The New Era of Automotive Diagnostics with Codey Taggart, Part 2
The Jaded Mechanic Podcast · May 28, 2024
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And especially when all the other shops you've worked at are equally bad, you get to a point where, to go back to what you were saying earlier about, you know, people who've been in the industry for 10, 15, 20 years, and they've seen the same thing over and over again. At some point, they either stop where they're at and they just stay there forever, or they leave the industry. That's Cody Taggart on this episode of the Jada Mechanic podcast. Thanks for listening and downloading this episode. This is part two of a conversation that Cody and Jeff had that started last week. So if you missed the episode, be sure to listen to that podcast as we'll pick up right where they left off on this week's episode of the jaded Mechanic podcast.
What I learned is, when I walk through a shop, I can still remember this from the last dealer. When I walk through and everybody stops and looks at you, that's a red flag.
Yeah, I've got that. And they're already dying for hours. They can't even believe that they're hiring another mechanic or thinking about hiring a mechanic. I've been the guy who looks at the new guy walking through before, like, what the fuck is this? Like, we're already only turning 30, 35 hours a week. Do they think it's gonna get better because they bring somebody else in, and they do think it's gonna get better. They think that that's gonna give them the opportunity to. When we have three appointments that we got to turn down that day or three phone calls we got to turn down now we got another mechanic, we can bring those in, and they'll get done.
And those three. Those three phone calls appointments probably weren't even worth shit.
Yeah.
And I know how many times you've probably been done it, too, where you're the new hire, and then within two weeks, somebody got terminated. Mm hmm. Right. I hate that because for the. And when it starts to see it become a pattern every time, then I will see somebody higher. I'm like, am I?
It's. And I'm sure. I'm sure you've been in the same position as me, where you were the guy with the bad attitude, because you were the guy who spoke up for yourself. And they don't want people to speak up for themselves. They want somebody who's going to toe the line and just do what they say. I've been let go from a couple shops for that. It had nothing to do with my abilities. It was all because of the attitude and because of the, the shit that I stirred, whether it be with other mechanics, getting them on, not on my side, but getting them like, hey, you know, yeah, this is bullshit, you know, I don't want to deal with this either type of thing or battling with them because I'm fixing their comebacks because I'm just fed up with, hey, you got paid 4 hours for this.
I got to do it for free because you effed it up, you know.
Or you, you got. That was the thing that always drove.
Me, or battling with management over it.
And check engine light drivability, diag. I always hated not to do it, but I hated because it was like, you got the upsell off of it, right? So, way back in the day, Chrysler come in an EGR valve, right? EGR was common, common, common, common. And you. So you did the EGR under warranty, and you sold them fuel system cleaning. Right. It had that mileage on it. Right. There's some, there's some carbon buildup.
There's some passageway. I'm not saying that the EGR or the carbon cleaning was going to fix the car, right. The EGR is what fixed the car. But the EGR valve gave us an opportunity to upsell, and now other people, maybe from, from a business standpoint, don't agree with that. That's fine. It was what we were trained to do. What was we're encouraged to do. The people that did it certainly did better than those that didn't.
That's why we did it. I'm not making excuses. It was what it was. Well, that's all finding good until the guy that it comes in without a code. Then it's just a complaint, and they unload the parts, cannon at it. Mm hmm. It comes back, and the guy that can do drive ability catches that. It's like, hey, EGR stuck.
Didn't give an egr. Well, then, guess what? I get the warranty. Time to put on all that other upsell they still got to keep. That was my rub. Worry on a comeback was. It's like, and, well, we paid you straight. Time for your comeback. Cool, cool story, bro.
He got 2 hours to do a fuel system cleaning that I can't sell. This customer not faulting him because he sold it, ida sold it to. But he got 2 hours that I can't get, and I'm still back on the car. That was the whole thing for comebacks with me is it's like, no, I want the whole ticket that he got or she got. Don't just give me what it is. To fix the car. I want the whole damn ticket. Because that's how you learn.
I can't give that to that tech.
Yeah.
You know, it seems so simple, right, Cody, when you say it out loud, but it's like, you know, people in leadership and management are listening, is going, what? That can never work. You're right.
Supposed to work.
That's not point. Yeah, that's.
That's. As you said, that's their incentive. Stop giving it to that guy because that's the position you're gonna put yourself in. It's going to cost you money, and it needs to cost them money, or they're gonna keep on doing it. And that's the thing. It doesn't cost them money because it's the. I'll get you on the next one. Don't worry.
We'll take care of you. Don't worry. We'll get you paid. No, you won't.
I had so many when I left jobs, they had so many say to me, I never had one say, you couldn't fix the car. They would say to me, your attitude is just, we can't. We can't handle it. And what I saw, what they meant was like, yeah, you're a threat to what we're trying to do here because you get everybody talking.
Yeah.
