200 an hour. I'm not saying that shops need to charge $200 an hour.
06:52
You might be somewhere in a, in a, in a community that will not support $200 an hour, but you need
06:58
to know what your community will support. And you do need to be not just giving it away. You need
07:03
to be, your, your labor needs, again, you need to have the proper labor margins, which means that
07:08
you've got to make a certain amount of money. And as much as technicians don't want to hear it,
07:12
I can't give a technician flat, you know, a pay of half of what we sell. That doesn't work in
07:19
today's business. It worked 30 years ago, right? It doesn't work today, not with everything that
07:25
goes with it. Because by the time you add in all the other stuff that goes with it, it does get
07:28
up there pretty high. It's just unfortunately, because of all the things that we have to pay that
07:33
goes with it, the tech doesn't see the half, right? Yeah. But, but you have to start with
07:41
giving value to your clients, giving value to your vehicle owners. Number one,
07:47
if you charge $1,000 an hour, just make sure that that $1,000 an hour comes with a lot of value.
07:54
What are you giving for that $1,000 an hour, right? If you can make your clients desire your work
08:02
because they value it, and then you can make a price that's commensurate with that level of value,
08:12
they'll be more than happy to pay you, right? The numbers are the numbers. The numbers are
08:17
different for every, it's why when I hear these cookie cutter things like, oh, you should be $150
08:21
an hour, you should be, you know, you should be 60% parts margin, or you should be whatever the
08:27
number might be, right? It's like, well, okay, well, if you live, if you work on cars that you're
08:31
going back to the dealership for a lot of your parts, how in the world could you ever be 60%
08:36
parts margin? That just doesn't work, right? You know, if that'd be, I mean, that'd be fantastic
08:40
if we could do that, but now you're, you're going to be way more expensive than the dealership is.
08:45
And okay, I'm, in cases, we are more expensive than the dealership. What we do give some value
08:50
that they don't get, we get a 5 or 50,000 mile warranty, they don't, right? We have a very personal
08:55
relationship with people, most don't. Okay, but from a shop standpoint, somebody that you, you
09:00
asked me, what would be one of the things you do? Give good value. Lots of ways to do that.
09:07
Lots of ways to do that. So, so many different avenues you can go down. I mean, I can sit here
09:13
for an hour talking about just that, right? Well, I think that would be the first one.
09:18
You know, when I liken it to this, because I know you guys wash every car when it leaves,
09:23
right? It's always going out clean. Are you still there?
09:32
Yep. What happened? Are you still there? Yeah, we're back. We're locked down. Yeah.
09:40
But I noticed like, you guys, you know, you do it as part of your young, young tech night and
09:44
everything, but I mean, every car that comes into royalty leaves washed, right? And that's just
09:48
something that you've always done. And I worked at the, my tenure at the Nissan dealer, that was
09:52
their policy. Every car didn't matter what it came in for always. And at the time it was like,
09:58
man, it was really backing up the workflow in the shop because they were washing them in the shop.
10:02
It wasn't a separate thing. And it, you know, sometimes you had to wait for the car to be
10:04
cleaned before you could drive out to get your next car into your bay. It was, it was a, it was a
10:10
pain. But that little thing of five minutes of just spraying the car off, running it over with a,
10:15
you know, some soap, clean it up, shine the tires, like it was worth so much more in retention
10:22
back to the customer. Cause like for some of them, they came in and the car ran fine, you know,
10:27
how to check engine light on and it left with a check engine light on, but or off, excuse me,
10:31
but it never changed how it ran. But man, they were just glad to get into that car and it was
10:35
clean again. You know what I mean? Like it was up here with the salt, everything right now,
10:40
all over the roads, man, they will come in and be like, big deal, you know, huge thing. It was
10:48
I think so. If I were going to give like just the, the tiny footnote version of
10:57
some value, right? Okay. Number one, before we get into that, you got to fix the car.
