The “Monster” in Your Head Is Costing Your Shop Money [RR 1086]

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Carm Capriotto, good to see you.

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Okay, let's get on with Greg.

Hi, Greg.

Hello, hello.

Glad to be here, sir.

Thank you, good to have you here.

Oh, by the way, so this is coffee with Carmen and Coach.

I love that graphic that I made.

That is so cool, absolutely.

That is just too cool.

And then we have this really cool background

that you're all gonna see in a little bit

with a brewing cup of coffee.

And I said, Greg, you gotta have your coffee.

And he said he has his.

I got my coffee here.

And I have mine, so, okay.

This is going to be a very powerful framework

of a leadership episode.

It's kind of like this, everyone,

because Greg and I have already discussed this

and I was blown away by what he's bringing to you.

It's like we all have two voices inside of us

that every shop owner, every specialist,

every service advisor has,

one voice builds you and the other one destroys you.

And Greg is gonna teach you how to have those pillars,

if you will, of voices help build you, right, Greg?

Yes, we're gonna go as far as we can.

This is great.

All these people inside of us

and all these particular pillars,

I just love your premise.

This is really gonna elevate our listener.

You bet.

Now I'm excited to bring this to the table.

And really, we're not obviously gonna get

quote unquote religious on the show here,

but we've got our inner voice, right,

which is that wants us to succeed,

that wants us to do well,

that wants us to be successful,

the true essence of who we are.

But we have some other voices that go on in our head

that try and tell us,

nah, you don't really wanna do that, right?

And if you study neuroscience

and I don't claim to be one,

I don't play one on TV,

but I've been reading a lot about human behavior

as a business coach and really,

you become a life coach in a lot of different ways.

The question becomes, okay, why is human beings,

if we know what we're supposed to do,

why don't we do it, right?

So there's a lot to unpack there.

And I think we have this,

what I call the monster voice.

And that is that voice.

And I give a whole presentation on this,

but it's the overprotective security guard.

And so, you know, when we were kids,

you know, whether it was,

hey, I don't wanna be the one not picked on kickball

or, you know, I don't wanna be the one

that's ostracized for saying something that, you know,

I believe or, you know, you're figuring out socially

who you wanna be, who your friends are,

what life is gonna be like, you know,

maybe you've got parents that were a certain way, right?

Whether they were helicopter parents,

whether they were, you know, super authoritative type,

maybe they were absentee

and you had to be the adult in the family.

This overprotective security guard

is always talking to us about how to make us comfortable

and how to make us safe.

And you go all the way back into human behavior

and go, why do we behave the way we do?

Why do we do things the way we do?

And the only way man has survived thousands of years

has been because we survive in tribes.

You know, if you're in a tribe

and you're all gathered around the campfire,

you're not gonna wanna get kicked out of that

because literally you could be, you know,

kicked out into the jungle and eaten by a wild animal

and not only you lose your own life,

but lose your, you know, your legacy, right?

Your offspring becoming part of a tribe

and staying within that tribe

literally was a point of life and death back in the day.

Well, now, right, it may have an emotional pain,

but it's not necessarily life or death,

but you know, you see somebody's willing to share

their opinion just between you and that person,

but you put them in a crowd

and they may have a strong belief they're not gonna voice

and that it really traces back to,

hey, I don't wanna rock the boat.

I don't wanna be seen by the quote unquote tribe

as being an outsider.

And so this voice that we have,

it's not really designed to make us successful.

It's not designed to push the envelope.

It's not designed to push us out of our comfort zone.

It's designed to keep us safe.

And then you can, you know, again,

maybe just hovering a little bit

on the religious side of things, right?

That we all have us in nature

and it doesn't matter what you take all the religions

of the world or all the philosophical views in the world.

You know, I think everybody knows

that human beings have a propensity to be selfish,

to do things in our own self-interest

that could be harmful to ourselves, to other people.

So I think that voice is in there too,

but as I've been studying this and learning this,

really there's a separation between those two voices,

three voices really, right?

That you're authentic self,

you've got this overprotective security guard in our brain

and then we have what I'm gonna call the sin nature

that says, hey, you know what?

You can get away with this

or just that selfishness really

that I think we all are born with

and well have to fight.

You know, Greg, ever since you told me

about the monster voice,

I started to really think about it a lot

and I started to think that, do we get that?

Does it overwhelm us when we have fatigue or stress

or maybe we're a little bit in isolation

or we're overwhelmed, we're financially pressured,

we're exhausted, we're unsupported

and that monster voice has a chance

to take over a little bit of our world.