You get everybody thinking. And it wasn't always an intentional thing. It was just like I had that I don't give an f. Attitude if it got to that point. And then it's like, what do we do with him? Because it's not that he's going around telling everybody, I was just like you said earlier, I wasn't going around everybody going, hey, we need to start a revolt. But it was the situation of, they saw me, and it's like, I'm. No, I'm not doing his comeback. The keys can sit in the tower.
I'll sit on my frigging bench. And then when they saw me do it, and they go, he did it. And they didn't fire him.
Yeah. A lot of people just didn't even realize it was an option.
Then the next guy does it, and the next guy does it, and it's. So that's why even probably when I'm done wrenching, I'll still be people. I'll be still having that influence on people. And I, you know, it puts me in a. I know there's people that I have my detractors. I know there's people in the groups that don't agree with me. It's. It's fine.
I'm not advocating for the shop owners. Right. I want them to be successful, but I'm trying to make the technicians understand what they really are. You're the product that they're selling. It comes with a certain level of respect and expertise and professionalism that we have to bring ourselves up to. But you have to then demand that you're treated a certain way, conduct yourself a certain way and expect to be treated a certain way. If you conduct yourself a certain way and you're not getting treated that way, don't stay there. Demand better.
That's what it, that's the only way this thing changes.
Yeah.
So I had lots of people, they're like, God, your attitude sucks. You're so talented. Why is your attitude so. Because if I'm so friggin talented, it shouldn't still keep happening to me or to us the way it is. Yeah, give me the reason why it happens and let's work towards it not happening. And they couldn't do it. They couldn't put the processes in to stop it. You know, I get a kid, the guy that, you know, shirts his comeback, but he's busy.
I don't care, I don't care.
It's come back. But he already tried three times and couldn't fix it. Why is he always getting three times?
Why is he always busy? You know, I'm always busy fixing something else. Yeah, what's that guy that didn't fix it? Always busy.
And here's another one too that you haven't mentioned. This is one who used to get me at a couple places I worked. It. It was probably the worst thing that anybody's ever done to me. Um, or very, very close to the. One of the worst things is when they find out you can diag drivability and you start getting, they, they take your advice. The last thing you were saying, they stopped giving it to everybody else. Now you've got a backlog of drivability issues.
It's going to take you a week to get through, you know, and you're now turning 2020 5 hours a week, working through all this diagnosis that should be selling more diag on some of these jobs, and they won't. So not only are you getting screwed on that, and then they're coming after you about your productivity is low after that. But on top of all that, I just diag this car. It needed, you know, it needed an EGR valve or it needed, you know, some of the older ones we used to see, you know, the, the idle air control valve on, you know, a lot of, a lot of different stuff. We used to see idling, choppy, surgy, idle and stuff like that. We don't see that too much anymore, but you see those type of things, you know, easy diags and whatnot. But then you, you know, you look over the car and it needs brakes and it needs a tie rod, and guess what? You've got a stack of ten work orders over there that you got to get through. So, hey, we're going to give all this gravy work to so and so and this other guy because they're slow today, they've got time.
And you've got ten cars to work on today that you got to get diag. So we're going to give all the actual work that you're going to make money on to these other guys. So now I'm already screwed on a diag, I'm already having a bad day, and you're giving away all of my money basically to somebody else. It's work I still have to do if I want to make the money. But I'm more than willing to do that work instead of doing more diag. I love diagnostic work. It's my favorite thing on the planet. But if you're not going to pay me for it, if I'm salary, all the diag in the world line it up around the block.
If I'm salary, I will come in and I will just knock that shit out all day long. But I never was. I made that argument at several places I worked. If this is what I'm gonna do, I need to be hourly or salary. That's just all there is to it, or I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop doing it.
I was.
And by stop doing it, it meant go somewhere else, because they were still giving it to me no matter what.
So I was so fed up with the processes in the shop, and I was so fed up with always the monthly meeting, talking about comebacks, and we all knew, and it was just like, you know, I've said it before, my friend and I, we just skipped the meetings. We stopped going because it was so counterproductive to our mental health. But it was the same thing. I would go in, in the morning, and if it was like the first thing, that automated dispatch to me was like a tire job and a brake job, I go back to the tower because we was an automated dispatch, but we still had a dispatch tower girl and go, do you want to give me drivability? Just because, like, I might as well fix it? Now, instead of having to fix it when it comes back. And I knew that that tire job and that pre sole brake job was probably a way, like, the efficiency was better. There's probably an opportunity for an upsell, but it's like, give me the drivability, because I was so sick of watching it leave and have to come back, me have to fix it. So I was just trying for less.
Money, this, when you, when it comes back the second time, I was just.
Trying to circumvent the situation and like, hey, let's bring up the CSI. I would do that. And then it was like, but the guy over there, at the end of the day, when he had no work, they give him some of mine, because that's like, you know, you were familiar Chrysler. You could do wiring and drivability all day long and not run out of work. Other work that was on the car is eventually you run out of it. You could always be fixing transmissions in limp. You could always be fixing cars. Won't start, always be fixing, check engine.