11:02
You got to fix the car. Okay. I mean, that's, that's, that's a given. You, for us,
11:10
again, for us personally, it's an ethical thing. We got to look the whole car over and we have to
11:14
present everything. We don't have purchase sale, anybody for anything, but we have to present
11:18
everything, right? So that they can make an educated decision, the vehicle owner on whether I want
11:23
to put anything in it, right? They might say, well, I don't want to spend that much on this car and
11:26
I know I'm going to have to at some point, so I'm done. Now there's ways to make sure that they
11:30
understand the value of the vehicle and the kind of stuff I can't get. That's, that's a long
11:33
conversation. But, you know, we got to fix the car. We got to look it over, but value stuff,
11:39
pick up and delivery, make it, make it easy for them, right? Go pick up the car, bring it into
11:45
your shop. I don't care if it's an oil service, go pick it up, bring it up, do the oil service,
11:48
do the other stuff, take it back, right? I mean, the mom that's sitting at home with her four kids,
11:52
she don't want to pile them four kids into the van to bring it to your house, right? Anybody who
11:55
had kids in the, in the, in the car seats, right? You know, it's a, it's not like a two minute thing
12:01
to get in the car and go, okay? All right. So that's, that's convenience. Yes, washing the car
12:07
is a convenience thing. Let me footnote that with something though, because I had a technician come
12:12
in here and we were talking, doesn't, you know, from another shop. And we were talking about
12:20
washing cars and he said, yeah, the shop I'm at, they want the tech to wash the car. And, and that's
12:26
your shop owner out there, you want to wash cars, unless you're going to pay that tech,
12:30
which I will tell you is probably not a real smart thing to do financially, unless you want to pay
12:36
that tech to wash that car. Don't, you need to hire a car washer, right? If you're going to hand
12:41
wash them, hire a car washer, okay? And, and I would highly recommend hand washing them because
12:46
you start running them through the machines and all of a sudden, something gets scratched or
12:49
whatever it might be, and that's a big deal, right? So we hand wash. We don't detail. We wash the,
12:53
we wash the outside, we vacuum the inside, we do the windows, and people absolutely love it,
13:00
right? Okay, car wash is a value. If you can give loaner cars, it's a value. We had a big
13:07
issue with that, won't get into that, but you know, it's a big, big added value.
13:13
We do a rose at the end of the, when a car is picked up, it gets a rose on the dashboard,
13:16
on the instrument cluster and on the dashboard, on the instrument cluster. So a nice wrapped
13:20
rose. It didn't start all like that. It started off with just literally a rose, right? Then it was
13:25
a rose with a water bottle, then it was a rose with a water bottle with a little, you know,
13:29
little tag on it that had our name on it. Then it was, then it was wrapped and it was baby's breath,
13:33
right? And I mean, so we build the roses here. We buy the roses locally and then we,
13:38
and then we put them together with the wrap and the baby's breath and all that stuff on it.
13:42
But this is evolved, right? I mean, this is 20, this will be our 30th year on July 26th of 26th,
13:49
right? And this is all evolved over time. You know, you can do this in a smaller way if you're
13:56
smaller shop. But understand this, there's two arenas to play in, in my opinion. There's the arena
14:03
of price. I'm just going to be, I'm going to, I'm going to position myself as the price leader,
14:12
whatever you want to call it, right? And so I'm going to be the least expensive or at least I'm
14:16
going to play in that. I might, maybe I won't be the least expensive, but that's who I'm going
14:20
against, right? I might be a little bit more, but I'm going to tell them I do quality work or
14:24
whatever, but you're still in that price arena, right? That arena is huge and full. And then there's
14:31
the arena of I'm going to do craftsmanship, quality work, take care of, make sure I diagnose it
14:37
properly the first time, not charge for things that we don't do, make sure that we're doing this
14:42
stuff ethical, right? We're going to look the whole car over, we're going to have conversations,
14:45
we're going to create relationships with our clients, right? These are all things that are
14:50
much harder to do, right? It's way easier to tell somebody, I can do your break job for
14:54
$99 bucks, all four wheels, and then they're going to just be, oh, man, okay. I mean,
14:58
nobody else is going to tell me that price, right? And it is to go, yeah, the break job is like you
15:02
said, $2,000, you know, they go, oh, let me, you know, let's go over the features and benefits
15:06
before you give them the price, honestly. But, but, you know, that arena is small and,
15:13
and not very populated, right? And, and to me, if you, if you have an area where it will support
15:21
it, okay? And I think everywhere will support that arena, just the price that you can charge
15:26
will be different, right? But, but if the price has got to be lower, guess what else is lower?
15:31
Usually your, your costs are lower, you know, you're, you're, you're, you could hire a car washer
15:36
for less than I can. I mean, I pay my car washers, it's, it's a large amount of money
15:40
because otherwise I can't, they won't come to work for me, right? So, but that's fine.
