Why Technicians Are Leaving the Industry | Adam Matz
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Brand
Aston Martin
Aston Martin is a luxury car brand the guest worked on. Working on cars like that can teach you extra attention to detail and specialized repair skills.
Brand
Toyota
Toyota is referenced as the speaker’s starting point in dealership technician training. The episode uses Toyota as a baseline for how pay and training differ when moving between brands.
Brand
Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz is one of the car brands the guest worked on a lot. Working on European cars usually means you learn more specialized tools and repair methods.
Brand
Lamborghini
Lamborghini is an exotic car brand. The point being made is that when you’re repairing or reassembling a car like that, you have to be extra careful because mistakes are costly.
Concept
flat rate
Flat rate means you get paid based on the job’s estimated time, not exactly how long it takes you. That can make pay feel higher or lower depending on the shop and the work.
Car
Land Range Rovers
The Range Rover is a luxury SUV. The speaker is using it as an example of a vehicle that can be complicated to work on, especially with problems that involve the car’s structure and systems.
Brand
Rivian
Rivian is a company that makes electric trucks and SUVs. The speaker is saying the cars are great, but their job experience felt overly controlled.
Term
trouble code
A trouble code (often read via an OBD-II scanner) points to a fault detected by the vehicle’s computer. The speaker contrasts cases where the code points to a component versus cases where the underlying issue is wiring or a circuit problem.
Term
green corrosion
Green corrosion is a sign that moisture has gotten into an electrical connection and started damaging it. That can cause weird, intermittent electrical faults.
Term
EVAP faults
EVAP (evaporative emissions) is the system that captures and routes fuel vapors instead of venting them to the atmosphere. EVAP faults often involve components like the charcoal canister, vent valve, or related sensors and can be triggered by leaks or control issues.
Term
module
A module is an electronic control unit (ECU) that manages a specific system, like body electronics or emissions controls. The speaker notes that warranty approval often gates module replacement because modules are costly.
Term
extended warranties
An extended warranty is extra coverage you buy so repairs later are paid for (at least partly). It can add paperwork and approval steps before repairs are authorized.
Concept
supply chain issues
Supply chain issues refer to disruptions that delay parts availability and shipping. The episode ties this to longer repair timelines when parts must be approved and shipped internationally, which customers often don’t see.
Car
Mercedes S Class
The Mercedes-Benz S-Class is a top-tier luxury car. The speaker uses it to illustrate how some managers benefit while technicians feel the financial squeeze.
Term
ABS
ABS is a safety system that helps your brakes not lock up. If warning lights like ABS stay on after brake work, it can mean something wasn’t set up or connected correctly.
Car
Toyota Land Cruiser
The Toyota Land Cruiser is a large SUV built to handle tough roads and last a long time. People often keep older Land Cruisers running with regular, sometimes frequent maintenance. That’s why it’s discussed—because it’s meant to be used hard and kept going.
Term
scanner to bleed the brakes
On some newer cars, bleeding the brakes isn’t just opening a bleeder screw. You may need a scan tool so the car can run the brake service procedure correctly.
Term
service writer
A service writer is the person who talks to you about the problem and creates the repair order. They’re important because the technician depends on the details they collect.
Term
lug nuts
“Lug nuts” are the fasteners that secure a wheel to the vehicle’s hub. The speaker uses a wheel coming loose scenario (missing lug nuts after a tire rotation) to illustrate how small mistakes can become serious safety issues and lead to repeat visits.
Term
tire rotation
Tire rotation is when the tires are moved to different wheel positions to wear evenly. It’s usually routine, but mistakes during the job can still cause problems.
Term
aftermarket
“Aftermarket” refers to non-dealer repair shops and parts/services outside the manufacturer’s dealer network. The speaker notes that customers may try multiple aftermarket options before returning to the dealer, especially when warranty coverage is no longer available.
Term
warranty
Warranty is the manufacturer’s promise to pay for certain repairs for a limited time. If the dealer can’t fix the problem while it’s covered, many customers won’t keep coming back after it expires.
Concept
over-the-air software update
An over-the-air update is software the car downloads by itself through its connection. The point is it can fix issues without a big repair visit.
Concept
60,000 mile service
A 60,000-mile service is a planned maintenance visit at that mileage. It can include several checks and services, so it may take time and cost more.
Concept
brake caliper bolts left loose
Brake caliper bolts hold the brake caliper in place. If they’re left loose, the brakes can work incorrectly and become dangerous.
Concept
service advisor
A service advisor is the person who talks to you about your car’s service and sets up the work. The speaker thinks that part of the process needs to be better.
Car
Ford Escort station wagon
They’re talking about a 1995 Ford Escort wagon. The point is that a brand-new car used to cost far less than it does today, even with comfort options like air conditioning.
Car
Ford F150
The Ford F-150 is a large pickup truck. People use it for hauling, towing, and general daily driving. It’s mentioned because it’s a very common choice for many drivers.
Car
Suburban
They’re talking about a Chevrolet Suburban, an older big SUV that someone can keep driving for years. The takeaway is that older vehicles can make financial sense.
Concept
secondhand cars
They’re talking about buying used cars instead of new ones. Used cars can cost a lot less up front, so people can avoid big payments.
Concept
ripple effect
They mean one big problem can spread outward and cause more problems elsewhere. If auto jobs disappear, other businesses and communities can suffer too.
Concept
cattle trailer
A cattle trailer is a specialized trailer designed to transport livestock. Mentioning it highlights the difference between vehicles bought for real work (towing livestock) versus vehicles bought for convenience or status.
Term
10 millimeter
The “10 millimeter” is a running joke among mechanics: the idea that the most-used tool is always missing. It’s commonly used to represent the chaos of shop life and the reality that small tools disappear during repairs.
LIVE
People are walking away because they're absolutely just tired of what you and I have been talking about this whole time. And come Christmas around here because the holidays around here get busy, they are not going to have the people to work. They're just not going to have the staff. And I, unfortunately, I think that's really what it's going to take to show these, to show these powers that be you think things are. This is how bad things can really be.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another exciting episode of the Jaden Mechanic podcast. So I got a really excited, I won't say young man, really excited guest with me tonight. It's not. Mr. Adam is with me tonight and Adam's in Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta, Georgia. My mouth is not working very well. Adam, how are you tonight?
I'm lovely. How about yourself, sir? I hope it's. Hope the weather's thawing up a bit up there.
Yeah, we've had a really good thought. So almost most of the snow is gone now again being this is, you know, second kind of the second week of March, I guess you could say the end of the first week of March, beginning of the second week. We still have seen lots of snow, you know, well through April and into May even up here. So it's not, but it's, it's mild already and the snow's kind of gone. So what we're going to probably see is a lot of more freezing rain and not a lot of like accumulated snow up here, which is going to be good freezing rain. People don't like to drive in. But like accumulated snow means I don't have to like fire up the snowblower and shove it around, which is always good.
So, you know, most alien thing I could think of, a snowblower.
Yeah, it's kind of. Yeah. If you've never seen one, it's kind of a weird looking machine. It's more like, I don't know, people down the States. It's kind of like what you used to see going in the garden, you know, or rototiller that would. Yeah, it's a little bit bigger and it's chucking snow out the side of it. So it's pretty cool. So tell us a little bit about yourself, Adam.
Well, I've been a dealership mechanic for going on 22 years now. Started out in the Toyota T10 program. Graduated from that a long time ago back in, oh, 2004, around there, 2005. I started as an intern when I was about 18 and I'm about to be 42. And it's pretty much all I've ever done is dealership work. The majority of my career up till this point has been around jlr, Mercedes Benz, those type of products. And for a few years, I was also an Aston Martin technician here in Atlanta, which. Which was a pretty cool job and definitely learned a lot.
And when you. When you're putting a Lamborghini back together, you need to be just that little bit careful. You know what I mean?
Yeah. I. It's funny, where I work, salesman has one, a Lamborghini. I don't know anything more like a. I don't know which one it is. It's expensive. And I. Yeah.
And I've never. Never sat in it, never opened the door, never lifted the, you know, the. The rear hood on it. None of that kind of stuff. It. It holds zero fascination to me, honestly. So, I mean, it's. It sounds good when it fires up, I'll say that.
But I mean, other than, like, I have zero inches to ride in and everything like that, I. I see him and, you know, he's kind of a guy. He's about my height, but he's not. He's much more slender, and he has a hard enough time getting in and out of the damn car. And I'm like, I don't want nothing to do with that, you know, like.
So you. You really won't like a Lotus, then? We'll just put it to you that way.
I think they're impressive, what they do, and I. I appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into some of them, for sure. But it's just. It passes the point for me where it's like, I cannot. How do I say that? That level of expenditure for me is just. There's so many other things that I would spend money on. Now, when I talk about, though I'd spend $100,000 tomorrow on a bass boat if I had it. People look at me like I'm nuts, because they're like, why would you spend $100,000 on a fishing boat? Right.
Or aren't all fishing boats the same? So I can totally relate to, you know, how people that are out of the circle don't really get it. But I think from mechanics, like, I just look at it and just becomes a more expensive problem to me. Right?
Well, it is. But the funny thing is, I had so many customers there that were just your average person that was our age, that I'm 42, that had a good job, and that was their only car that they had.
Yeah.
And the best Part about it was these people, they could care less if they were without it for two weeks because the rest of the year they got to drive it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, and you know, hey, why not? I mean, listen, I, I got three or four motorcycles. So we all have our bad habits one way or the other.
Very cool. What, what kind of drew you then to leave from Toyota and to go into that different segment of that kind of car, the, the Mercedes and the Land Rover Jag kind of thing?
Oh, that's real easy. They pay better.
Yeah, okay.
It's just that, it's just that simple. Like I, I, from 2004 till 2014, I was making literally the same amount, a dollar rate on flat rate. And this was even after the recession. And I walked into a Mercedes Benz dealership one day, applied, didn't think I'd get it. And not only did they hire me, but they gave me a $12 an hour, $12 an hour pay raise right off the start. So this is, you know, 2014, you're making close to 30 bu, flat rate, you know, it's pretty good. And I mean it's, that was back when, you know, my rent was 680amonth for a nice one bedroom apartment. So what the hell, you know, I just gave myself a nice pay raise and you know, really, that was it.
I don't regret doing it because honestly, like, a lot of the stuff that you'll learn at a European dealership will make you a better technician.
Yeah.
And I know for a fact a lot of the Japanese technicians just, they don't deal with the electrical headaches like you do when you work on European cars. They don't deal with the chassis issues like you do when you work on Range Rovers. I mean, they're just big heavy things that are also meant to go fast. And yeah, when they get some miles on them, they're going to need some work and people are going to pay you for it if you know how to do it properly. And I, you know, hey, it bought me this house. I, I own my own home, have for 10 years. And for most people our age, as you know, on either side of the border, that's just becoming increasingly difficult to do.
It's crazy.
Which I think is the biggest, the best part about your podcast, it's like if people aren't taking that away with like, you know, people are just trying to really live and eat and, you know, take care of their families and we're not, we're not trying to be Rockefellers here. But the way the. The way the industry's gone is just the amount of greed that I've seen over the last couple of years. And you add that to the fact where they don't really seem to care as much as they say they do about workplace safety or dealing with problem people, you know, and I quite frankly just had enough of it, especially after working for Rivian for two and a half years, which again, was another great place to work. Honestly, I loved it. I love the product. I can't. You will not believe what they made.
It is one of the toughest vehicles you will ever see. I have nothing but good things to say about the Rivian product, honestly. But working for them, yeah, it comes with too many strings attached. And I don't. I don't need to be pulled. Need to be pulled off my job for this, that or the other all the time because I'm kind of old school. And they do things more in a corporate way, which was just, you know, way too much for me because we just didn't get anything done, unfortunately.