You never ran out of it sucked, because at the end of it, you'd like you said, okay, you want a steady diet of that, mister? Here you go, 7309. Number one thing is dispatch drivability. Here you go. And then at the end of it, you get 45 hours at the end of the week because I got a lot of straight time on a lot of my warranty for diag. I was good that way. But the guy over there that couldn't solve anything, couldn't fix the sandwich. He got 60 because it was like. And I'm just like, okay, this is not fair.
This is not how it should go. And that's even when we step out of the dealership scenarios that we talk about. We talk about independent shops. You got to understand, your, your problem solver makes it available for you to be able to sell all the other work on the car. If you don't have the problem solver, I don't care how good an investor inspection you do. I don't care about your 300% rule. If you don't have somebody on the property that can solve the problem, you don't get the work to sell. And it's like, people go, okay, well, then we don't.
We don't book drive a billion, all right?
See how long that lasts.
See how long that lasts. Look at the kind of cars, the problems that the cars are having now. You know, a lot of it is warning lights. A lot of it is, you know, cars, won't we see them look at the cars when they're on the side of the road. There's just as many now they're on the side of the road with the hood up as they are with the tie rod snapped off and it's waiting for a tow truck. Yeah, anybody can put the tie rod on, but the one that's got the hood up, hypothetically. Not everybody's going to be able to get to the root of that. Why it don't run.
Yeah, your diagnostic tech is always going to be your marketing crew. I mean, that's. Your reputation revolves around that diagnostic tech, or at least having multiple techs of a certain level of competency. When you are that shop that has a bunch of guys who just shotgun parts of stuff, you're the guy. You're the shop with the 3.8 star rating on Google because you get so many one star Google reviews, because you don't fix so many people's vehicles, because you literally have a 50% chance of fixing somebody's car when it comes to you. And one of the best things about me opening my shop, where I, where I'm at, is most of the shops around me are like that. It's. I mean, there are some really good mechanics at some of the shops, but if it's a shop for eight mechanics, they've got one, maybe they've got two halfway decent mechanics.
You know, the rest of it is just people, you know, some people who are parts changers, some people who shouldn't even be working on cars at all. Um, it's just, it's. It's bad. Yeah, the, the diagnostic tech. I mean, in this day and age, there's, there's way too much drivability issues, as you say. You're never going to run out of that work. A brand new car will have a drivability issue. If you have put brakes on every car, on every customer that you have on, on your whole customer book, you put brakes on everybody's car.
Guess what you don't get to do for the next three to five years? Brake jobs. Unless you get new customers in that need brakes. But guess what you will do? Somebody's car is going to break down. Somebody's going to have ignition coil go bad, somebody's going to have a transmission solenoid go bad, somebody's going to have any number of things. An oil leak, a fluid leak of some sort. Somebody's going to, you know, hit a rabbit on the road and bust a radiator, stuff like that. You know what I mean? Which that's not a drivability, but sometimes it can turn into a drivability. We've, we've gotten them here before, um, weird situations where they, you know, they come in, it doesn't run right, and then, you know, you find out the bottom of the radiator is busted out and they overheated it.
It's got a blown head gasket, no coolant in it. That's. It starts the drivability, at least. But, yeah, I mean, we see that. We see that stuff all the time. You know, you, you got to be able to fix a broken car. Cars break every single day. They don't wear out every day.
Once you, once you fix the wore out parts, they're good until that part wears out again. Years and miles and miles away. But it could still break down tomorrow. The fuel pump could go out tomorrow, you know?
So how do we cultivate Cody more, more numbers of drivability and Diagtex? How do we do that?
I know a lot of people talk about how we don't have enough people in the industry who are car enthusiasts anymore. I don't think that has much to do with it. It might have enough to do with it might have more to do with it than what I think it does. But my theory on that is I didn't because become a good diagnostic tech because I really liked making cars go fast. That had nothing to do with it. That's the worst thing about making. When I had fast cars and big trucks, the last thing I want to do is figure out why it was broke. You know, I wanted it to not be broke.
I wanted to drive it. I wanted to build it. I wanted to make it bigger, faster, better in some way, shape or form. I never wanted to deal with it being broke, but I think a lot of it has to do with just the challenge in the industry. In that particular field, diagnostic work is challenging, and it takes somebody who likes a challenge. And there's, it's not that there's fewer and fewer people like that. I think it's that they're attracted to other things. And I think that's the biggest issue, is we're, as an industry, we're not doing anything to attract them.
And, I mean, it goes with the treatment of tax and the history of tax and a reputation and stuff of how shops treat them and everything else. But even more than that, it's, you know, we don't have any, anybody out there advertising for us, out there advocating, you know, out there talking to people who were in high school, who were, you know, obsessed. I didn't, I didn't know I wanted to be a mechanic. I didn't want to be a mechanic. At one point, I was, I had nine credits in high school in electronics classes. That was, that was almost half of the credits I needed to graduate. Most of my electives were in electronics classes. You, I just absolutely loved doing it.