15:46
I mean, it's just part of the, part of doing it. And don't be afraid to make money. You know,
15:51
it's like, don't apologize for making money. A lot of us have spent many, and even if,
15:57
let's say even the business five or six, seven, eight years, right? And, and you know,
16:02
you open your shop up, and you've only been in business for two years. And people all,
16:07
you see all these different companies that are like, oh, you need to do loss leaders on
16:11
oil services, and you need to bring in these cheap oil services. And so it's like, to me,
16:16
it's like you're already inviting in, to me, the wrong clientele, right? I want the word to get
16:21
out there that we're good. They're good, right? But I think that shop, when, when guys are in that
16:31
range, five, six, seven years, and they're just open their shop up, and they're scared.
16:36
They're scared to charge, right? And think about this. Let's say that, let's go back to that lawyer.
16:44
Went all the way through regular school, graduated high school, went to law school,
16:48
right? So you went to, went to college, went to law school, he's got, I don't know how many years
16:52
a lawyer has to go, four, five, six, whatever it might be, six, seven years, I don't know. I mean,
16:56
I know doctors got to go a lot longer and do a lot more than that. But I mean, I'm pretty sure
17:00
the lawyers come out of their 25, 26, 27 years old, you know, and they're, and they're lawyers,
17:04
they're lawyers. And those law firms that they go to work for, don't mind charging a lot of money,
17:10
if they go to work for some prestigious law firm, they charge a lot of money for that, right?
17:13
Yeah. You have the same amount of education. If you've done it right, as that, as that guy does,
17:21
right? And they're not afraid to charge and you are. Yeah. You just have to get your mind right
17:27
on, what are you actually providing? Yeah, you're providing a fixed vehicle, but you're
17:32
providing convenience for people. Yeah. And people don't mind paying for convenience.
17:37
They really don't. I hate hearing, I mean, honestly, there was a guy that,
17:40
it's auto shop owners hang out on Facebook. I haven't seen that one. I'm in there. I posted
17:46
on there yesterday. Did you see the post yesterday? He posted on there that he was test driving a
17:52
vehicle and that there was no front plate on it, I guess. And I guess he's in a state,
17:55
we got to have a front plate. Did you see it? Yes, I did. And he got pulled over and the vehicle
18:01
got towed and well, got impounded and he's like, he told the customer that that was his responsibility
18:10
and he got blasted. He got completely blasted, right? And of course, a hundred percent he was
18:17
wrong. I mean, you got the car got towed because your license was suspended. Yes. And you had,
18:28
you not had your license suspended the cop because they gave my ride back to a shop
18:31
for an hour. I can tell you right now in this town, which I know the police here,
18:34
but they're not going to go, oh, Mr. Shop owner, you had a suspended license,
18:38
we're going to tow the car, we're going to give you a ride. They're going to be like,
18:41
he got somebody who can give you a ride, man. Because we're just going to leave you stay,
18:43
you know, you're just going to be sitting here, right? So clearly the police probably would have
18:47
went, all right, tell your vehicle owner to put a tag on that thing. The reason that got towed
18:51
was because of his license. Yeah. And you know, I reached out to him, I messaged him and I've
18:58
talked to him a little bit, but here's the kicker on that. He's a young shop owner. I hate to see
19:08
it. I'm broke. Yeah. The money made him make an immoral decision. I don't, I've watched,
19:15
I looked at his, I went to his shop, looked it up on Google, five stars, you only got seven reviews,
19:21
but he's got five stars. And not only does he have five stars, but he got five raving stars,
19:24
because people are actually writing a bunch of stuff about him, right? So he let money make
19:31
him make a decision that he wouldn't probably know, had he had the money, he would never
19:36
made that decision, right? And it really bothers me because it's like, this is clearly a person who
19:44
who is just struggling in this industry, not because he doesn't can't do good work, because I
19:51
can see from his reviews, he can do good work. It's because he can't, he doesn't know how to run the
19:57
business, right? Yeah. And that's the one thing that I think that if I could say anything to
20:02
anybody, you know, you said three things, be valuable, you know, give value, charge appropriately
20:08
for that, whatever that looks like in your area, right? And don't let somebody tell you you have
20:13
to charge this or have to charge that you figure out what your numbers, you know, there's plenty
20:17
of stuff online for you to go figure that out, go figure out what your numbers are, what's your
20:21
overhead, what do you look, how much do you do you want to make, right? Now that might need to be a
20:26
little lower in your beginning years, you know, if you're overhead low in your shop and keep your
20:31
personal overhead low, right? And, and I mean, for a long time, don't be oh man, I had a great
20:37
year, I'm gonna go buy a boat, let's slow that down a little bit, right? And, and just, just treat
20:43
people right, treat your employees right that you hire, take care of them, take it, and it will work,
20:49
but but the key to that is give value and charge appropriately for it. Yeah. Really? Love it. How
20:57
what's the goals for 2026 Sherwood?
