Changing The Industry Podcast

Lucas Underwood 0:01
Bring your mic. So yeah, bring it to the other side of you. Oh, yeah. That way we can

David Roman 0:09
do this with anybody else. They just walked up Mila who? Can't see their face or anything. He didn't care for you. Apparently it's special.

Lucas Underwood 0:18
Now, we just got to make sure we send it to Cass.

Ethan Ross 0:21
Yeah. I didn't tell him I was doing this. On purpose. Good. I'm actually going to put it on Instagram. And tag him.

Lucas Underwood 0:29
Yeah, that's good as like,

Ethan Ross 0:31
I'm gonna tell him as I'm telling everybody else. Yeah, about I talked a lot about, you know, right.

Lucas Underwood 0:35
Introduce yourself.

Ethan Ross 0:37
Yeah. I'm Ethan Ross. I'm the service manager at Choate diesel solutions. We're division of Choate engineering performance, which is a diesel engine remanufactured parts manufacturer, out of Bolivar, Tennessee.

Lucas Underwood 0:51
It's weird to hear you say that, because especially wobble Tennessee, but you know, are you it's not a wobble anymore. I love as well. I mean, like,

Ethan Ross 0:57
it's also not Bulevar, which is everybody else's.

Lucas Underwood 1:00
You know, it's weird, because, like, I met CASS Yeah. By, gosh, seven or eight years ago. And then we became friends then. Yeah. And now here we are all these years later. And like from what it was then like he was fixing appliance? Yeah. Somehow we met right. Oh, yeah. I think it was something about a diesel truck. And and so like, we've been friends for years. You reached out a while back. And you said he reached out. And he said, Hey, will you talk to Ethan? I said, sure. I'll talk to Ethan. And it's been an interesting journey since then, to say the least you want to tell us about it. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't mean to interrupt you, but I know you go ahead. Start from where you started from a minute ago about what you were doing before you got into automotive. Oh,

Ethan Ross 1:52
okay. How far back do you want?

Lucas Underwood 1:55
I mean, maybe when where were you born? Yeah, exactly. Jackson, Tennessee.

Ethan Ross 1:59
That's about 45 minutes from Bolivar

David Roman 2:02
Bolivar balama. No,

Ethan Ross 2:04
well, not Bolivar Bulevar Yeah, I mean, I think it's spent I think it's probably named after Simone Bulevar but

David Roman 2:11
well, over the A and Bolivar at Accents over the so you're supposed to put the accent thing? Yeah.

Lucas Underwood 2:16
And how would you say David Bolivar?

David Roman 2:20
I don't know.

Ethan Ross 2:21
There you go. That's the same way. bolivars? Right. You got it. You got to sound a little bit more like Lucas when you say Bolivar

David Roman 2:28
Bolivar. What was the other town you said? That changed its name to something?

Lucas Underwood 2:33
Well, they were in white. Well, Tennessee, and what?

David Roman 2:36
Wow, why? VUL? Why? White Ville? Why? Tennessee? No, no, wobble. It's wasteful. talking gibberish.

Lucas Underwood 2:48
Doggone mountain. Can mountain in the mountains, bro.

Ethan Ross 2:50
So so somebody tried to mimic your accent yesterday? Yeah, I was like, that's just Texas. That's not. There's not just one southern accent. There's a bunch of different ones. That's it. Yeah.

David Roman 3:00
I can only do Texas. I can only do a certain kind of Texan. Yeah. And I try to mimic his voice. He appreciates it. Yeah,

Ethan Ross 3:08
I bet he does.

Lucas Underwood 3:10
Start calling you John Fern Jr.

David Roman 3:12
John. I can't do John firm. Drum firms his own like, entity. Yeah, I can't do I can't do his wife's job.

Ethan Ross 3:19
harm is awesome. He's

David Roman 3:21
alright. So you were born in Tennessee? Yes. And then went to the army? Well, I

Ethan Ross 3:26
went to college first when I was 18. Okay, I failed out. I had a full ride. And I lost all my scholarships. And my parents were like, you know, we'll pay for it. Don't worry. I was like, I don't know what I want to do this. That's stupid. Let me just let me join the army. Then my mom started crying. Like, let me join the army get some direction, said this was in 2000 2009. So things were pretty hot still in the Middle East. And so she cried a lot. And she said, okay, because she realized that was probably the best decision for my life. And he was a tank gunner, and was in Korea for a couple of years. Met my my former wife there and had a daughter and move back here. And 12 and then 13. I got out completely finished my contract. Went back to Cookeville, Tennessee, not Cookeville gutful. And a big difference, went back to college and Tennessee Tech. And was a history major. This time went way better. So I've actually got a bachelor's in history. So as a full time police officer and full time student that was a tough four years was exhausting. Hadn't had a son and two. And after that graduated in 16 and 17. I went to Virginia to Washington elite law school. And

Lucas Underwood 4:48
what why did you go that direction?

Ethan Ross 4:51
Because my adviser pushed me to I wanted a PhD in history. I just wanted to be I wanted to wear a tweed and be a history professor. Yeah. Have a funny looking mustache like bowler. See that?

David Roman 5:03
That makes sense. If you want to be okay, when we want to teach history, so I'm gonna go major in History. Yeah,

Ethan Ross 5:08
it's like I want to be a professor. I thought because I had such an incredible experience. I had such a supportive experience there that I was like, This is what I want to do. I want to be able to help these kids that are, you know, because 20 year olds aren't kids aren't adults anymore? Yeah. Yeah. But that's what I wanted to do. And my advisor was like, Dude, I did that don't do it. And I was like, Okay, what should I do? He said, go to law school. He said, it's three years, not six to 10. Like, well, that doesn't make sense fiscally. Yeah. Also looking at, you know, six figures for what I wanted to do. So I wanted to do international contract negotiations. So that was, that was pretty cool. And that's, that's a lucrative field to be here. But I got divorced shortly after going to law school, and had a bunch of personal issues. So after the second year, I moved back to West Tennessee. Kind of the to my car for a few weeks and bounced around to some family members got a job in a factory weighing up raw materials for plastics, which is super, super carcinogenic. So I don't recommend that if you guys Yeah, think about that. Don't do that. I met my now wife. She got me a job in construction with her dad. So it's building bridges in West Tennessee, which was, which was pretty fun. I was operating trackers and stuff like that. And but I was working with your father in law, and it's not ever good to not ever good to do that. Really? Yeah. So I, my my Sunday school teacher, actually, name's Adam, to great guy, one of the best people I know, said, You know, I've got I know, this guy named Castro. He's down in Bolivar. He said he's always hiring somebody who builds diesel engines you want to draw on? I was like, that sounds manly. Let's do that. Right? Like, what? That's the Yeah, absolutely. It's go. He took me down there, like the next day. And Cass said to me through the plant and said, When can you start? And so that was that was pretty cool. I went from went from being in law school, we're in suits. We go into DC valleys function and stuff like that, too. In a factory getting disgusting every day. Right? And now Now I've got actually got a good job. And, uh, and what is it awesome industry?

Lucas Underwood 7:21
So let's break this down a little bit. Oh, great. Because my recollection of events after meeting cast was a little bit different than yours. Okay. So I remember when you got Maid Service Manager, right. Yeah. You had never been a service manager. I don't know if you caught on to like the rest of the story. You had never been a certain

Ethan Ross 7:46
manager? No, no. I had a couple of soldiers under me. When I was in the army. And I ran a few organizations in law school. That was it. Right. But I told Cass had leadership experience.

Lucas Underwood 8:03
But you've never been like automotive at all

Ethan Ross 8:05
right? No, I think he knew it. Maybe he knew it. Maybe he knew that. Maybe he knew and

David Roman 8:11
everybody throws that term out. Very leadership experience. Yeah, I've got I've got leadership experience.

Ethan Ross 8:17
I did have two soldiers under me as a tank gunner. So that's that's leadership spirit. Listen,

Lucas Underwood 8:21
just because you weren't sitting on top.

Ethan Ross 8:25
It also been blys 10 years, since I've done that. Right. And I was like, 21 year old, as much different. Yes. Yeah. I forgotten all

Lucas Underwood 8:34
that. And I don't know if you know this, but leadership changes when you have a gun in your hands. Right. It really does breezy. It is. I mean, people listen way better. Yeah. You know, we'll never experience that. No,

Ethan Ross 8:48
you've never threaten your employees with a gun.

David Roman 8:51
I have not ever thrown threatened my employees getting. So what you said earlier before we started recording that was not true. I don't I don't try to fluff up my stories.