I loved messing with it. It was, it was intriguing. It's just the stuff is not something you get to do on anything. You know what I mean? It's, you have to work on very specific things to be able to work in electronics and stuff like that. And I think we need to get that type of stuff, that type of information, that type of work that we do out in front of a broader range of people who might be actually interested in that type of stuff, because I think there are a lot of people out there who are, and they just don't even see the automotive industry as a possible avenue for their career to go. I know I've heard people talk about, you know, it's gotten to a point where we need more it guys rather than mechanical guys, and I think that's it. But like I said, nobody's out there. Nobody's out there presenting to those people.
Nobody's out there going to the electronics class in my old high school and saying, hey, you guys ought to see what's in cars now and what it's going to take to fix these cars in the direction that automotive, automotives are going in. Computers and electronics. It's wild, and it's really exciting stuff to see and to understand. I can't remember what he's doing that.
I can't remember if I shared the most recent video or not. Or if you saw it, maybe Michael Berg, the flat rate master, he said almost the exact thing last week where he said, you know, the old adage used to be, we used to show the guy, and he was greasy and he had a chrome wrench in his hand and, you know, a rag in his pocket, and he was going over setting points on a really shiny hot rod or something like that. You never saw the guy walking around with the, you know, snap on. Used to do it. They used to show a guy over a hood of a car with the scanner in hand, but he's like, we need to be showing them that. It's like this clean cut guy, shirt tucked in, pants clean, iron pressed, you know, clean, clean, clean, with a laptop in his hand, going up to a car. That's what we need to be really showing these. These young people that it's like you like to.
You like the game, you like to write code, you know, all that kind of stuff. This is how you get into this industry and you can do that. And I really think that it's gonna happen where. Because we already do it. We're all. Lots of us are walking around all day long with a laptop or something, doing the DVI portion, right. So it's an easy sell. We all do it.
It's a very common thing now to see a tech walking in a bay with a laptop in his hand, but we have to show them that it's like you might in the near future be somebody. And I think this is where the industry's going, where you're just gonna inspect the car, hook, hook up, do the diag, pull some coating, and somebody else is going to do the repair. You know, it's already happening with the mobile techs. That's really. The owners are not going to like it. But I think if we need to start selling this industry, we need to start maybe really highlighting and showcasing some of those. The mobile guys because, you know, Paul Danner and I. Paul Danner, some of.
The good mobile guys, not. Not the average ones, not that.
Not the guy doing a brake job in the. In the autozone parking lot. But yeah, you and I were talking Paul Danner before we got on. And I mean, it's. I was probably. You're likely the same as me. It was so inspiring and foreign to me to see Paul in a parking lot at a shop, you know, ten years ago on a YouTube video, diagnosing a car, then leaving and the car just gets fixed. That was so foreign to me.
And because, yes, I diagnosed cars, but I didn't know that that was a thing that you could get your level to that high where you didn't even have to get dirty. You just had to go in and tell, hey, Pete, you know, yeah, it needs a fuel pump. Cool, thanks, Paul. Here's $150 or whatever. And onto the next one. I think we need to really start to showcase and spotlight the, you know, some of the absolute. The whizzes that we know that do it. And, yeah, I'm not hating on the guy in the autozone parking lot.
I'm not trying to hate on him. But that is. That's one reality. But then the real reality, I think that is real marketable is to the younger generation, is that you couldn't be a guy that walks it with a scan tool and a laptop all day long, and you just go from car to car to car. I did a interesting interview yesterday, and it was a, he'd been a former field service rep for GM, and he said that was a. And that was a great conversation, Chris Higgins, because it was like, what was that like to go into some of these shops where you're the, you know, the token smoking gun, right? You're going to come in here to this dealership where, oh, here's the field service guy coming in. What was that like? And he. It's, it's actually a lot different because you think that a lot of them would you be faced with a lot of ego or you'd see a lot of really poor incompetency and you're there doing some really basic stuff and he's like, nah, that wasn't the case.
Most of them were very receptive, very friendly, very eager to help. And he said it would just became like, after that, it just became a team thing we got to work through and get this car fixed. We've got to sell that. That's literally, you know, it doesn't plateau out for a lot of these people when they get into the dealership and you just become the best guy in the dealer or in the shop. There's so many more avenues we could go down. It's like you could be that field service rep. You could be getting a really good. Yeah, you're going to live in a van, you're going to be on the road a lot, but you're going to learn a ton, you know, like, have you ever done any kind of field service like that?
Not as a profession, necessarily. I did, I did a lot of mobile stuff when I was a little bit younger, out of necessity, you know, either not making very good money where I worked or just in my, in my area here I was, I was a big partier for a long, long time. So I'd be out at the bars all the time, drinking, stuff like that. I meet a lot of people that way, and people find out you're a mechanic, they find out, you know, at least they think you're a decent mechanic. Hey, can you take a look at that? Either they'll bring it to me, or sometimes I'd go out to them. My dad had a lot of friends in trucking industry and stuff like that, who, they'd have a problem at their house with their truck and they had it to this dealership or that garage and they couldn't figure it out. And my dad, hey, you know, you mind if my buddy calls you? He's got an issue with this, or he's got something tore apart and he can't get it back together. Whatever, stuff like that.