Now you said something interesting and I wanted to kind of add on it because I, I can certainly understand and agree with the sentiment is you talked about like a lot of the technicians that come from the Asian side of. Of doing things like they don't run into a lot of the electrical component failures the way we do in the other brands. And I'd have to agree with that. 100. Like when I've looked at the older Mazda's, older Mazda sometimes, but especially Toyota, Honda, like it was almost always you when you scan it for a trouble code. Like it was almost always the part that it was telling you it was never the circuit. You know what I mean? Like, the wiring was always put together so much better. My experience versus what I had seen in the domestic side of things that I was like, I can understand why some of them were like they.
They. I don't want to say they were weak, but it was like they. They didn't get. You would show them green corrosion or something on some of the things I can remember talking. And they're like, well, we never see that. Like do. Do your cars not. Aren't sealed like what's happening here? It was just stuff like that I thought was really cool.
They were good about like fixing oil leaks and engine. You know, stuff like that. But right. They were behind on the. You know, I can remember like vent solenoid faults and evap faults. Like it was always the canister and the vent valve and you never had to worry about the, you know, the circuit because the wiring was always intact, like, whereas in a Chrysler it's like it was half and half, you know.
Oh, well, yeah. From what I've heard about Chryslers and the electrical issues that they've just had, you know, even, especially after the Daimler Chrysler era, it looks like a lot of their stuff just drops like flies, unfortunately.
Yeah, that was my era. That was my.
I love that you're Daimler Chrysler.
Yeah, I was, I came in around like 2003 is when I started working in the dealer and left, you know, around 2012. And that was, that was my, that was my formation, my foundation of, of what made me where I got my, you know, feet wet and got my strengths and what I like to do. So I mean I was, I was very fortunate because it was just rinse, wash and repeat. You got to develop a process because the car failed in a, in a very not predictable way, but they failed in a way that forced you, that you had to have all your, you know, steps in your process because they would bite you if you didn't. It was, it was good. You couldn't just chuck parts at them. You actually had to check the circuits out, you know, it was, I was lucky that way. Part of that too is the climate up here, right.
Like in Canada we get so much water, so much salt, so much corrosion ads, you know, to the, to the weird stuff that you see. Like, it's like, you know, Chryslers are known now for the, the rotten grounds that always happening, right? And it's like, oh yeah, we just, we just knew that to, to check that. We just knew to do that. And then you see other people was like, our grounds never go bad. Like it's always.
Yeah, I know, yeah, so, or I, I, I had a, I had a fun one on a 10 year old Mercedes that had 10,000 miles on it that had had all these parts thrown at it to fix this intermittent electrical issue. And the car had been all over the country and it came in us as a Carvana car. Okay. That they get, they're willing and to be fair to Carvana, like they're always willing to get cars fixed. They don't want to put, they don't want to put bad cars on the road. I've seen that here. I've, I've even bought a car from them. And the funny thing was, I guess after all this time on this car, nobody bothered to basically lift up the carpet on the driver's side and check the junction connector in this Little lin circuit and probably like this from new.
And I found two bend pins.
Yeah.
And it, it didn't take me that long to find it, honestly. I mean I knew we're, you know, it's more of a faff to get the carpet up and all the stuff that's under there just to get that. And you know, you know, after this car had been traveled and lived in several different states and just had part after part after part thrown at it, you know, for, for what reason? You know, it's just like, and those are the kind of things you'll definitely run into with the European dealerships. And their, their tech support is usually pretty good and it still is. But nowadays the biggest hurdle that customers have, that I don't think they, you know, when they go for something under warranty, like it just sucks how you got to get everything approved, pre approved to replace a module or something expensive. Now when they're under warranty and I get what they're trying to do, that they're trying to control cost, but they keep building these cars that keep ending up in this situation. And if you get formal education in this, like, like I have and, and you like, you know that like days down or days down and like you can be, you can, your butt as the technician that's trying to fix the car can easily just, especially in America, can easily be hauled in the court for it just as easy as anybody else can. And through real no fault of your own other than you're trying to do this, that the other.
And when you work on the high end brands, I mean these customers, you know, they have money for lawyers and they got no problem calling them, you know, and at the end of the day, like I don't think people also understand that, you know, us at the dealer, like we're trying to get your car back to you as soon as we can, we keep them gone.
Yeah.
You know, we have plenty of work. We don't need this car to sit here for two weeks waiting on approval whether it's from the manufacturer, from your extended warranty company, like that's a waste of everybody's time. We would love to expedite that process as much as possible, but you know, unfortunately these days you add that to the fact that so many new cars are just dropping like flies. I mean I've mechanically totaled so many cars that were less than 4 years old the last few years with less than a hundred thousand miles on them. And it's just like people still owe finance on this stuff.
Yeah.
You know More than likely, you know, like, how is this a sustainable future for the customer? Like, I think one of the, one of the things that drew me to your podcast is I think you and everybody else that I've seen on here, just that's what you're trying to make better for people. Well, I appreciate that.
And it's a situation of. It's like, you know, you touched on something really like everybody, you know, and it's. The thing is like, I have to stay to the comment threads too much because it's, it's, again, it's not a lot of technicians, it's customers, it's disgruntled people, you know, people that want to hate on technicians or whatever in the comments and all this stuff. And the reality is, is like they just sit there and think that, like, we didn't want to fix it or, you know, we over promise and stuff. And I understand sometimes somebody at the front counter is over promising because they don't have any training and don't know what else to do. But like, you know, when, when I can't get your part or I can't get approval to install a part, you know, I'm sick about it because it just. I understand. And it's not, you know, because somebody's always asking me for an update.
You know what I mean? Like, service wisers coming out and going, hey, did you hear back from Tech Line on this? No, I did not. Like, you know, or hey, you know, I realize that we've got three cars sold for today for, you know, work. But all of a sudden, like techline just called and they want you to drop and take that phone call. Like, none of that's effective, you know what I mean? And then it's the same thing. And that's just if there's a parts or. Because a lot of people don't realize a lot of this stuff is when I. My experience, even way back when you would get it and a lot of it was going to be a software fix. You would call Tech9 or somebody engineering, they say, oh yeah, we know about that.
Okay, cool. What do I do to fix it? Oh, there's software coming. Great. You know, and then you have to hope that your customer accepts that as an answer. Now it's a more acceptable answer now because everybody's carrying around a cell phone. You can relate to them. Well, you know how your phone updates? Yeah, well, car's going to do that too, right? Same thing. They go, oh, okay.
But when we're talking back in 2006, they didn't want to hear that, you know what I mean? It was like, well, I don't like this little thing that's only, you know, my six month old car is doing and I'm paying for it and it really frustrates me and I want to just be mad about it. And you're supposed to sit there and go like what do you want me to do? Like I can't install a part, not going to fix it, you know, and, and it was funny, you would see stuff back in the day. It's that window before engineering knows about it, before they may tell you about it. And you would see some of the weird stuff that people would put in like, oh, car just cranks and doesn't start one morning and you know, no codes or anything else. Oh, it might get a crank sensor tossed out of another technician, might throw a fuel pump at it. Right. And then all of a sudden somebody tells you there's software. It's that window when we're waiting for them sometimes to tell us what to do or a new WIN module or, or something like that.
You know, something with the anti theft, that's when we look really incompetent to our customer. And, and that's what I've always tried to explain to them is like if you've never worked in it, you have no idea what it's like. Zero. Right. Even if you're a technician, you've worked in a shop, your life, but you've never been in a dealer where the thing's brand new and you're under warranty and you're paid for that rate. You really don't know. You're only getting the disgruntled customers side of the story. When they finally come to you and it's like, you know, you finally like that example, that bent pin in that, in that car.
Yeah.
Cars out of warranty, right. You find it, all of a sudden the customer is completely irate because they're going that should have been fixed way back when. You're right. But here's the reality. It's not that they don't want to fix it, it's that there's a situation in place where, where the skills to fix it and the time allotted and paid out to find that and go through that as part of the process, it's not there. And it's not just not there at the dealer level at the OE thing. It's not there throughout our industry. Now like I talk in all the time, it's not.
And I catch Hell, because people are like technicians who like you could give them three hours and they wouldn't solve a lot of problems. They're right, some of them. But the reality is, is like right now I think we're, we're still thinking like it's 2004 and we're selling our diags at an hour. And the reality is, is there's so many more variables in these cards. We need to be going to two hours, probably initial diag on these things. Because somebody says, well, you've seen the conversations, Adam. And it's like, well, I'm not paying the guy to read the manual.
Yeah, you are.
But you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe you're. And the, the customer also doesn't know who, who's going to be working on their car. Like you might, your car might get dispatched to the seasoned technician who's seen whatever problem you have five times and can get it fixed like that. And okay, we're, you know, we're going to charge you an hour diag or whatever because you know, dealerships, they, they can't help themselves. I mean, yeah, me personally, I, if I was running a store, I would for, for regular customers, definitely I'd rather help them out a little bit because I know they're going to come back in for the, for that, you know, 1500 $B service, you know, down the road. And if I got to pay my, if I got to pay my tech, my internal rate than fine, that's just the cost to do in business. But that's the other thing.
Like dealerships, just dealerships especially like I noticed during COVID to keep all of us in dealerships here, they gave everybody on average a 10 to $13 an hour raise. But they paid for that by upping their labor rates by eighty or a hundred dollars. And now you got some dealerships around town. I won't say who, but you got some dealerships around town where I charge 300 an hour. And you talk to the techs that work, there they go. We only do warranty work and prepaid services. Our customer service stuff is just in the toilet. And the only customer service work that we get is extended warranties.
And then when you have, let's say you got a shop full of 10 technicians, well, if six or seven of them are speaking to extended warranty advisors during the day, because now we have to have them come in like this is downtime for the customer that the customer doesn't ever see. They never get explained to this, number one, because we get it. The customer they bought an extended warranty. They want to get the car fixed, and they did their best to prepare for it. You know, always try to give them the benefit of the doubt. But the process that it takes to go through that, and then you have all these techs, you know, over here dealing with the extended warranty. It's like, why I don't, you know, it's, it's just time, time, time, time. It just keeps adding up.
And then, oh, well, you know, hey, we could have ordered that part that we knew we needed a week ago, but we had to wait to get it approved, so. But guess what? Now it's got to come from Germany. And, you know, I'm sure in Canada right now. It's not easy to get things from overseas as much as this is down here. I mean, it's, it's global shipping hasn't been the same since COVID No matter, no matter what. Unfortunately, we're still six years away from that. We still have supply chain issues, as you know. And that's the other side of it that the customer just doesn't see.
It doesn't get explained to them, unfortunately. But what, what the dealers have, what the dealers have also created here is they'll give gravy services to their hourly people on the lube text that, you know, they make 13, 14 bucks an hour. And I remember that too. But I also remember back when I was that hourly guy, guess what? We got thrown a little bit of everything. And my, my point was, why don't you have those two guys in their 60s that really shouldn't be working on cars anymore, watching over six or seven of these younger people and throw them some problems and, you know, who can, you know, throw them some customer pay work that's a problem to find an electrical problem or whatever it is, if it takes them a week, so be it. They'll learn. Yeah, we used, we, we used to do that for. We used to do that.
But you don't, you don't starve your, you don't starve your technicians, your flat rate technicians on purpose when you're slow and you give the gravy work straight to the hourly people, especially when we're slow. I mean, it's just a slap of the face to us because we know all that does is it puts more money in the pocket of people who, you know, whatever manager is driving the $200,000 new S Class that, you know, hey, yeah, I drive a Mercedes. It's 23 years old. I paid five grand for it. You know, Yeah, I mean, I love it, but you know, I'm not making the money to drive the new car. And here's, and here's why, you know, versus these people would be just as rich if they threw us a bone once in a while.
Yeah. You know, I had a really good conversation with another online content creator about that very thing that happens where shops are setting up quick lanes and, and you know, fast lanes as they call them and stuff. And they're trying to give that low skilled technicians a lot more of the break job, what we used to call the gravy work. And it's like their argument is what they're gonna learn. And I'm like, but the reality why they do it is because the effective rate becomes so good when you pay them so low and yet you're building it out at, you know, competitive market scale in your local area. That's a whole other conversation on brakes jobs. Yeah, stuff like that. But it's.