Ethan Ross 9:06
You're looking at Luke. He's like he does. Oh, I did.

David Roman 9:08
Oh, no. He fluffs every story. Every

Lucas Underwood 9:11
so huge. Huge. It's huge. So I I remember the telephone call. Yeah. CASS right. And boys, he was stressed out. Yeah. And for those that don't know, Cass like, Cass is a is overachiever. The best word like dude, he is added. I mean, his entire life. He's just like been added because I mean, yeah, he went from appliances to a diesel shop. And the diesel shop was this little tiny. Like, nothing Shaw. Yeah. And like, overnight cast is like, I want to grow. I want to grow. I want to grow. Yeah. Then they had the first little one. And he's like, dude, I'm on this. Right. Like, I'm gonna make this happen. Yeah. And it was like, dude, overnight, and he's been Very successful.

Ethan Ross 10:01
Right? Yeah, he started under a tree. Yeah. In his parents driveway. Yep. Fixing appliances fixing. That's when he started trucks. Yeah. start fixing trucks under a tree and the reason he started wildly

David Roman 10:11
successful fixing appliances. Yeah, yeah, it has been

Lucas Underwood 10:15
wildly successful. Everything. He's touched everything. He's just like super lucky or what?

Ethan Ross 10:19
He's just he's an insatiable. Yeah. And unstoppable. Literally like, he doesn't stop. He just works. Yeah.

Lucas Underwood 10:27
24/7 I mean, it was honestly work. 24/7 It's hard to get out of bed this morning. It is not guaranteed. He's sleeping now. I guarantee he's at work. Oh, absolutely. Right. There's no doubt about it Cass's at work. Yeah. And not, interestingly enough, I think it's a culture thing. I think it was the way he was raised in a lot of ways. Yeah, it absolutely was. His

Ethan Ross 10:48
parents never stopped either. Yeah.

Lucas Underwood 10:50
I mean, I think that's just, and there's a lot of people in like, our little area of the country that are like that. And I mean, there's people like that everywhere. Yeah. But I mean, that was what you that's what you did there. You know what I'm saying? Like, I tell you about my parents, right? Up until my mom got sick. She worked seven days a week, 14 hours a day. You know, and that's what she wanted to do. It wasn't like it was a chore. It wasn't like she didn't want to do it. She'd love doing it. My dad, like right now he'll be at work. There's no ifs, ands or buts about it. I guarantee

Ethan Ross 11:19
then my dad actually worked in that factory I was talking about Yeah, that's how I got that job. And it sounds like a lot of nepotism in the story. Just said it all that anyway. Yeah, he he's hidden. He hit 35 years. Yeah, a couple of years ago. He's retiring this year. Right? Because he's like, he physically can't do anything anymore. Almost. Yeah. But yeah, 37 years now. And this company is crazy. And he worked six days a week. I remember growing up six days a week. He didn't work every Saturday when I was a kid. He does now. Yeah. But yeah, six days a week. Hard work goes in. I think he wakes up at 430. He wakes up at four in the morning, drives an hour to work and doesn't get home till five.

Lucas Underwood 11:58
I mean, that's really the story of blue collar America. Yeah. Right like that. Is that absolutely consistent with blue collar America around the world and right around the around the country.

Ethan Ross 12:08
And it's not just the South. I just think the the saturation is a lot higher in the South. Yeah,

Lucas Underwood 12:15
I think you're right. Yeah,

Ethan Ross 12:16
I think you're right. So I'm not casting aspersions on the Midwest. Is that where we are right now? Is this the Midwest? Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Lucas Underwood 12:24
Very mid, like, square. And yeah. We're almost dead in the middle, aren't we?

Ethan Ross 12:29
I think this is as far west as I've been in America. Really? Except for my layover in San Francisco.

David Roman 12:34
When you went pretty far west when you went to Korea? Yeah.

Ethan Ross 12:39
Yeah, that was in the air, though. I don't know. I didn't

David Roman 12:42
know. Technically East because you cross over the international dateline. So I think that's,

Ethan Ross 12:46
yeah. Drew Brees flew West, but it's considered east. Yeah, yeah.

Lucas Underwood 12:53
So, you know, Cass is stressed out? Because he's put you in a position. Yeah. And really quickly, I think there was an casts, like, what cast does resonates with me because I'm bad to do the same thing. Yeah. Right. Like, I get enamored with the next thing. Here. You do this? Right. Like you do this job

Ethan Ross 13:15
now? Without without making sure like that. Has that that person has that under control? Yeah. Yeah.

Lucas Underwood 13:20
And I'm off doing my own thing. Yeah. And I just expect them to, like, hear, you gotta know, take care of it by Yeah. Right. And so part of that kind of resonates with this story. In the same respect, like you. You were super frustrated, too. It wasn't just Cass. Yeah, you're both pretty frustrated. Tell us a little bit about what was happening.

Ethan Ross 13:39
So I actually took over in, I believe, March of last year. So it's been, it's been right at a year now that I've been doing this job. And pretty quickly, he realized that I wasn't gonna be able to turn a profit, because I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know how to manage workflow. I didn't know how to I don't know how to price things. I was the last person who would quit didn't didn't leave the SOPs. Yeah. Where I could find them. Which is, that's, that's tough stuff to come into that with no, and they they trained me as best they could, but they're busy too. Yeah. So I just kind of was like, Alright, there's a phone. There's your computer. Let's go. Right. So he called you pretty quickly after?

Lucas Underwood 14:20
Yeah. You were in a tough software. You were in a really hard to use software. You had two software's Yeah. And and I remember that, one of the first things that we discussed as a you had no experience, but be like you, you kind of had numbers you were being held accountable to. But then the engine shop was sending work that was not contributing in some ways to those numbers, right.

Ethan Ross 14:48
Yeah, we had to we had to really iron that out. So back then we were all one company. It was all children's near performance. And we just had I was the service manager of the head of the service department. And I guess previously they kind of been ironed out and how how the service side could make a profit while doing a lot of the engine building companies work. But by the time I took over it was I was not able to generate profit from doing the engine installs. Which was very frustrating. Very frustrating. And I did, but I didn't know I'd never run a business before. I'd never tried to earn a profit before. I'd never. I'd never had to deal with people that weren't legally required to do what I said. Yeah, who's an army? They have to they're going to jail. Yeah, yeah, my text didn't do. Well, he just quit. Yeah. And so that was terrifying to me, too, because Bolivar is a small town. Yeah. And now I realize like you can attract you can attract talent from other places. If you're, if you have a good company culture, and if you're paying them enough money. Excuse me. But I was scared. I was like, I'm gonna lose my text about pushing too hard. And which I'm sure every Yeah, everybody feels that. Yeah. So he called you. Y'all had a long talk. And then he told him he gave me your number. And said you were wrong, really prominent the industry had your shop ran really good numbers. And you really gotta go to you actually ran a sock. And I wasn't familiar with that. Obviously. I didn't know anything about the industry. Right. So I called you. He was super personable, super personable.

David Roman 16:27
But then you find out he has terrible numbers doesn't run a SOG. And he's mediocre at best yet.

Ethan Ross 16:33
David. David.

Lucas Underwood 16:35
David, David is the true elite.

Ethan Ross 16:38
He carries all that down that beard? I'm

Lucas Underwood 16:41
dripping out

David Roman 16:42
like I'm drinking more mediocre than mediocre.

Lucas Underwood 16:45
I didn't even make

David Roman 16:48
up past were mediocre. Yeah, yeah.

Lucas Underwood 16:51
So. So really quickly. I think we figured out that, hey, you felt overwhelmed? Yes. And and I one of the things like I remember my journey of improving my shop, like trying to find my way. Yeah, one of the big ones was what do I expect from a technician? And that was one of the big conversations that we had. Yeah. Because like you didn't know what to expect from them. Yeah, exactly. And there had never been any accountability, right. Like, we talked about treating techs better, and that's awesome. Tech should be treated better. But there also has to be some type of accountability. Right? Like who's making sure they're doing a good job who's making sure that they're that they're productive and even in like in David's case, David's not too worried about hitting a certain number of hours right? Like once you want

David Roman 17:40
to hit the number of hours and after that, that's right. And

Lucas Underwood 17:43
that number for David's fairly low like he's okay with that. But the point is, is like he's talking to them as manageable.

David Roman 17:49
You're gonna give him a text a complex, the really good Luca says we do low numbers. No, I just needed an acceptable level of performance.

Lucas Underwood 17:58
Your boys don't listen to this. That's

David Roman 18:01
manageable. I date. The apps do Absolutely. Do

Ethan Ross 18:05
they listen to this podcast? Yeah.