21:02
And I'll tell you right now,
21:06
about the, we talked about it yesterday about four years ago, three or four years ago, I was trying
21:11
to retire, I actually wasn't even wearing work clothes to work anymore. I'm like, yeah, I help
21:16
my guys a little bit here and there as a back and I felt really good, you know, and then Sherwood
21:20
put a camera in front of me one day and all of a sudden I've got more of a job now than I've had
21:24
in the long time. Yeah, it's work. It's a lot of work. I would say, you know, obviously we want to,
21:33
we want all of our social media to grow our big goal, our biggest goal, which we underestimated
21:41
massively last year is to have our training website up. Yeah. And that is
21:49
a massive, massive undertaking. And I do see why a lot of places charge as much as they do to have,
21:56
you know, for those training access to those websites, because the amount of work that's
22:01
going to go into this is just, yeah, it's a lot. It's just a lot because I think a lot of other
22:07
stuff is happening too, right? Because you got to do all this. You got to keep doing what you're
22:10
doing. Yeah. Right. And then you got to, it's just another plate, you know, we're spinning plates.
22:16
Yeah. Right. So it's got a lot of spinning plates going right now. But that's our big number one goal
22:22
is that, you know, and I hope that we can get up to, you know, five or 600,000 on YouTube,
22:30
that would be fantastic. I think we'll do that. What's the next event you're headed to? Somebody
22:35
was asking me yesterday, the Canadian contingent was asking me if you guys were going to make the
22:41
the tour show in Pennsylvania in, I believe it's April. And that's in Hershey, Pennsylvania. And
22:47
I'm like, I'm not sure if they come up that far north or not. But like you came to Aston, you came
22:53
to Apex, but do you? In the summertime? Sure. I come up north all the time. But you know,
22:59
because that white stuff is on the ground, I know I have no interest, you know, although I will be in
23:04
Indiana in January. Wow. Yeah. That happened. But yeah, I got to go out there and do some stuff.
23:12
You know, this was the first year that we didn't go to vision.
23:20
Do you want my honest opinion on this? The scuttlebutt is that a lot of people,
23:25
I'll just say this, a lot of people that I talked to didn't make the trip to vision. And a lot of
23:32
people that I talked to don't see themselves making the trip, I guess is the most politically
23:37
correct way I can, I can put it without, you know, throwing shade at people, which I don't want to do.
23:43
I'm not ever throwing shade at anybody. I think it's vision is a wonderfully fantastic event.
23:48
I think that the, the level that that has gotten to is, I mean, unbelievable. I love it, right?
24:01
I'll say, here, I'll tell you this. So in Jacksonville, when there's training in Jacksonville,
24:05
which there hasn't been in forever, right? It's the same 20 guys in the room every single time,
24:10
right? You'll get the onesies and the twosies that come in for one or two here, they're right.