Absolutely.

I was talking to a client yesterday

and he's involved in a family business.

He's got some frustrations

that his wife is sharing about the family dynamics

and it's a multi-store generational business.

So she's got pressuring him,

hey, you need to get your part of it, right?

That you do more than your brothers

that are involved in the business.

So you got a family dynamic,

you've got a business dynamic,

you've got a marital dynamic in there

and I'm sure that his monster is saying,

hey, I wanna keep the piece,

I don't wanna rock that boat.

What if I have this really tough conversation

with my dad and it doesn't go well, right?

What if I don't have that conversation

and now I'm at odds with my wife?

What if I have this conversation

and dad agrees and the wife agrees

but my brothers are now gonna push back

and think that there's favoritism.

So that monster is in there saying,

well, just let it go, just keep the status quo

and then what's happening,

it's eating him up inside,

that he's not speaking up.

So it can get really heavy.

Wow, you just described a huge issue

that goes on inside of family businesses every day.

Right, we do a lot of service advisor training

and it's not that a service advisor

doesn't know what to do all the time

but it's getting them to do it.

I always joke around at our company, right?

You know what, I forgot to properly introduce you

in the beginning, I'm embarrassed.

Greg Bunch, Transformers Institute

and the owner of Aspen Auto Clinics

and we've known each other for so many,

so many years, done so many episodes together.

So yes, this guy's the real deal.

All right, go ahead.

So I'm looking at my own business, right?

My six repair shops,

even though I feel like we do a pretty darn good job,

there's, you know, because I've got six locations,

there's approximately a million dollars a month of work

that doesn't get sold immediately, right?

And I think everybody knows, right,

that if you add 100% close ratio on every single thing,

everybody recommended, right?

We're gonna show up at your shop and say, show me, right?

That, you know, if you've got service advisors, right,

that we all look at our average written, you know,

it's $2,500, right?

If our service advisor closed 50% of that, right?

They're a rock star, $1,200.

You know, most general repair shops

aren't even at that level, right?

They're maybe $800, $900.

So all of that additional work that doesn't get sold,

what happens, right?

And I ask my coaching clients and ask the industry,

like, what do you do?

And people are like, well, you know, we got a CRM,

they get a follow-up email, they get a text message, maybe.

And a lot of people are literally just relying

that the customer is gonna remember it and come back.

You know what bothers the hell out of me?

I don't mean to interrupt you,

but I wrote this great blog about protocols.

And I said, you know, maybe it's possible

that you're not being able to install the processes

inside of your systems because you're in a little too deep.

Now, if you thought up top as a protocol,

what's the protocol for follow-up and follow-through?

What's the protocol?

And then you can design your processes under it.

My thought was that maybe we would get more done

or respect what those processes are

because, hey, we've got a protocol on QC.

What's the process underneath that

that actually makes it work?

Anyway, I didn't mean to bump into you,

but you're exactly right.

Well, so let's take this from the monster perspective, right?

Psychological, and I'll go into my other pillars

that you referenced earlier in the show here.

A million dollars of work that's not being sold, right?

If you go to your advisor and just say,

hey, why don't you jump on the phone, right?

Kind of have a slow day today.

You know, not a lot on the schedule tomorrow.

Why don't you call some of that decline work

and try and fill up the schedule?

Well, the reality is, and I'm sure shop owners

are gonna shake their head when I say this,

your service riders would probably rather

go clean the bathroom than go do that, okay?

They're gonna find every reason,

let me do a parts return, let me do an inventory check,

let me clean the bathroom.

So the question is, again, why aren't they doing that?

And to me, and the service advisors that I've talked to,

right, it goes back to that monster voice going,

well, you don't wanna bug people.

You don't wanna annoy people

because once in a while, you're gonna step on a landmine,

right?

You're gonna find out that they took it

to their uncle Sam, that you're gonna find out

that they don't believe the repair that was done,

that you charged more than the guy down the street.

And you get a few of those calls

and now your protective monster says,

well, don't do that again, that hurts.

Nobody likes to feel rejected, you just got rejected,

you got kicked out of the village, per se,

of your customer base.

Now realizing that 95% of those people

are gonna be thankful that you called

and got them rescheduled, but we've hone in on those people

that we had a negative experience with.

The other pillars that you were talking about,

and I can go as deep as we can,

I know we're gonna have a short amount of time here together

for how deep this can really go.

But as I did a study, I was inspired by a book

and really took that on and really studied

the book of Proverbs.

And again, not trying to get religious,

but there's a lot of wisdom that is packed into Proverbs.