The reality is unfortunately, like, because we don't know how to put them in the back and mentor them. That's what we do is we have them and then we, you know, they do a brake job and maybe a tire falls off or maybe they do a brake job and you know, the ABS and the parking brake light continues to flash after because something didn't get followed on the process. And everybody goes, well, that's just how they learn. The way they should be learning is being mentored. You know, like the way the old school method was, was that a master person, craftsman had an apprentice and a protege and they taught them how to do things. And that way the work was shared, you know, and, you know, everybody gets into the whole, well, how do you pay for that? And all that kind of stuff. I understand it's a, it's a mishmash of, you know, whose hours get flagged. I get it.
But this idea that we're just now we're cutting off our nose in spite of our face to take these and shake chase this effective labor rate because they don't know how to problem solve. They know how to do routine services, they know how to do flushes, they don't know how to do brakes, they know how to do tires. They know who to ask to solve a problem, but they can't problem solve for themselves. A lot of them, and it's because we failed them in the dealership especially. But we, we're doing a cross industry period in, in teaching them how. And, and a lot of it is because gatekeeping is one don't want to teach them the tricks and the way that they learned because they're coming for their job. That's the reality. And the second thing is, because we're not, the cars are harder to fix.
So it's become a situation of like, we didn't always have a really good process, but we could get to it fast because there was less variables to eliminate. Now there's so many variables to eliminate that it's not a fast process to even go in and not follow a good process and try to find what's causing the ghost in the machine. And everybody goes, I just can't spend that kind of money. The reality is we have to, because we don't have a ton of people in the next generation that are problem solvers. And that's the real thing. Like, I was just left alone for the most part to fix the car. And that's what made it where I, I developed my process and I developed my strengths. Because I wasn't being paid flat rate at the beginning.
I stayed straight time and they just handed me crap job after crap job and I got it and that was good. Now everybody's so staring at the number of production instead of what problem solves, what problems got solved that they don't know how to scale it now. And they go, this is just too much of an expense. The reality is, is that they have to be. The really easy turnover stuff needs to get to people that do it quickly, get it done, it goes right, it's done well. Don't worry so much about the effective labor rate on that and focus on that profit, on being able to account for the jobs that take longer or the profits, the margins not as great, it all should balance out. And they don't want to do that because they're, they're trained to look at just a certain metric and that's all they want to see. Then they're, they talk about, I'm going on a rant here.
They talk about, well, the CSI is down or whatever like that. CSI is not real life in terms of fixing cars. Never has been.
No, it's even worse. Csi, it's a system designed for everyone, and I mean everyone in the dealership, including the general manager, to fail. It is. The whole thing is I used to get paid. I used to get paid a CSI bonus years ago, about 300amonth. And I have bought car that was new to me and the payment on it was about that.
Yeah.
So I went, okay, hey, my CSI bonus is paying for this car. I'm great. You know, and I remember one month I didn't get it and I was told why I didn't get it and it was because the customer complained about the way the vehicle was wash. So way after I'm done, I've already moved. I'm probably two cars down the lane by now, by the time that thing actually got cleaned, you know, and they, they use the CSI system more as a system to punish.
Yeah.
Individuals, especially service advisors. Like, you know, I don't like stacking up stuff for service advisors because I'm a technician, of course, but, but this is definitely one of the things I will definitely stick up for service advisors because I've had so many of them over the years tell me that they have 100 surveys come back and nine of them were 100%, five stars all across the board. And one person didn't like the coffee in the waiting room. And somehow that's what kills it for them. I'm just like, you know, and then, but the funny thing is then you turn around and you see those same type of customers in the dealership. If you pay attention to front of house, the way that front of house staff gets treated by these people and management just lets these customers just walk all over them. I've, you know, it's been that way for years. I mean, when I first started though, funny enough, like 2004, 2005, I worked at this ancient Toyota dealership that was one of the first ones ever in, in South Florida that's actually a Pontiac dealer.
A lot of the Pontiac dealerships from the 30s in Florida ended up getting into Toyota franchises in the 60s. I wonder why. And a lot of these buildings still in the early 2000s were like that type of place and they had that type of vibe. And you know, I literally was in my service manager's office one time and we were discussing a customer's car and the customer barged in and we're all sitting there with the service advisor and everything. And it's a little thing we're trying to, you know, trying to figure this out for the guy. And the customer comes in and he's just irate and rude. And our service manager's going, you know, good for you, buddy. Yeah, you know, what do you want us to do? What do you want us to do? It just, you know, here.
Oh, you want us here? This is what it's going to cost. We'll take care of it. It, you know, and they just, they got, they used to get rid of people because some people you just need to know when to divorce a customer. And I know it's, I know it's touchy but the, you know, especially the front of house staff that has to deal with it way more often than you and I do in the back, like they just don't deserve the abuse from these people unfortunately.
And it's such a different like I say that all the time and it's something I need to really preface more when I'm talking in some of the conversations because I really get on the advisors a lot of the time in this industry and blame them for or you know, a lot of the real problems that have always been is But I'll say this, that like the, the advisor role at a dealership is so different than an advisor role at an independent shop or a chain store because chain store is even closer. But you know, Jim and Sally's little three bay, four bay former gas station service center that service advisor has, you know, if they're given the freedom and somebody comes in and is a completely irresponse, unappreciative, you know, a customer not worth the squeeze, whatever you want an analogy you want to use, they're well within their rights and normally allowed to just say sorry you're gone, you know, pitch you out of there.
Yeah.
Whereas the dealer, there's so many people that never deal with that customer that simply say you can't say no. You know, it's, it's, it comes back to that food service method, you know, oh, you always got to give them a free dessert or something. No, no, no, no. They're just, just sucking the energy right out of the room when they come in. And you're never going to make them happy. They don't want to be happy, but you have to appease them because either a CSI score or the now a Google review or the idea that eventually they won't buy another car from that brand again. Whereas when you're working at these little independent stores, whoopty do they don't come back for another oil change like or another break or another like check edge like diagnosis. We can focus on the customers that do appreciate us.
The dealership, we're not allowed to do that. We sold them the car or here's what even ticked me off even more. The dealer 10 miles away sold them the car for better price but now they want to come here because we're bigger and we can service them faster. And all of a sudden they're in my dealership raising holy cane, being you know, unreasonable, ignorant, rude to my and I'm not allowed to just turf them. Them that should be. Be allowed to, you know, say, no, sorry, you're irresponsible, you're unreasonable, you're rude to my staff, don't come back. And you should act by the OE on that. But they don't.
They'll throw you right under the bus.
Well, this is one of the reasons I've been an Android man for so many years. Because, you know, all of the years of dealing with phone connectivity issues and you could not tell iPhone people, especially in 2012, you. You just could not tell these people, even when you had documentation from Apple and the manufacturer of the vehicle. You know, this is a iOS issue. We're working on it. Whatever. You could not tell them that this was. It was their precious phone that was causing the problem on the car.
And the irony about me is, like, every car I've ever owned for the most part, has been old. And maybe it's had Bluetooth. Like, I got a car that's got a big stereo in it with Aftermarket CarPlay. But I only put that in there because, well, you know, the rest of the cars just basically speak speakers on wheels, and it's a nice sound system that I built up, you know, but my daily car just has a regular Bluetooth, and I don't care if I can talk on the phone in my car, and that's me. And some people want those connectivity features, and I'm all for them being there, but, you know, they have to work and, you know, not to. Again, not really to pick on Apple here. I mean, you know, we've had issues with, I've had issues with Google Pixels, all sorts of other phones, to be fair. But, you know, the, the earlier stuff from, like I said, 2012, when they started coming out with the ipod docks and the, and the dongles and everything, you know, there'd be, there'd be a list that would have like, yeah, three specific Apple products that would work with the car, and the customer doesn't have that.
And you just, you could not explain that to them when it was in black and white in, in the, in the freaking owner's manual.
Yeah.
You know, and you just add all of this stuff up. You add all this stuff up to now what's going on today, which at least is what I'm seeing here. I don't know about up in Canada, but you're seeing technicians just leave in droves because we're asked to deal with all this stuff. And then we're also asked to be satisfied with 25 hours a week. You just said so recently. 100 times zero is still zero. I have heard so many times in my life, oh, just stay longer and work more. Well, that's great.
But if there's no work in the rack, there's no work in the rack. Yeah, like I'm just staying here at this point, watching YouTube videos on my phone. I could do that at home or whatever it is people do on their downtime at work because they're just. Well, you know, I just don't know where we go from here. It just doesn't seem like a sustainable thing. And I, I just think that, I just think that sooner than later, I think, you know, they said this year is going to be a tough year for car sales. It's going to be tougher for more than just car sales. Yeah, it really is.
It. Every, every local dealer to me and they're like, we're. When I say local, I say so within 45 minutes east or west of me, north or south, within 45 minutes anywhere around any, there's a dealership. They're all trying to hire at least one mechanic. Some are trying to hire two. And the very real reality is like there, there just isn't a pool to pull from anymore because the young people, like I'm 50 and I can't remember the last time that I've seen a technician under 30 moving around from job to job. Like literally, even when I talk to my local tool people, I know them all by names and they're all over 35 and they're moving around. Right.
And they're chasing that every time because it's a couple bucks more. They go another place and, and you know, good on them because they're, they're max outing. They're maximizing their earnings right now while they can. And I appreciate that. The, the, there's so many sitting back going, I don't understand why these young people don't do it. It. Well, because we're not paying them enough to do it. That's the very real reality.
We're not paying them enough for what they're expected to know. Like if I was to land now in the technology start like starting out when I was 23, I wouldn't have made it. Wouldn't have made it. It's too much with the current systems in place on how we instruct them on how to learn how to fix this stuff. Like look at can diagnostics for instance on a 2018, 2023 versus look at it when I started in 2001. You know, it's so much different. It's so much different.
I was cutting, I've cut my teeth on timing belts, on old cam rays and you know, stuff like that. You know, we were still, we were still doing, you know, 10 hour 60k services on 80 series Land Cruisers in the early 2000s because, well, they stopped making them in 97. There's still plenty of them on the road.
Yeah, yeah. And the, so the young people now, it's just like you, you go and give them. We were talking to. My tool guy was talking about there was like a 23 Suburban at the dealership and it had a parasitic drain and it ended up being like there's some pinched wires up near the fuel tank factory. Pinched, not pinched by any kind of previous like that. So it was causing the, one of the modules to not go to sleep. Well, the technician had, they said about 10 hours in tracking down where the, where the draw was. And again it was, I guess it takes about an hour for the car to actually get into sleep mode and all that kind of jazz.
He found one thermal integer. So he's got 10 hours in the car that most the warranty will pay him is three hours. So one less than one third of his time is actually going to be covered. And they sit there and they go, I can't understand why young people, you know, the Ford CEO and all these other conversations come up. I can't understand why people won't come work for us. Because your people, your franchise dealers or even your dealer independence are choosing not to pay them. That's the reality. And it's the double speak.
Because it's like nowhere does the OES tell anybody you must run your dealership and pay them flat rate. But what the OEs are now telling them is like when it's done under warranty, we're only going to pay X amount of hours for doing that repair. Repair. So finding the parasitic drain, finding the wiring problem, finding the intermittent no start. The max we're going to pay is four hours. Tough luck, you know, if you guys got 10 hours in it. Oh, well, the OEs are hoping, I think I want to hope and think by what Jim Farley was talking about that the dealer owners and principals are covering the rest of the COVID of the text time. I think that's what they hope.
They know it doesn't happen that way because they see the conversation. So what I tell all the technicians is like, yes, you have to be mindful of what it's going to Pay. But the reality is, is like, if you put nine hours into it and you fix it, don't accept that. You're only going to get paid 3. Don't accept it. Ask where my other 6 is. The money is there. Do the Math.