24:15
But the same 20 guys. Okay. I think that has happened with vision. You know, we've gone every
24:21
single year for, I don't even know how long, a very long time, right? And it's fantastic. It's
24:31
great. It's the, but there's only, there's only so, I love Bernie, but there's only so many times I
24:41
can be in Bernie's scope class, right? I mean, and there's, but, but here's the deal. It's like,
24:45
what's Bernie going to do? I mean, it's not like they can, it's like John Thornton,
24:47
John Thornton is obviously brilliant, right? And, and, you know, he tries to come up with a lot of
24:52
new stuff and good stuff. But you know, it's like, you've been to a GDI class, you know,
24:57
literally 10 times, it's like, well, okay, there's another GDI class. What, and I always say, it's
25:03
worth it. If you get a nugget, one thing out of each class, it's worth it, right? But it's getting
25:09
harder and harder just, just because it's hard for, for instructors. I mean, I am one, right? It's
25:19
hard to come up with new stuff, you know, and, and I think that that's kind of hurting. And,
25:25
and on top of that, you've got other events that are growing, right? You've got the North Carolina
25:30
one that we went to, you've got Apex that's been around for a long time, but it's trying to push
25:34
itself out there and grow. And so you've got options for people that, you know, that don't
25:39
have to travel. And to, to Kansas in March, right? It's like, you know, it's not the, you know,
25:47
but I think that I think they tried it to do it in Mexico, didn't they one year? Wasn't that
25:51
something that Vision did one year? Yeah. I don't know how well that went over. But,
25:57
yeah, I think it's a great event. I think all of them are great events. I just feel like we need
26:01
to get more, you know, the 20, the 20 guys can't keep supporting, you know, the, the, the, however
26:09
many go up there, you know, you can't, you need new, new, new, new, we need new, and we, where's
26:15
the new coming from? You know, that's the kicker. And I'll be honest with you, the, the, the, some
26:21
people that I've talked to, which I'll be able to talk about later and maybe in a few months.
26:25
Okay. I can't do it right now, but I will tell you that a lot of people have no idea Vision exists.
26:34
Yeah. That's the big, big part of it is, you know, like, and I go to these shows. I had a
26:40
conversation right up here in Ontario, Canada, right in Toronto. There's a show held every year,
26:44
and it's held like two weeks right before, you know, Asta in North Carolina. So it's a conflict
26:50
interest to sometimes for me to be able to make both shows. I could make it work if I had to,
26:54
but you wouldn't believe the amount of people in my own province. It's essentially the largest show
26:58
in Canada. Don't even know it exists. It's the vision of Canada. Nobody knows it's there.
27:04
And, you know, they bring up, uh, Linda tech used to come up, right? Like some Brendan
27:08
secular has come up, like some great people have come up and, and, and taught. Nobody even knows
27:13
about it. So people of your listening and, and you run one of these kind of events,
27:19
when you think you're doing enough to, to promote the event, you need to do like five
27:24
times as much. And I don't know how to do it or how to get it into those channels,
27:27
reach out to the parts vendors or something and, and work out a deal. Because if it's not hanging
27:32
on a poster in the parts store, they're never going to hear about it because the tool guys don't
27:36
seem to mention it. I do everything I can do to talk about the events that are coming up because
27:40
I think it's pivotal, pivotal that everybody attends at least one event like that in their
27:45
life because it changes your, it changes your complete outlook. But if we're not the people
27:50
that are putting them on or just lackadaisal, like, yeah, you know, we got a thousand more
27:55
members attending last year than we had the year before. That's not it. And it ain't going to work.
27:59
It's not going to survive. Okay. You say you have a thousand more new people coming,
28:03
but how many did you lose? Right? You know, that's the key is like, okay,
28:07
did the numbers actually grow overall? Or did we just get a lot of new, new people? What would
28:11
be great, you know, if we had new people, that's what you kind of need, right? But we also need to
28:16
kind of keep some of the other people. Yeah. I think that, and I'm not saying this from a standpoint
28:21
of, of, you know, trying to promote myself here. But I mean, I think the easiest channel for a lot
28:29
of these companies and a lot of them get it. And a lot of them just don't. Yeah. The easiest channels
28:36
and the least expensive channels, quite honestly, to reach a lot of people is social media. And it's
28:44
not your social media. You know, it's not, you know, of course, the vision social media, the
28:50
people that go to vision, no vision social media, they're on there, they're on their stuff. They've
28:54
already been there. They already know you exist. You need new people. So people like, you know,
28:58
Eric with a million subscribers, yeah, I understand that a million followers are not,
29:02
not all technicians, right? But a lot of them are, you know, and, and, you know, Pine Hollow and,
29:09
you know, just all of them, right? Just, just name them, just reach out to them. Because most of
29:16
the time, you know, they don't mind. Now, I'm not going to speak for them. I don't mind we don't do
29:21
sponsored stuff, right? We do, we do for Apex. Apex, we're fine with that because we believe in it.