And so part of the premise of the book

is this guy had told his friend

that had been fired from like nine different jobs

and was really struggling with his career to say,

you know what, read the book of Proverbs for two years,

there's 31 Proverbs, you read one a day,

and you just work on applying those principles to your life,

you'll see that within a couple of years,

your life is gonna look differently.

And he tells the story that took him probably about a year

to really turn things around in his life,

and the guy's a successful multi-millionaire business owner

now.

And so, and I had been doing that already where,

and I'd gone through seasons of life

for kind of reading through those and like,

okay, there's some cool stuff in here,

but digging deeper and going,

okay, what do these words really mean?

So there were four words that really stood out,

and that was wisdom, knowledge, understanding,

and diligence.

It's peppered throughout the all 31 Proverbs.

So I'm like, okay, what does that really mean?

And I added one from a class I took back in my early 20s,

even before I owned any kind of business,

and that was when they said,

when you're reading something and it says righteous,

think of the word right choices, right?

So I added that pillar in there too.

As I was studying this and going, okay,

wisdom is really, you know,

knowing what that right decision is.

So, you know, Dave Ramsey talks about this

on his radio show, right?

I provide wisdom, you know,

the same thing that your grandmother would have told you.

I think we all know wise principles when it comes to money,

and that is don't spend as much as you make,

save for a rainy day.

Like we all know that's good wisdom.

And so then we have knowledge, right?

So knowledge would be, okay, how much do I make?

How much are my bills?

What can I do?

You know, how much do I need to invest?

Where can I put an investment, right?

So that's the knowledge component.

So somebody could know that and still not do it.

And then understanding is, okay,

you know, what are the interest rates that I can get?

What is the risk level of those investments?

You know, understanding how money flows

in and out of their budget or, you know,

household or within their business.

Now the key comes up is diligence.

Diligence is that guy that doesn't care how you feel.

And if you read the book, Atomic Habits,

that's really what it's about.

Like, diligence is doing what you know

that needs to be done whether you feel like it or not.

And then right choices would be,

hey, I'm not gonna do something immoral,

illegal to generate money, right?

I'm gonna do it in an honest ethical way.

It's not gonna violate my core values.

And so as I looked at these five different pillars

that come out of there and studying

what each of those words mean,

one of the things that gets brought up in my coaching calls

as we're talking about this is,

man, the one I struggle with the most is diligence.

And I'm like, so that goes back

to that component of human behavior.

If we know the right thing to do,

we understand the numbers, we understand our financials,

we understand money coming in and out.

Why do we not diligently save money?

Why do we make impulse purchases?

Why do we not do those things that we know what to do?

Why do we hold onto that employee that is on our payroll

that really isn't earning their keep, right?

All those components go into diligence.

And so that's where that study goes,

okay, there's gotta be something holding us back

as human beings from doing what we know needs to be done.

And that's where I came up with this concept

of the monster, right?

This overprotective security guard.

If you remember the movie The Village by Midnight Shalaman.

Oh, right, yeah.

I'd seen that movie a couple of times

and it really didn't hit me

until I started putting this together.

And if you remember the monsters,

and maybe people wanna go back and watch that movie now,

but those monsters, they weren't there to kill people.

They were that overprotective security guard.

The elders of that village believe

that if we scare people,

we'll keep them in our little safe village, right?

They won't go outside and find out

there's a whole nother dangerous world out there,

but they were using this fear tactic

that if you go beyond the fence,

these monsters are gonna eat you, they're gonna kill you.

So I kind of look at that same kind of a monster.

That's what's in our head.

Like, hey, Karm, you don't wanna go do this or that, right?

What if people don't like it?

What if you get rejected?

What if it takes more time?

What if it means you gotta get up earlier in the morning?

Whatever that might be

that have an uncomfortable conversation.

Showing up when it's hard.

And so you have to figure out a way

and there's different protocols

to kind of overcome that voice, right?

Of saying, and one of the tools is

literally you take five seconds,

you shut down that voice.

Like, I know this is the right thing to do.

I may not feel like it, but I'm gonna do it anyway.

And so really where I looked at,

and then I've read a lot of leadership books.

I've read a lot of business books and self-help books

and podcasts and all that.

And I go, every one of them I've ever listened to

all tie back to one of these five pillars, right?

Atomic habits is about diligence.

From good to great is all about wisdom

and knowledge and understanding, right?

That you tie it back and go,

man, there's just so much to unpack there.

What's the enemy of our success, right?

It's usually not an external force.