I did a good bit of that for a little while, and before I opened my shop, actually thought about going that route. I was literally for like six months in the process of finding a. A suitable truck, utility truck of some sort. I was looking for a very, very specific box truck is the only reason I didn't find one. I wanted one I could stand up in. That was the biggest thing. I'm six foot two and everything is like six foot tall. So I just refused.
I was like, it's got to be at least six foot four, six foot six, or I'm not buying it inside the box of it. And that was my biggest issue. And then just out of pure coincidence and luck, the building that I'm in right now came up. I knew the daughter of the guy who owned it. We were friends from way back in the day, and she posted on her facebook, and I reached out and talked to him. I came and looked at it the next day, and we shook hands and signed paperwork. And a few months later, I was moving my tools in. But that was, for a minute there, that's what I thought I was going to end up doing.
I didn't know how receptive the local shops would be for it because we do have a lot of ego in our area. I think back to that point there, I think one of the issues, I've said this a thousand times, the first step to being a really good mechanic is understanding and coming to terms with the fact that you don't know shit. And it doesn't matter how good you get, you still don't know shit. That is what makes you better and better and better and better. Because the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know, the more you strive to know more. And you just keep getting better and better and better and better. And to that guy's experience that you were talking to that. That engineer, when you're going into a shop and you're dealing with the guy who called the engineer, that guy, he might not be the high, the most highly skilled, but at least he's to a point where he understands he has a problem that he can't figure out.
And he's not the guy who's just, I got it figured out. It's this, or I know what it is. It's that they just won't let me do this work, or whatever excuse they come up with. Or whatever the, you know, the argument might be from him. That guy called the engineer. They called the Tac line. GM called it Tac, GMTAC. So that's, that's who I dealt with all the time whenever I did has to have stuff.
I've only seen an engineer one time in all the Chrysler GM dealerships that I worked at, by the way. And it came out to fix a really, really simple issue that they wouldn't let anybody else work on because it was a brand new core, brand new Camaro. When the new body style first came out in like 2006 or 2007, whatever, whatever year that was when GM started chasing you. Yeah, when they started chasing the, the Ford's idea of bring back the retro mustang, they wouldn't let anybody but the shop Foreman touch that car. And the shop foreman was a terrible mechanic. So that was the only time I saw a, a engineer is it was a car that had like 300 miles on it. And they came out because this guy tried and tried and tried and tried to fix this car, which was just a clutch switch, by the way, and I don't remember what the original issue is. I think it didn't start or something like that, but all ended up needing was a clutch switch.
And they, we had this car for months and months until the GM engineer finally came out and he had it fixed in like 40 minutes and left. Um, but anyway, but they wouldn't let anybody else touch it. But, yeah, when that engineer goes out there, he's usually, I'm sure he's usually talking to somebody who understands. Like I said, they, they understand. They don't have the knowledge or the skill to fix that vehicle, and somebody else is coming out who may have it and they're going to pay attention to that guy and they're going to try and learn something from that guy, because what they also don't want to do at a dealership is atmosphere, is be the guy in that position again that puts 5678, 910 hours into a car, can't fix it, and can't get paid for a lot of that time because of the way the dealership pay setup is and everything. So they're going to pay attention in case they see that problem again, because, you know, what do you know about a dealership? If you've seen that problem before, you're probably going to see it again.
Oh, I was like that with, there was like, airbag faults on caravans that I got to be where it was like, airbag faults and evap. I made so much money, especially when the damn thing was out of warranty because it was like our diagrate was an hour and a half for every hour. That was one of the things that was like really made it worthwhile. But we'd see water issues get into the damn thing and then the airbag, you know, system would walk, go wonky. And it was like, you know, the other guys that Chuck modules out and I'm like, this fucking thing has no power. Where did the power go? Well there's a splice there that they, you know, they put that cloth tape around and it's laying in a puddle, you know, and it was one of those things again, it showed 12 volts but won't light a test light. It was, I go, keep going back to that because it's so there's, I made so much money on understanding that basic concept that somebody taught it to me like the first year out of tech school when I, they, I joke with Brian. I had a shop, first employer, first big employer in this industry.
He took my meter and literally locked it, this toolbox and said, here, you don't touch this until I give it back to you. Here's a test light. That's what I want you checking because it was trucks. It was trucks and trailers and wires and lighting. This is what I want you using. And I was like, but, but he's like, no trust, trust me. And it was like mind blowing. It totally changed my trajectory in this industry.
Was having that first boss, you know, that was like is he was, he was known as the guy in the trucking industry around my area that if it was electrical, you wanted to go see Rex because he could get to the bottom of it. And he'd been asked by the local. So up here, the apprenticeship board, they'd asked him more than once to come on as a teacher and just teach the first year kids electrical. And he said, there's no way I'm going to do it. I can't do it. Because he knew what the curriculum would be. He's like, I'm going to take that curriculum and throw it right in trash and I'm going to teach these kids how to, you know, load a circuit and vet out a wire. That was it.