If you're $40 an hour, six hours, what's that, 240 bucks, right? If you believe for any second that any kind of dealer can't afford to pay you $240, you're crazy. They'll spend that on lunch Friday, right?
Oh, more than that. And you're out. To add to your point, many years ago, I was at a Jaguar Land Rover dealership here locally in a part of town where they have plenty of wealthy customers. You know, you can make money and highly recommended. They have good. They have, you know, they had good service there, good technicians, and for a while there they had management that, that really knew how to treat people. And the main reason I had stayed for a long time was right after I got hired, they had a management change. And this manager, service manager really saw a lot of value in me.
And he was put in a tough situation for a customer that had bought. We always get these luxury car dealerships that have bought like 8 or 10 cars from us and, you know, they got them for their wives and their kids and whatever, and, and we get this, we get this older Range Rover Sport supercharged that, you know, skip timing. Anybody who knows Jaguar Land Rover products knows that timing chains on them, even with proper maintenance, can go on them, even on just one bank. And the decision was made that we're just going to put a cylinder head on this car because it just had vent valves on one cylinder head. And they paid me. And this is one of these body on frame ones. I completely pulled the body up off the, off the chassis, which is actually easier to do on one of these than you would think, believe it or not. But you definitely need the scanner to bleed the brakes.
So you backyard people, don't, don't think you can do this. Okay? It's a lot of work. It's not just, it's not like a Jeep. Exactly.
Yeah.
And we put, I put a cylinder head on it and redid everything. And I had all this time in it, I mean, and I just kept finding one thing after another. And my service manager was just like, listen, listen, the higher ups are paying for this. It's just that kind of customer. Because the rest of the car was in actually really fantastic condition, to be fair. And they had, they had probably spent, you know, how I mean, what, 20, $30,000? How much does a customer spend in 10 years on service at a Jaguar Land Rover dealership? They go there every time, right? You know, I get it. And I had. I had like, over 50 hours in this car, just actual time that I had run on it.
And guess what? They paid me. Yeah, they paid me for what I had into the car. It didn't matter that I'd been working on it for a week. They left me alone to do it. They're like, look, this is a number one problem. You're stuck with it. We're gonna take care of you. Just get it done properly.
We don't want the damn thing to come back. Yep, not a problem. And we. We used to do that in this industry, like. And, you know, for the management, the powers that be in dealerships, if you don't want to bite that bullet for that customer, you know, in spite of how much money they've spent in your dealership, then don't. But if you're gonna. If you're gonna accept that as. As the manager or an owner of a dealership, like, well, live with the decision that you made and don't take it out on us.
Like, my dad had a construction company for years, and unfortunately, he was forced to close after the 2008 recession because down in Florida, that really hit hard down there. And he barely paid himself hardly anything, but. But he was paying his crew foreman's $35 an hour in 1999. Yeah, because he saw value in people. And granted, he expected a lot from you. And if you screwed up, you'd hear about it. But if you did your job and you showed up to work on time, you did what you're supposed to do, he would. He would take care of you.
And I mean, think of. I mean, think about that. I mean, think about how much. I mean, 35 bucks an hour, even if you were hourly or flat rate. Today is kind of.
Eh.
But. But you know, 25 years ago, that would have been killer.
It was huge, you know, huge money.
It was huge money. That's why I worked for him as a high school, when I was in high school, when I was a teenager, because every other kid's job back then paid five bucks an hour. He paid me 14. That was a pretty easy decision.
It's. And. And it goes into that so many different levels of what. When we actually say to take care of our people. Because when you talk about, we're going to bring that job in here, you know, and I tell technicians all the time, the reality is like, yeah, you're tasked with fixing that and it's going to be a 50 hour nightmare. But as soon as you just accept that they're only going to pay you 13 hours and you got 50 hours into it, as soon as you accept it, you set the precedents that mean that they will do it to you again or they will do it to somebody else. And the very real reality is like when we again when we're talking numbers, it, you have to hold them accountable. Which means I have to get my time covered.
Now I'm not talking about going down, down wormholes that were, we shouldn't get paid because we didn't file a process or rework or whatever. Right? I'm not talking about.
Right.
I'm talking about there's a job that's an absolute kicker and you have to get through it because somebody is telling you to get through it. You should be paid for that job. That's the agreement that we all sign up for. So when you allow them to not pay you, you've set precedence that says I will accept that as treatment. We shouldn't be doing that. Because what you've done now is you've donated your skill and your labor to the customer who doesn't even know that you did that. Because they don't know how we're paid. They don't understand.
That's why the other thing, when you try to have these conversations with these people in the comments and all the, the general public, they don't even understand how we're paid or how it works. So when you start to tell them about, well, they're frustrated because they bring in this intermittent thing and, and nobody can find it. Do you realize that like if you bring in and you hand the keys the advisor and go, you know, it did it two days ago, but it hasn't done it today. But this is when I have my appointment. I'm really hoping you guys can find something. When you talk to that person, you go, do you realize that today if I don't find anything, I'm probably not even getting paid? And they go, what do you mean you're not getting paid? Well, if I don't find something to put on your car as a repair that might fix it or might not, I'm not getting paid for this. Why would you work that way? Great question. Why would I work that way? Because that's how this industry has always been.
My whole thing is to just make people understand if you want to go to work and you Want to look at it the end of the year, and it all balances out to you, and that's fine. But the reality is, like, don't ever accept that that's all the money that there is to pay you, because that's. That's B.S. especially the dealership. And it's in a lot of independence, too, because who you have to hold accountable is the people that make the decisions. That's who you have to hold accountable as a technician, your service writer, when they fail to get all the information that you need to diagnose the car. When they fail to sell enough time to diagnose the car, you have to hold them accountable. Because we're held accountable to doing the repair.
But it takes a team.
We're always the fallout.
Yeah, right.
We're always the fallout. That's what I would always tell. I mean, I would go out of my way to make sure some of these young kids just wouldn't make silly little mistakes that, to be fair, anybody with lack of experience could make, because I know what's going to happen to them. And then the irony of it is you get a car that comes back that's missing a couple of lug nuts on a tire, and three of them are just, you know, loosely baiting right there. And the wheel almost fell off the car because it had a tire rotation two days ago, and somehow the customer put, you know, 50, 60 miles on it. The damn wheel didn't fall off, you know, and, you know, that person never seems to get dealt with. But I guarantee you, you know, the one kid who. Who misses some piece of trim or something small like that is just gonna, you know, doesn't reset a tire light.
You know, I mean, yeah, it. It upsets customers. Yeah. You know, but, you know, there are growing pains with. With younger people. And, you know, I often. The way I like to lead on that is when I've had younger people in the shop, they've been trained by older people. Like, if I catch one of those cars that one of these rookies worked on that, okay, yeah, they made a mistake.
But, you know, go, let's handle that amongst ourselves. We'll be honest with the customer. We'll tell them what's going on with their car, and it was a mistake. It shouldn't have happened. We should always be transparent with the customer, but we also should always take these moments as a moment to learn for everybody. Even if you're 22 years older, you've been doing this for over 20 years, like I have. And. And another Thing that customers don't get, especially today, that $275 an hour or whatever crazy labor rate your dealership's charging.
I don't think there's any of them out there that are below 250 anymore. Probably not the technician. Even if it's a seasoned technician that's working on your car, they might be making 13% of that. Yeah, they might, maybe. And we're the higher paid people.
Yeah, they're not making, they're not making 50%. You know, the argument comes up all the time. Well, technicians used to get 50% of the door rate. No, no, they really never did. Or, you know, they used to get 30%. And you see with 40% it, there was a lot more variables involved now in order to, to make the whole machine work so the technician unfortunately can't get. And then the other thing is now we're, we're providing more benefits to technicians than we've ever have in the past. So that money has to come from somewhere.
Right? So maybe you used to get 40 of the door rate and no health benefits. Now you get health benefits and you still want 40 of the door rate. Like if you still want that, that price is the door rate up to a certain level. And that's going back to what you're talking to. We can price the door rate to a level where all of a sudden now technicians are grumbling going, nobody's selling anything. I can't make any money. There's no work coming in. And I think we're at a very real place now where we've already done that.
And I think it's. Some of it is a follow up from, from COVID The other thing is a lot of people, and this is I, I hammer on people all the time on this. If you can't fix their car under warranty, they will not. No matter what they'll give someone in the aftermarket 3, 4, 5 chances to fix their car before they'll begrudgingly go back to the dealer. It's especially on Diag. Right. Like they'll go and have the part fired at three other shops. Shops, please don't think I'm talking, you know, other shops.
I'm running down just. And then they'll come back to the dealer and the dealer will go, I know exactly what that pattern failure is for that. And I, I know exactly where the software is. And, and they fix it and they begrudgingly pay for that. And then they go, well, I'm not bringing it. I wasn't Going to bring it back because I had this weird squeaker rattle or my phone wouldn't connect when it was under warranty and I wasn't. I didn't think they could fix anything. If we can't fix it under warranty, we can't keep them as a customer after warranty.
So we all have a responsibility to do our best. But that's where the OEs and the, and the dealers are not getting it is because we're not paying our people enough to fix the car properly. And then they sit back there and they go, you guys are not selling enough hours or there's not retail work coming in. Yeah, because you screwed that up at the beginning. It wasn't a technician. I'm not going to go to work for free on something to try and build your image. It's your image. My image is how well I fix the car.
Right. Well and like for me, like I've had plenty of times in the past, especially at jlr where customer comes in and you know, they're out of warranty and they got a phone connectivity issue. But I know a over the air software update's gonna fix it which a lot of places would love to just charge for that. I mean me personally, I'm not charging for anything over the air. It's if I'm just pushing a button on a computer to send it. And that's how it used to be. Nowadays it's, you don't even need to do that. But, but you know, if they're coming in buying a, you know, a 60,000 mile service or they're buying a coolant repair, you know, and I'm, I'm getting 4, 6, 8, 10 hours off this thing which you know, especially on Land Rover products, very, very easy to rack up that kind of labor bill.
You know what? Yeah, yeah, they're going to get a little something extra for me and if it's something that's going to take me two, you know, two minutes to just push a button and do a software update. So they have a, a phone connectivity issue or like the old, the old JLRs used to have infotainment control plus they had this massive software update to make them over the air Update capable and CarPlay capable and all that stuff. And if you have one of these cars, it's imperative to keep that thing up to date for it to work, you know. And you know, I just don't believe in wasting people's time but I also believe in giving, you know, something to the customer that's of value. You know, I like to ask for forgiveness sometimes more than permission. And you know, at the end of the day, it could go either way. Customer's happy, customer's not happy. Like, I know I did the right thing because I've had so many cars over the years come in from independent chains or, you know, Bob's U fix at car shop or whatever the heck you want to call it.
We're not gonna, we're not gonna name real names here, but I'm sure you and I can both guess who they are. You know, where they come in for a noise complaint and they just went to this other repair shop over there to have brakes put on. And then, you know, half the brake caliper bolts were left loose. And you know, well, no, yeah, the rear parking brakes on, but you know, you can see the caliper move this much with the wheel swinging just with the thing shut off with it up on the lift. And you know, I, I had one of those happen one time and I just said, you know what, I put new bolts in all around it. It, you know, the bolts are going to cost what they're going to cost. We're going to charge the customer an hour for this here. Easy, easy to find.
I mean, this is literally textbook. You can get this done within an hour's amount of time. I didn't even have to take the wheels off this damn thing to, to check everything. And when we went to go explain everything to the customer, her attitude, maybe. I'm sure this person was upset at where they bought the brakes from, but their attitude towards us was, thank you. You saved my life today. And you're right because I did. And I'm not looking for that pat on the back.
I know that that person now has a safe car. And they came in here and they didn't.
Yeah.