David Roman 18:08
I have one that listens, like on Spotify. And the other ones listening on YouTube or they sponsor who Spotify? No, okay. listens on Spotify. He's got a Spotify I

Lucas Underwood 18:21
don't know is is all for listeners are his tags.

David Roman 18:28
And now my wife, my wife now listens. So we have five listeners. Oh, that's pretty sweet.

Ethan Ross 18:34
My wife will probably listen to this one. Oh, cool. So we got six now. Hot dog,

Lucas Underwood 18:38
man. We're moving up the world.

Ethan Ross 18:40
Yeah, I just started

David Roman 18:41
talking about those numbers. We have sponsors now. You sit on a podcast, you only have six listeners. What do you guys females these numbers like, well,

Ethan Ross 18:50
I just started Instagram and I've got like 56 followers all like, Okay, this is sad.

Lucas Underwood 18:59
I turn them all into listeners. That's what's gonna happen. certainly do.

David Roman 19:03
There's a guy that that grows small business, like Instagram accounts and tick tock accounts. And his his whole thing is just got to post something every day. Yeah. Everybody asks him like, What do you mean every day every day? It's like, yeah, every day, every day. He's like, consistency. And the content will get better over time, because you'll kind of get a feel of what people are asking, right? He's got to post every day. If you post every day, and he posts his numbers. And these are like, random businesses. Bob schmo chiropractic, yeah. You know, offices, and he'll grab their account, and he'll go from 56 followers to 10,500 followers in three months. In grades they ask them to do we just post every day? Right So, so Lucas made your posting every day. So Carolyn tick tock dances

Ethan Ross 20:07
who who has time to post something like that every day

Lucas Underwood 20:09
Carolyn was 60 seconds our my shop social media manager.

David Roman 20:14
60 seconds old is all you got to do. The The hard part is coming up with what? What to talk about. Yeah. But you get somebody like Justin Allen and who's seems to be able to find something to talk about. In almost every situation. It's like, oh, I can do a live real quick.

Ethan Ross 20:33
I think I could do that. Those are the nature of our work is is just interesting was we're not a general service shop. Right? Yeah. So

David Roman 20:40
everything but even then, even in a general service shop, I think in our minds, we have something that comes in and it's you know, just making this word clicking noise or, you know, it has an exhaust rattle, and we look at it and oh, yeah, heat shield loose. And then out the door goes. But somebody who doesn't know anything about cars, they hear that rattle, and they think my car's falling apart. And again, I'm gonna die. And all it is is a piece of metal just shaking,

Lucas Underwood 21:09
you know, I'm not really worked. Shut marketing pros is working my social media pretty aggressively, but I'd like I'm not taking them videos like I should be and working that aspect, right? Because I've been busy. But like the loose wheel deal, right? We had a car come in another day that he said, Hey, I've got this noise and the wheels were loose. That's been a super popular video. You know what I mean? It took off just because, hey, something people think about from time to time, you know, it wasn't like a complex video. It was literally, Ryan holding. It was a DVR video that I sent her. Right. And so Ryan's holding a camera, and I'm reaching up and tightening the lug nuts by hand. Right? Hey, this is what's wrong with your car. And that was more than enough for them to take it and make something out

Ethan Ross 21:53
of it. You know? That makes sense, though. Right? That makes we had an exhaust manifold. Same way. Yeah, guys, like, Man, I'm not building any boost. No boost at all. Imagine that. Yeah, we got it in there. As soon as it got cooled off, which took you know, four hours. Got up there and literally could turn the exhaust manifold bolts by hand. Right? Of course. And when I was snapped off. So that was an upsell.

Lucas Underwood 22:14
Well, so from from that point, we discussed a getting you some help. Yes. Right. First and foremost, like, immediately. Yeah, because I mean, that's more than like, what simple little advice can fix Yeah, right. Simple little advice is not going to solve that problem. Right? You can listen to a podcast, you can listen to whatever.

Ethan Ross 22:34
But it can't solve an entire lack of experience or,

Lucas Underwood 22:37
and no system. Like no system, right? When it's not on

Ethan Ross 22:41
cast. Like it's not his fault. There wasn't a system there. He he had a bunch of stuff on his plate. I mean, he's a CEO with his hand and everything, every single part of the business. And he's still got it like that. But

David Roman 22:51
well, I don't know this guy. So I can say that I absolutely his fault. He sorta screwed up by setting you up for failure. You know, it's not an isolated incident. We can see it that way. It's, this is very common. Yeah, they see college degree, military experience. Obviously, world traveled smart. Oh, I can manage this is not that hard. Never taking into account that. I've already got X amount of years. And I've already been through the fire on this. Yeah, I know what I'm doing. It should be able to figure it out. It'll be fine. Yeah. Go. We've all done it.

Ethan Ross 23:34
Now. You were right on everything except the college experience. He I think he saw that as a detriment. Because he dropped out of college. He dropped out of school. Yeah. To start

David Roman 23:41
with. Yeah. But he's, he's, he's a freak. So that's a good it's not? He's well,

Ethan Ross 23:49
I mean, he's not wrong. No, he's not

David Roman 23:51
definitely somebody that can that can grow a business, and then just shift fields all of a sudden, and just think grow another business. That person is made out that way. Yeah. It's instinctual for them. They know. It's a gut feel thing for them. They know how to make the right calls over and over and over again. Yeah. And they'll, he could close down, everything goes up and restaurants and you'll do the same thing. You'll be successful with that. And she's absolutely everything. That is absolutely the truth. But some people are wired that way. Well, and the most of us are not the

Lucas Underwood 24:27
people that are wired that way. Because we live life through our lens, we live life through our experiences, they just assume everybody else has had the same experience unless you really slow down and like stop yourself. It's easy to assume that you had the same experience he did or not necessarily experienced when on paper experience, which you had the same ability he had. Right. Well, this is easy. Yeah. Right. And it's not. But but from his perspective, it's easy. So he thinks it should be easy for you to he

Ethan Ross 24:55
said that to me almost verbatim before. You know. He says I look around and I expect people to know exactly what I know. He said I'm realizing that they don't. Yeah. Do you think

David Roman 25:05
it's not even the knowledge to it's the attitude? It's the it's the approach to work. It's, we had somebody in the in the Facebook group I think the Rosie, maybe it was her name, and that you see some of our responses. And it was the it was the classic Five Percenter. Thank you, dear. You're a Five Percenter, you make up 5% of the population, the way you approach work, business life is unique to a small subset of the population. Yeah, everybody else is different. They need structure, they need processes. They need a framework. They need guardrails. They need all that and they need continuous feedback, praise correction. They need all those things. That's 95% of the population. You like you can motivate yourself self motivator. You see what needs to be done. You just take action and go. Really small subset.

Ethan Ross 26:07
And I would say Cass is even in like that. half a percent.

David Roman 26:12
Oh, yeah. He's a different level. I mean, he's, yeah, the different level. You get to the a Five Percenter starts their own business. Yeah. Because they, they're like, I can't have somebody telling me what to do. Yeah, I can't have those guardrails. So you start your own business, but then there is even on top of that, I call them empire builders. Yeah. Like Sean O'Brien that channel brands a guy who owns a shop he he had a shop and I think Parsons Kansas, which is this like dirt down the middle of nowhere, right? There's a Walmart there. That's where he is. He built his business up. Close it. I think he closed that or moved at something. I don't know. He's got four shops now. That That guy the minute I met him, I'm like, he's gonna own like 10 shops. You can just tell some some people just driven like that. And nothing will get in his way. Absolutely. Nothing will get in so he'll just make it happen. Yeah, or I'm looking at it going, man, that's a lot of work. I want to sleep in on Saturday.

Ethan Ross 27:08
Yeah. CASS is exactly like that. It's so much that he he has to bring people in just to harness some of that energy. It's literally what it feels like. Yeah, it I won't say who says this, but some people say like, they just get nervous being around him. Not that he makes them nervous. It's just he's got

David Roman 27:25
Oh, no, he's vibrating with people. People have certain gravitons they give off a certain vibe. And it is very intimidating for absolutely a lot of people very intimidating for a lot of people. But you know, that's some people find it magnetic.

Ethan Ross 27:40
It was exciting for me. Yeah, I was like, This guy's he's on a rocket ship grab on. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, absolutely. And at first, it felt like, I think that where you're getting to is that rocket ship didn't feel like it was going up anymore. It felt like it was launching straight into the earth.