It's an internal voice

that's holding us back from our true potential.

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Greg, it's amazing as I'm sitting here listening to you

to discuss diligence.

And I think of examples like

we've got to follow the processes every time.

We have to perform complete inspections.

We have to train and educate

when we don't want to and when we're tired.

We have to have those hard conversations.

And if we can do that

and respect that the monster is not talking to us

but we have to be strong in our diligence,

we're gonna have a lot of success.

I think it's also gonna build our reputation

not only as a business but as a leader.

Absolutely.

And you think about consistency in a shop, right?

A lot of shops, the success

or whether they have a good day or bad day

is truly based on the mood of the owner,

the manager, the service advisor, the technician, right?

You just pencil-whipped an inspection.

So old school started out on paper.

I know we all have probably everybody has DVIs now.

So I'm the service advisor

and Karm's kind of that senior tech, grumpy guy

but does good work but you pencil-whipped an inspection

and I know it.

So the monster is gonna say,

you know what, just leave Karm alone,

he's having a bad day.

I don't wanna have that confrontation.

But what does that do?

Cascade that all the way through the customer experience.

I don't confront you.

So I just, you know,

write up the few little things that you wrote down.

I talk about those things with a customer

and now that car is on the road,

there's a breakdown,

there's something, the deferred maintenance,

the cost of further issue.

Now that customer is back upset at us

and it all ties back to my unwillingness

to have a tough conversation with that master technician

and say, we have a protocol here, right?

Every single car gets inspected every single time.

There are no shortcuts.

I need this thing done correctly.

Even if that, you know,

you're gonna bite my head off, right?

Like, it doesn't matter.

We have a system and a process to follow in my shop.

It doesn't matter what mood you're in.

Doesn't matter that you don't feel like it.

Doesn't matter that you gotta pull that car back in

and do the job right.

If that system is not followed

because it's based on somebody's mood,

the customer suffers from that.

The business suffers from that.

Yeah, I'm just thinking here.

Here's this guy Karm over in the shop

who failed to do it completely right.

And I'm, if you will, a shop manager knowing this

and thinking of what goes on inside of my mind

is what kind of conversation can I,

should I have with Karm, legacy guy, he knows better.

And I think part of us overthinking what we should do

prevents us from doing it a lot of times.

Absolutely.

Well, if you think about it, right?

What does a service advisor really get paid for?

They get paid to properly communicate.

Be the client advocate.

So if you are the client advocate,

you know you've got to get this person on your side.

The inspection, okay, it's about safety reliability

and it's about trust.

We can't miss stuff even though they may not be happy

that they may have to have it done.

But today in our whole professional world,

the DVI, the comprehensive inspection

of safety inspection on that vehicle

is it was brilliant when it was discovered.

And I think we looked at it as a toy,

but it's part of our professionalism.

Karm, have you ever driven a like performance car

like on a track with a instructor

or anything like that in your life?

I could have, but I didn't.

Okay.

Well, it's an interesting experience.

So I've got an older 2002, 911 and took it to the track.

I'm not like racing people, right?

But it was like a Porsche event

and they put a driving instructor in the car with you.

And so, you know, you get warmed up, you go around the track

and we all have like this internal gut

of when we hit the brakes,

how fast we can take that corner.

Now the instructor that knows another level

is saying, okay, hold off, hold off, hold off, now break,

right, or push, push, push through that corner.

And what I found is my car outperformed my gut feeling,

meaning that that car could outperform

where my level of safety and comfort was.

And I wouldn't have pushed it

if I didn't have that person sitting next to me,

knowing my car better,

knowing how to drive on a track like that

and getting more out of that car and out of me.

But what I had to do is push past my fear

that I'm gonna roll the car, spin out of control,

gonna not be able to break fast enough, right?

So we take that analogy and we put it on the sales counter

of a lot of service advisors will only talk to a customer,

confront that technician up to that level

where that nod in their stomach is telling them

that that's far enough.

But true success comes from pushing past that,

having that tough conversation.

Again, whether you're a shop owner with your employees,

with a vendor, with a customer,

being able to push past that fear,

that monster that says, hey,

if you have this tough conversation,

maybe that person isn't gonna like you.

Maybe they quit on you.

Maybe they bad mouth you, whatever that is.

But is it the right thing to do?

Is it the wise thing to do?

Do you understand the consequences of not doing it?

Well, then that means you push past that nod in your stomach

and you have that conversation.

And believe me, I don't have this mastered either.

I'm not perfect at it.