29:28
Um, I would certainly do something, you know, if they reached out, you know, for, for Asta or,
29:33
or your vision or if, if everything aligned, if we could, you know, I'm not going to just put it
29:37
out there. I'll be more than happy to, if everything aligned, right, we could all come to an agreement
29:41
on how the, because we're not going to change how we do things, right? I'm not doing a corporate
29:47
video, you know, I'll do it how we do it, which is if we like the product, if we like the event,
29:54
of course we want people to know about it. That's how we do everything in this building. If I use
29:58
the thing, I'm going to show you that I use the thing so you can, again, like we just said, people
30:02
don't know what exists. People don't know how these tools exist, right? So we'll 100% do that,
30:07
and I'm sure other, other people will, I'm not speaking for them, but, but I think that that's
30:13
one of the biggest ones because, you know, part stores throw flyers on the counter on a weekly
30:20
basis, right? And 99% of them are right in the, you know, in the dumpster, you know, I mean,
30:27
it's just, I don't, who's got time, you know, but we've got to get them excited about wanting to
30:33
get training. We need to get this. So again, going back to the craftsman thing, how do we get
30:40
technicians, first of all, to know that training exists, right? Because it's incredible to me that
30:48
I was having a conversation with somebody the other day, and I'm like, what do you,
30:50
do you know who John Thornton is? Do you know who Bernie Thompson is? Do you know who Brandon
30:53
Stack was? And no, no, no, I never heard of them. And I'm just like,
30:59
do you know what vision is? No, I don't know. I never heard of that. It's like,
31:04
you know, and it just, it's mind bending to me because it's like, I would not be where I am today
31:12
if it not, we're not for those people, right? And how do we get that in front of people? And
31:20
then once it is in front of them, how do we get them excited about wanting to go there? Because
31:24
once you go, like you said, you know, you said you should go once in your lifetime. Well, I think
31:28
if you go once, you're going to go back many, many times, right? You know, we got to get them
31:32
in the door. And I don't know what that looks like from their standpoint. I don't know what,
31:37
again, what is their overhead? What happens there? How do we make it? But you can't just
31:44
be status quo. We got to get these, we got to get these people who have never been to training
31:49
and don't even know what the training looks like to get them in the building, right? You know,
31:54
maybe that scholarships or something, man, I don't know, we need to all kind of get together
31:57
and go, you know, I mean, because there's some really smart young
32:04
I say more and more on social media and guys that are just putting up little,
32:09
you know, little six minute videos, and they're showing their diagnostic process and something,
32:14
and I'm like, you're 22 years old, and I was not as good as you are at 22, you know, and they're
32:21
smart. Oh, and it's, I thank the internet for that. I really do. And I take pride in the fact
32:28
that if I could just be 1% responsible for somebody finding a Bernie Thompson or John Thornton or
32:34
Brandon Stegler, Paul Dan or Sherwood, you know, if I can be responsible for somebody finding that,
32:41
I'm good, man. I've had the effect that I want to have, you know what I mean? Because
32:45
it was only an algorithm that ever showed it to me. You know what I mean? It was just by fluke,
32:50
you know, I hung around an ITN, but I didn't get on the social media side of it until I was just
32:55
sitting there bored scrolling and a repair video pops up with Paul Danner. If I'd have never seen
33:02
that, I wouldn't have been where I am right now. There's no possible way. It wasn't going to happen
33:07
otherwise. I wasn't getting exposed. It wasn't getting trained. It wasn't none of that.
33:11
So if we can reach just 5% more people, these young people on social media to show them,
33:18
go back to the value of training, the value of education, the value of what it is really you
33:23
bring, bring that career mindset, bring that, I want to be that craftsman again, then we're
33:31
going to solve so many of these problems in the industry. It's not even going to be funny. We're
33:34
not going to be talking and arguing about. That should be charged and you can't charge that much.
33:43
We're going to have all these other issues already solved. It's going to be,
33:46
it's going to take care of itself. Also, there are a lot of options online.