Lucas Underwood 27:54
Right? Well, I mean, you were hanging on to a tail fin wobbly. Air next to the lame, like, yes. Yeah. Well, and so tell us about the next step. Right? Because like things are not what they were six months ago, right? Like you've seen some tremendous change and, and and there's things that still need to be improved. We know the numbers need to work. We know some other stuff needs some work. Kind of my first recommendation was is like, hey, there's such a devoid of process. There's such a devoid of anything here. Like we we can see the majority of the problems. Yeah. But we've got to we've got to get a software that you can use and you can manage. And so we went with getting to Shopware, which is a whole lot easier. It's more

Ethan Ross 28:35
you guys didn't even tell me to write I listened to your podcast. Shopper was a sponsor. And I thought okay, Lucas seems nobody's talking about cash. trust him implicitly. A shopper is a sponsor of his podcast. That's all I needed to try it. Yeah, I was. I mean,

David Roman 28:50
that's a wrap boys. We're done. Let's go.

Ethan Ross 28:54
So I am a little gullible. I guess too,

David Roman 28:56
right? Definitely. Oh, no, not that. No.

Ethan Ross 29:03
I'll bring it full circle. So I tried them for a month. And I was like, This is it? Yeah. Because I was running two softwares Yeah. And I told him when I when I cancelled but other ones because I'm also a people pleaser, which is not great for balls to people. So I call them was like, Look, you guys, it's not you. It's me. I was like, listen, I can't run two softwares anymore. You guys can't do both. This is it for us. Sorry. I hope there's no hard feelings. Yeah, so then I started using Shopify like okay, I started it makes sense. This is his last last summer. Yep. And started getting some numbers right. started getting some numbers. They were bad numbers. Yeah, but I actually had numbers for ones because I didn't have numbers before I didn't know what I was doing. Right? Nothing no metrics, nothing. And like cats would be like, what your GP? What's uh, what's that stand for?

Lucas Underwood 29:53
general physician. Yeah. Hang on. I think she's over into

Ethan Ross 29:56
Yeah. So anyway, so I got hooked up, do it because you names. Yeah. So you hooked me up with Captain Bullard. Yeah, of the institute called me talk to me. He was great. He hooked me up with Mark see, well, one of the coaches there. So I've been with Mark since then, Mark was given me great advice. And that tried to help me. But at that point, between him and me and Cass, it just wasn't connecting the puzzle pieces were there. But we couldn't put them together. Right. So I don't really I broadcast the time, full host wholeheartedly. He probably attest to that. And I know that mark, and probably can't who can attest to that. Right. So when I went to, I went to ASD in September, which was cool. He, you know, he had invested in a coach and he invested in send me to ASD to these classes. So I was like, Okay, it's not all bad. But I was so frustrated. And the stuff that they were saying in these classes, I was like, There's no way. Yeah, changing the company culture. That's not going to happen where I work. And I was so frustrated. I mean, to the point of like, thought about leaving the industry. Yeah. And I almost did almost it almost. Yeah, almost left the industry something told me not to. And now I know that that was nice. I was praying a lot about it. Me, my wife were and God was just like, stay there. Pump the brakes. Chill. It's gonna be okay, trust me. And I did, stuck it out. And it was like two months later was like cash almost quit, almost quit and just just left. And so I don't know what happened. He base he took his hand off the business in a big way for me. And he started changing the company culture, as a whole both showed engineer performance and Choti solutions. He changed it as a whole started really having a different different heart for his employees that we hadn't seen yet. And a lot of it was he built that business from the ground up and says Maven, he'd been burned by so many people that he had treated, right. Yeah. And once you've been burned so many times, it's hard to come back from that. So anyway, in January one, Joe diesel solutions got its own LLC. Huge. That was huge. For me. It was like, Okay, this is something we can grow into something we want to see. So as soon as that happened, he's like, Alright, we're gonna franchise this. Like cast. This is not franchise. Like, this is baby levels, right? He's like, No, we're gonna do it. We're absolutely going to do it. You ready to go? Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's go. So, got them. And Mark has been helping me along the way. And it's taken shape now.

Lucas Underwood 32:32
What were the things that you and Mark really like? Did he come to you and say, Hey, there's some things we got to start with? What were the real basic things where you, you're looking at numbers, you're seeing what's going on? Where Where did all of this kind of start? What was his big thing when he looked at the business? And he said, Hey, we got it. We got to do something about

Ethan Ross 32:52
Yeah. So the problem was, I wasn't telling him what I needed from him. I think that is what was the cause of the frustration for the first six months. I was selling it, I was telling him basically, I was the service advisor. So he was trying to teach me how to sell. We're backed up constantly, like six to eight weeks. So the selling wasn't really the bad point. And our upsells are pretty good. So it's just, it's a great culture for our upsells. Like, I gotta think I told you yesterday, we had a oil change come in, right and got like a $9,000. upsell changed the whole fuel system out. So it's easy. And I'm not a great salesman. I'm really not right. But so for the first little bit, it was he was teaching me how to sell. And that actually did end up helping me later. But right then it was like, Okay, great. So once I once I realized what I needed, I was like, Hey, Mark, I need help. With the business running this business. He's like, Oh, okay. Why don't you say that?

Lucas Underwood 33:50
Well, I didn't know what running the business was Mark.

Ethan Ross 33:52
I don't know, Mark, I don't know. So that's when he was like, let's start from the beginning. This is an SOP. This is what an SOP looks like. They said you need these for everything you do in the business. He says this is what a workflow looks like. So he sent me like a 30 page example of a workflow. It's like basic SOPs. Yeah. All the way through the shop. Right? And starting setting those base levels. And learning how to see like, okay, GP, is this GP is parts cost plus labor costs, right? Third, whatever it is. It's your total total minus parts cost minus labor cost. That's your GP. Yeah. Now let's look at net profit. You got to take all this other stuff off. And I was like, oh, man, it's like, like zero. Yeah. And I was like, someone's it's like, it looks like it's under zero. He's like, Yeah, that's you're losing money. Right? Like,

Lucas Underwood 34:49
oh, you're dying to come to work. Yeah.

Ethan Ross 34:52
I was like, that's, that's not great. Isn't He's like, That's really bad. He's like, you know, you've been flushed with cash, but you're still in that job. Have you been losing money? I was like, Oh, dear. Right. So that's when I was kind of like, okay, let's have an awakening. Let's start. Let's start doing stuff, right. And everything kind of just fell together. Yeah, I started, we started generating a profit, and we're still not, not anywhere near the numbers we want to be. But we're actually turned on profit consistently. And it's inspiring.

Lucas Underwood 35:22
So, you know, I think at that point in time, you really had an employee mentality. Yeah, right. You're approaching this as an employee. Absolutely. And so I think when you people who truly care about the people that they work with, the people they work for, and truly care about the business, when the realization of the true numbers here, right like that, that awakening to what net profit really is, right? Because I don't think there's a lot of people who truly understand it. There. And if somebody's listening, and they're a technician, or they're a service advisor, you need to understand what net profit is. Yeah, you really need to understand, I

David Roman 36:00
think you can explain it to them. Because we I go over my numbers with my, with my staff, they know what our breakeven is, they know where sales numbers are. I don't necessarily share percentages, I don't like, I don't really operate that way. I tell them, I tell them what they need to know, to control what they can control. Because if I, if I broke it down, and I did one time, I said, Look, if we don't hit this number, this is the hierarchy of what doesn't get paid. Because if we lose money, something doesn't get paid. Yeah, the first thing that goes is this. And then the second thing that goes is this, and I start to cross it off, it's like, well, if we don't hit this number, then I gotta not pay this. And then I don't pay this. And then I don't pay this instead, now we're behind the eight ball, because the next month we have to all those same bills come in. But we now have to make up for what we didn't pay last month. Yeah. And so if we have a bad winter, we're paying for it in the summer, and then we get behind the end of the next one.

Ethan Ross 37:00
Yeah. It's a vicious cycle. Yeah,

David Roman 37:02
it is a vicious cycle. It's ugly. Intellectually, I think they understand that they see the numbers and they're like, Okay, that makes sense, right. But then they go back to the trenches. And they're like, the disconnect happens again, because there's I just got to fix this. We'll burn. Yeah, it's like, okay, but remember how we just talked about this. So that $5,000 job has to go today? Because I have $5,000 doesn't collect today. It has to then collect tomorrow, but another another 5000 has come in tomorrow to Yeah, exactly. And so you're responsible for this 5000. And then, you know, we have another $1,000 job or whatever, that fleet. But we have to have the 6000 for the day. Yeah. And we haven't have to have another 6000. For tomorrow, it has to be consistent. And they they lose that that disconnect. So even if you sit down and you're like, I can explain all these numbers to you. But they don't always put the two together practical, the practical behaviors that lead to bettering the numbers. That's where the disconnect happens. Okay, that's the numbers make sense? What action do I need to take tomorrow immediately, to make sure that I can affect those numbers in a positive fashion. And I know I don't do a very good job of articulating it. And even if I do, I don't do a good job of selling it. Because sometimes it is like, Hey, if you hang out and watch YouTube videos for 30 minutes before you start the day, instead of starting the day at 750. When you get here, you start the day at 830 when everybody else gets here, yeah. And then at the end of the day, we don't finish that car because you're an hour behind. Where did that hour come from? Oh, that hour could have been made up this morning. Because you set the ball in motion to make sure the car got finished.