And that's the big, that's the biggest thing that really customers just don't see as. Well, they just, they don't, some customers, they don't see this type of negligence, but some do. And dealerships just don't seem to care if that type of negligence happens because, you know, back in the day, like I said, the kid who left the tire loose, that kid would have been fired back in the day. Ok, now we, we, we can't fire anybody for legit reasons anymore. But you know, the old crotchety bastard who's making 25 hours a week, who's complaining about not making enough money and you know, he got to buy his kids T ball equipment or whatever. Yeah. That's the guy we're going to get rid of. We're going to get rid of the person that we, that knows what they're doing because well, makes the payroll tax a little cheaper.
Why not?
Well, and we call them toxic and we say that they're damaging for the culture and they are, and they are. But here's the reality. Like what made them toxic? It goes back to my like why am I called the Jada mechanic? Well because like for 20 some years, right, I went through one job after another where I felt like what I was bringing to the table for them was never really compensated fairly or, or recognized at the level that it should have been. Now I'm not saying everybody was, was treated me poorly, but it was always like I've had to fight to, to get that hour that I, I spent, you know, and, and that's to me was always right from day one seemed backwards. It seemed like I shouldn't have had to do that. I'm bringing a skill that most of the other people in the shop couldn't do a lot of time. The people that I worked for later on especially, they couldn't have gone back out in the shop and did what I did. So why is it that I'm, I'm looked upon as lowlier? Like I shouldn't be, right? I don't need my butt kissed, I don't need to be hugged every day and told you're the greatest thing ever.
But let's just like be polite and friggin pay me for my time. That's not a crazy request. You know, when it goes to this, I want technicians to do this for free and I want technicians to do that for free. And it'll all come back around to them. I think the days of trusting that'll all go back around are gone because
I think they've been gone.
We have to go to this level of like the process out front has to become so much better. And again you're going to hear me go on the service advisor thing because I think it's something that in 2026 really needs to be brought.
It's bad.
To the forefront. They're not.
It's.
Yeah, it's, it's.
You know, I had a service Advisor advisor in 2006 that I'll never forget. That was an older guy that was a tech for 20 years and then was a service advisor for another 20 years. So this guy's in his late 50s, early 60s. And this is also back in the day when well, we all Worked within a couple of miles of downtown Delray beach where all the bars were already open when we got off of work on Friday. And I shit you not, this, this service advisor would go out partying all night as an older guy and somehow make it back to the dealership in his truck. Probably shouldn't have, but it was a lot closer than going home at probably two or three o' clock in the morning. Guy would get maybe three or four hours worth of sleep, brush his teeth, you know, get a cup of coffee, put on a clean shirt on a Saturday morning and he'd be out there a half an hour before we open, selling every which thing he can. Especially during season when we were always really busy in the winter.
That's when we used to make our money back in the day in Florida. And delightful human being. Okay, yeah. And I mean, you know, maybe he partied a little too much or kept partying a little bit too long, but he was never intoxicated on the job. And this was also back in the day where, I don't know if you remember this, but this is also back in the day where. Where pretty much everybody smoked cigarettes and you could smoke cigarettes wherever the hell you wanted to. And this held that place. I had a general manager who smoked two packs a day and had two smoke eaters in his office that couldn't keep up with his habit, you know?
Yep.
But most delightful guy you'd ever see and could sell, could sell ice to a friggin Eskimo, as they used to say. And at the end of the day, like that's really all we, that's really all we want people to show up on time because that's what all of our fathers and our grandfathers were taught to do. And they didn't have the benefit of being able to have a dialogue like this and open up not just to each other as professionals, but open up to real mental health professionals, which I hope more people take advantage of because trust me, like I said, my dad, I love him, but my dad never got the help that he got that he needed because he was born in 1944 and, and men from that time period just didn't do it. It was seen as a weakness and it's not now. But you put all that together and we're just still in this rut. It's like it's no wonder there's so many people our age, you and me, that are in our 40s and 50s, that we're just like, dude, we've had enough. And we're gonna go do something else. And you know, I hope whatever comes for me next I can make a real positive difference in anybody's life, whether it's the automotive industry or not.
Because at the end of the day, I grew up on the old school American dream where you know, this little house that I have here is what everybody aspired to own. You talk to people that are in their 20s now, they can't afford a house. No, they don't even think about that. And you're in on, you're in. Outside of Toronto or Ontario. Yeah, yeah. I mean cost of living in that part of Canada is just absolutely crazy.
It's terrible. It's the worst it's ever been in, in, well, as long as I can remember and I'm 50, but it's like it's ever been in 20 years in terms of like now the young people, it's. To own a home is not even a goal of theirs. They have given up on that idea, most of them. It's like they hope to own a reasonably nice car and, and can maybe take a vacation every year. And the rest of it is like they're totally satisfied with renting an apartment or renting a home. Like two incomes maybe rent a home or they sign up for a mortgage because like they would do that here. They'd give them 40 year mortgages when they're 30 years old and you're like you're never going to be able to pay that off.
And they're like, that's okay.
It's like the 10, it's like the 10 year car loans nowadays. It's just like. And what, what a lot of people don't think about that also is like what's going on with car loans right now is the same thing that was going on with the housing crisis in 2008, but both, both here and in Canada.
Exact same. Yep.
Yeah. And, and it's, and this isn't people. Oh well, you know, it's electric. Nobody wants to buy. It's got nothing to do with electric cars or this, that or the other. Like, it's just the pure simple fact that, you know, my mom bought a brand new family Ford Escort station wagon with air conditioning as an option on it for less than $11,000 brand new in 1995. And as I'm dating myself here, you know, nowadays what you'll buy for $11,000 cash is maybe a 10 to 15 year old Ford C Max hybrid. Good choice.
Mind you, because my girlfriend has one, I've fallen in Love with it, unfortunately, but love that little car. But you know, it's not going to buy anything new. I mean, when, when, when over 50, when about 50% or more of the population in this country doesn't even make over $50,000 a year. And that's what a new car costs on average. I mean, it's an unsustainable system. So. So Mr. Farley, if you're listening, me and Jeff over here, you know, we've, we've been trying to tell you these things, you know, and because I'm glad you brought, brought that up earlier and I'm just like, I, I would love, I would love nothing more than to sit down and talk with him or anybody that high up the food chain that really wants to know how we can fix this.
If it's real simple, we do what we used to do and we pay people what they're worth. And you want to know how you keep technicians happy? It's real easy when they walk into the luxury car dealership that they work at and the sales manager or the service manager or some other manager is the one that's driving the new $200,000 car or the new $80,000 Ford F150 that they'd really like. And what are you driving? Some crappy old Honda or just some 20 year old beater that you can afford. And I mean, yeah, as mechanics, yeah, old beaters that we can just fix and they're cheap cars, we don't have to have payments. But you know, honestly, as I'm getting older, it'd be nice to have a new car with heated seats, you know, and that's all I want, you know, like I, that's. And I used to be able. And I've owned so many cars over the years. My first, my first new car that I bought, I still have it.
It was $16,000 brand new and I still have it. And what is there for, what is there for people to afford? And what we, you know, that's unfortunately where we're at. And that's why I came to you in the first place, because it's like, oh my goodness, you know, the algorithm figured out that there are people out there who agree with me.
Well, and you know, the comments in my threads all the time and people go, well, it's not fair. It's, it's pricing, you know, auto repair. If the door rate at a shop goes to be $180 an hour, nobody can afford that. And the reality is, is that there's still a huge Population pop. Part of the populace that can't afford 180 an hour, they can't. They just might go with something else or go without something else. It might be a vacation. It might be, you know, they don't get a new iPhone every year.
They get a new one every three years, right. Such and such. And people get really mad at me when, you know, when Sherwood from Royalty made the comment like, you know, it could be, don't tell me you can't charge $200 an hour to do brakes on a Chevy truck.
Truck.
And everybody's losing their flipping minds and all. The reality is we can. And the people, unfortunately, that if it gets priced to where they can't afford it, inflation is, is sucks. And it's a terrible thing. And it's happening, but it has always happened and people have always adjusted and pivoted to it. The reality is, is that some people really, if they did the math and did the budgeting and looked at at the end of the week, if they don't need a vehicle, they probably shouldn't have a vehicle. Vehicle in the sense that if you're, if public service can provide you a transit option to get to work and get to where you need to go and everything else like this, you're crazy sometimes to be trying to limp along a 15, 16 year old car and paying up here insurance, so you don't have an option, you have to pay it. It's mandatory repair, maintenance, all this kind of stuff.
If you could take public transit, because public transit's maybe $150 a month, right? For a pass, Right. Well, I don't, I don't want that. I want my freedom. I get it. I totally understand. But freedom comes with a lot of responsibility sometimes and expenses. I, I joke all the time before I drive. Bought my, my 2015 Wrangler.
I was driving a 96 Cherokee that had no floors left in it, right. And the only reason I finally got rid of it and didn't fix the floor is because it needed floors, it needed rockers, no big deal. The, the air conditioning compressor had seized up and I put a. Yeah. So I put a bypass pulley on it the year before because I'm like, well, I'm coming into the fall. I don't need it anyway.
Yeah, what would you need it for in the winter in Canada?
Right. That is a situation. If I start pricing out to fix the AC and fix the car, I'm like, I'm gonna put three grand into a 500 vehicle. It doesn't make sense now, do I like the simplicity and reliability of that vehicle? 100. 100%.
Oh yeah.
But I went through my whole career never buying a new car. I went through my whole career never buying anything really newer than 2002. I was driving in 2002. You know, by 2012 it was blown up, the transmission was gone, it was a Cavalier and I was, it was, it was rotted and it was scrapped. Like that's where, that's what I've always existed on. Because this industry costs so much to make the tooling and the up and down flow of sometimes the pay that we don't always qualify for a really great car loan at a really great rate on a really nice car, you know. You know, so it's, it's like people don't understand sometimes the sacrifices even that the technicians make to do this line of work, you know, and the tooling thing is just one, one example, one cost. And you know, technicians get really ripped on a lot of time because they say we're terrible with money management.
And we, we are. 100%. We are.
I would say I have three motorcycles. I'm guilty.
A lot of us, I'll with the other way of saying. A lot of us I think are materialistically trying to, how do I say it? We're trying to treat INAC in a, in, in inadequacies and things that are missing within our lives with sometimes material things or addiction, drugs, alcohol. We're trying to fill up that stuff because of what this stress of this job can do to us.
Right, well, and that's where it comes, that's where it comes from the most. I mean I've seen so many people over the years have loads of substance abuse problems. And I mean, I'm not gonna lie, when I was younger, hell, I was with that service advisor, you know, party and Hardy after 5 o' clock too. Didn't even go home. And I live right down the street. We, we all did back and we all did back in the day. And as a younger person, you did it because you could. And then, oh, the engineers from Japan are in town and they, you know, they got to use my Scion as a guinea pig because I was the first one to buy a Scion down in South Florida.
And you know, but hey, that's what they did to thank me with it. They took me out and bought me a few beers and even 23 year old me couldn't keep up with those guys, you know, but that's, you know, it comes from that but it also comes from just, you know, going home and, you know, you got a fifteen hundred dollar a month mortgage, you got another five or six hundred dollars in utilities or car payments or child support or, you know, back taxes, whatever it is. I mean, yeah, people get themselves into financial pickles all the time and. Yeah, I get it. You know, you could sit there and go, oh, well, they should have been smarter. They should have been smarter. Well, you know, a lot of them. Yeah, they should be.
Some of them, you know, maybe through no fault of their own, they just really ended up in a horrible situation because somebody could afford a better lawyer than they could. Yeah, you know, let's, let's, you know, and then it just leads down this cycle of, of vice to where, I mean, hell, it was up until about 2012, where I could still smoke in the shop and I don't smoke cigarettes anymore. I haven't for years. But like, I mean, I'm, I'm almost 42. Why do you think I look like this? Like, this is where it came from. You know, I, I, it's funny because I had a friend of mine that I've worked with for a long time, a parts guy that I've known for many, many years. He literally told me the other day, he's like, I don't remember you being that gray three years ago. And that was a little sobering, I gotta say.