There's conversations that I need to be having

that I've been putting off

because the monster says that's gonna hurt.

That's gonna potentially have a negative effect short-term.

But the other voice says,

but Greg, it's the right thing to do.

It needs to happen.

You've got to address this behavior.

So powerful.

Hey, I just want to remind everyone,

we're here coffee with Carmen, a coach.

We're with Greg Bunch from the Transformers Institute.

Appreciate you being here.

And the CEO of Aspen Autoclinic Six shops

out there in Colorado.

This has been brilliant so far.

I think you're motivating our listener

to dig down deep inside and find,

we talk about leadership all the time,

but I think this is almost,

I don't know if it's hovering over leadership,

if it's supporting, it's the foundation,

but there's so much here.

Please do a personal reflection on all of Greg's points

and say, hey, I am and I'm not.

And if you're not,

figure out how to get better at these levels, these pillars.

Another one that I run into with shop owners

is if they don't want to look at their KPIs,

if they're, no, they're not good.

They don't want to look at their profit loss statement

if it's not good.

So, but you can't manage what you don't measure.

And I believe me, I've done it too.

Like, oh man, this was not a great month.

You open up your QuickBooks

or your bookkeeper sends you the report.

You're like, okay, here we go.

But I don't want to look, right?

And that head in the sand type mentality.

And there's another part of Proverbs

where, you know, King Solomon writes,

you know, know the condition of your flocks.

That's where you're, you know, the wool from your sheep,

you know, that's what they make the clothing,

the food and all that.

It's a call no matter what position we have in life.

Like we have to know, right?

And that's that knowledge.

Like, do I really know what's going on?

Or do I put my head in the sand and I'll,

as long as I don't know, it's not going to hurt me.

So there's where knowledge says, I'm sorry,

I don't mean to get unemotional on you,

but you need to know what's really going on.

When you and I were talking,

you said something to me, I wrote down,

you said business is an emotional math problem.

I wish I was the one that said that,

but I, I read that somewhere, I'm let,

that was like a big light bulb that went off, right?

That everything in the business has emotions tied to it.

The emotions of our customers,

the emotion of our employees, our emotions,

when really, like you said, it's like a,

it's a math problem, right?

So that's where knowledge and understanding come in,

and go, hey, I know you may feel emotion for this employee,

but they're not pulling their weight or whatever that might be.

And, you know, are you making a business decision?

Are you making an emotional decision?

And if you confront that,

and you ask yourself that question,

and some people will literally say, Greg,

I know I'm making an emotional decision.

This guy's been with me 25 years.

He worked for my dad before I took over the business.

I am willing to take a hit on my numbers

because of the emotional attachment I have to this employee.

What am I gonna say to that?

They own it.

They're putting that relationship above, right?

Their profit margin, that's their choice.

They're the business owner.

But my job as a coach is to get them to look in the mirror,

be able to voice that and admit that,

and then understand now I own the consequences

of that decision.

Someone either on a previous episode

or somewhere I read this or heard this,

fast nickels, slow dimes.

And when I was thinking of the issue that we had

with the disgruntled Karm in the bays

who didn't do a complete job,

he was going for fast nickels,

and my job is for slow dimes.

That would have motivated me knowing

that we can't do things fast

because the fast nickels could have lost that customer.

And we have to do things proper and right

so slow dimes gets us

where we ultimately, long-term strategically,

always wanna be with our clients.

Anyway, you just made me think of that.

No, no, that's good.

And I remember getting a little bit more psychology here

when I was a technician, cars that come in and out,

they become a piece of machinery that you're looking at.

And so when I had the opportunity to meet the family

that was gonna be in that vehicle

or the driver of that vehicle,

be able to look them in the eye, shake their hand,

it did something to me as a technician to go,

you know what, I just met that guy.

I just looked him in the eyes, I shook his hand,

told him he's gonna be in good hands.

I need to do a much better job.

I need to be even more thorough.

It put a human element into that vehicle

that you're driving knowing that,

hey, your mom's in the hospital, two states away,

you're gonna be driving it.

I better make sure this thing is just perfect.

And so the technicians, we have to talk about that.

There's a human element

that these are not just a piece of machinery.

These are people rely on us

to make sure that their transportation is safe.

And so that nickel guy,

how could we have maybe changed that, right?

Understand who drives that car,

maybe even if they're waiting in the waiting room,

bring them back, show them, introduce them.

And that may reframe that guy

trying to just get through the day

and pencil whip something to go,

you know what, I do need to slow down.

I need to do this job correctly for that person.

Greg, let's jump in to wisdom.