Lucas Underwood 38:49
I go through that too. I go through that too. And, and here's the thing for me is that that all too often, you know, we hear this story like technicians and service advisors say, well look at all that money they made. Look at that, you know, that's, that's $5,000 They made? No. In you have to understand that. Because that's not $5,000 that I just get to put in my pocket. Right? Right. And unfortunately, many of those conversation sounds like that's what they think happens with that $5,000 Like I'm just sticking it in the bank account.

David Roman 39:20
I think at this point, especially if they're listening to those podcasts. I don't want anybody listening to this like I really don't I don't know we've talked about it so many times is like Dude, we don't keep any of it. The government takes a chunk of parts or undertakes the other chunk. Yeah, electricity and rent and this that the other you start like Tiki tacking all the way down. And then at the end of the day, you're like, huh, I got 500 bucks. You did 97,000 Last one. So yeah, when I got 500 bucks out of it. It was good.

Ethan Ross 39:57
Yeah, it's definitely my sister in law. stomach ulcers like three months ago. Really? Yeah. So maybe four months ago? Oh, yeah.

David Roman 40:05
You know, stomach ulcers no longer our thing. Apparently, statistically speaking, now it manifests back pain

Lucas Underwood 40:15
to like ulcers almost had stomach ulcers. Because you don't have back pain? No, I didn't have that way.

David Roman 40:21
You get all I was saying that from the stress. Yeah. It was common to see stress cause stomach ulcers, you don't see as many stomach ulcers anymore. It's wonder if there's a there was a percent precipitous drop off in the 80s. Going into the 90s. On people having stomach ulcers, they just stopped. Node stomach ulcers, it became very, very less common. And then all of a sudden, there was a spike in back pain and neck pain.

Ethan Ross 40:54
I wonder if that's because people used to drink a lot when they were stressed. A lot more than people who still drink the 90s. The 90s saw a big drop off in drinking levels of drinking. Yeah, really? Really? Yeah. They started that Mothers Against Drunk Driving. There was a bunch of campaigns in the early 90s. To stop that it had some effect. I wonder if that's possible. I

David Roman 41:17
read a whole book on it. Thank you, Carlo. The doctor said, yeah, it's not back pain used to be all sorts. Now. It's back pain. Yeah, everybody's got back pain. And it was like, I like the back pain all the time. Yes. Terrible. Yeah. That's stress induced.

Ethan Ross 41:35
So I wanted to ask you, when you said that about explaining that profit to your employees, what does that look like? How do you how do you show it to him?

David Roman 41:42
Or just run down to p&l?

Ethan Ross 41:44
Okay, so you literally just filmed a piece of paper? Well, I'm gonna draw it out. But okay,

David Roman 41:50
I draw it out on the whiteboard. Yeah. But we talked about, you know, I don't necessarily get into the expenses, per se. Or, you know, I like what I shared with him the budget for the year. Yeah. At the end of the year, you know, we went through and we did goal setting, and what are what are my numbers look like? What are my number is gonna look like for next year? Or what am I going to target? And I didn't get into those weeds with them. If they asked, I'd be happy to share it. But you know, that sometimes, like I start rattling off numbers, and

Lucas Underwood 42:29
it becomes overwhelming it almost it well as

David Roman 42:31
the water. Yeah.

Ethan Ross 42:32
Maybe I get that. Well, how do you like how about I do it?

David Roman 42:36
I break it? Well, we do this weekly. So we break it down to a break even number like yeah, for us to pay the bills. And this isn't me paying myself all that much. But for me to pay the bills. I gotta hit this number. Yeah. And so like, I'm really proud of one of my Tech's I asked them, like, what's our breakeven, and he gave me the wrong number, because he gave me last year's number, but he knew last year's number, he like, boom, he's like, this number. And I'm like, that's really good. It's actually pretty $1,000 more this year than it was last year. But it's really good that he remembered, because we talked about it all the time. It's like, we've got to hit this number, we've got to hit this numbers. Everything else doesn't matter. For you, your focus is this number. And one thing, one thing we did here very recently, it freaked my my technicians out, they looked at me like I was like, I had two heads. I go, I'm not gonna want to sort of stop caring about build hours. And an audit, we mean, I said, I want to focus on revenue, I want to focus on on the revenue you're generating as a technician. Because once we hit a certain threshold, we can really start providing some really good benefits, I can start upping the pay quite a bit. And the other thing too, is I I said, Well, I really want to start doing experiential things. Yeah. Let's go shoot some guns. Let's go go karting. You know, just, we'll just shut the shop down, or do it on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon or whatever, let's just go do something together. But that's going to cost right. And the other thing too, as I say that I want to cut our work year down to 50 weeks and just shut the shop down for two weeks. Yeah, it might be around ASD like the whole week. We're, we're off. And then between Christmas and New Year's, the whole week, we're off. I said but that that then pushes our revenue numbers spread out over 50 weeks, not 52 weeks. So that means we have to work a little harder. And I told them I said I really want to start focusing on on on revenue generation because that At the end of the day, I don't care that you billed me out 45 hours in that guy billed me 38. And that guy billed me 30. Like, those numbers don't translate necessarily. It's more important that you generated me $6,000 And you generated me 12,000 Yeah, that that number is more important. Yeah. In that, for, I haven't flushed it out, I don't know what that's going to look like. But I'm hoping to maybe give them a little bit more control over parts. He makes sure the right parts are on here. Because they offload so much of that. It's like, Hey, this is broken, go sell it. And then they're done. Yeah. And then we start the sales process, we start the estimating process, we get the parts, the repair sold, they come back and they're like, hey, all these other parts are broken to I didn't notice it, sorry. And then we gotta go back and sell. So I told him, I said, I need this to be more collaborative. I need this to be a more collaborative effort where you're in a better line of communication with the front. And your guys are talking back and forth to make sure that at the end of the day, this revenue numbers getting hit. Yeah. And if that means that, hey, we probably could sell this with that. You know, hey, I want to make sure I got all the parts listed on this ticket. There's ownership there. Yeah. And then, you know, on a very simple level, it could be something like the valve cover gaskets on three seven MDX. Yeah, okay. You do Val Carter, the, I don't know what they would get numbers use an accurate MDX valve cover gasket, sorry, Acura MDX. 3.7 liter when you do valve cover gaskets, you almost always want to sell these O rings on the back of the cylinder head. Yeah, because they leak, they always leak. Or sometimes it's just the O ring that's leaking. Well, that's going to require valve cover gaskets, O rings, and the plenum gasket which gets forgotten, most sometimes can be reused. But it's like a our cost $70 plenum gasket, and then probably should sell spark plugs too. But I'm in there already. What else should I do? Valve adjust. Okay, so now that six $700 valve cover gasket job might be $2,000. Because I have sold a, b, c, this is now a conversation Do we really need to do this, that I may be looking at the map sensor voltage to see if I were kind of getting close, were out point nine eight volts instead of point eight to nine where I should be. This is now a conversation I can have with the customer. The technician could be feeding that information to the to the service advisor service advisor now has ammunition to go back to the customer and say we really should, if you want to prevent us from having to go back in there in six months, because you got a weird misfire on cylinder one, we should have just the valves while we were in there. I'm trying to increase that. Yeah, I'll meddling or like, I don't know.

Lucas Underwood 48:19
Here's the thing, though, is that I think that and you're right, like technicians need to have a part, especially when it comes to parts. Right, technicians need to be providing that information. That has to be their responsibility. And that's a wake up call for dealer guys, right? Like, I've worked with some dealer guys, and they're like, What do you mean, I need to find my parts. You don't have a parts guy, right? You don't. And some shops do. But you don't have somebody who knows that vehicle and sees what you're seeing. They can say, hey, you need all this, right?