33:55
Keith Perkins, the L1 training. Of course, I know Keith and I mean,
34:03
incredibly smart individual, right? I keep missing his Monday night things because I'm like,
34:09
I said, we're talking about this thing and then we're talking about it. I don't forget where we
34:15
were. Maybe we were at SEMA or Apex, wherever. We were talking and he was saying he had this
34:24
thing and I'm like, oh, and so I went on and I'm like, oh, I'm actually already signed up for the
34:29
thing. Oh, but I didn't, but I'm not in the paid version of it, right? So I signed up for the paid
34:33
version of it and then I want to get on this thing, but it's super inexpensive and some great
34:41
information on just the things that I've gone in there and looked at. What guys need to understand
34:46
is young guys will, gosh, I want to make sure I say this right because I actually had a knockdown,
34:55
drag out fight with a girl in a class, live class because I said something that her mentor,
35:07
her lead tech, did not believe in, right? I'll tell you what it is. I said, you need to take
35:12
the bleeder loose when you're squeezing in the brake caliper, right? And she said, absolutely
35:17
not. He's done that thousands of times. He told me that's a waste of time. Don't ever do that.
35:20
And he's never had a problem. But she did come back to me at lunch and she's like,
35:26
I'm really sorry. I'm like, no, I love your passion and I love the fact that you so respect
35:31
that that person, right, that you're willing to almost go to blows with me, you know, but, you
35:38
know, what that lead tech, you know, what I would say to him is, I know you've been doing
35:45
the long time. I know you're smart and know you got a lot of good skills and a lot of good techniques
35:50
that doesn't mean that you know everything and you have every skill and you have every
35:54
technique. It doesn't mean that everything that you've done your whole career still holds true
35:57
today or that it was ever true to be quite honest with you. Maybe it wasn't the best
36:01
practice and you just didn't know it, you know, never stop learning, never stop taking classes,
36:08
never stop, whatever it might be, never stop. Because I mean, as long as I'm doing this,
36:15
I'm going to be learning from people, right? And you have to be. I think I cannot, I cannot
36:23
stress that enough for guys, you know. I don't think we're going to see you go anywhere for
36:29
quite a while. I don't think the industry is going to let you go right away, sure would son.
36:35
I mean, I know you want to dial it back a little bit in 2026, but I think I think we're going to
36:39
be seeing just as much of you. So, which is not a bad thing. So I'm good with it.
36:45
I'm going to get to play golf. I'm going to get to play golf, you know, a couple of days a week.
36:48
I'm, you know, Friday and Saturdays, you know, that's it. I mean, everybody should be on a four
36:53
day work week by now at the shops. Like I said, that's not true. I think it's a really good thing.
37:00
Yeah. Everybody, I just, this is my Christmas present to everybody. You're going to hear it
37:06
now after Christmas, unfortunately, but I mean, that's just, I wanted to do this. And, you know,
37:11
this is, sure would somebody that I have so much respect for, and I've been very lucky to be able
37:16
to meet the man in person and shake his hand and consider him a friend. And I can't say enough about
37:21
how cool their family is and what they're truly doing and where their heart lies for this industry.
37:26
And, you know, we all have to do not more, but we all have to think about,
37:33
we all have a responsibility when we, every day, when we go in and do this as a career,
37:37
about how deep that responsibility actually really runs. And, you know, there's a legacy
37:42
in this industry that we have to preserve, but at the same time, we have to do better every day.
37:47
So I keep saying, you know, just shoot to be 1% better tomorrow than you were today.
37:53
And, you know, if you're not going to do it every day, but at the end of the month,
37:56
if you're 10% better at something, 10% is incredible. That's a major milestone.
38:03
Right. So just always keep pushing for that. Cause I mean,
38:06
Sherwood's a guy that is still like he just finished saying is never stopped learning.
38:10
And that's the, that's the secret power. That's the superpower to this guys.
38:14
You know, your body's going to change and slow down and things are going to start to hurt.
38:17
But as long as you keep developing your brain and your skills,
38:21
you can, you can do this as long as you want. And it is a rewarding, fulfilling career.
38:27
And that's the whole thing is just approach it like that.
38:30
Try to be a craftsman tomorrow guys and girls. So anyway, Sherwood,
38:34
Merry Christmas, buddy. It's always a good time to talk to you. So, you know,
38:44
Yeah, there's a seat here for you anytime you want to be here. Say hi to Sherwood for us.
38:50
I'm sorry he's feeling under the weather, but a lot of us are trying to kick that right now.
38:54
So, you know, and thank you for everything you do, Sherwood. We really appreciate it.
38:58
Absolutely. Hey, I appreciate you. Everything you do.
39:00
Thank you, man. We'll talk to you all soon. I love you all. Bye.
39:34
Here's hoping everyone finds their missing 10 millimeter and we'll see you all again next time.