Wisdom.

So where I started with this garment,

I'll have to send you a picture there.

I don't know if you can put it on this,

but I went on to Amazon and I bought a costume.

I think it was a Moses costume, right?

I was looking for that robe

and then a long gray beard and gray hair.

And so I was at the mastermind meeting

and we were on a break.

Nobody knew what was going on.

So here I come from the back of the room up on stage.

You know, people are snickering,

like what the heck is going on?

And then I read this monologue

as if I'm father wisdom, right?

Personified this character and talk about, you know,

that the more we tap into wisdom

and people have to define really what wisdom is

and what that looks like.

So, but I define like, you know, if you listen to me

and I'm here, I'm available,

there's a lot of different places to gather wisdom,

but the first step in this is wisdom.

And so Proverbs again says there's wisdom

and a multitude of counselors.

So one of the reasons we have our mastermind groups

is there's wisdom.

We had a shop owner that was about to buy a gas station

that has a repair shop that the tanks are 39 years old.

Well, in the state of Colorado,

they're mandatory pulled and replaced at 40 years.

Well, obviously the guy knew that

while he was trying to sell it.

And so the wisdom in the room said,

hey, this is not a good idea.

Here's what's going on, right?

And if they get into those tanks

and then they find there's a leak, right?

You're now on the hook for all of that.

So wisdom in the multitude of counselors

and whether that's, you know, hey, a marketing campaign,

a, you know, a pay plan change,

a buying another building or, you know,

buying and doing an acquisition, right?

So there's a lot of wisdom out there.

And, you know, I think Jim Rohn said it,

you become the five people you surround yourself with

and the five books that you read.

What that principle is about wisdom,

who are you listening to?

The guys that don't have any money in savings

and spend it all on beer and pizza on Fridays

or the people that are building success and longterm.

You've got to find out what your source of wisdom is

and tap into that and listen to it.

And then we have knowledge.

CPA is the one that gives us our knowledge, right?

That doesn't hold back to say you're making money,

you're losing money, hear your margins, your KPIs.

Their knowledge is really unemotional.

It's either this is the facts and this is the truth,

whether you like it or not.

So how willing are we to listen to that voice of knowledge

and go, this is where I'm really at in life?

Knowledge in my mind is learned and earned.

Absolutely.

And so is wisdom, right?

That there's an element of,

I used to teach my kids this, right?

That smart people learn from their own mistakes.

Wise people learn from other people's mistakes.

Years ago, as I kept going to

more and more training and being involved in

masterminds and associations,

and then all of my selling the business

and then working for corporate America,

I started to realize that I was a perpetual student.

Those two words just flowed out of my mouth.

I own them words, I think, and I speak about that a lot.

As a leader of any organism,

an individual who's picked the role in the shop,

you have to be a perpetual student.

How they look at the opportunities that they have

as clients and what should be fixed

and what shouldn't be fixed.

They're out there gaining knowledge

and you have to learn how that adapts

and how you end up building that relationship

to not be a perpetual student in today's life

and or in this professional industry of ours is wrong.

And it's truly dangerous for our careers.

So we've probably both talked to people

that said, I don't want anything to do with AI, right?

It's the antichrist or whatever.

Well, you better have a knowledge of what AI is now,

where it's going and how it's going to affect our industry,

right? That's you can't put your head in the sand

and expect to survive if you don't know what's happening

regarding AI and what it's going to do on an industry.

You've had them on the show before.

We've done episodes on AI.

We have a marketing perspective on, you know, instead of SEO,

it's AEO, but we also,

I'm getting ready to do an episode with Chris Cloutier.

I mean, this guy's deep in AI.

He's told me a book to read that I read on it

and I fell in love with what AI is today,

where it came from, what it is today and where it's going

and how it can help you.

So yeah, we can't ignore it to your point.

So you've had him on our, you know,

he's a friend of our network here, right?

Brian Sump spent on your show before.

And so yeah, so he was in the room.

We're talking about knowledge, right?

Let's get real personal here.

He was at some kind of a conference or something

and they had this, you know, as a husband,

how would your wife rate you from one to 10, right?

One, you're a piece of crap.

10, you're Prince Charming, the best thing in the world.

So the speaker challenged everybody,

text your wife right now and get what that number is.

You talk about knowledge, not wanting to know,

like, who is brave enough to do that?

Brian Sump was brave enough to do that, right?

And I think the number came back at a seven,

which is, I think, pretty darn good.

And then he had a conversation with his wife,

okay, what do I need to do to make that an eight or nine?