David Roman 48:52
But it's not. It's not just, it's not just the parts list. That's what I was trying to make the point with a three, seven. It's not just the parts list. a parts list is one thing. It's preventative maintenance. It's additional repairs that could be done while we're in there. It's like I want them to take ownership of the entire ticket. I have one technician who used to get paid flat rate plus a percentage report so guess what all his tickets had parts a lot of parts on it. And I don't want to pay that way because I don't want to encourage nonsense. Yeah. And those places like that encourage nonsense like all of a sudden every single every single brake job needs hoses, calipers slides then that you know that's not necessary. Does it does it though that Yeah, exactly. So I've got this little surface rust on there. So I don't want to encourage that at all. But at the same time, I do want them to take that ownership of that ticket and that's why the shift has to be towards revenue is how much is that money is that ticket generate Adding some shops do it by just looking at the number, the dollar amount being estimated per invoice. likes the fun. Yeah, he he's got a he owns a shop in Maryland, it's a BMW shop, I think he does Mercedes. Now to me, anyway, he is very specific with his tax, that every car on average has to have this dollar amount, because this dollar amount allows us to sell it this percentage, which then hits our average repair order, which then generates the revenue that the shop needs to be profitable. Yeah, that breaks down beautifully. That number there, if they're not hitting that number, on average, because of the kind of car that he has in the area that he's in that number is easily doable, unless you are skipping steps on the inspection process. Yeah. And you are shortchanging the inspection process. And if you are, we need to have a conversation. I wanted to do that without doing without doing what's the fun does, I want to in the estimating process, I need them to take ownership of the vehicle and start looking at things a little bit differently. That enables them to then communicate properly to the service advisor, the service advisor then communicating back to the customer. And then instead of good weeks, we do 1000 All Aaro bad weeks we don't we more consistently hit that $1,000 arrow. It'll make sense.

Ethan Ross 51:37
Not only that, but you're gonna keep customers for come back in three months. I mean, like, Why didn't you tell me? Yeah, and

David Roman 51:42
here's the thing is that we tried to prevent that as best we can.

Lucas Underwood 51:44
What I don't I think it's a lot easier when we talk about diesel to do that. Yeah, because they're like, and you may not have found this yet. But a 6064 a six, seven. They all have their nuances. And we know because we're working on that vehicle over and over and over again, we see you know, because when I when I first opened my shop, it was all about 24,012 valve Cummins. Yeah. And so that's all worked on. So I knew those trucks, hey, you're gonna have this problem, you're have this problem, you're gonna have this problem, and you're gonna have this problem. If we deal with those. Now, we don't have to do them all right now, but if we deal with this, plus other things we're gonna need here's what you're looking at, but it's gonna save you this down the road. Yeah, that's a whole lot easier to do when you're working on a single truck or a single brand or a single. Right. That's a lot harder when you get into one day I want to MDX the next day, I'm on f1 50. And the next day I'm on the right. And I'm not saying it's not possible, don't don't misunderstand, I think it is, but it helps to

David Roman 52:40
have more technicians in your shop. And each technician is specialized. Not necessarily specialized. Not specifically specialized. But you have technicians that know a particular line extremely well. Yeah, I have a tech who Chevrolet trucks and Ecotec engines if I want something done or something looked at or something like hey, how do you handle this? That's the person I gave it to because he's done 10s of 1000s of them at this point. Yeah, I got a Honda Acura guy in Toyota guy, like I got an issue dumping on him. And I go, Hey, like, how do we deal with this weird Lake? Oh, this little plate on the backside of the engine that needs to be gasketed. Everybody misses it. Like the guy knows. Yeah. Because he's just experienced, I think you just I think it will be harder for a guy that has to tax. Yeah, that's true. Then somebody with fortex in some space that all of a sudden I can. I can flush this out a little easier.

Lucas Underwood 53:43
How many takes Do you guys have no, three. Okay. Yeah.

Ethan Ross 53:46
I just recently,

Lucas Underwood 53:48
so the same two that you had had, right? It seemed to I had Yeah. Yeah. So when when we started talking, there were no build hours.

Ethan Ross 53:58
So the actually the two texts, when we first started talking were different than the two texts that I have three months ago. And now I've got third. But yeah.

Lucas Underwood 54:07
So we didn't have hardly any build hours.

Ethan Ross 54:10
No, I didn't know what that meant. Okay.

Lucas Underwood 54:13
And you weren't tracking it? I wasn't sure. I didn't know about it. Yeah. Where are we at now? What what's changed in that aspect?

Ethan Ross 54:21
So I'm still trying to get a handle on the shopper analytics. And tracking it because I just I just started to shopper analytics last month. So I'm just now started tracking it. But because I'm also the service advisor and the customer service Parts Guide, shop owner, I've had to do everything so it's it's hard to it's hard to get new ones right now. Also the inexperienced lends itself to everything takes longer for me than it should yeah, so I will get a better handle on it. But now I am starting to see like, okay, look, you only turn 28 hours this week this What, what's wrong? And the best thing is now I can take it to them and say what's the issue? and they can tell me what the issue is. Whereas before I was like, everything's, it's going downhill. I don't know it's burning run. Well, I

Lucas Underwood 55:07
mean, you know, the airplanes on fire. Yeah. And if all you can think about or get out of the airplane, I mean, you're not thinking about the process to get the airplane back on the ground. Right. And that's the same thing with business ownership, if you don't know. And I'm super appreciative of my first coach, because he sat me down, and he gave me this KPI tracking worksheet. And so every day, I put the numbers in, and over time, because I'm putting the numbers in it every day, I'm beginning to see when I do something, how see how my action, how that emotional discounting calls my parts up to come down. So therefore, everyday, I

David Roman 55:45
don't, I don't do any of that. Because that takes time and effort. No, I don't like to do

Lucas Underwood 55:50
I mean, I don't do it now. I don't do it. Now I'm saying what I liked about it was, and I hated it, I effing hated it. But it taught me what affected those numbers. So now, if

David Roman 56:03
you don't, yeah, if you don't, if you don't understand the numbers, and like, which dial the turn, then yeah, that's a good exercise. Well, my first coaching company used to tell me, you come in, and you take 15 minutes of executive time, because as soon as like the shop opens up, and then the fire start, and then you're just running around, that's all putting out fires. So you have to come in early. And you have to take your 15 minutes of executive time. And that's essentially what you do is they like, put your numbers in, read your numbers, see where you're at, see what bills need to be paid. See what like pressing matter, check your emails, do that kind of stuff. And then when the trap opens in the fire start, then you don't have to worry about it, you're more at ease. You're not putting it out. Now you don't get any of these, but you're not neglecting key aspects of the business that need to be handled. Because you took your 15 minutes of executive time. That's yeah, that's what she called it, which is, yeah, fantastic advice for somebody that's getting started. For me, though, I got to the point where I knew what what dials to turn, I know what dials to turn, and I can look at my numbers. Well, like we don't look get into the analytics on Shopware. I don't I have it? Yeah, I just don't use it. Okay. You just leave because ours on the Reports page, I go to the Reports page, he does the same thing. Now he wanted me to maybe maybe what? Like, I can see the snapshot of my week. And I go, I can know, why were we successful this week. Because we hit this number in this, and this Monday, like the numbers at the end of the day are really, really simple. Yeah, they're not overly complicated. When you get when you open up the analytics, and analytics is great when you want to go. I need to figure out what market I need to drive more like what's the most profitable market I can I can go after, and then you break it down. You're like, Oh, I see Chevrolet's of this particular years. Okay, then I can go to my marketing person and say, Hey, can you find me these old vehicle owners what area they live in, then look at the geographic area, and you can then analyze and figure out, well, if I send these kinds of postcards, I'm gonna, or hey, I do really well with Hyundai. So I'm going to start slapping Hyundai's and all my marketing pieces as a sort of a dog whistle to all the Hyundai owners go, hey, they work on Hyundai. So I'm gonna go there. But you you don't need to do that on a daily basis that that's you're talking like,

Ethan Ross 58:33
well, if I don't have time to do other stuff, I definitely have time to do.

David Roman 58:37
But I think a lot of I think a lot of shop owners. They overwhelm themselves with the information that's available. And then I, I there's there's so many numbers in the analytics. Like yeah, there is there. I know. But shopper in particular, because the GP optimizer does a lot of the work for you. Yes, it does. You could just turn it on and kind of let it go.

Ethan Ross 59:04
Where do it though, you can override it,

David Roman 59:07
you have to avoid overwriting it. And

Lucas Underwood 59:10
the number of people who are complaining saying we need a matrix, I was told we're gonna have a matrix that drives me nuts.