And I don't mind being gray, but it's the, I know how I got there. And it's the stress and it's the, it's the drinking and it's the, the, it's the staying up past your bedtime and it, you know, you haven't been on a vacation in three years. And then when you finally do get to go on a vacation, you're only going because your parents can afford to pay for it.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, yeah, I've had plenty of those family vacations where, yeah, I chipped in a few bucks here and there, but mom bought the airline tickets to Europe, not me, you know?
Yeah. And, you know, it's hard sometimes to relate to my parents. And, you know, I don't have my father anymore. I have a stepdad, and I have my mom.
Sorry. Hear that?
Nah, he was, he was a cool, he was a cool dude. And I have my, my mom, who's 75 and, you know, like, you wouldn't know that she was 65 and active and healthy and all that jazz, takes care of, care of herself, but she can't even relate to this Day and age, you know, about the cost of everything because like they look at it and, and they've had their, their mortgage paid off for 25 years, you know what I mean? Like a lot of them at that, at that point in their age minimum 25, sometimes even longer, some of them didn't even have a mortgage. Right. And it's like they look at the price of cars now and they go, holy crap. And that's just the car. And then if you go and shop around and look at the house and everything like this, so it's like you cannot, it's really hard to do it on a single income. So that's the other thing that, you know, we don't talk about sometimes is that technicians have a very tough job and then we come home sometimes to, you know, we don't always know how to like share the stress that we went through that day. Like my, my ex would know when I wasn't making hours because I would tell her and I would be, you know, she heard every frustration, every gripe I ever had with the industry way back when.
So she knew what it meant, what flat rate meant. She knew what it meant to be, you know, he was a fed mechanic. She understood all that kind of stuff. All the lingual that we. Yeah, and thank God that I had one that listened and cared because there's a lot to come home to that and they don't. And then they just get sick and tired of listening to our negative attitude and you know, we destroy the relationship that we're in. And then it's like, you know, maybe you destroy the relationship and you've got kids and now you're paying child support and now you're like, it just keeps snowballing and snowballing, snowball following the thing that keeps popping up in, in the conversations. And I had it again with somebody and it's like they couldn't believe me and I had to show them the facts.
Technicians are the number one auto technicians for suicide in blue collar. Yeah, number one.
You know, and, and they, and they're also the same type of people that are stressed out like that. They love to start fights with other people at work just because they're pissed off and you're there, there and you just go, that guy's got a wife and two kids at home that he supports. You know, I mean, he just told me two months ago he's busting his ass to try to make this car payment because, you know, he's driving around in some rusty old beat up Cherokee like you used to have. Because he wanted to do the honorable thing and make sure that his wife had the nice car because his wife's taking care of the little kids. And you know, I mean, I mean hell, I got a friend of mine in the army. Army does that. He drives a 25 year old freaking Suburban and he loves it. But yeah, it's so that the wife can have the new Hyundai Elantra that the kids go in and yeah, that's under warranty and the AC always works and it's not going to break down and if it happens to them, it's not going to happen.
If it happens to him, what do you do? It doesn't matter if it happens to him. You know, and there's so many, there's so many men and women who, who fix cars on a daily basis that like, you know, they are their only provider. Some people are single, some people are single parents as well. And I, for all of those out there that are parents, I don't have kids really not something I'm interested in. Just personal note. But listen, I'm in my 40s. I have plenty of friends that have little nieces and nephews. I can have a softball team going tomorrow there, Jeffy, if I wanted to, you know, but you know, it's you, but you, you learn, you'll learn how real difficult it is when you, when you have children.
I mean me, yeah, I'm single and keeping this roof over my head. You know, that's one thing. If I had a wife and kids to support. I don't know, I really don't know how I it. Even when I was making six figures a year, it's just like. Yeah, because the money, you know, your, your monthly pay that you bring home, I mean 60, 70% of it is just your fricking mortgage or your rent right there, it's, it's just gone.
Yeah.
You know, done. End, end of story. Hell, the only, the main reason I bought my house 10 years ago was when prices were super really low and affordable around here. It equated to about the same as I was paying in rent for a two bedroom apartment. Now, now, now I'm paying five or six hundred dollars less than what it would be for a two bed, a comparable two bedroom apartment around where I live in a nice safe neighborhood. And you know, and I don't live far from Atlanta either. I live, I'm less than 25 miles from downtown Atlanta. So.
And for most, and I mean trust me, I've seen the house Hunter shows Up in, up in Canada, everything's like 6 or $800,000American. It's always over. Everything's always 1.1, 1.4 million Canadian. I mean, I mean how does a working guy afford that in just a regular neighborhood?
Yeah, you know the, the neighbor across the street, very similar house to mine. She, she had, she'd lived in it for 25 years. So like they, it been paid off a long time ago. Long time ago, that house like so I bought my house for less than 200,000 when I moved into it going on 15 years ago and it's not worth over a million million. You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So it's like I, it's. And that's again because of the way the market went. No, that's not me bragging because the market could change tomorrow. But we're in such a shortage of, of housing in this country now that it's just driven the market right up. So everybody's like, well Jeff, you don't have a ton of money saved for retirement. I know. I, I'm not.
Yeah, me neither.
Me neither.
It's all, it's all in my house.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because I'm looking at that going, that's going to be. What's going to take care of me is, is that, you know, maybe I sell it and move to an apartment, which probably won't make any sense, but I mean, when the mortgage payment is finally paid, that's money now that I put in my pocket every month. Right. And, or I redirect into some kind of savings. The timing is not optimal, it's not perfect, but I'm, I'm still going to be okay. But the young people, a technician 10 years younger than me, I remember I worked with one and like what they were trying to find him and her. Her. And this is again what the conversation we don't have too often.
He didn't like they weren't at a point where they should have necessarily got into a marriage or they shouldn't have gone into a cohabitational relationship, but he couldn't afford to move out of his parents house at 28 years old unless he had somebody to help. So we're sitting here and it's like, you know, and then what happens? Well, maybe then you, you both do a little bit more maturing and you realize, realize this is not who I want to spend the rest of my life with. And you went and bought your first home together. Now you go and put that home on the market and sell it. You pay A bunch of lawyers, a bunch of money to figure out how you're going to split everything up. And, and they wonder why technicians are mentally so unwell. Well, that's the reality of it. And it's not just technicians.
It's. It's this generation period. It's, it's, it's, it really is.
It's, it's advisors. It's, it's, it's, it's valet. It's all the people who are really responsible for making the machine work. Yeah, you know, the manager. You know, I'm not saying, you know, managers don't do anything, but a lot of managers, they especially higher up, they just like, they sit in their office either at the dealership or the one across town, and the same thing with the human resources department. And they don't know their employees and they don't know their strengths and they don't know their weaknesses because they don't care. Because. Because they don't even see us as human beings anymore, quite frankly, Jeff.
They just see us. It's like what George Carlin said. They want us to be smart enough to run the machines, but stupid enough not to question how much we're getting screwed up. And that statement is more true today than it's ever been, because there used to be. When I first started, I had a team leader that, guess what? If somebody on the team had a car that needed to get pushed into shop, shop. We all went to go push it in the shop. And it got done pretty quickly. When you get six guys pushing a car, you know, without, without the nice little electric pusher thing that I wish we had when I was a kid, you know, and back then, you know, if somebody wanted to be mouthy about it, they just go, you know what? Go home for the day.
You're done. You're not going to make any money. You want to keep behaving this way and not be a team player, then you can stay home for a week and eventually. Because that's what would get you fired, you know, back in the day, it would. It would just be your unwillingness to work because, yeah, you know, some of these crotchety old bastards, and to be fair, I'm one of them to a degree. But, you know, yeah, some of them are out of date and out of touch with. With a lot of things. And trust me, from personal experience, they're allowed to flourish just as much as anybody else is.
People who just say horrible things to you because they heard it on the news the night before, and it's Just something you should tell people, I guess. I don't know. But there used to be more team building exercises and there used to be more Saturday barbecues where at the very least they went to Costco and got some burgers and some brats and some buns and just ketchup and mustard and cheese. I mean, you couldn't make this simpler and just grill up for your employees or have a pizza party every once in a while. But your, your, your, your buddy that you were talking about. I earlier was at Rich from that, that shop in Florida. I've seen him on your podcast before too. The guy with the ponytail.
Older guy, Sherwood from.
Yeah, I've seen him. I see him a lot online. And, and like there's an example of a shop that knows how to treat people and there's an example of a shop that knows how to manage people and set real expectations. I've heard him tell the horror story stories on his own page, you know, and I've seen him and other little independent shops, you know, you know, once every other week they buy the shop lunch. I mean, hell, there'll be guys, you know, there's, there's a, a shop here that works on old cars and does old car storage that they do Friday night beers the old fashioned way, you know, because they got a kegerator and they order some pizza and they sit around after work and it's, you know, hey, if you want to go home, go home. But you know, this is what we're going to do to of show our appreciation to our employees. My father, no matter what, when he had his own construction company, would go out of his way to throw a Christmas party for everybody. And if he didn't have a lot of money that year, guess what? We did it at our house.
Yeah.
And he would invite the 20 people that worked for him over to our house and he would grow out for all of them. And if that's what he could afford, so be it. Because they were going to get a Christmas party.
Yeah.
And you know, the restaurant industry seems to get that. I know a guy who's owned a bar here for 30 years that told me a long time ago ago I could drive a brand new Mercedes, but I drive this 20 plus year old knackered Tundra.
Yeah.
Because I pay my people and I put my money back into my business. And ever since COVID he takes all of them on a week long trip to Vegas or wherever, you know, and shuts the business down and pays for it for a dozen people. It's just like, I mean, and we're not even asking for that. We're asking to just have the, have the freaking paycheck so that, you know, we can take our kids to Disney World. We could take our old lady to Vegas and you know, know, have a couple of drinks and see a show and not drive or, you know, whatever it is. Like, what do they think we're gonna do? The around the world in 80 days? I mean, we ain't got time for that. We got cars to fix, buddy.
And, and I worked for so long where it was like always, I, I couldn't afford to have taken two weeks vacation a year. Like, they would have offered it to me, but it wasn't paid. You know what I mean? It wasn't, it wasn't paid time off. So it'd be like, you know, and everybody goes, well, like, why'd you work for those people now? You know, it is what it is. And there was other times where it was like I couldn't even. Because again, it was going to be the average of what it was going to pay a flat rate. Right? So it was like you weren't. Yeah.
That you would sit back and you would go, if I take that vacation, that one week now and one week, say Christmas or something like that, that it's going to hurt me too much and I'm going to be behind and I can't be behind right now because, you know, work is not what it needs to be for, for workflow coming in. And you know, these jobs are kicking my tail and I just, and I wouldn't take the time. And now through the beauty of this podcast, like, I take all the time I want and I'm very lucky. I have an employer that appreciates. Now it's not paid time off. I don't get paid time off. But it's right, it's one of those things where it's like, you know, if I'm going to go and do a trip trip, I'm okay, I'm gonna survive. It's not going to kill me.
You know, these, these young people that can't afford vacation and yet they're not all the way invested into the career like we were. You know, it, it puts them in a really tough spot, the employer, because they don't, they don't know how to get them to buy you in. Well, I'll tell you how you get them to buy in. It's not just about paying them, but it's like you said, it goes back to if you just give Them the excuse that there's, there's no money for a Christmas party. If you just give them the excuse for, you know, there's no money for a new piece of shop equipment, what they become is they become hyperfocused on where else the money's going. Okay, this is a, you know, so if you, then business owner son gets a, you know, a new project car or you know, he's driving around in a three year old Mustang or something like that and the, the shop needs an alignment rack that's not going to kill somebody when the truck goes on it. You know, we, we look at things like that and we go, and again, I understand people look, it's not your place to say Jeff, I get it. But it comes very hard to justify the excuse of there's no money when we see where the money's going to that maybe is not in the best place for the growth of the business.