So that's taking wisdom.

Don't get shocked if your relationship's not where it is.

Knowledge is your wife's really telling you

where things are at.

And then understanding is understanding

what do I need to do, right?

And if that means, you know, for my wife and I,

that I stopped working at six o'clock at night,

even though I could work till midnight,

I need to cap it off, right?

That becomes that time.

Wisdom, knowledge, understanding, diligence says,

okay, it's six o'clock.

I know that Karm wants to talk,

but let's postpone that till tomorrow, right?

Like, honor that commitment diligently.

And maybe there's room for, you know, once in a while

that, you know, hey, there's just an exception to the role.

But right now, that number can go up.

Tying all of those things together

for improving your relationship and improving your business.

Okay, so a great episode.

But what we have to do right now

is to challenge every listener, male, female,

whatever job it is in the industry,

to go out and get rated.

Go ask one to 10, ask your employees, ask your peers,

ask your significant other, ask your family,

and collect those pieces of data

and find out what your maybe,

maybe averages at work, averages at home.

And I love what Brian said, what can I do to go from seven,

maybe to eight, honey, I know I'm not perfect,

but what do I have to do?

And, you know, I think that, well, what a learning curve.

You can't let your ego get in the way.

And that's the monster I don't want to face out.

And so, you know, asking our employees,

I've got another client that recently did

an anonymous survey, right, SurveyMonkey

or something like that,

and that promoter score internal for his employees, right?

And learned a lot of very valuable information, right?

I think I'm the best employer in the world.

Well, 30% of my team doesn't, why not?

And it's not always pay, right?

It's whatever, hey, I want it, you know,

you told me we were gonna get more education

when I came to work here or work environment

or whatever that might be.

We can't fix things if we don't have those numbers, right?

Sending out a survey to our customers.

I'm, you know, we just had our mastermind meeting

a couple of weeks ago and we sent out a survey

and it's like, okay, let's find out what people said.

Now, me, I really didn't want to do it

because I'm like, no, it was a great meeting.

Everybody's happy.

Well, I think everybody was, but there was a few that like,

okay, there's some good points that we need to listen to.

You and I both do industry events and speaking

and there's always those surveys and human nature is,

we're gonna gravitate towards the negative ones,

but we need to know what they are.

We need to look at, you know, is that just an outlier

or did I really say, um, way too many times

or did I not respect, I got in trouble one time

and I made an inappropriate crack about, you know,

that a shop was full of ex-cons or something like that

where, you know, that, you know,

people have people's perception of a shop

and I had a gentleman come up

and I sincerely apologized.

It wasn't part of my script, but like, you know,

he was an ex-con and he had some of the work for him,

but he's like, look, we all turned our lives around, right?

It was 20 years ago, we made some mistakes, like,

and I'm like, you know what,

that was absolutely wrong of me to go down that road.

Learned a lesson from that.

Greg, listen, it's happened to me.

I've been there and I've done that.

Felt so ashamed, if you will, after I apologized

and I said, you ass, I just kept being down on myself,

but it didn't stop me, okay?

It honed my skills, if you will,

it honed my better judgment.

It honed my, if you will, impromptu-ness of,

you just thought it, it doesn't mean you have to say it.

Moment, right?

And part of what I think has helped me

over the last three years

is when we formed our Toastmasters group,

Remarkable Results Toastmasters,

and it makes you value the words that come out of you

if they're important and if they're not

and how you can speak

and a lot of times in Toastmasters,

it's not what you say, but it's how you say it.

My dad used to say that all the time.

You can tell somebody you'd go to hell

and they punch you in the face

or they high-five you and laugh.

It's a lot of how you say it.

Hey, thanks for letting me know where I gotta go.

I know, oh my God.

And again, this sounds like Pastor Greg here speaking.

I don't mean it to be that way,

but again, a proverb, power, life and death

are in the power of the tongue, right?

So our words have power

and the words that we speak

and the words we don't speak.

This is a perfect end, what you just said.

And I know you could go on for two hours

and dive really deep in this.

Do you give this class when you're out at conferences?

Not yet.

So I have, for my internal Transformers group,

I created this notebook with a dialogue.

And so when I came out on stage,

I read and I didn't memorize it

because it was like a page and a half

where I'm that character.

And then I had Doris, who's on my team.

So I think she was knowledge.

I had Seth Thorson, who was understanding.

I had Fernando, who's on my team, was right choices

and whom I'm missing, diligence.

I had somebody else stand up and do diligence, right?

So we all read our parts

and then as we went through it, we made notes.