David Roman 59:21
These are sophisticated shop owners, the ones that are saying that and they're used to having a matrix. And then they go into shop where and they're like, there's no matrix. It's like, yeah, there's no matrix, let it go. It'll it'll be fine. Don't worry about it. They want the control. And I can understand that condition. I was helping a shop owner. This was years ago, I was helping the shop owner. He was looking at his parts. And he's like, my, my parts numbers are off. Typically when your part numbers are off, your matrix is wrong. There's discounting going on or your parts are slipping through the cracks. That's it. Yeah, usually that's that's all that's involved. You mean

Ethan Ross 59:58
like you're buying parts and putting them on? On vehicles and it's not at the end of the second

David Roman 1:00:01
build. Yeah. Okay. So how do you fix those three things? I told them, I said, Well, is there just counting? You can look at your numbers and see if there's just counting. And he went through he did ticket audit. Yeah. He's like, No, there's no discounting. And he's, he's sticking to the numbers. Okay. Let's look at your partner's your matrix. The matrix was like, five levels. So okay, you need like 30. Because between these dollar amounts here, your bulk of your sales are in these dollar amounts. Let's break it apart and see, we can probably squeeze more money out of this. Yeah. And so he went through, I didn't do it for him. He went through and he broke that sucker down. He had like three levels on his matrix, as you can see. And he's like, Yeah, you know, I can make another $10,000 a year if I just bumped this one level up. Great to that. But what he found out was he wasn't there. A lot of stuff was slipping through the cracks. Yeah, parts were getting ordered. Never build that show up on the p&l. And he's thinking is generating this kind of gross profit margin. He looks at the p&l, and his numbers are off. Yeah, he's like, Oh, that's a cram. So there's three parts. Yeah, you can't disregard the folder system as well, how he, he's not I don't know what he's, if he's still doing that, but the folder system was easiest way for him to fix that. Right. All the invoices go into one folder for that particular Oh, then you open it up at the end, before you bill finish the billing, and matcher. Every single part is made out on that. But that's it the simple. It's like simple actions. Yeah. That 30 Step matrix is the GP optimizer now, without having to build a 30 Absolute 30 level matrix. You don't have to do that. It will tweak it out. The other thing too, is what a lot of lot of shops don't realize. When I was when I was in the part store, the parts store made a ton of money on brake pads. Easily the number one selling part in any part stores is brake pads. Yeah. And there was a middle of the road brake line. That was the 80% of the sales. You had a cheap wire and you had the middle of the road. And then you had a premium line. And then we started introducing ultra premium lines and like specialty lines for heavy duty trucks and that kind of thing. Yeah. 80% of the sales were that one brake line. Yeah. Okay. So what would they what they would do on the weekends, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the price went up $1. Then that would just get sent in from the mothership, just bloop. And you'd see the pricing adjustment pop up on on Thursday, Thursday night, Friday, you would open, they would all be $1. More $1. Nobody notices now. On Monday morning, the price would come back down another dollar. And then Monday through Thursday, you'd run with the dollar last price, nobody would notice. But that adjustment, padded their bottom line. Yeah, they didn't have to do anything else. $1 diff, that $1 Difference meant 10s of 1000s of dollars, that in particular month, hundreds of $1,000 for that store, spread out over 1000s of stores, that is huge money going in and just adjusting that $1 That $1. And

Lucas Underwood 1:03:15
here's the thing is that the consumer never noticed.

Ethan Ross 1:03:19
The consumer never notices, because it doesn't read much to one individual.

Lucas Underwood 1:03:23
But that's just it's like we worry about, you know, most of these tickets, right? If our GPS low, most of these tickets, we're talking about 15 to $18. On some of this. Yeah. Right. Do you think the consumer is going to notice 15 to $18. Right.

Ethan Ross 1:03:39
I will say diesels a little different diesels. It's not, it's expensive. No,

Lucas Underwood 1:03:44
it's not. It I have listened. I have been through this with diesel shop after diesel shop. I started as a diesel shop. And everybody said, Oh, but I'm diesel Aki. I can't make my poor margins if I'm diesel. They're too expensive. You can.

Ethan Ross 1:03:58
Okay, well, I have started okay. Now that I think about it, I have just been holding myself to the to the what's it called the optimizer and people still

David Roman 1:04:11
have a cost to fix my truck. And I $1,000 Okay, thanks. And that's the end of the conversation I give, it doesn't go well. You know, that bolt. There shouldn't be $11. It should be $8 Why you guys start marking it up another $3. Nobody gets into the weeds

Ethan Ross 1:04:24
that you bite when I'm looking at it. I'm like, oh, no, that shouldn't be that much. Well,

David Roman 1:04:28
my point would be optimizers that you as it's adjusting your pricing through to try to hit that target GP. Yeah, it's doing what every other retailer does on a daily basis. Every other retail Walmart does it. Everybody does it and it's Automator and they're automatic. Every single day. There's a lady or a guy that walks through the aisles at Walmart and changes the prices every single day. They're marking some things up and something's down because they've got computer systems that are tweaking those prices daily and to hit certain metrics, and

Lucas Underwood 1:05:06
if you knew how many shop owners have complained saying, I don't like the optimizer because he could adjust it and he could charge one person, one price and another person another price.

Ethan Ross 1:05:16
Yeah. No crap.

David Roman 1:05:18
No crap. You start the day off early and that milk is $5.12. By the end of that day that milk might be $5.89. You just got there at the wrong time. They had already changed the price on there. What are you going to do? They need to hit that extra 70 cents or whatever? Their numbers and they're

Ethan Ross 1:05:39
constantly it makes sense, right? When you say like this, it extrapolates perfectly. Yeah, I understand that. Okay, like shipping rates, right. So our shipping quotes are good for like 48 hours. Yeah, that's it. As that you don't know. Because you don't know what the fuel is going to do. You don't know anything? Exactly. And so yeah, that makes sense. It

David Roman 1:05:58
wasn't it's crazy. The mindset. I think for me, like one of the the biggest eye openers was oil. When I started when I opened my shop up, I think it was charging to 49 a quart. And I just I don't know where I came up with that numbers and 49 cents for a quart of oil. Yeah, this was this was lovin years ago. That's not that long ago. I know to be that cheap. That's That's what I was charging. I think I was paying maybe, I don't know, Buck 50 for the quarter oil or something like that. Yeah. And the big shift was I, I ran out of oil, called the part store up, hey, how much for a case of this much. And you're like, Well, hold on now. You're charging $5 A quart for this like conventional garbage oil? Well, yeah. What's the retail on that? That's 549 a quart. And people are paying? Yeah. How am I charging 249 For like, holy crap. And so I just start jacking my prices.

Lucas Underwood 1:07:09
You know, I think we get into our own heads. The Oh, yeah. And we get stuff every day. And you know, the Eric merchant who's here, right? Yeah. Big diesel shop. I still haven't met him. Right. Like, it's cool. Yeah, yeah, it really is. And like super well known, super well known, especially in Duramax. World. Yeah. And, you know, Eric, had this like, hardcore realization, like, hey, if it wasn't for the parts business, the shop, like what I started doing, like, where this all came from wouldn't even be in existence anymore. Because it's not making any money. Yeah. And in some ways, that's what happened with you guys is because the engine business, when it took off, it was subsidizing the repair business. And thankfully, right. And we talked about Paul Danner, Paul Danner did a video, where he's talking about, like, Hey, we're fixing this vehicle that nobody else could fix, we got to charge for it. Like, it's not fair to not charge for it. And so just like with cash, just like with Eric, just like with Paul, I mean, these are super well known people, they should be charging a premium for this service, because people are coming to them because they want this service. And they're afraid to charge it. And so what do they do? They end up damaging the reputation, because they're not charging enough to provide the quality service and stamp behind the product the way they should. Yeah. And if they do, they're taking the money out of their own pocket out of the other business to pay for that screw up. And then they get Uber frustrated, they get so mad, so aggravated, because now the numbers suck, right? The numbers suck. And so what do you do, you're pulling your personal money to fix this. So you're aggravated, whereas if we just charge what we need to charge to begin with, for a supreme service that nobody else in the country can offer? I mean, it's like, you know, you watch these these high end law cases, right? Like the the Murdoch case or whatever, in Georgia. You know, murder, dude, it's like super famous right now killed his wife and son. I mean, his legal teams, like millions of dollars a week. And it's like, well, but I wanted the best. Well, I mean, so you're telling me like, the best is gonna charge me, you know, the $500 or whatever, or I'm gonna, I really shouldn't pay because there's public defense attorneys. I'll just get me one of those. Right. I mean, do you do are you gonna get the same result with a public defense attorney as you are with a I mean, he's going to it's not going to help him. He's in trouble no matter what.