That's all he was going to teach. And they're like, you can't do that. You got to teach Ohm's law. And so thank God I ran into, you know, I had an owner, an employer that was a fantastic tech and taught me a lot, you know, business wise he sucked. I mean he fired me for B's, but I was lucky to work for him. He's made me appreciate all the other people that I've worked for since that were maybe really good business people and terrible techs or weren't even techs at all. Like, I've worked for service managers that were never were techs. I worked for service managers that like their service managers in the dealership on a product that they never put a wrench to even drive that product.
Work for a lot of those. Yeah.
It's funny, eh? Like, it's like, so what you drive every day is a lease that the dealership gives you? Yeah. And you don't even, like, you don't work on. No, no. They, it's just, you know, goes to give me another one. What do you, what do you, what do you work on? Oh, I used to work, you know, I used to work for the railroad. You're telling us the right way to fix these cars and you never worked on them? Yeah, that's, uh. I got talking today in one of the chats. It's hard for me to go and work for somebody in a boss role who I don't respect as their technical ability.
And that scares me when I see now we were talking just the other day about how there's going to be all this money coming into the industry soon, and they're going to be buying it up, and it's going to be, people that have never worked in this industry, never put a wrench on a car, and they're going to start to tell the technicians how we're going to value. Some people think it's gonna be a good thing. I. It scares that Jesus said of me because I can't. I know now, in my point, if you're not a tech, I can't work for you as my boss.
Yeah.
Can't do it. I don't. It's because whatever you bring as a process, it's untested, probably from your standpoint. So if it's untested from your standpoint, you want me to adopt it and, you know, live and breathe it, I can't do it. You got to show me that it works. You have to show me.
Yeah.
You know, whereas if the guy's been in through the trenches like me, we can disagree. I'm going to, I'm going to put my faith in him. I'm going to do what he asks. But somebody's in there.
There's. I mean, I lived through a situation like that. Well, a bunch of times. That's happened to me. You know, where you get a service writer? Well, why don't you just do it this way? Why don't you do that? Or, you know, did you check this? You know, so I was like, you don't even know what you're talking about. Why are you asking me questions like that? Like, I told you what's going on with this vehicle? You know, I mean, I've had people, I've worked for places, and, you know, like I said, as good as I am at diagnosing vehicles, I would tell them what's wrong with it and be like, that can't be it. And then they start going through their whole thing. I've actually had, I think it's only happened once, maybe twice.
A service writer take the vehicle from me after I diagnosed it and gave it to somebody else to double check my work because they couldn't understand how what I was saying was even possible. And it's, you know, it doesn't matter how well you explain it. If somebody thinks that they know better, then you know that you're just not going to get around something like that. So I believe it's only happened to me once. Only one time that I can remember. That's definitely happened. But I left a shop. Well, I left the industry one time to go to the coal mine, ended up not taking the job, but I got hired, and I ended up not taking the job when I was leaving to go to the physical, and me and a girl I was dating at the time decided that it was not worth the drive that I was going to have to make and the hours I was going to have to work and everything else, because at the time, I was actually making pretty decent money at the shop I was working at.
But I left one shop to go to the mine, and I left that shop early, and it turned out to be like two months in between before the mine actually sent me to get my physical, after they had hired me and told me the whole process and everything. So in the meantime, I had went and started working at another shop just to help out because they were really far behind. They didn't have any good mechanics, and that was the shop that my mother was actually the secretary of. Okay. But when I went to the mine, though, what they wanted me to do was to go underground for my six months or whatever to get my black hat or however that whole system works. I don't remember the exact situation. And then they were going to send me off to school for foreman training, and they wanted me to be a foreman for the company. And then my job was going to be to just make sure everybody's doing their job.
And during the interview process, when they were offering that to me, given me the choice of either go underground and be a maintenance technician underground or be a foreman. And they wanted me to be a foreman. They. I asked them a question. It's like, so, like, I don't remember the exact way the conversation happened. This was 15 years ago. But it was something along the lines of, you know, I was asking them, you know, would I be down there working with them? And, you know, would I just be leading the crew? And they'd be like, oh, no, you wouldn't actually be allowed to do any of the work because they're union and you're not. So you won't be able to allow to touch anything.
You just have to be down there and watch and make sure they're doing it correctly. And I was like, so I have to make sure they're doing the job that I'm not even able to do myself. Like, I would not be able to work for a person telling me how to do the job if they aren't also doing the job on a regular basis, because they're not going to know how to do that job as well as I can. I could not, I could not do that. So I turned down that position. It was just going to go underground. I ended up turning that down, like I said, you know, talking with the garage with at the time and just not worth the hours and everything else. So I stayed at the shop where my mother was a secretary.