Okay, what came out of that?

What spoke to you?

And then on the last Mastermind group,

I actually, even though I bought a monster mask,

I was going to do the monologue as the monster,

but I created an AI monster

with the creepy background music and everything

and the character.

So I started with the monster dialogue

and then we went into a group discussion

on listening to our monster.

What's he saying to us?

Where is that monster voice holding us back

from being more successful in our life?

And where did that programming come from?

And going back and understanding, you know, as kids,

you know, like I said earlier,

the kids that, you know, the parents were kids themselves

or weren't there, those kids had to grow up fast.

And a lot of those turned into

what we now do is our control freaks,

which can be, you can leverage that for success,

that, you know, there's an element of being in control

that brings business success and life success,

but it can also go too far and stunt your growth.

That the people please are right,

that, hey, I wasn't accepted in my social circle.

Maybe I wasn't accepted very well in my family

and I knew that I had to walk on eggshells

and just be agreeable to everybody.

Well, great, you know, that can be great

to a certain extent for bringing on employees

and being a good service writer and all that,

but it can be detrimental when you're putting that ahead

of what's right for the business,

what's right for that customer, you know,

whether it's asking for that money,

asking for that sale, letting that employee go,

that shouldn't be there.

So you've got these strengths and weaknesses

that are all birthed out of our childhood experiences

and you're never going to silence the monster,

but you got to put them in its place

and say, what am I really listening to?

Am I listening to this overprotective security guard?

You know, again, that you could use

a Scooby-Doo analogy too, right?

That there was always this monster that was scary

and really what it was is you pull the mask off

and it's just some guy trying to protect his comfort zone.

I'm going to encourage you to create this

and take this on the road.

And I think the title of it is silence the monster.

And I think people, you know,

and once you put your subtitle below that,

I think you'll pack the class

because every single one of us knows that we have

this alter ego sometimes not good.

The monster side that gets in our way

of being super successful,

I think you could pack the classes all the time.

And I got to go back to the monster mask

and that whole thing, you know,

I've given my keynote on the rise of the specialist

a bunch of times, a bunch of times,

dozen 14, 15 times in the last year and a half.

And probably half of them might come out

in a chef's jacket.

And it's kind of, if you will, a uniform

because the whole concept of this thing came out

from the professionalism of the food industry

and what respect chefs have.

And then you think about what we look like in our industry

to take the chef's jacket off

and they usually have another kind of uniform under that.

I don't want to give away the whole premise

of what the keynote's about,

but I encourage you silence the monster.

What a great seminar that would be.

Thank you so much, Greg Bunch.

Transformers Institute, how do they get a whole of you?

TransformersInstitute.com, got our phone number,

got my email on there, fill out a form,

let us know how we can definitely help.

And whether that's service advisor training,

mastermind group, we have online training,

we have online groups, we have in-person groups,

you name it, you know, somebody's got, you know,

if they're from $800,000 and they want to grow

and we've got programs that help people grow multi-store,

we help multi-store owners, we've got, you know,

clients that are doing over $20 million in sales

and, you know, helping them build their leadership team,

train their leadership team, whether it's, you know,

shop foreman, store managers, COOs, director of operations.

In fact, you know, the COO group is heading down to Texas

to be with one of our multi-store shops down there

and learn from each other.

So we got, you know, really the only thing

that we don't work on is the technical training.

There's plenty of great people out there

and great companies doing that,

but everything else we cover to help a shop owner

and their team be successful.

Well, thank you so much for being here with me,

coffee with Karm and a coach.

Thanks, Greg.

Thanks for being on board to listen and learn

from the Premier Automotive Repair Business Podcast,

Remarkable Results Radio.

Get your episodic education on the ARPN listening app

at automotiverepairpodcastnetwork.com.

Also enjoy the podcast

on our Karm Capriato YouTube channel.

Karm is all for advancing

the professional automotive service industry

until next time.

The “Monster” in Your Head Is Costing Your Shop Money [RR 1086]

About this episode

NAPA Autocare

NAP Autocare Apprentice Program

NAPATRACS.com

Aspen Auto Clinics

service advisors

CRM

protocol

QC

inventory check

technician shortage

McNeill's Auto Care

structured training

Napa Auto Tech

ASE certifications

Department of Labor

billable hours

Carlisle tools

cost of tools

shop management system

Napa Tracks

post-sale support

deferred maintenance

Transformers Institute

piece of machinery

human element

underground fuel tank replacement (Colorado requirement)

CPA

margins

KPIs

SurveyMonkey

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