And I understand, I've talked to a lot of people, technicians especially say I work for a person that they're in the twilight. They, they, they're going to be going out soon. They're not putting any money back in the shop. And, and they say to me, you know, it's frustrating because I don't have a scan tool or I don't have a subscription update or I don't have identifix or I don't have it. I don't have, I don't have, I don't have. The thing is at some point, point maybe then we just walk because you have to, they don't necessarily have a date when they're going to be done, but maybe it just takes losing that one technician for them to realize and when they can't replace that technician, now it's finally time to get out.
And unfortunately I, I think, I think that the industry as a whole is going to have to go through a lot more of that before they're going to realize it. Because like you, you guys have said this on your podcast many times and, and hey, if he's listening, we don't mean to pick on Mr. Farley. We, we, we really don't. I, I think you and I and a lot of us who are in this industry, whether we're podcasters full time or not, I, I really personally, I think he's a car guy and I think he really does is sincere wants to find a solution to this problem. But the re. What, what we see, like you going back to what you said about what we see, all we see is him Going on other more well known podcasts instead of Europe, you know, maybe or you know, he goes on something that you know, the board approved instead of somebody like you who's gonna really ask him some questions, for example, you know, and hold his feet to the fire. You know, if you, if you wanna, if you wanna help out, you wanna, you wanna find a solution to this problem.
You want to find a solution to this problem. But the reality of it is is that we got too many people that own dealerships that have used that as an excuse to have their own private car collection. And, and I mean I know somebody who's been doing this for almost 45 years that basically that's what he's kind of in charge of right now, along with being a flat rate technician and a shop foreman at this particular place. And yeah, he gets to work on some cool stuff and at the end of the day he, at the end of the day he gets taken care of, but at the end of the day he gets taken care of after he has to go and complain about it. Like I shouldn't have to ask for you to pay me for the things that you've asked me to do. You want me to keep up with my manufacturer certifications, you want me to do it at home? Okay, fine, you know, know, throw me a bone here or there. Like I've had managers, I've had managers do that and I've had managers that won't do that, you know, and you just, everything's just becoming so corporate these days where they just have to keep putting more and more money in their pockets up top because they've been sold the same lie that a lot of people have, the trickle down economics. They just don't work.
And it's not what made, it's not what made this country prosperous, it's not what made Canada prosper a prosperous country. It isn't. It was just blue collar people that were, were willing to fix a car or go cut down a tree to frickin for raw materials. I mean, you know, just, you know, name your pick. I mean my dad left a cushy sales job when he had kids and got into construction, not knowing how to do it because he wanted to be a stay at home dad and figured he could make good money at it. And he did for a while. You know, he got, he taught himself how to do it, he got really good at it. And isn't that the American dream? Isn't that what we want? Because we keep saying that, we keep telling younger people that but we don't act like it.
Well, so where, you know, where do we go from here?
There's no, there's no, there's no sweat equity anymore. That's the reality.
Nope, you know, that's true.
And, and that's the, the, the idea. The hustle behind the muscle is gone. You know, everybody is, just wants to be, you know, the first thing they always ask. And, and I again, you know, from a technician standpoint, it sounds funny, but everybody wants to know first and foremost what's it going to pay before I even think about whether I'm going to do it or not. And you know, yeah, from a flat rate technician standpoint, you have to know what it is. But there are some jobs that unfortunately like you are going to lose when you do it the first time and it's just part of it.
Yeah.
And then, you know, you, you develop your process, you get better until after that. Just because I say that you're going to lose on the first one doesn't mean that I'm saying, you know, you're expected to do that and you should expect to. I don't like it. But in the current system that we still incorporate under, which is everything is flat rate, that is just part and parcel of the reality. And the idea is that you bring yourself every day a little bit more valuable than you were to them yesterday. And that's the only leverage you ever have on them is to make yourself to be exceptional. And then.
Oh yeah, you know, well, and it shows when you do that because like one of the best pay scales I ever worked on was I got an extra, let's just say $2 an hour if I got over 40 hours a week. And then if you get 50 hours a week, you get paid an additional X number of dollars an hour. You know, or when I used to get paid on CSI bonuses, I used to get an extra three or four hundred dollars a month, you know, on, on, on that like it, it literally paid for the car that I had a finance on at the time. I, you know, I think, you know, the difference was maybe 27 or something like that. But for I went, hey, free car for me. My CSI bonus is paying for it and everything else is going to be, going to where it should be. And it's, it's little things like that that not just your technicians, but your service advisors, your, your parts people, your porters, people who, you know, deliver cars, you know, everyone who, because the reality of it is they need us to run the dealership more than we need them to manage it. Yeah.
And what I fear is going to happen around here by Christmas. And I, I really hope I'm wrong. I want to be wrong on this. From what information that I've gathered, I still know a lot of people in town that work for several different dealerships and represent several different manufacturers. And people are walking away because they're absolutely just tired of what you and I have been talking about this whole time. And come Christmas around here, because the holidays around here get busy. And you know, the holidays start getting busy real quick around Halloween. And they are not going to have the people that, they're just not going to have the staff.
And I, unfortunately, I think that's really what it's going to take to show these, to show these powers that be. You think things are. This is how bad things can really be. You can sit here and, and you can keep doing and expecting this to us and oh, we gotta, you're not gonna pay us for our certifications. And like you said, you know, you're not gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna be accepted, you're gonna accept this lower pay on this job. I mean, I just saw something on Instagram earlier. Guy had half the dash apart on an F150 for a freaking radio brain that only paid like two hours. I'm like, there's no way that guy has only two hours and just the repair, let alone the doc, let alone the diag.
Yeah, you know, if you had to go do pen testing or anything like that. And people are just in, you know, the labor rates as high as they are, they're scaring away people. They're going to independent shops now, especially at the European dealerships here. They're, you know, they're not going to the European dealership anymore because why would they. They don't want to pay 300 bucks an hour. I get it. A lot of them don't. Some of them, they don't care, you know, and that's, that's fine, whatever.
I've had plenty of those clients. But does it have to get this. I just don't think it should have to get, get that bad. And it should have to get to the point where customers are already just already inconvenienced enough by the processes that are in place right now. You add that to, then we don't have enough staff to fix these cars. I mean, that's just, that's going to create a domino effect for customers down the road. And no wonder they're going to go back to Older cars because they're going to go back to that 15 year old Honda, Honda that they had 15 years ago because, oh well, hey, that thing treated me really, really well.
Yeah.
And you know, there's a lot of secondhand cars on the market right now that, you know, instead of putting ten thousand dollars down on a new eighty thousand dollar car, go on, buy this thing for ten grand, have no car payment.
Yeah.
And oh, look at this. It's lovely. And it gets 40 miles to the gallon and it gets me where I need to go because that's all most people need is just transportation.
Yeah.
You know, you know, and yeah, there's always those people want to sit behind those brands. But you know, that's where. That's what I wanted to hammer home to you mostly because I just think after, especially after listening to you, but my own experience is just, that's what's going to happen and if we don't do something about this sooner than later. So we all need to work together to solve this problem. Otherwise there's going to be a heck of a lot more of us out of work. And during the financial crisis in this country, a lot of people were not happy when President Obama bailed out the auto industry. But he did it for a reason. Because nearly 2.7 million people were going to be without a job.
If that hadn't happened. I mean, can you imagine the ripple effect that would have in our society? I mean that would, that would be a great Depression all over again.
Yeah.
And we better fix this before it gets there.
And it's getting scary when you think about, you know, the, if all of a sudden, because that's, that's the real threat that I see is that. And again, not that we won't touch on politics too much, if we all of a sudden allow all of these cars to come from a foreign country and be sold here? Like it's going to happen in Canada. Like we've already signed an agreement where yes, you have Chinese EVs coming in. People think that's just great because they're going to be able to buy an EV for under $20,000 and you know, it's going to pass the North American Safety Standard act and all that kind of stuff.
Stuff.
We have communities around where I live, like up near Toronto, Oshawa, where there's a large automotive sector. Right. You kind of go towards the, the Windsor, the other side of Michigan. There's a whole lot of automotive jobs. Right. From the, the manufacturer.
Yeah.
If we all of a sudden start Allowing this stuff to come in here, we're going to be in trouble because you're going to see entire community shut down. And I know that like for people that have been in steel or coal or whatever, whatever, they've all been witnessed it, they've seen it happen. You know, it comes and goes and. Yeah, but it's going to look really ugly up here. And the reality is, is like, yeah, we went and bailed out the automotive industry. Obama did it. And you know, you can say whatever you want about it. The problem was, is that all of that money that was allotted to them was not managed in a way that it actually fixed the problem.
And I don't know whether fixing the problem back then would have been breaking the UAW to bring the cost down or what. I don't know. I don't believe that necessarily. The fix was investing in a whole bunch of technology that hasn't made the car any better, it's just made the car more expensive.
Right. But if you start, that's a big part of it.
Yeah. But if you start talking about breaking the UAW in order to bring the cost down, then that's a whole other ripple effective. Like people are going to want my head. So, you know, that's as far as I want to go on.
Yeah, well, you know, it's, it's, it's funny you say that because like the last car my mom got, she, she got it on a lease and bought it out after the lease. And the buyout on it was like 14 grand. It was, it's a. And it's the nicest two liter low mileage Hyundai Kona you've ever seen from like eight years ago.
Yeah.
And it looks and drives like a brand new car. Sure. You know, and that, that I think what's, you know, I don't even think people with. When it comes to the Chinese EVs, I mean, I think the real simple thing with that is this. It's that. That it's got nothing to do with the fact that it's an EV or the fact that it's from China. It goes back to. You just said it right there.
It's something that they're going to be able to buy for $20,000. Okay. Like years ago I had a friend of mine that bought a brand new Chevy Spark, the remnants of Daewoo. And I know we all have our opinions on those, but she bought this car brand new and her payment on it was like $200 a month.
Yep.
For a brand new car that runs and drives with AC, it gets, you know, 40 mpg. It's got a warranty on it, you know. Yeah, they sold those in droves. And the one, the one vehicle that is definitely selling here, and I want to give some credit to Ford here, is the Ford Maverick because it's something people can afford and it's for 80% of the people that want a pickup truck. That is all the pickup truck you need, right?
Yep.
That is, that you don't need. You don't need an F150 or an F250. I, you know, I have no desire to haul a cattle trailer, so I'm not buying anything that anytime soon. Yeah, you know, no, nothing against people who have one. You, you want to have one, you can afford it. Great. But like, I mean even some of the cheaper options on new cars right now, even from some of the more well known companies like Hyundai, Kia, like, like the Hyundai Venue, I mean I, you know, compared to my mother's 8 year old Hyundai Kona, it's just crap. Yeah, it just is.
And people are just tired of these buzzy little turbo four cylinder engines that aren't really that good. Like in my opinion, a GLB Mercedes is better in electric just because it doesn't have that buzzy God awful engine in it. Now that's the same thing using Nissan, you know.
Yeah. You kind of shared something with us. You're going on a, on a different. There's a possible new avenue for you going forward.
Can we talk about, we could talk about that a little bit. I just hope this doesn't ruin my chances for the interview that I got tomorrow. No, I think, yeah, no, I think, I think I would be okay. I think I would be okay. It's, it's, it's, it's an instructor position at the collegiate level. And the best part about it is it's right down the street from my house. So no more Atlanta traffic. I mean, you know, you want to look up some of the worst traffic on the east coast of this country.
We have it here, we have plenty of that. But I think for me it's going to really, really give me a chance to take a step back a lot if I get this job because I'm gonna have almost 100 days of training for it as well. And it's something I can really sink my teeth into. And plus, just honestly I'm physically exhausted from crawling around on the cold floor anymore. I've been using pads on the floor to kneel down on the floor for years, but I should have started using them when I was a lot younger. And trust me, that's gonna be one thing. Students are, here, use this. You'll thank me later.
