Episode 132 - Shaping the Perception of Automotive Businesses with Nathan Bryant and Erich and Lauralee Schimdt
Lucas Underwood [00:00:00]:
David. We hate you. David taught a class on hiring today. It was a good class.
Nathan Bryant [00:00:09]:
Yes, it was.
Lucas Underwood [00:00:10]:
Yeah. I thought it was very, very interesting. What? All right, so kind of what we're going to talk about here is post Laura Lee class here. Were you in her class?
Nathan Bryant [00:00:33]:
I was in Laura Lee's class.
Lucas Underwood [00:00:35]:
This is her first class ever. What did you think?
Nathan Bryant [00:00:38]:
She did a really good job. Best part about it, from my opinion, was that she brought a perspective from outside the industry. I think that way too much. We get kind of stuck in our own echo chamber, and all we do is talk about the same stuff, same perspective, same shit, different day.
Lucas Underwood [00:00:56]:
Definitely. Tell us what your class was about.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:01:00]:
I talked about the beauty of branding.
Lucas Underwood [00:01:02]:
The beauty of branding. I don't think you're close enough to that microphone for hello. I'm going to have to make some adjustments here. Laura Lee, this is just okay, usually.
Erich Schmidt [00:01:10]:
You all tell me I hear nothing.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:01:12]:
Well, you're deaf?
Erich Schmidt [00:01:15]:
Stop it.
Lucas Underwood [00:01:16]:
Did you say something?
Lauralee Schmidt [00:01:19]:
Is this better?
Erich Schmidt [00:01:22]:
Why are you the way you are?
Lucas Underwood [00:01:26]:
This is about me. You see this dude sitting over here at the end of the table?
Erich Schmidt [00:01:31]:
No.
Lucas Underwood [00:01:31]:
This is why I'm the way that I am. Did you hit it before? No, dipshit. I'm just sitting here talking for no reason. It has it's usually when you're sitting behind the board that that happens.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:01:49]:
How many shows have you done and not pressed record? Oh, really? Okay.
Lucas Underwood [00:01:55]:
No, that's never happened. He's lost some recordings. Yeah, he's lost some. I have. Okay, so tell us what your class was about.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:02:14]:
I spoke on the beauty of branding from kind of like the basis of the beginning of putting your brand together all the way to rebranding and how it would affect your culture and your staffing and your clients and just all of it.
Lucas Underwood [00:02:29]:
Where'd you get this idea from?
Lauralee Schmidt [00:02:32]:
Branding is what I come from in my old role in cosmetics, and I'm a heavy consumer, so branding speaks a lot to me. I'm a complete brand whore, and I like labels.
Lucas Underwood [00:02:48]:
Do we miss the bar in automotive, you think?
Lauralee Schmidt [00:02:52]:
Yeah, I do. I don't think there's enough branding at maybe some shops, but I spend a substantial amount of time on the web looking at shops, and I think that branding is just something that's maybe looked over because it's such a technical industry and there's a bunch of dudes running around that spin wrenches. They don't care about branding.
Lucas Underwood [00:03:14]:
Right, I can see that. What was your takeaway from the class, Nathan?
Nathan Bryant [00:03:20]:
Biggest takeaway on it was that one. I got a lot of work to do. I don't really have a brand. I have a logo.
Lucas Underwood [00:03:27]:
Yeah, of course.
Nathan Bryant [00:03:29]:
Other than that, like I said, it was fascinating to me to hear the perspective from outside of our industry because other industries do a lot more with branding than we do. We're very a lot of small shops that we fix cars. We worry about what our own immediate customers, but there's no consistency to most of what we I after she asked us to look at our Google reviews, and I looked at mine and realized I have old pictures of my old sign on my Google my business page.
Lucas Underwood [00:04:08]:
Really?
Nathan Bryant [00:04:09]:
So that's something that I need to fix when I get back to the shop, because it should be consistently everything should look the same, of course, but I've got a mix of a 20 year old logo and a one year old logo.
Lucas Underwood [00:04:23]:
Well, and so let me ask you some questions about that, then. When you look at branding, what is it that you have really decided to bring to the shop? I mean, have you ever considered that we need to brand the shop? Have you ever considered that? Or did you just say, well, I'm a tech and I can work on cars, and what I do is fix cars, so I'm just going to put this logo up and say, I fix cars? We got into a massive argument. I don't know if you watched that last video. We got into a massive effing argument a while back because I'm talking about, hey, you need insurance and you need this for this guy starting this mobile business. And David's like, F that, you're effing crazy. And I'm like, Why? And he said, well, because you don't need any of that if you don't have clients. And he's got a pretty damn good point, right?
Nathan Bryant [00:05:08]:
No, I never thought about it in terms of, like, a global branding thing.
Lucas Underwood [00:05:13]:
Okay?
Nathan Bryant [00:05:13]:
I would think of it more as like an immediate thing of send out some advertisements. I understood my dad ran a liquor store in a small town, and from that, our idea of marketing was it was our family, it was our store. And what we did in person in the store and how we talked to people and how we knew everybody, that was our marketing.
Lucas Underwood [00:05:39]:
Okay?
Nathan Bryant [00:05:40]:
So I approached my shop mainly a lot of the same way when a customer comes in, hey, Joe. Hey, Sam. One of the things that I did to differentiate myself from a franchise or a dealership was I would remember my customers names, right?
Lucas Underwood [00:05:55]:
Of course.
Nathan Bryant [00:05:56]:
I would do my best to have a nice, clean waiting room, have a clean shop. I wanted a place that people were comfortable with. And after a few years here, I started to kind of realize that in a large part, really, I am the brand, right? They bring their car to never really I've still struggled with the idea of having a consistent brand. Laura Lee talked about posting on five different social media platforms. I'm lucky if I put a Facebook post up on the shop once a month, if that. And Google my business, other than responding to reviews, is largely ignored.
Lucas Underwood [00:06:38]:
I'm the same way.
Nathan Bryant [00:06:39]:
I have no idea what to post. I have no idea what to.
Lucas Underwood [00:06:45]:
Know. I was kind of guilty of the same thing. Because you get busy doing what the business does, right? And it doesn't feel like you have the time to do these other things. Larley, what do you think when you hear him say that? Because you kind of came into a shop. That was my bad homie.
Erich Schmidt [00:07:03]:
Listen, man, it was just a name that people could recognize. I know any better. And really, at the end of the day, it's just like Nathan said, it's not scalable. At a certain point, I think we're.
Lucas Underwood [00:07:14]:
All starting to realize why she's so mean to you. I think we're all starting to realize why she's so mean to you. And so tell us now, what do you think when you hear them say.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:07:24]:
That, nathan, I can help you with your Facebook post? Sad for you. I think it's something you have to make time for. It's not an option. You need to spend some time setting up posts. And at this point, we're so digital, you can just sit down for an hour and pre plan them out for a year.
Lucas Underwood [00:07:45]:
What do you think about hiring somebody to do those things?
Lauralee Schmidt [00:07:48]:
I think if you're not capable and creative, you should absolutely outsource that. Absolutely.
Lucas Underwood [00:07:54]:
Okay.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:07:55]:
And it doesn't have like as long as you give them the parameters and the guidelines of what you need the brand to look like and do and feel, then hand it over. But if they're going to go like, rogue and post, what if you don't.
Lucas Underwood [00:08:09]:
Have a brand at all, though? What if you are your logo?
Lauralee Schmidt [00:08:14]:
Then you're in your very precarious place. It's not hard for growth, I guess, if you do it right. But if you mess up or if you sell or you do go off the wagon in some way, the whole brand is tanked.
Lucas Underwood [00:08:32]:
You've ruined all your work, of course.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:08:35]:
So I think you had a podcast recently about building just your business around just you, and I think that's a huge misstep.
Lucas Underwood [00:08:45]:
Well, and I have done that. We have done that. We were just talking just a little bit ago that like the forums and the Facebook groups and stuff like that. I remember years ago, there were a series of shops, and they were performance shops. They sold performance parts. And what they did was they built this entire brand that they worked on this brand, Diesel Truck, and they sold parts for this brand, Diesel Truck. And so what ended up happening is eventually they had a little misstep somewhere, and this misstep turns into somebody getting on one of those forums and trashing them, which then turns into everybody trashing them. And so when you only promote to one group, right, we talk about specialization sometimes when you only promote to one group and one demographic and you make a misstep, especially if it's a powerful thing, like a Facebook group or like a man, you can absolutely screw up big time.
Lucas Underwood [00:09:45]:
Whereas at least if you're diversified and more people know about that brand, and they recognize that brand as more than just one thing, it's not as. And I want to say it was Scott palava who was telling us about a local shop, and I think it was an ice cream shop or something, where dude did something crazy and it put him out of business. Just like I I want to be careful about saying that, because we talk all the time about how one simple little mistake is not going to put you out of business. But not branding your business for ten years and expecting your logo to be your brand and nobody knows about you aside from the clients that are coming through the door, and you're not advertising or marketing at all, that's dangerous. That's as dangerous as it gets. Now, what I've been doing over here is I'm messing around and looking at all kinds of stuff over here. I'm looking for something because this is something I got sent the other day. Okay.
Lucas Underwood [00:10:45]:
And you brought it up. And this is from your area of expertise. We're going to see if we can get it to play on the show, and I just want to hear your feedback on this. Okay?
Lauralee Schmidt [00:10:58]:
Okay.
Lucas Underwood [00:10:58]:
And we're going to talk a little bit about what we're charging and why we're charging what we're charging. Okay, sure. And we're going to see how loud this is, but I just want to know what you think about this. And so we got to go back here and click some buttons around, and we're just going to do this right here. Let's make sure we get the okay, we're going to go back here.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:11:46]:
Slow.
Lucas Underwood [00:12:18]:
Now, look, here's the thing. I know this is a completely different thing, and people want things like their hair done or whatever, and I get that. But you as a shop owner, what does that feel like when you hear that? Because we've got shop owners who are absolutely terrified to tell somebody they're going to charge them $170 to look at their vehicle, and you just heard these people talking about getting their hair done, and it was $500. What does that feel like to you?
Nathan Bryant [00:12:48]:
I think that we have a huge problem in our business with people with a lack of training and lack of confidence to be able to charge what they should charge. And I think a lot of it comes from technicians becoming shop owners. We have a lot of technicians that never get any training on being a service writer until they open their own shop and they're making it up as they go. Technicians make terrible service writers because they started fixing their own car because they weren't going to pay retail to start with. I became a technician because I was too damn broke to fix my car, right? So I had to fix it myself. And it was a big struggle for me when I went from technician to service writer to get used to what retail prices were, right? Because when you're working in the back, you don't know that you just fix the car. You know how many hours a job pays, but it doesn't really translate into how much value there is to the customer for fixing that car, right? And it was kind of a big turning point for me when, one, I got some training and that helped a lot. And two, you just start talking to people outside of non technicians, talk to people who have to get their car fixed and realize that it's not $250 for a battery, it's $250 to know that their car is going to start when they get off the airplane and it's 02:00 A.m.
Nathan Bryant [00:14:23]:
And they have to drive home. So now that $250. Is that's really reasonable?
Lucas Underwood [00:14:29]:
We've had a lot of conversations in ASOG lately around how to present this, because this is not just as simple as saying, because I did the same thing when I first started learning about raising my prices. I've got some stories right, where I went out and somebody said, hey, you need to bill by the hour and you need to charge more per hour and you need to charge for how much time you've got in testing. I didn't put any of the nuance in it, you know what I'm saying? I didn't put any of the work in that says, hey, here's how I explain this and here's how we're going to communicate to the client and make sure they understand and get the prior approval. And boys, I will never forget. And it was a $400 bill. I still remember this day. It's $411.41, okay? And I did not get prior authorization, right? So what do you always hear me harp about? Like you always, always it doesn't matter what it is. You get prior authorization before it goes up one penny, it can go down as much as it needs to go down, but before it goes up one penny, you get authorization, right? And you communicate with them about what that is.
Lucas Underwood [00:15:34]:
And so it took almost 5 hours of test and I thought, well, I don't feel right charging him 5 hours for this. Because at the end of the day, while it was just a fuse, we did things to verify it wasn't going to blow again and we fixed a wire and we did all this other stuff. But in the consumer's eyes, because the way I explained it, I charged him $400 to change a fuse, right? And so it's not just being able to go to them and say your bill is $400. It's being able to present that in a way that they understand it makes sense and that you show them the value that's your responsibility as owner. And so when you hear that right, because that was the field that you came from, not necessarily hairstylist or no.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:16:13]:
But I've worked inside of hair.
Lucas Underwood [00:16:14]:
Right. What does that feel like to you when you hear that? Because you've been harping on all of us. Right. I caught a lecture a while back because what was it that you've charged, like, $600 an hour to bring out your little baggy?
Lauralee Schmidt [00:16:31]:
That much? No, I charge $150 an hour just.
Nathan Bryant [00:16:36]:
To show up at your house to.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:16:38]:
Do some makeup, and that gets you an hour of my time. Anything past that, you're paying me additional hours of my time, unless you want to book me for a day, and then I'm a one $200 day rate.
Lucas Underwood [00:16:49]:
Well, so, I mean, I guess at the end of the day, that's my question is, like, why is it that it seems in automotive, that that's not acceptable? Why is it that so many shops are looking at this and saying, we can't do this when this other industry, that I mean, reliable transportation is something very important, like getting your hair done? I guess that's kind of cool. Nathan, you probably wouldn't you're talking to.
Nathan Bryant [00:17:13]:
The wrong guy here.
Lucas Underwood [00:17:15]:
What about you? You look pretty preppy. And that's supposed to mean?
Nathan Bryant [00:17:23]:
I'm just saying, I will say that my wife's haircut costs more per hour than what I charge.
Lucas Underwood [00:17:30]:
Yeah, well, I mean, that's what I'm saying. And so what makes that okay? I mean, it seems like we have to bring I'm not saying they're not talented. They're really talented people. I mean, the sheer excellence in charlote. You can spend a an hour in there like nobody's so why is it that we have such a problem with that?
Lauralee Schmidt [00:17:57]:
I'm going to say this and I'm going to get reamed, probably, but I think shop owners are scared.
Lucas Underwood [00:18:02]:
I agree with you.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:18:03]:
I just think they're scared. I think they think with their own pockets, and that isn't really the way to do business at all. I don't know. And there's so much of the conversation about, like, oh, my economic area, oh, this is where I am. Oh, people are poor around me, or this is how much money they make, but in reality, that doesn't really ever matter or stop a consumer from spending on what they want to spend on.
Lucas Underwood [00:18:36]:
Right.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:18:36]:
And I know this because I was telling him, one of my friends, Dearly, needs brakes on her car, but she used $1,500 to go buy a Taylor Swift ticket and denied the brake job. The value wasn't in the brakes. The value was to go see Taylor Swift. Yeah, she going to crash her car soon because she ain't got no brakes, and now she ain't got no money because she's spending on Taylor Swift, and.
Lucas Underwood [00:18:57]:
Then it's going to cost her more money in the long run.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:18:59]:
And she bought, like, $450 worth of gear while she was there, like, Swifty gear. So it's like they put money where they put value and fun and interest and auto care is not fun or interesting.
Lucas Underwood [00:19:14]:
I don't disagree.
Nathan Bryant [00:19:16]:
I don't know. You're absolutely right. I mean, it's not even fun on my side of the I mean, how.
Lucas Underwood [00:19:23]:
Can it be fun for them? I've got a friend and we've talked a little bit about this back and forth who just absolutely got raped over the coals on Facebook the other day. It was rough, it was bad. And I was talking to them and they said, well, my labor rate is $80 an hour. How in the world, how in the world am I supposed to do any better than this? Because I can't continue to go on. All these people are mad because I'm overcharging them and you're telling me you're charging more? I'm like, of course I'm charging more, because the people you got in your shop are the wrong people to begin with. Right. Because that's what they're looking for. Look, when you take somebody who is in poor financial shape and you make them spend money, they are going to look for everything they possibly can.
Lucas Underwood [00:20:11]:
You tell them that car is blown up, they're going to be looking for anybody they possibly can to say, this is your fault. I need your help with this. Right. I don't think it's intentional. I think in a lot of ways it's that they're so frustrated they don't see an out, they don't have any money, and so they've got to find somebody to blame because that's overwhelming. That sucks, and I get that. But here this guy is he's charging $80 an hour. Well, we talk about finesse, right.
Lucas Underwood [00:20:35]:
And talking about the right way to do things. Well, they're charging $80 an hour to change light bulbs. They're charging $80 an hour to put a wheel hub in. They're charging $80 an hour to do testing. And so I think it's a miss on multiple labor rates. Right. He should really have multiple labor rates so he can make sure that clients aren't getting taken advantage of for really low skill work. I'm a big advocate of multiple labor rates, but I also think that if you're a shop owner who doesn't know how to apply and implement these strategies, you got to be careful about jumping out and just dropping these strategies out and saying, I'm going to go with it.
Lucas Underwood [00:21:11]:
Right. You got to know how to do it.
Nathan Bryant [00:21:15]:
Absolutely. And you can't just go from eighty dollars to two hundred dollars. You have to provide $200 worth of value. I'm in a major metro area here in Denver. It's freaking expensive to live here. My labor rate is right at $200 an hour. And I'm not on the high end of things, but I also have a labor rate of $65 an hour for my oil change. And that's labor rate I use for rotating tires, for changing an air filter, and for changing oil.
Lucas Underwood [00:21:47]:
Right.
Nathan Bryant [00:21:48]:
And if I'm going to be doing some complicated electrical testing, I'm probably charging closer to an hour.
Lucas Underwood [00:21:56]:
Right?
Nathan Bryant [00:21:57]:
Because that's a test that is more valuable. The shop owners have to first, they have to believe in the value of what they're doing. They have to believe that that brake job is worth $650, and they have to get out of their own pocket because they would never pay $650. Because they would buy the parts at wholesale, they would do the labor themselves. So for them, a brake job is $100 worth of parts. But for a customer that doesn't know how to change their brakes, that might as well be building an airplane. So it's incredibly valuable for them to be able to stop when they get to a stop sign.
Lucas Underwood [00:22:51]:
Yeah, sure.
Nathan Bryant [00:22:52]:
We have some pretty high mountains here. Nobody wants to fall off of them.
Lucas Underwood [00:22:57]:
I don't know.
Nathan Bryant [00:23:03]:
But so tires and very, very valuable. And there was a Facebook post about somebody was talking about being too expensive on a set of brakes.
Lucas Underwood [00:23:18]:
You're saying that I'm sitting here thinking the same thing.
Nathan Bryant [00:23:21]:
I mean, I would have been two to three times that cost, and my customers will pay it without thinking twice, because, one, I've built up some trust. They know that I'm not going to recommend anything that they don't need. And they know that if I tell them that this is what it costs to do the job correctly and to provide a quality repair with my three year warranty, they pay it because they want their car to stop when they're coming down from coming down from the mountains at 70 miles an hour, and they need to be able to stop.
Lucas Underwood [00:24:05]:
Well, when you walk back through that post and you look at all the different comments and some guys that two years ago would have never, ever thought about charging, that one of the things that I've noticed about this, and I've paid quite a bit of attention over the past couple of months. We're at Ratchet and Wrench 2023. You go to some of these training events and you look at some of these coaching companies. You've long said that you're uncoachable. Right. 100% can't be coached. Not going to happen. Right.
Lucas Underwood [00:24:38]:
And so I wonder if some of these focuses that have been placed on our industry are placed in the wrong place by accident. Okay. And what I mean by that is a lot of these coaching companies and a lot of these events are built for bigger shops. They're built for a five, a six, a ten bay shop. Right. You know, the class I'm teaching tomorrow is about a small shop. Why? Well, because some people don't want a big shop. Some people are completely content in a three bay shop or a four bay shop.
Lucas Underwood [00:25:08]:
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I have seen more shops fail by coming out of a small shop, a two or a three bay shop that they never optimized or maximized what it was capable of in the first place, and then they go into a ten or 15 bay facility and they didn't know what they were capable of in the small shop. Right. I'm not saying I would go back we were at your shop yesterday. Beautiful shop, by the way.
Nathan Bryant [00:25:34]:
Thank you.
Lucas Underwood [00:25:35]:
I'm not saying that I would go back and I would trade for the smaller shop, but we lost some stuff, we lost some efficiency, we lost some productivity when we came out of that shop and went into the big shop. And so I think in a lot of ways, the small shop's been discounted and nobody has been there to train them. Nobody's been there to say, there's a better way to do this. You can do this in a small shop and this can work. A lot of the strategies that are taught today, and I'm not trying to throw shade at any of the coaches or anybody else, a lot of the strategies that are taught today are tough in a small shop. It's hard to make it work. And, man, I learned that firsthand because a lot of what I was trying to do was what I was seeing in these groups and seeing what everybody was saying. Some of the things that work in a ten bay shop do not work in a three bay shop.
Nathan Bryant [00:26:22]:
No, because there's things that you have to be able to scale if you have a business model that some of the coaching companies push, and a lot of them, almost all of them push for the idea of either multi shop ownership or absentee ownership. So that means you have to have enough volume to pay a manager, to pay a service writer, probably two service writers and probably five technicians. A lot of these strategies don't work for a sub million dollar shop.
Lucas Underwood [00:26:58]:
Yeah.
Nathan Bryant [00:26:59]:
And before I bought my shop, I managed a million and a half dollars shop. So for me, it was a huge struggle to figure out how to run a one in a two man shop.
Lucas Underwood [00:27:12]:
Right.
Nathan Bryant [00:27:13]:
Because everything that I knew was big was from a big shop, and I tried to replicate it and I almost went out of business in the first two years because I was trying to do something that wouldn't work on the scale of what yeah. So, like when we talked earlier about branding, but the brand of my shop is largely take it to Nathan.
Lucas Underwood [00:27:35]:
Right.
Nathan Bryant [00:27:36]:
And that works in a three bay shop. Yeah, because for a three bay shop, it's never going to be big enough for me to be an absentee owner.
Lucas Underwood [00:27:46]:
Right.
Nathan Bryant [00:27:46]:
There will never be a face other than mine that will be the face of my shop for a three bay shop.
Lucas Underwood [00:27:54]:
Let me ask you about this, though. What if something happens to Nathan? What if something happens and you can't work what I've said often? Well, you got to build value into your organization to where if you have to sell it, you can sell it. Or that if something happens to you, it can continue to make money. What do you think when I say that? What comes to mind when that I'm.
Nathan Bryant [00:28:25]:
Not big enough for that. If something were to happen to me in, say, the next few years, the shop's done, the business is dead. End of story.
Lucas Underwood [00:28:37]:
How does that feel, though? I mean, are you okay with that?
Nathan Bryant [00:28:40]:
I've accepted it as the reality of the situation.
Lucas Underwood [00:28:43]:
Okay.
Nathan Bryant [00:28:44]:
But one of the reasons why I went from a one man shop to a two man shop a couple of years ago was the idea, well, if I break my arm, I'm out of business. If I break my leg, I'm out of business. So now I'm at a point now where if I was permanently disabled yeah, the shop's done. If I got to be out for two weeks or three weeks, the guy I got working for me, he can run it. If I grow a little bit more and I hire a second person, then the shop can run for a short period of time without me. What the struggle would be, would be to replace myself with a person that has to be paid a salary and then still have enough money to be profitable after I replace myself.
Lucas Underwood [00:29:35]:
Right. To be able to pay yourself in the whole nine yards.
Nathan Bryant [00:29:38]:
Because for a two or a three bay shop with one, two technicians, it's hard to have to generate enough profit to pay for a manager in addition to paying for an owner.
Lucas Underwood [00:29:52]:
So does that mean that you put different protections in place? So if something does happen, I mean, do you have some type of insurance or something that if something happens to you, what's your sustainability then? Yes.
Nathan Bryant [00:30:05]:
So I have a disability insurance. If I get hurt and I'm disabled for the rest of my life, it will pay me a certain amount of money every year, basically replace the income from the shop. I would just sell the business liquidate assets and basically walk away from it.
Lucas Underwood [00:30:23]:
Okay.
Nathan Bryant [00:30:27]:
Like I said, I have disability insurance. I have life insurance, and I contribute to retirement plans because largely at the size that I am, I still own a job, so I treat it as a job. I invest in retirement as if I was an employee.
Lucas Underwood [00:30:49]:
Right.
Nathan Bryant [00:30:49]:
Because at this point, my business isn't valuable enough to sell.
Lucas Underwood [00:30:53]:
Right.
Nathan Bryant [00:30:54]:
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that at this point. It's just you have to recognize it.
Lucas Underwood [00:31:03]:
Because I see if you don't, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble.
Nathan Bryant [00:31:05]:
Yeah, because I see posts, I see advertisements. I see people trying to sell a business, and they want $500,000, but the business is worthless because the business revolves entirely around one person, and it's not ideal. Situation. If anybody's wanting to open their shop and get into this, I would say make a plan to get past where I'm at right now. Otherwise, it's a little sketchy, but recognize where you're at. Don't make a plan based on a fantasy.
Lucas Underwood [00:31:44]:
Right? Well, that's a big thing. I don't necessarily want to say switching gears, but you look at what you guys just went through and the huge change, right. You're always right near something happening in a bad way where you could lose a major staff member, you could lose a critical employee, and the shop can be dramatically affected overnight. Now, David and I have talked many different times about this constant churn of whether we like it or not. And, you know, the keynote speaker today said, you know, my my average tenure, tenure is 14 years. But what he doesn't say is, that's average. And so there's some in there that I've turned over five and six times. And that sucks.
Lucas Underwood [00:32:37]:
Right? And the constant churn of having to do that wears you out. How do you guys feel about that now that you're on the other side of this? But there were some talks about doing something different business wise when everything was going down and it was such a mess and things sucked. Looking back at this now, how do you all feel about that? Would you rather be in a smaller shop or you thinking, look, I'm going to continue to grow this thing. We're going to get into something bigger, we're going to do something better and build into that resilience some structure where we can have the manager. Because you guys kind of wanted to be absentee owners, right?
Erich Schmidt [00:33:13]:
I would like to work less.
Lucas Underwood [00:33:14]:
Right? Well, I mean, you just open the door, she's not going to let you work less. You know that, right?
Erich Schmidt [00:33:25]:
She's the one that never shows up to work. I'm the owner. But then I see a picture on Facebook of her chilling on the desk.
Lucas Underwood [00:33:33]:
Did you catch that?
Nathan Bryant [00:33:34]:
Yes.
Lucas Underwood [00:33:35]:
You caught that. Now you've got dinner with these two later. You've got dinner with these two later. Yes. And so I just want to point out to you that if he goes missing, you're an accomplice. Okay. Let's be real about this.
Nathan Bryant [00:33:48]:
Good to know.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:33:49]:
Me and Dana have a plan, okay?
Lucas Underwood [00:33:52]:
If you both go missing, I know nothing, right? This episode will never be released. But, I mean, seriously, what's the strategy from here, then?
Erich Schmidt [00:34:01]:
I mean, at this point, I want to scale. I've definitely changed.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:34:06]:
We've changed what that looks like, though.
Lucas Underwood [00:34:09]:
Tell us how tell us what changed.
Erich Schmidt [00:34:15]:
Culture, people.
Lucas Underwood [00:34:17]:
But I mean, what changed with your plan? Right? You had an idea of what it was. It was going to be before. What's different about now?
Erich Schmidt [00:34:25]:
So when you're going down that dark path, right, you see nothing but negative, and the only thing you can think about is, I got to go work for somebody.
Lucas Underwood [00:34:35]:
I'm done.
Erich Schmidt [00:34:36]:
It's over. You don't see anything positive, forward, moving. And then when you do finally see that light and you get a bit of stress relief, you kind of can get a little clearer picture of what do you really want to do? And Cecil really helped me. Hey, man, you got to figure out what you want to do. Do I do the same thing every other shop owner does. I go back and forth. Working for myself is just more appealing. I have a really good thing going too.
Erich Schmidt [00:35:09]:
Have good sized shop. We have pretty decent people. So at this point, I would like to max my shop out and maybe potentially buy a couple more.
Lucas Underwood [00:35:22]:
Got you.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:35:25]:
We wanted three shops. That was what the goal always was. Three shops that we were going to build, ground up our shops. And the one we have now would be the flagship shop, right?
Lucas Underwood [00:35:34]:
Yeah.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:35:35]:
But now I think the plan is that we don't necessarily want three shops. We just want to buy all the local shops and make them our shop.
Lucas Underwood [00:35:43]:
There you go. So that keynote speaker this morning, right? I was sitting there thinking, and I almost wanted to ask a question, but didn't end up asking it. I was sitting there thinking, how do you develop a vision for what he's done with his organization? Okay. I've noticed that owners who come from a parent or a family business, they take a different trajectory business wise than someone who comes from, I'm starting my own shop. Okay. So like, the guys that mom and dad owned a shop and they gave them the shop or they inherited the shop, however it worked, they typically go multistore, right? It's very common for them to be multistore, and they typically take it and run with it, and they find success. Usually not all of them, but a lot of them do. The independent owner that has never been in a repair shop, aside from being a technician or something like that, they typically have a lot harder time finding the destination that they want to head to.
Lucas Underwood [00:36:50]:
They have a harder time saying, in five years, I want to be here, and this is what that looks like, and here's how much money it takes to do this, and in ten years, I want to be here. And so I don't know if that's a byproduct of you grow up in a shop. You see the mistakes mom and dad make. You see all the things that they did, and you say, I can improve upon this. And if I improve upon this and I see all these things, I can take this and I can implement this system I have in my head. Look at Mike Allen, right? Multi store, very successful. Dad owned a shop. Mike's story literally is I saw the mistakes that were happening, I saw where we were missing.
Lucas Underwood [00:37:31]:
And I grew up in elite coaching I grew up in these programs and I was seeing and I could see where dad was missing it. I could see what he wasn't doing because I was so exposed to the negative in it that I could realize if I just did X, it would work. Those of us starting shops typically are not seeing that vision that far out like that. Why do you think that is?
Erich Schmidt [00:37:57]:
You don't get that 1000 foot view when you're growing up through the business. The only thing you have to go off of is where you've worked at prior. Which is why we continually generate poor shops because they typically leave because it's a poor shop.
Lucas Underwood [00:38:11]:
Right? Right. And so they create in turn a poor shop. And so we just have this because.
Erich Schmidt [00:38:16]:
You don't know any better, you don't know what you don't know.
Lucas Underwood [00:38:18]:
Right.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:38:18]:
Well, I think one of the good dynamics about us is because I don't come from auto care. So when I walked in, I was coming from business and so I could see holes all over the place that weren't going on. He had such a good solid shop with good technicians and good customers, but I was like, friend, we could make this really big if we just did XYZ. But he didn't see those things because he didn't have a business education background, he didn't have a marketing background and a branding background. So I came in and helped out with those things. And we're able to kind of move the mark because of two very different perspectives.
Erich Schmidt [00:38:59]:
I think we're not blinded by commonalities in our industry either.
Nathan Bryant [00:39:04]:
It's a fresh eyes.
Erich Schmidt [00:39:05]:
Yeah, absolutely.
Nathan Bryant [00:39:09]:
My dad owned small business, so you would think that maybe I would have a little bit more, but no. My dad owned two little stores and he was always running them. He worked 80 hours, 90 hours a week. So until you know that it's possible to get out of that rot, for lack of a better term, you don't have the imagination to figure out, oh, well, I can get over here, until you can imagine that you can get over there, then you can start looking at oh, how do I get there? It's why I think there's so much value in some of the like the ASOG Facebook group because people get their feelings hurt when Seth Thorson comes out and says, oh, I made a million dollars last.
Lucas Underwood [00:40:02]:
Right, right.
Nathan Bryant [00:40:03]:
But until you have a Seth Thorson that has three shops that are doing a million dollars in a month, I'm not even sure if that's what he's doing. But then you start thinking, well, wait a minute, if this guy can do it, how did he get there?
Lucas Underwood [00:40:20]:
Right.
Nathan Bryant [00:40:20]:
What can? So it's it's like there was a guy who can't find employees and then a couple of us looked up his website and his Facebook page and saw his shop and that it's. Like, dude, this is what the problem is, right? Hopefully he gets over being butthurt and looks at it and goes, wait a minute, these other guys did this, right? If somebody else can do it, I can do it.
Lucas Underwood [00:40:49]:
We see a lot of butthurt as moderators. We see a lot of butthurt. We set a lot of hurt feelings, and we see some people get, like, pretty ridiculously petty and mean. Do you work in a big shop.
Erich Schmidt [00:41:05]:
Before you started your own?
Lucas Underwood [00:41:07]:
No.
Erich Schmidt [00:41:07]:
Do you work in a small shop?
Lucas Underwood [00:41:08]:
No.
Erich Schmidt [00:41:09]:
Did you ever work in a big shop?
Nathan Bryant [00:41:11]:
I one time managed 22 technicians.
Erich Schmidt [00:41:15]:
Did they all get butthurt?
Lucas Underwood [00:41:16]:
A lot.
Nathan Bryant [00:41:17]:
There was constant drama with that many people. When I was managing a reconditioning department, a used car dealer, I had 22 technicians, two tow truck drivers, three porters, a couple of parts people we were constantly hiring. Somebody was calling in sick every once a week. There was drama with boyfriends, drama with girlfriends, drama. But yeah, nobody was always getting along. I guess this is probably a really good management lesson, is you have to learn when to ignore the noise. When somebody's butthurt about something, it's okay to just let them vent. You don't have to address everything.
Nathan Bryant [00:42:04]:
And even when you go to conferences like this or anywhere you get shop owners talking, somebody's going to get their feelings hurt. Especially if we're sitting around the bar and somebody's had a few drinks and somebody's get their feelings hurt about something.
Lucas Underwood [00:42:20]:
Yeah, for sure.
Nathan Bryant [00:42:21]:
But you don't always have to react to it. And sometimes if you said about it a little later, you realize, yeah, maybe they were right.
Lucas Underwood [00:42:30]:
Well, we've done that with some people in ASOG, right to where we've kind of let it cool down and they come back and they're chill and they're know probably missed the bar. We've had some who absolutely refuse to listen to any voice of reason at all. Anything that disagrees with what they believe right now is a right. And to each their own, I guess, right? It doesn't matter. It's just that I find it so interesting that there are so many mean just in the confines of ASOC who are exposed to this information and this knowledge, yet they're still head down fixing cars. They're still marching forward fixing cars. I know this other shop owner that was completely head in the sand when things were going sideways at the shop. And the worst that things got at the shop, this dude just, like, continued to bury his head in his ass.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:43:26]:
It's easier to put your head down and keep working.
Erich Schmidt [00:43:28]:
Is it me? Why are you looking at me?
Lucas Underwood [00:43:31]:
Might be you.
Erich Schmidt [00:43:33]:
Could be it's maybe me. I wouldn't say I was burying my head in the sand, but it's just an element of stress my brain didn't want to deal with, I guess.
Lucas Underwood [00:43:41]:
No, I mean, that's the thing, right, is because it's hard, right, to get through it. What do they say you got to go through hell to get to heaven. Right. You have to march through it.
Erich Schmidt [00:43:55]:
I got through. It is because of that gal over there. For real?
Lucas Underwood [00:43:59]:
Yeah. I can agree, man.
Erich Schmidt [00:44:02]:
She's a good weeder.
Lucas Underwood [00:44:04]:
I don't disagree. When you threaten someone with death, you typically take off and do a good job.
Erich Schmidt [00:44:10]:
I can't even get mad because I.
Nathan Bryant [00:44:11]:
Started all this crap.
Erich Schmidt [00:44:17]:
She was a voice of reason under high stress situations. And I'll be honest, sometimes at the very end, I had to calm her down quite a bit because she's just.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:44:26]:
I was no longer the voice of reason.
Erich Schmidt [00:44:28]:
Done, man. Your brain just turns it off.
Lucas Underwood [00:44:31]:
Well, but I mean, that's just it is like some of these shops have consciously made the decision, I'm just going to sit over here where it's semi comfortable. This sucks. The dumpster is definitely on fire. I am sitting in the dumpster. It is floating down shit creek, literally. And I'm going to sit here and pray to God something changes without taking action or doing anything about it. Right. I mean, we've seen quite a bit of that.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:45:01]:
You get scared and you freeze up. Some people do.
Nathan Bryant [00:45:05]:
And human beings can get used to just about anything. They will convince themselves that whatever situation they're in is, oh, this is normal, it's okay, instead of because if you got to fix the problem, it's scary.
Lucas Underwood [00:45:23]:
Yeah, it is. Because you don't want to break it worse. Right?
Nathan Bryant [00:45:26]:
You don't want to make it worse. For my shop, COVID ended up being really good. And it's because when COVID hit and people stopped driving, everything kind of I had to really focus on who is my customer, who was I as a shop and what was I going to do? Because just sitting there waiting for things to change didn't seem like a good option to me. So I'm sitting there in an empty shop because we were essential employees. So we go back to work, but nobody else around me, none of my customers were at work, so none of them were driving. So I'm sitting there filling out 1000 postcards to send out to all my customers. Tell them I'm open.
Lucas Underwood [00:46:21]:
Yeah, we're here.
Nathan Bryant [00:46:24]:
I had customers bring in cars for maintenance items that they weren't due for.
Lucas Underwood [00:46:31]:
Yeah, just to try and yeah, same thing for us.
Nathan Bryant [00:46:35]:
So that was what was really just really focused on who is my customer and this is what a relationship business means. As opposed to, I wasn't sending out oil change coupons. I wasn't sending out anything transactional. It was just, we're here. And my customers, my community responded. So that was really focused on, okay, so this works. Because that was a change that I had to make. There was really committing to, of course that but until I was faced with sitting there with an empty shop and no phone ringing and no cars on the road, it was like, okay, I got to change.
Nathan Bryant [00:47:28]:
I got to do something here.
Lucas Underwood [00:47:30]:
You say that. So something I've been thinking about lately. I remember the hardest times in my shop, like, when I was super stressed out, and I remember thinking to myself, if I could just get all these cars fixed, right? I just want to get these cars fixed, and once I get this done, everything will be okay. And once I get these cars out, I'll feel better, and I'll have some free time, and I can clear my head and I can breathe, and then I'll get things straightened up, and once I get things straightened up, everything will be okay. And I went through that cycle probably 15 times. And then I would slow the shop down. I'd get all the workout and like, all right, I feel so much better. And I'll never forget my coach at the time saying to me, lucas, you don't want to get rid of your problems, because if you get rid of your problems, you're dead.
Lucas Underwood [00:48:22]:
What you want is better problems, and let's talk about what those better problems are. And so at the time, I didn't really dig into that thought process, but now I see the signs of it with a lot of the shops that I know and a lot of the shops I talk to, right, because what are they saying? I'm just so busy right now. I just got to get caught up. And what are they trying to do? They're trying to get through the cars that they have, and then they slow down and I can breathe. Well, the problem is they never build sustainability into the business, right? Because the business has to in perpetuity fix cars. It is going to fix cars forever. And those problems that come with fixing cars are always going to be there. You're not going to do anything about that.
Lucas Underwood [00:49:04]:
They're always going to happen. And so why not begin to talk about what those problems are and fix them instead of waiting until I have time to do something about it? But I've seen so many people do that, right? It took a pandemic for you to have enough time to sit down and say, like, hey, I got to rethink this son of a bitch, right? Like, this is crazy.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:49:25]:
Well, I do think at least one positive thing with COVID was that you could sit down and take time to regroup and dream again about. And I think we have a lack of dreamers in the industry, whether they're blocking out any futuristic dreams because they are so busy trying to get cars in and out, or they are busy staffing or whatever, putting out fires, you have to keep dreaming. And COVID. I wrote pages and pages during COVID I felt so burnt out prior, and we came out with tons of event ideas and marketing ideas. So that was good because I got a chance to kind of breathe and dream again.
Lucas Underwood [00:50:03]:
For me, I think looking back, it wasn't even that I didn't have time. It was really, at the end of the day, that it was so stressful, it was so overwhelming. All of these clients want their cars right now, and a I didn't know how to set expectations, and so I'm not saying, like, here's what I can do. And so they wanted their cars right now, the vendors wanted their money right now. The technicians wanted things to be better right now. Like, there was this whole host of things pushing inward at all times. And so what I wanted to do is I wanted to stop the madness. I wanted to slow things down so I felt like I could get my hand back around them.
Lucas Underwood [00:50:47]:
Okay? And so I specifically remember a couple of different situations where that's literally what I was trying to do. I was trying to figure out, if I slow this down, I can get back to where I can manage it again. And the problem is that that was only showing me what my management skills were. It was showing me what my potential was for managing. And if I knew then what I know now, I would have seen that I was lacking. And I needed help and I needed information. I needed knowledge to be able to begin to put those pieces in place and say, okay, I can perform at a higher level with knowledge and information, I can consistently perform at this higher level. I can generate more revenue.
Lucas Underwood [00:51:31]:
I can do it without wanting to off myself because this is too stressful and I can balance the shop and can take a deep breath here. Right. I can leave for a day, for God's sakes. Does no one else think that it's a problem that shop owners say there's no way I could take a day off? If you have a business and you can't take a day off, something is effing wrong.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:51:53]:
Yeah, somebody posted that they hadn't had a day off in like, what, 20 some years or something one day.
Lucas Underwood [00:51:58]:
I was like, absolutely ridiculous.
Erich Schmidt [00:52:00]:
I think we block it off from being a prior technician. As a technician, for me, when I start a job, I'm looking for that completion and that gratification.
Lucas Underwood [00:52:11]:
Right.
Erich Schmidt [00:52:11]:
So as we have a constant flow of cars coming through the shop, we're always looking for that end. Right. But in a good shop, there should.
Lucas Underwood [00:52:18]:
Never be there should never be an end. Right.
Erich Schmidt [00:52:19]:
So I think that is maybe a bit of a fault that we carry as past technicians turned business owners.
Lucas Underwood [00:52:31]:
That post that they're talking about, it very much sounded like that person wore that with a badge of honor.
Nathan Bryant [00:52:37]:
Yes.
Lucas Underwood [00:52:38]:
I've not had a day off in 30 years.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:52:41]:
All I'm trying to get is days off with that.
Lucas Underwood [00:52:44]:
Hang on a minute. Well, somebody walked in. We're going to have them on the show tomorrow. Somebody walked in earlier and they said, I started this shop for freedom and really quickly realized that owning a business has nothing to do with freedom. And so if you don't have that structure in your business, you will not have freedom when you start it okay. And my fear is and we catch a lot of flak there are five particular people that I can think of. We get hate from every direction. I'm completely good with it.
Lucas Underwood [00:53:21]:
It's okay. I don't mind at all. But there's five particular people who consistently get upset because we're encouraging people not to start shops. And what I wish they would understand is that the reason that we're saying that is because a lot of the people trying to start shops don't understand what they're getting into. And it is not I don't want to say it's not all it's cracked up to be. It can be extremely rewarding. It can be a lot of fun. It can be very profitable.
Lucas Underwood [00:53:51]:
It can be an enjoyable process. But I am going to tell you that if you think there's not going to be struggles, if you think you're not going to have problems like you have working for someone else, if you think that you're going to have more freedom than what you have working for someone else, you're fooling yourself.
Erich Schmidt [00:54:10]:
I was caught off guard.
Lucas Underwood [00:54:11]:
Yeah.
Erich Schmidt [00:54:11]:
I was that guy, for sure. And I had multiple shop owners that I worked for in private shops that said, you ain't ready, man.
Nathan Bryant [00:54:18]:
Yeah, I thought I was ready.
Erich Schmidt [00:54:21]:
I wasn't ready for none of it.
Nathan Bryant [00:54:23]:
I mean, I had been a technician. I had been a service writer. I had managed million and a half dollar shop, which, with inflation, is probably two and a half million dollar shop. Now, I'd managed, like I said, 22 technicians at one point. I knew what a PNL was. You had a good education, and it's still different. It's a different world when it's your money, it's your name, and there's nobody else to make the decision.
Lucas Underwood [00:54:57]:
Yeah.
Nathan Bryant [00:54:58]:
When you have to hire somebody, when you have to fire somebody, when you have to sit there on a Friday night and decide, am I going to pay this bill or that bill?
Lucas Underwood [00:55:09]:
Yeah. And we all do that, no matter how successful, and you can be extremely successful and still be there. I make jokes all the time about being up at 03:00 a.m.. I mean, you all get messages.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:55:23]:
No, you're really like up.
Lucas Underwood [00:55:24]:
Yeah. Making groups. I don't know if I can do this. This sucks. This is tough, you know what I mean? Like, you wake up and your heart's beating fast and you're hyperventilating. You're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Did I do this? Did that happen? You can't control all of these things.
Erich Schmidt [00:55:42]:
Too much emotion.
Lucas Underwood [00:55:43]:
We go into this and we think, I don't ever want a boss again. Oh, my God. Let me tell you something. You start a business and you just got however big your customer list is, that many bosses, okay? And they're not reasonable. Some of them are. They're not always kind, they're not always respectful. Right. And you're dealing with people who want something from you.
Lucas Underwood [00:56:07]:
And I just think that sometimes we miss the boat. We, as shop owners, we come out here and we start these businesses and we go at it, and we're going to do this thing.
Nathan Bryant [00:56:19]:
And I think that a lot of times. So I think one of the personality things that makes a technician a good technician is a very linear thinking, very tunnel vision. Eric just made me think about this when he said, I want the start and I want the end.
Lucas Underwood [00:56:36]:
Yeah.
Nathan Bryant [00:56:37]:
And that is a really bad characteristic.
Lucas Underwood [00:56:41]:
For a business owner, because there is no end.
Nathan Bryant [00:56:45]:
No. And there's no linear progression. You have to think about at the same time that you're dealing with marketing, and then you have to deal with a car, and then you have to deal with this and you have to deal with that. And I'm not a visionary. I am not a creative person. I couldn't give you a vision for my business. I'm a linear thinker. I do one step at a time, fix the car.
Nathan Bryant [00:57:12]:
My wife, though, she's very visionary, very creative. She's the one that helps me have a big picture because I couldn't do it. It's not in my personality. I've come to realize that there's things that I just am not good at.
Lucas Underwood [00:57:32]:
Right.
Nathan Bryant [00:57:33]:
And I think that that personality trait that makes people good technicians is a handicap that has to be overcome to become good shot shop owners. It's why I look at some of these people that came in from outside the industry.
Lucas Underwood [00:57:48]:
Adam Rath, man, they're always almost more successful.
Nathan Bryant [00:57:52]:
John Starkey yeah, these are people that came in outside the industry, and they had an idea about building a business as opposed to an idea like, I just want to fix a lot of cars. Or from my point of view, I ran out of people that I wanted to work know. I'm the guy who said, I'm not working for that asshole anymore.
Lucas Underwood [00:58:14]:
As David would say, you're unemployable.
Nathan Bryant [00:58:16]:
Yes, I'm very much unemployable. And that's why my business has to work, because it would be an absolute disaster if I had to go back to work for anybody else.
Lucas Underwood [00:58:24]:
Right.
Nathan Bryant [00:58:24]:
So we have to be self aware. We have to know what we're good at and what we're bad at, or at least class. Today was really good for me because marketing is something I'm bad at.
Lucas Underwood [00:58:42]:
Right.
Nathan Bryant [00:58:43]:
Because I can't picture the whole thing. I can picture I need to design a logo. I can't picture that my logo is only one part of the entire brand itself.
Lucas Underwood [00:58:57]:
Yeah.
Nathan Bryant [00:58:58]:
For me, I know that as I scale my shop, I'm going to have to hire people to do this stuff because I just can't do it.
Lucas Underwood [00:59:10]:
And I've done the same thing, and I can do some of those things, but I found it was much easier to hire somebody than to try and do it myself. Right.
Erich Schmidt [00:59:18]:
That's what they always preach. Delegation.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:59:20]:
Do what you don't want to, hire what you don't want to do.
Lucas Underwood [00:59:23]:
So I guess kind of in closing, I want to ask you two both something. Individually, you've been a moderator for ASOG for, let's see, almost four years now.
Nathan Bryant [00:59:36]:
Has it been that long?
Lucas Underwood [00:59:37]:
Wow. I think it's been that long because you came on right after I did. Okay. I'm pretty sure it's almost four years. I'll have to go back and look.
Lauralee Schmidt [00:59:43]:
Yeah.
Lucas Underwood [00:59:44]:
Had a lot of discussions, seen a lot of stuff happen in that group. What would be your message to the members of those groups? You see some common themes over and over again. What would be your message to them?
Nathan Bryant [01:00:00]:
Listen to the people that have been there before. Nobody is picking on you because they want to put you down. We've all made the same mistakes, and we just don't want to learn from our mistakes. You don't have to make them all yourself.
Lucas Underwood [01:00:16]:
Yeah. 100%. I'm right there with you. So many things, and it often comes back. It's negative. It's this, it's that. It's really not. You don't know the tone that they're saying it in.
Lucas Underwood [01:00:27]:
What they're doing is they're over there gritting their teeth, clenching their fist, saying, Please, God, don't do that. Please, God, don't do that. Please, God, don't do somebody.
Nathan Bryant [01:00:35]:
Man might have been Andrew Lee or anyways, somebody in one of the thread probably a couple years ago now, was dealing with a really hard headed new shop owner, and he said, Listen, my business is successful. I don't need to spend my time arguing with you, so I'm doing this to help you.
Lucas Underwood [01:00:58]:
Yeah. What benefit would it be for me just to stand here and argue, just to be an asshole? Why would I do that? Doesn't make sense. The majority of the people in that group really are not being negative. They're trying to help, and they're working hard to help.
Nathan Bryant [01:01:11]:
Yes.
Lucas Underwood [01:01:13]:
Lola Larley. What would be your one thing? You'd want them to please use the search feature?
Lauralee Schmidt [01:01:22]:
No.
Lucas Underwood [01:01:22]:
Did Dutch pay you for that?
Lauralee Schmidt [01:01:24]:
No, but Dutch and I align a lot. I think I was like his wife or something in a past life.
Lucas Underwood [01:01:31]:
Give you a pat on the back.
Erich Schmidt [01:01:33]:
I'm used to it.
Lauralee Schmidt [01:01:35]:
No, but the same thing. Well, you know what? Even outside of trusting everybody, my advice to some of these people would be get yourself some friends outside of the industry that run a different type of business or an executive friend to look in and have these conversations with you. Because as much as I love all of you and all of your perspectives, I get a lot of really great feedback on our. Business from my friends who don't work in automotives. And they keep me energized and they keep me excited and they keep me on track and they kick me in the butt when I'm messing up.
Lucas Underwood [01:02:09]:
Yeah, I've got a really good friend of mine and he owns a big company, okay. A while back, I think he said something to the effect of, well, I guess, you know, you've made it when you got four tugboats in your employee, right? Like big company. And he was standing in my office one day and he's supposed to be picking up a car. He answers the phone, he stands there and he shakes his head, okay, I'm on my way. Tell him to come get me and I'll get on the plane. We'll go. He walks off. Three weeks later he comes back in, right? Kind of curious friend.
Lucas Underwood [01:02:49]:
What was that about? He said, we hired this guy back. We shouldn't have hired this guy back. He was working on a propane tank and broke the nozzle off the tank and doused himself in liquid propane, which then ignited and we shouldn't have done this. And I told him we shouldn't have done this. So I had to go deal with that and visit the family and do all this stuff. I'm thinking, Holy cow, my problems don't seem nearly as big as they did just a few minutes ago. He's like, man, he's like, we're very careful and we're very precise. But this happens a lot.
Lucas Underwood [01:03:18]:
He's like, you've got 3000 people that work for you. There's going to be mistakes always. And I'm over here thinking like, I'm worried about my guys. Well, why did you ruin that lug nut? Why couldn't you have done something better to get it off? Why did you? Well, it was swollen balls. Well, I understand, but I would have gotten it off. And I'm thinking, these are problems. And this cat's over here having to go talk to families about the fact that somebody had lost their life. And I'm thinking, you know what? My problems really are not as big as they seem to be just a few minutes ago.
Lucas Underwood [01:03:53]:
And he looks at me, and I'll never forget this. He looks at me and he said, son, let me tell you something. He said, with big money comes big problems and you need to make a decision. Are you going to be able and willing to tolerate big problems that comes with big money? And he said that this is just what it is. And he said, you need to make that decision. And he said, if that makes you nervous, then I'm going to tell you right now, you should probably go get a job. Because he said one day, he said, I pray to God it never happens. But he said, somebody's going to be back there working and something's going to happen to him.
Lucas Underwood [01:04:30]:
And he's the one I get that term from. You're always on the razor's edge of life, because you really are. You never know when something's going to happen. And if you can't stomach that, this business is probably not for you, right?
Lauralee Schmidt [01:04:46]:
Oh, I think so many people think, if I just get bigger, it'll get easier.
Lucas Underwood [01:04:49]:
No, lord have mercy.
Lauralee Schmidt [01:04:50]:
It just gets harder and harder and harder.
Lucas Underwood [01:04:52]:
You can put more people in place to manage it. You can put more you got to manage to help. Right? Exactly. And God forbid, I watched a shop, and he knows I'm talking about him. He listens, and he's going to send me a message here as soon as this comes out. I've watched a shop that was absolutely optimized to the T. Multiple locations, smooth as can be. And we've had some really hard conversations over the past couple of weeks because they lost some advisors and it set this thing in motion.
Lucas Underwood [01:05:23]:
And now it's not like can't pay the bills, but now all of a sudden, technicians are upset because they're not getting the hours they were getting. So instead of making 120, they're going to make 60. And so all of a sudden, this whole thing, even though he's got great leadership structure and people in place to do all this, guess who gets to solve that problem? That doesn't go away. And that will never go away. And if you're expecting it to go away, you're fooling yourself. Exactly. Thank you, guys.