I ended up managing that shop for a couple years there at some point, and, you know, made decent money, and that's, that kept me in the industry at that point. My plan at the time was to work at the mine for, like, two or three years, bank a bunch of money, and then go open my own shop. So this is my own shop has been an idea in my head for many, many, many years. But, yeah, the whole idea of having somebody who doesn't know, I mean, having service managers who don't know anything about cars, question me about, you know, well, did you test this? Did you test that? Did you look at this? Well, what about this? And it's, well, why don't you go back and run this test and tell me what it says? I'm not running that test. I'm not wasting my time. I'm telling you, I don't need that. That has nothing to do with it or whatever the case may be. It just it just drove me insane.
So I definitely understand where you're coming from on that to wrap it up.
So, you know, I kind of know where you want to go, but what's, what's the biggest thing about this industry that frustrates you?
The fact that there are so many bad shops that so much of it is exactly my own experience. So many technicians who, you know, have been in this industry have been treated the same way that I have. It drives me insane, especially now as a shop owner. Not because looking and seeing how I would treat them or how I wanted to be treated or anything like that, but I mean, that's a huge part of it. But also there's a selfish aspect to it of now I'm a shop owner and I need to hire mechanics. And a lot of the really good mechanics are either so jaded, they've got a really bad attitude and they're never coming back in terms of their attitude, or they've left the industry and they're never coming back to the industry. And now, you know, we're in a situation where we've got an enormous tech shortage. And I'm happy about the tech shortage because the pay increasing.
If I was still a technician at this point, it would be fantastic. But at the same time, knowing that so many people have lived through that and have had to deal with that and have just given up and left, never knowing. Back to something you were talking about earlier, you know, they never heard a podcast before. They've never heard of your podcast. They've never known that there was a good shop out there that you could work for. Um, you know, to know that there's so many people in this industry who have no clue that it's maybe incrementally, but it is getting better slowly. And it may only ever be 20 or 30% of the shops one day that are really good shops, but also only five to 10% of the mechanics out there are really good mechanics. So it, you know, it's at least at that point, you'd have a little bit more of a balance where really good, really hard working techs who really want to be better techs than they are today, you know, and always be progressing and always learning, can find a place that's going to treat them the way they need to be treated and to make sure that that opportunity is there for them.
It's almost gross to think about how long it's going to take to get to that point. It could be five years, it could be 30 years. There's no telling how long it's going to take.
I think it's more than five.
It's going to be a lot more. I've been in this industry for like three years and I've, I have seen the change in the attitudes in like the AsOG group and stuff like that. Um, part of it being when I first joined the AsOG group, uh, there was maybe one post a day in there and I read every post and every comment that was put in that group for like a year and a half to two years. And now it's to the point where, I mean, there's so many people commenting and posting in there, you, it's impossible to keep up. I just, I, you know, I skim through at some point every day I'll skim through and I'll read a couple of things, a couple of comments and stuff. Or, you know, because of Facebook algorithm algorithms, like things that you comment on will pop up, things that like Brian Pollock comments on will pop up all the time. Stuff of that nature. I do read a lot of that stuff.
I really do. A lot of the stuff that has a lot of comments because it's there. It's obviously an interesting topic I want to, I want to get involved in and see what's going on there, but that's not a big enough change. I mean, it's, I see, I was going to mention this earlier. I see people who've been in that group since 20 15, 20 16, 20 17, and they come on and they ask the craziest questions imaginable. And it's like, you have not read a single post in this group in five plus years. I'll guarantee it because it shows in the attitudes they have. And it's like they joined that group because it was a group of shop owners way back in the day, before it really became anything.
And I don't blame them. They didn't pay attention because it was never on the radar, because it was a small groups, not a lot of people, not a lot of posts, things of that nature. But now it's, there's so much good information in there. There's so many good owners in there trying to bring everybody up to their level and boost them even higher. And to see so many people in there, I mean, thousands and thousands of owners who are only just now getting a peek into that group and some of them see what's going on in that group and they're like, no, I don't want any parts of this. I want the hours, I want the money, I want everybody turning 60 hours a week. I want to pay them as little as possible with the highest profit margins. This group's dumb.
And every now and then you see them post about how ridiculous the group is and some of the posts are in the group and then they'll leave. And. Which is one of those, like, you don't have to tell us by. Just go, you know, if you want to increase your. Your standing as an owner, if you don't want to be better, if you don't want to treat people better and pay people better and provide a better life for the people working for you and a better service for the customers coming to you, we don't want you in that group either, you know.
Yeah, my brother Lucas says it all the time. Unfortunately, not all the shops are meant to survive and not all of them will. And I'm going to close with that, that I, you know, I appreciate us being able to have this conversation today and, you know, I say it all the time. I'm blessed to be able to interact with so many like minded people and it truly is. And anybody listening, please don't take it as, like I said earlier, we're not trying to divide. We really are not. But we're trying to show that we all. Lucas said to me, I got to get out of my bubble.
I got to get out of my echo chamber, because he was sick of me at one point with how my jaded attitude was. And he's not wrong. He's right. There is. There is. Because you couldn't tell me that there was a good shop owner out there. I was in such a headspace. But the reality is, is it's like such a small percentage when we keep calling people out for doing, you know, questionable stuff, their attitudes, it's because the people that are in the group that are the right change.
There's such a small percentage, and that's keep having a conversation. It isn't because we're trying to attack anybody. It is just because they, all of us daily need to remember that we represent such a small faction that we're trying to. We're trying to do a huge thing. We're trying to change history. And, you know, it's never meant to.
Be.
You know, a personal attacks. It's just like I said yesterday, when the. When the young man falls asleep in a class, everybody do better, you know, be concerned about why that person's not getting out of that class. What? Maybe you think they should be concerned. Don't be judgmental. You know, I spent too many years being judgmental of everybody from the tech working next to me to the owner. And a lot of it was. Was duly founded.
It was right, you know, it was. There's truth to it. But I probably could have done so much better to try and lift everybody up instead of just trying to sit there and go, yep, looks like a duck. Quacks like a duck. It's another duck. There's. Okay, cool. But how do I make it better? And that's what we're all about.
And I appreciate you. You're an excellent example of somebody that's grinding through and putting up some sacrifice to be that change. And I appreciate you. And like I say again, this is going to be a revolving thing of repeat guests because, you know, there's people that we align with that do really well, and we need to keep sharing that and, um, you know, keep us all informed. Cody, as. As you progress and, you know, get attack and the hoist and the whole thing, let us know. Let me know, because I. There's nobody.
I mean, you're the type of person that we want to spotlight here on the podcast. So I want to thank you for coming on and giving us your time today.
It sounds good. I mean, I'm more than welcome to come back on another time, too. You know, there's, like I said, there's. There's so much. There's so many details and so many, so many wild stories of stuff that I've seen in shops that I'm sure you've seen before, I'm sure you'd appreciate hearing. And, I mean, we've been, you know, this was a very, very vague, just.
Kind of, oh, we just scratched the blanket.
Yeah. Blanket conversation of, like, how. How much of a wild west it really is out there. You know, I can't wait to kind of go a little bit more into detail on some of the wild stories. Like I said, I've never really talked about any of this stuff to anybody because I've. I've never had anybody to talk to it about until the a saw group, you know, about the type of stuff that I've seen. So it's. I'm really interested in talking more about some of this stuff and going into some of the craziness that we've seen.
Yeah, we'll flesh it all out. I mean, it's. And again, you know, we have to. We have to keep reminding people that there's a reality out there, you know, that you and I went through and, you know, if you don't forget your history and you know, we all are products of our environment, and what it did to us is why we're here. And so, I mean, on that note, I'm going to thank everybody. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. Cody, thanks for sharing with us, man.
We'll have you back. So we'll talk to everybody soon, okay? Hey, if you could do me a favor real quick and, like, comment on and share this episode, I'd really appreciate it. And please, most importantly, set the podcast to automatically download every Tuesday morning. As always, I'd like to thank our amazing guests for their perspectives and expertise, and I hope that you'll please join us again next week on this journey of change. Thank you to my partners in the ASaw group and to the change in the industry podcast. Remember what I always say, in this industry, you get what you pay for. Here's hoping everyone finds their missing ten millimeter, and we'll see you all again next time.
About this episode
Cody Taggart returns for part two of his discussion on the challenges and dynamics within the automotive repair industry. He shares insights on the frustrations of technicians dealing with ineffective management, the importance of diagnostic skills, and the need for better treatment of mechanics. The conversation highlights the struggles of finding quality techs in a landscape filled with bad shops, and the necessity for a cultural shift to attract new talent. Taggart emphasizes the value of respect and professionalism in the workplace, advocating for a change in how technicians are perceived and treated.
Original notes
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In this episode, Jeff Compton and Codey Taggart wrap up their conversation. Codey shares his journey from mobile car repairs to opening his own shop. Codey emphasizes the importance of having competent diagnostic technicians to maintain a shop's reputation and success. Jeff and Codey discuss the need to portray automotive technicians as clean-cut professionals and address the challenges posed by non-technical individuals in leadership roles.
00:00 Being let go for speaking up at work.
06:21 Technicians should demand respect and professionalism.
08:01 Frustrations with the workload, diag issues, and tasks.
12:49 Diagnostic tech is crucial for the shop's reputation.
17:00 Exciting work in electronics needs broader visibility.
18:05 Uncertain if I shared the video and the importance of the image.
22:29 Worked on mobile mechanics out of necessity.
27:06 Profitable repairs on caravan airbag and evap.
28:32 Trucking industry boss known for electrical expertise.
32:03 The Service writer questioned my diagnosis, leading to conflict.
36:33 Frustration with lack of opportunities for technicians.
39:07 New owners discovering valuable information and support.
44:24 Please share, subscribe, and join us weekly.
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The Jaded Mechanic Podcast
Jeff Compton
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