I'll throw it down right at their feet, you know, make it, you know. But I've always wanted to find something that I could be effective at in positive change. And I think teaching is definitely one of those things. I think that's something also that we've lost a lot in the industry. I mentioned to you earlier, I have a two and a half year vocational degree in this. I went to a public trade school instead of going to a private one many years ago. There used to be more of those options, but these days, shops will seem to hire you whether you have a formal education or not. They don't seem to care, you know, which kind of sucks in a lot of ways because you'll learn a lot on that side that will really prepare you for going into a shop.
And I'm all for, you know, I'm all for knowledge is power. And the more I can teach you today, the better that, you know, you can perform tomorrow. And hey, people can teach me things too. I mean, hell, a friend of mine who's 23 years old taught me a lot about EVs that, you know, I went to his wedding last year. I mean, like, and, you know, I didn't give him a hard time because he was a younger person. He clearly knew what the heck he was talking about. And, you know, I want to get, I want to get back to that, definitely. But this teaching thing, you know, it's a lot of things really, but for, you know, yeah, it's convenience next to my house.
But what it really is for me is it just gives me a new chapter because just after 22 years of fixing cars, I'm just broken. Honestly. I am, I am broken physically, I am broken emotionally. I'm broken mentally in so many ways. And I'm, I'm honestly glad that it took us this long to get together in this format because I'm gonna be honest with you, Jeff, I was pretty angry initially when I emailed you, and I was really just, just hoping that you would be somebody that would listen. Clearly you've checked that box at this point. You know, I appreciate that. I really do.
Because the reality of it is, and what people should take the most from this podcast and your podcast in general, in my opinion, is we are not slowly approaching, we're, we're vastly approaching, like this is going to happen in the next couple of years. And, and you could blame it on politics, you can blame it on China, you can blame it on whatever you want. But until those of us who actually keep the machine running, people like you and I have a voice and people actually take us seriously, not believe us, take us seriously and implement some real changes, that's how we're going to be able to come out with not only vehicles that people can afford, but jobs that people want to keep. Keep. Like, you know, you hear about, you hear about places, not just shops, but you hear about little mom and pops that have been around for 50, 60 years and they never have to fire anybody. Why does that happen? I wonder why? You know, because you keep people happy or they'll work longer, they'll work harder for you. They, they'll, they will be better. It's just that simple.
You can give them all the education and all the tools they want, but at the end of the day, you know, if they come home, home and they're worried about paying their rent versus paying the traffic ticket and you know, like you said, you know, I mean my girl, thankfully, you know, her dad was a mechanic. So clearly she has a type. Unfortunately for her, but you know, she understands and you know, you're lucky that yours did. But you know, that might not also necessarily be the case. And yeah, that can lead to pro. And you know, problems at work can lead to problems at home and problems at home can get really, really bad and really, really ugly for a lot of people. And so you can sit there all day and say, oh well, this guy just, you know, thinks he's hot stuff and wants to make more money and you know, wants to drive a brand new Porsche. No, you know what we want to do? We want to take our girl to fricking Ruth Chris or a nice restaurant or something like that.
We want to be able to pay for our kids braces and you know, Little League and all that other stuff. You know, my, my mother, when I was a kid, kid worked for General Electric and we had, we had the best health insurance you could possibly have in this country for a family of four. It didn't cost her anything and it covered everything.
Yeah.
So. And that's all people really, really want. And that's what the, that's what all the powers that be need to get back to. And you know, yeah, other bad technicians, sure. There's also a lot of bad managers, there's a lot of bad leaders, there's a lot of bad owners and you know, sport sporting leagues don't seem to have A problem getting rid of people who cause chaos and disrupt the system and disrupt the flow of money. And I don't know, last time I checked, the NFL, the NBA, they look like they're doing pretty good.
Oh, yeah, Yeah. I would, I would challenge the, the older people. And again, we won't. We won't keep you much longer. Adam, I appreciate it. Is.
Oh, you're good, man. This has been great. It's been fun.
Is think about this like, like what Adam's talking about. You know, there's a lot of therapy that we get from this as we age out in being able to. To pass it on. Right. So when you have young people around you that have potential, share what you can with them and keep them. You know, don't always bring the negative. Bring the truth. The truth sometimes is.
Can sound negative, but bring the truth. Try not to bring all negative and, and guide them into this and empower them to understand. Like, this is a very rewarding career, you know, and it is challenging, and it is not it. You can puff your chest out and be proud of when you say that you're an automotive technician, because the very reality is, like, this is not like 60 years ago when half of the people walking around probably could get. Could do it. It is a small percentage now of people that can actually do this job day. And it's not just the technical ability. It's the.
It's the fortitude and the resolve to be able to do the job every day. So take pride in the fact that you are and you can and share with the young people your skill set and your abilities and guide them into this. And that's all I'm doing through this podcast, is it's not about. I'm trying to hold a manager accountable. I'm trying to hold an owner accountable. I'm trying to blame people for this and that and the other thing. It's got nothing to do with that.
That.
But we're going to start having the conversations where I'm teaching these young people how to survive this now. Yeah, surviving this means discomfort for a different group than it traditionally was. I'm not responsible for that, but it's a situation of. I'm telling them what worked for me. To get through here may not work for you, but it did work for me. And to consider it, you know, don't. Don't accept so many answers. Don't accept poor treatment, toxic employees, if you have one, like, don't allow it to become toxic.
You go talk to your people and you make them Very aware that, like, I will not tolerate that under no situation. I'm not talking about, like, you know, you gotta have some thick skin. Like if you show up and, you know, they make crack a few jokes, they're just cracking jokes. But if you have somebody that's trying to undermine your ability every day or is giving you false information to try and see you fail so that they can remove competition from within the shop, you need to address that and you need to nip it in the bud. And you need to be very willing to stand up for yourself and fight for your place. If you do that, you will always go be right in what you do. That's the key. But you have to involve your people, people, your hr, whatever the owner, you have to say, listen, that's toxic.
Here's the very reality. They may not do anything about that person because right now they can't. You have to accept that. That means you may have to move on, as sucky as it is. Okay?
Yeah.
But the reality is, is that like what we are now bringing is we're bringing it up, the shortage. And when they see this, they're not going to always have toxic people staying around. Because it's been talking about and proven more and more that the toxic people have an effect on so much more of the bottom line than we ever saw. We saw them and they're like, they were a consistent 40 hour producer for the shop and then we remove that toxic person and all of a sudden they go, we're up 60 hours with that person on. So that's a very real reality. So when you're listening to this and you think you have somebody toxic and you've had people come to you and complain about a person that's in the shop and you're just blowing it off as it's all these young, whatever millennials and all this stuff they got, you know, they're pansies, you know, thick skin.
Yeah, I know.
Listen to what they're saying because they're telling you, right, I, I want out of here. I want this to change. And if you can afford to lose, lose people, which I know none of you can, then don't listen to a damn thing Adam and I say. But if you can't look at the situation and do something about it, it's not healthy and it's not necessary anymore. It truly is not. That person that's all jaded in the back and angry and toxic, man, they're not all that they thought they were, you know?
Yeah. And for, for older people I would also add to, for people our age that are still doing it, it's like, look, yes, it is a different world and for a lot of good reasons. I mentioned earlier, I used to be able to smoke and drink at work and in the wintertime when I worked at this Toyota dealership years ago in the wintertime we were super, super busy. Somebody would go get beer at 6 or 7 o' clock and you know, when we got done at 10pm, we'd been there since 7am, you know, that morning. And yeah, that's. Yes, that's how. Yes, that was 2004. Okay.
Things aren't like that now. Now, now, some of you old bastards probably have an air conditioned shop to work in now or one that's heated. So that's, that's probably pretty nice. I know I don't, I don't complain when I have a climate controlled shop to work in at my age anymore. And I'm from Florida. We're not a wintering people, okay? Yeah, the world is a little different. And yeah, you can crack jokes with people and you can have fun with people, but you know, don't just try to go push the line automatically, you know, you know, know, sit down, talk to them, listen to them. You know, people will show who they really truly are pretty early on.
You just gotta, you just gotta let them. Okay? And okay, so you didn't get to tell this one joke that your favorite celebrity said that, you know, probably isn't appro. If you ever stop and think if this is this appropriate for the workplace, if you can't come up with a definitive yes, then just don't say it. It's just that simple, you know, know, and do what you can to do to make life better for everybody around you. And also if you have younger people that are showing some initiative and they can teach you something. I mean, because I got to tell you, what if you're, especially if you're working on evs, buddy, the, the EV industry has no problem getting all the young people that don't want to come work at traditional dealerships. And they teach these kids pretty freaking quick. And they're, and these cars, they're not going anywhere.
Anywhere, okay? And we're already starting to see third party shops for Teslas and other old EVs, so. And like, I don't know about y', all, but I'm not allergic to money, Jeff. You know, like, I can, I could spend somebody's money if they have a Tesla the same as if they have a Porsche. I do not care and go into it with that attitude. And remember what your grandma always told you. You know, the good Lord gave you, you know, two ears and one mouth for a reason there, son, because you're
supposed to use one twice as much as the other. Yeah.
Yeah, it's true.
Adam, I appreciate you being on here tonight, man. I'm really excited.
This has been fun.
Yeah, that's. That's hopefully coming down the pipe, and I will check in with you shortly, you know, in the very near future to. To hear how it is and. And what's new. So, you know, there's the.
There's the girlfriend checking on me.
Well, that's what I mean. I won't keep you much longer, so.
So you're good. You're. You're good. She. She's trying to remind me that it's time to eat. We had the time change, and now it's late.
Yeah, same here. I got my little dog. She wants to go for dinner, too, so. But thank you. We'll check in with you. Like I said, I'm. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you. And I'm really, really hope that, you know, we can check back in a couple months and hear how it's going.
You know, I'd love to do that. I. I really, really would. It's been an honor. It's been a pleasure. Thank you again for your time, and I hope all your listeners really enjoyed this podcast. So, like, comment, subscribe.
Excellent. Thank you, Adam. We'll talk to you all later, everybody. 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 extravagance, expertise, and I hope that you'll please join us again next week on this journey of change. Thank you to my partners in the ASA group and to the 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 10 millimeter, and we'll see you all again next time.
About this episode
Adam Matz, a 22-year dealership technician, explains why technicians are leaving: burnout, greed, and a system that underpays diagnostics while adding approval delays, software-only fixes, and ever-more complex electrical problems. He contrasts Japanese reliability vs European “electrical headaches,” criticizes warranty/CSI processes that punish shops, and argues dealerships price labor so high that customers and techs both drift to independents. He also discusses mentorship vs “gravy work,” toxic culture, and the financial pressure technicians face. Adam hints at a future teaching role to help the next generation.
Original notes
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In this episode, Jeff is join by Adam Matz to discuss challenges facing dealership mechanics today. They talk about stagnant wages, rising labor rates, and management practices that impact technician morale and retention. The conversation also brings up the growing technician shortage and the need for better support and fair compensation to sustain the industry.
Timestamps:
09:42 Starting in the car industry
11:42 Challenges with car repairs
20:53 Training and mentoring younger workers
27:00 Challenges with customer feedback
31:44 Talking about car audio setups
36:44 Warranty pay limits for repairs
42:57 How mechanics are paid
44:26 Mentoring young mechanics and mistakes
52:25 Feeling undervalued at work
55:47 Generational views on mental health
59:39 Keeping technicians happy
01:07:38 Challenges of modern living
01:13:47 Struggles of young adulthood
01:20:13 Building trust with employees
01:23:10 Frustrations with dealership management
01:27:47 Challenges in fair technician pay
01:36:00 The value of trade education
01:38:05 Challenges in industry and workforce
01:44:04 Dealing with toxic employees
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The Jaded Mechanic Podcast
Jeff Compton
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111:42