Ethan Ross 1:09:36
He got convicted. But other every other case is different. Yeah, exactly. But I mean,

Lucas Underwood 1:09:41
he didn't do it. I mean, you know, who's this

David Roman 1:09:44
person? Murdock?

Ethan Ross 1:09:45
Yeah, it's him murders. It's me rd? A ugh.

Lucas Underwood 1:09:51
Yeah. Mirto. Yeah, he

David Roman 1:09:53
killed his wife.

Ethan Ross 1:09:54
Yeah, sure. Yeah. It was like a trail of murders that are like a trail of deaths that followed him around.

Lucas Underwood 1:10:01
And he and he does. He's like super famous. He's like a, he's like a world known defense attorney or something like that. Like the

Ethan Ross 1:10:07
his family basically runs this town for the last like four generations. Yeah. No, they were they were the they were the prosecutors.

Lucas Underwood 1:10:15
Oh, that's right. That was prosecution. He wasn't a defense attorney. He

Ethan Ross 1:10:17
was. My wife's been following us. I've been getting the updates. You know what I'm saying? No, like,

Lucas Underwood 1:10:21
seriously, think about that. Like he goes in pays millions and millions of dollars for this, like, elite team, this elite defense attorney to get him out of this trouble. And knowing that it's probably not going to work anyway. I mean, at this point, he's delusional anyway, like, you can watch how he acts. But I guess my point is, is like if I own a shop, and I am the elite shop, nobody else can do the job that I can do. Why the hell am I worried about charging less than everybody else? Yeah, it does not make sense.

Ethan Ross 1:10:53
I will say I've seen some examples of that lately. Here, too. So I've got a guy that sent me a 97 e 350. He works hard. I'm sorry. It's okay. Just wait to see the invoice. It's. So he he owns a company that does like overlanding stuff. And they they do special builds. And they they do like remote power sources and stuff like that. And he called me he's like, hey, I want a 500 horsepower. 730.

Lucas Underwood 1:11:21
Okay, then. All right. Is that hard to do? Yeah. Nearly reliable. Yeah. reliably, reliably stuff.

David Roman 1:11:28
So anything what's up with these trucks doing 1000 horsepower or whatever? Well, that's

Ethan Ross 1:11:34
nice. Yeah. Yeah. It's all a little pressure driven. Where's the six oh, can get to it easier than a seven, three, but it's Yeah, seven threes. It's tough to get that squeeze that horsepower.

Lucas Underwood 1:11:42
And especially especially on a old tire block. Right. You'll blow it right outside. Yeah.

Ethan Ross 1:11:47
I mean, we're putting, I mean, we're building a pretty good it's fully sleeved. Yeah, it's got girdle on the bottom. I mean, it's great. So he's like, as he's like, he needed you to build me this quote. So I contacted somebody that helps me out with a bunch of builds Matt Meyer. And he's like, Okay, here's what you need. All new fuel system, new air. It's like bigger turbo, all this stuff, right? Like, okay, I build it up. And he's getting a cask watch engine, which is good, up to like 600 horsepower for seven, three, probably more. But um, it's the highest reliability bill. It's the beefiest build, we'd have all our platforms. And I sent it to him, he bet we've been talking back and forth. And it was like, it was a big bill. I mean, it's like, it's like $70,000 right now. And he was like, this is like, twice as much as anybody else has quoted me. And I was like, Yeah, I know it is. So do people come to you because they want the cheapest price? Is that why they visit your company? Are you going to give them the budget? Or are you going to give them the best? He was like, Oh, okay. Let's do it. He said, let's talk. So he's, yeah, so it's gonna be like, $85,000. God taught me.

David Roman 1:12:54
Holy moly. Right. On an e 350. On any Ford, but it's Chauvin.

Ethan Ross 1:12:58
She watched

Lucas Underwood 1:13:00
those. Those overland vans, right. They weren't a lot of them are built by Quigley. Yeah. And so they are date. They are expensive. Yeah. I mean, they were expensive and quick

David Roman 1:13:14
lesson overall. And Van I don't know. Nada. They're like, they'll lift them

Lucas Underwood 1:13:18
and put whole like suspension systems and all your own

David Roman 1:13:21
lifted van. We're putting on a rollover hazard. So

Ethan Ross 1:13:27
yeah. Take it easy. No, we're doing a full suspension setup. We're doing an Allison conversion, brand new rear end. It's four wheel drive conversion. It's a bunch of stuff. So, but he's taking it to SEMA. Right? Oh, well, yeah. And he's gonna He's gonna live in it as he drives it across to these different shows. No pressure for me, right. I hope.

Lucas Underwood 1:13:53
Okay, so that quickly builds GMs transits Nissan's and Ford E series. Okay. All right. And I like is

David Roman 1:14:02
that I've seen before like the the sprinters that are like lifted up and they look like they're motorhomes kinda sorta, yeah, but a 97 e 350. Like that. Okay, well, yeah, I see.

Ethan Ross 1:14:13
It's gonna be awesome. It really is. Cool. Ha, you should have it at SEMA

David Roman 1:14:17
this year. That's cool.

Lucas Underwood 1:14:18
So we've not said enough things to make casts mad at us.

Ethan Ross 1:14:21
No, I was I was afraid let's I was pretty worried we would write those I was gonna be

David Roman 1:14:26
trying to relate back. You're going like down a dark path forecasts. I don't know who he is.

Ethan Ross 1:14:35
He says everybody he's supposed to be here but he's too busy.

Lucas Underwood 1:14:38
That's been that has been the story every single thing that's gonna be my story next year.

Ethan Ross 1:14:43
He came to PRI where you guys appear? I don't know what that is. performance racing industry. Wow, it's pretty awesome. Yeah, it's pretty cool. There's so much stuff there

Lucas Underwood 1:14:53
while you've been there not been but

Ethan Ross 1:14:56
it was like it's so the expo floor is about like eight times the size of this one. Maybe Sure, and it's racecars. Anything you can think sounds like SEMA. It's not it's not SEMA. They don't have any rims there.

David Roman 1:15:09
They have everything of SEMA. I know I haven't been fancy wax on this year. Oh, yeah. So they're like we're we're that's all race. They have this but it's huge and they have like show stuff right? Like show cars. They have show stuff but there's a lot of like tool manufacturers and CNC machine manufacturers and body the frame. You want to see cast straightening things you

Ethan Ross 1:15:32
want to see cast nerd outlet lead him to the CNC stuff and

Lucas Underwood 1:15:35
yeah, yeah, eyes glaze over, starts drilling on we can't

Ethan Ross 1:15:38
dragon webcast, it's time to eat. We have to go eat lunch now, where you're going to be hungry later. There's machines here. I can't leave. I have to see this. Well, you were talking about experiential stuff you'd like to do for your guys. We've started to cast started a program this year of how we're going to it's a reward system for employees to get to go to SEMA PRI. And we're going to ultimately gotta

Lucas Underwood 1:15:56
go to apex. Gotta go to apex.

Ethan Ross 1:15:59
What's Apex apex? The

David Roman 1:16:00
SEMA? Yeah,

Ethan Ross 1:16:01
it's, it's the thing right before, right? Yeah, me and, Mark, were talking about that. Yeah, I see. I think he's speaking at Apex. Dude, I'm

Lucas Underwood 1:16:08
gonna tell you what apex is.

David Roman 1:16:10
I submitted my class, you probably know, they won't. I think the six is the common off. And then they'll have a couple of weeks later, they'll announce who's going to be doing

Lucas Underwood 1:16:24
it. You know, the training classes are amazing. But the show Florida apex. Yeah. And the networking is like nothing you've ever seen. Yeah. Like you will not see something like that anywhere else. And well, it's vision but bigger, massive, massive. And the show this has been awesome. Do you imagine this show floor light times? 10? Yeah, it's way by and so you go in, you get to see the lifts and operation. You get more time with the vendors. It's a it's a show the entire time, whereas this is just like a two day show. Yeah, this is the massive show that goes on nonstop. And so you really get to get in and see the equipment work and see equipment that that like I came here for the first time and I thought wow, there's a lot of equipment to show. And then I go there and I'm like, holy

David Roman 1:17:09
cow. Way more niche vendors like yeah, planners. Yeah. plastic clips. They make this Yeah, yeah, we make this terrible at marketing because I've never heard of and that's all you make. How do you Okay, exactly.

Lucas Underwood 1:17:26
All right. Thank you for being here.

Ethan Ross 1:17:28
Yeah. Thank you guys for having me.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai